Algunos recortes sobre lo que fui viendo y leyendo durante el último mes (la fecha es de cuando lo leí, no cuando fue publicado).
Right now the league's five highest-scoring teams -- Green Bay, Detroit, New England, Buffalo and New Orleans -- are a combined 17-3. None of these teams are in the top 10 for defense. In the modern game, high-scoring is the surest path to victory.
Dr. Obousy, for one, made his preference known in a couplet: On to the stars! Cowards shoot for Mars.
(Gregg Easterbrook, "Victories, even comebacks, are earned", 04/10/11)
As you grow older, you begin to worry about the coming revolution's logistics. It's likely that such a concert would have brought an immediate end to the occupation. A few hundred would have become many thousand, and there finally would have been a reason for the police to descend in the name of crowd control, codes governing amplified noise or some other potentially arbitrary reason.
Not understanding why markets fail, many on the Left claim that regulation is necessary to protect us from too little competition in the form of exploitation by sellers and employers with market power. But the real reason we regulate, or should regulate, is to protect ourselves from the consequences of excessive competition with one another.
(Robert Frank, "Charles Darwin, Economist", 06/10/11)
The tits and gore aren't there because anybody's confused about how to speak to their intended audience; they're there because DC knows exactly what it's doing, and when other media are eating your lunch you play to your base, and you print the books in a language called Badass. Movies can give you a Joker played by Heath Ledger and video games can give you a Joker you can punch in the nads, but no one in those industries would sign off on a Joker who's naked and asking to have his face flayed. Only comics can give you that, because only comics would.
(Alex Pappademas, "What the Joker Was Doing Naked", 07/10/11)
However, Mr Sargent's association with the rational expectations revolution and its extension to the efficient markets hypothesis, much demonised during the crisis, is somewhat misunderstood. Much of his work has focused on agents learning within models and less-than-fully-rational expectations. Much of the criticism of rational expectations is integrated into this work. Learning involves two elements: firstly that agents (consumers or businesses) have incomplete knowledge of some parameters in the model, and secondly a specification of how agents learn about these parameters, based on the observations of evolving time series.
(H.G., "The Nobel prize in economics: How to know what causes what" , 10/10/11)
According to Bar-Yam’s team, between-group violence is unlikely when one of two conditions are met: Either diverse communities are so well-integrated as to prevent any one group from dominating, or — lacking such integration — when political or geographic boundaries match demographic borders. When there’s a mismatch, tendencies to persecution have opportunity to flourish. Majority groups have the power to define local rules, but minority groups are large enough for conflicts to arise. With the right borders, this wouldn’t happen. “Violence arises due to the structure of boundaries between groups rather than as a result of inherent conflicts between the groups themselves,” write Bar-Yam’s team in their Switzerland study, released Oct. 6.
(Brandon Keim, "Computational Model of Peace Predicts Social Violence, Harmony ", 11/10/11)
Ahora el Presidente sólo cumple con la Constitución sin siquiera acudir a las instalaciones del Congreso. Luego organiza un evento con invitados a modo. Este procedimiento representa una desafortunada regresión en el fortalecimiento de nuestra democracia. Podría decirse que volvimos al estilo monárquico que reinaba durante el presidencialismo priista. Estamos lejos del debate serio y constructivo que registran democracias mejor equipadas cuando se cumple con la disposición de informar. Digamos que en España el Presidente del Gobierno tiene que dar su informe y ahí mismo discute y polemiza con los legisladores opositores. En México, para tristeza de no pocos, esos ejercicios son cada vez más distantes y debilitan la democracia.
(Álvaro Bracamonte, "Lo bueno y lo malo del Informe" , 17/10/11)
("Not Such a Stretch to Reach for the Stars", 18/10/11)
But that's what people do. You miss something, you grieve for it, and then you move on. It's human nature.
(Bill Simmons, "Behind the Pipes: Into the Arms of the NHL", 19/10/11)
That said, the danger of contagion is real. If holders of Greek bonds can incur losses on what they once thought were safe investments, what of holders of Italian or Spanish debt? The initial deal on Greek debt in July was followed in August by the dumping of Italian and Spanish government bonds.
Grand political bargains between China and Europe—money in return for more representation at the IMF, or market-economy status—seem wildly improbable. These prizes will eventually come anyway; and weak though parts of Europe are, the EU cannot be seen to trade them too nakedly. Bargaining of this sort would also require both parties to change their positions markedly. China is keen not to be seen as a source of “dumb money”, but requiring big political concessions in return for cash is a pretty clear signal that this is not a commercially attractive investment. As for the euro zone, it can hardly claim that senior Spanish and Italian debt is now safe for institutional investors if it has to horse-trade too hard to get China on board.
(A.P., "China to the rescue?", 31/10/11)
U.N. forecasts suggest the world population could hit a peak of 10.1 billion by 2100 before beginning to decline. But exact numbers are hard to come by — just small variations in fertility rates could mean a population of 15 billion by the end of the century.
(Adam Cole, "Visualizing How A Population Grows To 7 Billion", 31/10/11)
¿Acaso no indican todas estas cosas que estamos entrando en terreno desconocido, en un mundo agitado, y que, en comparación con él, la visible alegría de los clientes que salen de una tienda Apple con un dispositivo nuevo resulta, no sé, tonta y sin importancia?
(Paul Kennedy, ¿Hemos entrado en una nueva era?, 3/11/10)
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