Not directly related to the piece (from 2010, although still interesting), but the first comment has a link to Brad Templeton's website, which was nice to discover!
I've liked other stuff by William Bernstein. His book "The Birth of Plenty" is excellent. I haven't read the pamphlet mentioned in the article, but I just downloaded it.
I'll be interested to see what his advice is to younger people now. At least in the past, he was not quite the typical scold. I always liked this quote:
'An optimist might cite this as an example of the "magic of compound interest." Too much is made of this phenomenon. A pessimist would note that our industrious saver died an old man without enjoying his fortune; had he consumed even a few percent of it each year his estate would have been vastly smaller. Personally, I’d rather be a 26 year old roaming the boulevards of Paris with a few francs in my pocket than a rich old man. Everyone cannot be rich, but perhaps their grandchildren can.' (from: http://www.efficientfrontier.com/BOOK/chapter2.htm)
If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend The Four Pillars of Investing by Bernstein. Goes into a bit more depth than his newer books, but it's still very readable.
Isn't there an old saw about every big "Web 2.0" business being something that took what people were already doing but made it "social"? So Facebook made blogging social, Twitter made texting social, etc.
10+ years ago I knew a bunch of people who had personal blogs, but of course most of them were filled with "sorry for the lack of posts recently" type posts.
I'm not on Facebook, but I understand why it's popular. The more people who might be reading, the more reason there is to post stuff. So it makes sense that everyone winds up in the same network.
I remember being so excited that my brother and I skipped school and "snuck in" to the ACS meeting in Dallas. This was after their first announcement, but they came and gave a big talk to a packed hall. I seem to recall it was hurriedly put together because of all the interest. At the time I thought I was witnessing a huge historical event. I guess I was in the history-of-science sense at least.
You almost certainly know that already, so here are a couple more remarks just for fun:
One useful technique when making pseudorandom number generators is to take two not-so-good RNGs and combine their outputs (e.g., adding them or XORing them). If the two RNGs have different enough "structure", the combined generator can have much better statistical properties than either of its two components. The fact that it's much harder to prove anything about pi+e than about pi or e individually is rather like that.
But even proving that pi is irrational is highly nontrivial. (Proving that e is irrational, on the other hand, is a fairly easy exercise. Sketch: suppose e = p/q; then q!e is an integer; but q!e is the sum of a series whose terms are initially integers and then abruptly positive numbers small enough that their sum has to be between 0 and 1; contradiction.)
But Spain and Italy are in a much different situation than Greece or the other smaller "peripheral" Euro economies. Basically, Greece needs a bailout or must leave the Euro. Italy needs non-insane monetary policy:
You need to go get yourself a recording of Rubinstein playing Chopin's Nocturnes. Hurry!
EDIT: I seek no arguments. Wikipedia says nocturnes are generally thought of as "expressive and lyrical". Surely that should be of interest to hackers...
