Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, and the New York Times and is a contributor to Radiolab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
« Music and Words | Main | Radiohead and Consilience »
Posted on: July 15, 2008 1:48 PM, by Jonah Lehrer
What you need is a distraction from the drip of bad economic news. (Just remember: the stock market is a random walk that, over the long-term, has an upward slope. Besides, investors who do nothing to their stock portfolio - they don't buy or sell a single stock - outperform the average "active" investor by nearly 10 percent.) So, instead of trying to get your broker on the phone, browse through these exquisite satellite photos, courtesy of NASA:
via kottke
Humanities & Social ScienceTrackback URL for this entry: http://scienceblogs.com/mt/pings/76366
Thanks for the photo!
And you brought back memories of my finance undergrad and our bible, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Malkiel. I was told then to imagine the market as a man with a yo-yo walking up a hill with the advice that investors should focus on the steady rise of the hill, not the daily ups and downs of the yo-yo.
Jonah, its interesting you refer to the Random Walk of markets (based on the Efficient Market HYPOTHESIS), financial bubbles, and Sir Popper all within a few posts. Not easy to reconcile my friend. Science is best left to scientists and finance to alchemists.
(Email is required for authentication purposes only. On some blogs, comments are moderated for spam, so your comment may not appear immediately.)
Comments (3)
Lovely image. You just made me wonder - as I am sitting 10" underneath a battered copy of Howard Berg's "Random Walks in Biology" text - whether anyone has analyzed the stock market with multidimensional diffusion tensor or finite element analysis. (Now say that ten times fast.) I'm sure someone's done it.
Posted by: Rachael | July 15, 2008 3:04 PM