"What is it that mathematicians accomplish?"

"Computational complexity has in the past adapted well to new computation models from the PRAM to biological and quantum computers. But we are seeing new computing paradigms in multicore and cloud computing and theory seems late to the party. There was a nice SODA paper on MapReduce, the basic cloud computing operation, but for the most part theorists haven't tackled the cloud computing model and only a few have looked at multicore. Theory can say much about new computational methods, both in how we can take advantage of them and what they can't do, but only if we make the effort to develop the proper models to capture these new approaches."

"In statistics and machine learning, "model selection" is the problem of picking among different mathematical models which all purport to describe the same data set. This notebook will not (for now) give advice on it; as usual, it's more of a place to organize my thoughts and references..."

"While demurrage is a natural feature of private commodity money it has at various times been deliberately incorporated into currency systems as a disincentive against hoarding of money, as well as to achieve other perceived benefits. In particular, with regards to long term investment financing it has the effect of changing the dynamics of net present value (NPV) calculations. All else being equal, a currency system with demurrage places an increased emphasis on the value of long term returns on an investment. As such it may create an incentive to invest in initiatives which offer more in the way of longer-term returns."

"Fortunately, we are not yet “perfected” consumers but if we are not vigilant, our attention span will continue to shrink, and those available conveniences that help us force more and more material through our tiny pinhole of focus will proliferate. (Just as road-building worsens traffic problems, media-management and organization tools tend to exacerbate our attention problems. Hence, I spend as much time editing metadata as I do concentrating on music I’m listening to.)"

"In fact, their dismissal of history is a direct consequence of their version of Darwinism, which is focused on demonstrating how the actions of literary characters provide illustrative examples of human biological nature. While they give no end of homage to the idea that actual human behavior is subject to environmental influence – as far as I can tell, no one seriously doubts this – they seem to have no interest in investigating how behaviors and environments amplify into history. Literary Darwinism is paradoxically static, the examination of flies caught in amber, and Darwin himself has become a Platonic fetish to ward off the evils of change, of history."

"I think the thesis of the Monetary History has just taken a hit."

Good summary