I’m a huge O’Reilly Media fan boy. I can’t hide it. I hear Tim O’Reilly speak at conferences and I think to myself, “Screw being president, I want to be Tim O’Reilly.” I’ve been a subscriber to their online book services called Safari Books Online for years. Every month I see the bill for $43 come through and I think to myself, “Self, that’s the best $43 you spent all month.
It’s common knowledge that I struggle wrapping my head around the apply functions in R. That is illustrated very clearly in the following discussion on Stack Overflow: Dirk’s comment is actually spot on. I’ve asked the same damn question at least 4-5 times. Only I didn’t really understand it was the same question. That’s one of the problems of not really being good at something; it’s hard to think abstractly about it.
When he’s not sitting around thinking about how sexy statisticians areI am, he apparently gives speaking engagements. Who knew? Here’s a video of him saying stuff about managing “knowledge workers.” I believe that “knowledge workers” is a euphemism for “people who like to play video games.” I could be wrong, but not likely.
We’ve all heard all the stories about how ‘Sully’ Sullenberger has to go through a special line at the airport because his large brass balls always set off the metal detectors. Well. It’s true, and here’s proof: Ever since Sept 15th, 2008 I have had a bit of a fetish with studying accident theory (that’s when our financial system started its current free fall). One of the best books I have read on how big studs like Sully make decisions is the book Sources of Power by Gary Klein.
Let me start by saying that I like Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Benoît Mandelbrot quite a lot. I don’t agree with them all the time, but that is generally true of people I like. I recall reading Mandelbrot’s book The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulencesome years ago and being struck by how much sense Mandelbrot makes. It helped that his early work related to markets was in cotton prices and I am an agricultural economist.