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Thereâs nobody Michael Lewis likes better than a hero who gives a defiant middle finger to the conventional wisdom: the short-seller who bets against a soaring mortgage market; the equities trader who insists that the stock exchange is âriggedâ; the baseball general manager who consults the cold stats, instead of relying on the fuzzy feeling of gut instinct.
And then thereâs Lewis himself, who has made his own name and fortune by writing against expectations, taking arcane subjects that most of his mega-readership might know next to nothing about and skillfully unfurling their intricacies in all of their dramatic glory.
The Pandemic Gets the Michael Lewis Treatment, Heroic Technocrats and All
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There’s nobody Michael Lewis likes better than a hero who gives a defiant middle finger to the conventional wisdom: the short-seller who bets against a soaring mortgage market; the equities trader who insists that the stock exchange is “rigged”; the baseball general manager who consults the cold stats, instead of relying on the fuzzy feeling of gut instinct.
And then there’s Lewis himself, who has made his own name and fortune by writing against expectations, taking arcane subjects that most of his mega-readership might know next to nothing about and skillfully unfurling their intricacies in all of their dramatic glory. His last book, “The Fifth Risk,” was about the unsung heroes of the federal bureaucracy (or what the former Trump whisperer Steve Bannon derided as the “administrative state”), and how the Trump White House was making their job harder, if not i
Backgammon Then and Now
Authorâs Note: I played backgammon professionally for almost 20 years, then gave it up completely. I reached the high intermediate level, but most of the players that were interested in gambling with me were better. That was a prescription for disaster. I needed to get a job because I was not a winning player anymore. Todayâs blog has nothing to do with video poker, but it does have to do with gambling.
I played most of my backgammon at the Cavendish West, which was in the West Hollywood section of Los Angeles, from about 1974 to 1993. Some of the regulars back then who are still active in tournament backgammon are Bob Glass, Jim Pasko, Steve Sax, Joe Russell, and Bob Wachtel. (There are likely others I donât know are still playing.) They were all better than me back then, and theyâve kept
Is there still research to be done in Programming Languages? This essay touches both on the topic of programming languages and on the nature of research work. I am mostly concerned in analyzing this question in the context of Academia, i.e. within the expectations of academic programs and research funding agencies that support research work in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). This is not the only possible perspective, but it is the one I am taking here.
PLs are dear to my heart, and a considerable chunk of my career was made in that area. As a designer, there is something fundamentally interesting in designing a language of any kind. It’s even more interesting and gratifying when people actually start exercising those languages to create non-trivial software systems. As a user, I love to use programming languages that I haven’t used before, even when the languages in question make me curse every other line.