Full Metal Jacket

Another sunny day in New Haven. Had another talk about the financial crisis this morning - this time with Az Biazar, who knows Wall Street pretty well; a decidedly non-academic viewpoint. I'm going to sit down with him this evening and (again) take extensive notes on his view of the crisis. He's worked at major Wall Street firms, and has impeccable degrees (UCLA, Harvard Business School, Yale Law); more importantly, he's a dear friend, and I trust his opinion - he is quite astute, and is not given to talking about things he doesn't really understand. I'm going to do some recommended reading (e.g., The Big Short), and then try and condense all of these conversations and notes into one coherent document. In the meantime, research!

Read an article today that basically tells you to be miserly about praising your kids [link], and watched a video (recommended to me by Jim Liu) on parasites:

Had a long discussion about clashing social norms and the efficacy of legislation in such scenarios with Debdipto Ghoshal, whom I first met at St. Xavier's (he's currently in Bangalore) - perhaps the topic for a future blog post? My thoughts on the topic are still fairly nebulous, so I'm going to wait for them to settle down. Debdipto is always a good source for interesting information, and he didn't disappoint - microfactories (tiny robots building stuff) [link].

Dining hall food drove me and Az out of the dining hall this evening, so we ended up going to Tomatillo; this in turn drove all work out of our fickle little minds, so we ended up watching Full Metal Jacket after. Quite an excellent film - I recommend it.


Today's Things:

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez snuffed it [link]
• Google released a paper [link] on the software it uses to read street numbers in Street View; it turns out that it can solve well over 99% of CAPTCHAs, so if you were relying on distorted text to protect your website, you're in trouble.  (Fortunately, Google reCAPTCHAs, which no longer rely too much on text distortion, are fine.) [blog post link]
• Ukraine
• NATO is going to send ships to the Baltic (not the Black Sea) to "bolster defence of eastern European allies" [link]
• Russia, Ukraine, the US and the EU agreed to "de-escalate" the crisis in Ukraine [link, link]
• Putin says that the annexation of Crimea was partly in response to NATO expansion into eastern Europe [link]
• Obamacare hits 8 million [link]
• Researchers generate stem cells form adult humans [link]
• US Supreme Court to decide whether NSA surveillance is legal [link]