Author Archives: brendano

Deep insight of the moment: Volatility frequently occurs when everyone suddenly realizes the stock market is just a consensual mass delusion based on fictitious valuings of abstract assets. It’s like finding out Santa Claus is real because you catch him … Continue reading →

Link: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Animated.

We’re now live at a new location: anyall.org/blog.  Good-bye, Blogger, it was sometimes nice knowing you. This blog is now on WordPress (perhaps behind the times), which I’ve usually had good experiences with, e.g. for the Dolores Labs Blog.  I … Continue reading →

MySpace and the Commission on the Presidential Debates put together a neat site, mydebates.org, which presents the candidates’ positions through various mini-polls and such. It even has a cool data exploration tool for the poll results … for example, here … Continue reading →

With my friend Doug, I just finished making a game — PalinSpeak.com — where you can chat with a Sarah Palin simulator. Check it out, it’s the best thing to hit the Internet since sliced bread. I’ll post more the … Continue reading →

The Stanford Engineering school has put up videos and course materials for several programming, AI, and optimization courses online. They did get some of the ones that are taught by excellent lecturers — e.g. introductory programming (the CS dept has … Continue reading →

The latest on the world ideologies front – In the light of Russia’s Georgia adventures, there’s been lots of talk whether this represents a new rise of authoritarian Russia, which is presumably another nail in the coffin for U.S.-led liberal … Continue reading →

Update: Charles Franklin (of Pollster.com) kindly emailed me with many interesting points on this post. One important note is that my technique isn’t really “no smoothing” — rather, there is now implicit smoothing within the polling houses, by assuming that … Continue reading →

Great anti-pop-science article of the moment — Mark Liberman does a take-down of David Brooks’ apparently careless column on cultural psych experiments that purport to show that East Asians are collectivist while Westerns are individualist. From Liberman: Question to Language … Continue reading →