It’s A People Weekend

Dedicated to all the very different things about people…….

1) There’s a 30-something guy in one of the tiny Starbucks outlets I visit on occasion – he’s been there I think easily for more than a year, any time of day I happen to pop by (perpetually trying to bag the veggie muffin, at one point). He always seemed to be watching Chinese game shows in the middle of the day. I couldn’t figure how he could do only that, day in, day out. Finally, finally, this week I saw it – remote access Bloomberg screen he scanned briefly before returning to…. was that a mid-afternoon Chinese soap? He’s trading his own portfolio out of Starbucks.

A Day In The Life of 18 Year Old Julian Marchese, The Full-Time Student Building A Hedge Fund Out Of His Dorm Room.

“…Marchese began cold-emailing analysts for advice on how to jumpstart his career in finance. “When you’re 12, the ‘pro’ is, you’re really cute and people want to talk to you,” Marchese says. “But when I was actually serious, they brushed me off because I was 12.”….”

“…At a Quantitative Finance Society meeting, club president Thomas Li warns: “All of us have massive egos, in case you haven’t realized……. ..Recognize your biases and avoid them. It’s easier than trying to remove them.”…”

Love that he said that – ego and pride can really cloud your judgment and cost you a world of pain. Countries have gone to war over “face” and hurt pride.

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2) The Relationship Between Genius And Mental Illness. Especially re the geniuses in creative writing.

Did mental illness facilitate [these creators’] unique abilities, whether it be to play a concerto or to perceive a novel mathematical relationship? Or did mental illness impair their creativity after its initial meteoric burst in their twenties? Or is the relationship more complex than a simple one of cause and effect, in either direction?

“…..Many personality characteristics of creative people … make them more vulnerable……..”

“…..permits them to perceive things in a fresh and novel way, which is an important basis for creativity. But it also means that their inner world…… filled with many questions and few easy answers….” 

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3) The rather misleadingly titled Texas Man Drops Note With Gay Couple That Leaves Them Trembling. This tv show staged a gay couple going into a restaurant in Texas and a waitress who gets more and more personal and rude – to see how restaurant patrons react. (That’s really why it’s here – a story of human behavior, as can only be illustrated via a hot-button issue.)

There’s close to 13,000 comments following the Youtube; a quick scan didn’t come up with any overtly hateful ones (unlike certain popular sites closer to home which have some really disturbing race-related hate comments and which I therefore deliberately never link to) but if you find one say the word, this thing is gones.

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4) China’s Annual Shame List Of Illegal Renovations. Love that they published this, it’s brilliant! 😀 (Also very useful for Rockstar’s learning unit about buildings and structures)

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5) Another Power Of Social Media story. But also one about an animal lover and her beneficiary. Canadian woman finds paralyzed dog in Thailand, sets up Facebook and Gofundme pages, 3 months later he’s chillin’ in a permanent home in Ontario, Canada.

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6) 9 Facts That Have Changed Since You Went To School. Rockstar’s first response was “I bet Pluto’s on it.” He’s right, it is, but what really tickled us was the one about how it used to be mathematically impossible to fold a paper more than 7 times.

They had these formulas for doing it, depending on direction:

Then this junior High School student (who was after the extra credit) went out and got a piece of toilet paper and disproved that one by folding it more than 7 times. Like, d-uh.

We liked how she approached the problem: What kind of paper can you fold the most times? Big piece. Thin construction. I typed a whole bunch about how I arrived at my own epiphany fresh out of university of application and erm, fairly basic common sense trumping a lot of complicated math for most jobs even involving derivatives unless your job scope is as an actual quant. And then my wifi died as did my unsaved yarny story. Must be a sign. And now I’m just super-late posting. So basically, something trite about not seeing the forest for the math in….. stuff. Dones.

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7) Rockstar skit this week is Giddyap Horsie.

Good weekend dears…