Brett Hutley’s Site

From Alan Nevin, chief economist for the California Building Industry Association and San Diego-based MarketPointe Realty Advisors: “Now it’s just a matter of the pig going through the snake.”

“Any sufficiently complex bit of code is hard to make easily reusable without abstracting it to a level in which it is essentially useless.”

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who had a brain stroke on 10th Dec 1996. The stroke put pressure on the language centers on the left hemisphere of her brain. On the 27th Feb 2008, she gave a talk at TED about the experience. The talk is well worth watching!

I had work to do today, so obviously I had to procrastinate by reading xkcd archives.

Check out the following series:

1. Journal
2. Journal 2
3. Journal 3

There’s a new Banksy gone up on Newman Street (just around the corner from our flat).

Some interesting papers have come out on the “Credit Crunch”.

• Leveraged Losses: Lessons from the Mortgage Market Meltdown

  This paper provides a good overview of the financial market turmoil occurring since August 2007, and discusses how the crisis might impact other areas of the economy.

• A Black Swan in the Money Market
  

  This paper examines the sudden jump in spreads between the overnight and term inter-bank interest rates.

Here is a great talk by Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren on the upcoming collapse of the middle class. The first 5 minutes are spent on introducing Professor Warren, so I recommend skipping to roughly 5-6 minutes into the video. She gives a very, very interesting comparison of the changing socio-economic factors between 1970-2007. The talk was given on the 8th March, 2007 at Berkeley.

So, on Sunday I was lying on the couch reading when I heard this commotion from Oxford Street. I jumped up and went out onto the balcony - just in time to see the Olympic Flame go past! It was driven past on an open top bus, held upright by this girl in a track-suit.

I live in London, on Oxford Street. You can’t really live in a more urban environment than that. Last weekend Helen and I got out of London to the North Downs to go hiking. For me, this is the ideal lifestyle; live in the city in an exciting, stimulating environment. When you feel like “getting back to nature” - pick the environment you want, and go there for the weekend. The countryside is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there!

Garth Sundem of Geek Logik fame has a blog in which he comes up with formulas for wrapping every-day decisions in a mathematical framework. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while - especially with regards to procrastination. The trick is to quantify all the factors that you think are important in the issue you are considering, and then describe the relationship between the variables mathematically.