Happy Endings

This past weekend I took my son, the aspiring filmmaker, to see Martin Scorcese's Hugo. He loved it. And so did I. It's a wonderful (literally wonder-full), tender and lovingly made story. And an homage to early filmmakers and filmmaking. Scorcese's best in my opinion. It's certainly a radical departure from his normal work which, as we all know, never gets rated PG (like Hugo). The entire cast is superb. (Well, almost the entire cast. Sorry Sacha.) The performances of Sir Ben Kingsley, Asa Butterfield and Michael Stuhlbarg are especially good, excellent even. At one point, Georges Méliès, Ben Kingsley's character, expresses his deep disaffection with the way his life has turned out: "My life has taught me one lesson: Happy endings only happen in the movies." Without giving away too much, the whole story is about how Monsieur Méliès is cured of this cynical view of life through the efforts of the eponymous Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) and Prof. Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg).

I remembered this later on in the weekend when I watched a second happy ending:

The final whistle will tell the final story

I already that knew Rainford "The Master" Kalaba is one of the finest midfielders in the world. Last night's game was only the latest demonstration of that fact. What I didn't know is that he's also a philosopher and a poet:

Football is not played in the papers, it is played on the pitch; 11 against 11 and the final whistle will tell the final story.

Swallows for my son at seven

Jack Mapanje reading (beautifully as always) at the launch of his latest book last month:

Mo Better News

Dr. Mo Ibrahim guest edited the 27 December 2011 edition of the BBC's Today Programme. A very different take on Africa's present and future.

Economical with the Truth

Thomas J. Sargent's speech at the Nobel Banquet on 10 December 2011 was economical with the truth in the very BEST senses of that phrase:

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Chris Sims and I thank you for recognizing the many women and men like us who use statistics and economic theory to understand how governments and markets can improve peoples' lives. I state 7 practical lessons taught by my beautiful subject, which investigates the consequences of time and chance and cooperation and competition and foresight and incentives.

1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible.

2. There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.

3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do.

4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don't always work as intended.

5. When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation and defaults on debts.

6. Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government transfers (especially transfers to themselves).

7. It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. National government debts and the U.S. social security system do that (but not the social security system of Singapore).

Perl(mutter)s of Wisdom

2011 physics laureate Saul Perlmutter's Nobel lecture. Awesome.

An Early Christmas Present

I gave myself one:

The case against a carbon tax for South Africa

As the big global climate change conference to be hosted by South Africa approaches, it's worth taking a realistic look at the various public policy issues involved. Philip Lloyd, a distinguished South African engineer, makes the case AGAINST a carbon tax for South Africa.

Modernity, Majority and Generality

And now for something COMPLETELY different...

Simon Butteriss sings the Modern Major-General's Song from Gibert and Sullivan's 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance:

The illusion of validity and the illusion of skill

Daniel Kahneman is one of my favourite scientists. His work combines simplicity of questions and methods with profundity of results and insights. This recent article, adapted from his latest (and perhaps greatest) book, explores two cognitive illusions that are particularly relevant to these interesting economic times: the illusion of validity and the illusion of skill.

The (Real) Pixar Story

Dr. Alvy Ray Smith's documented correction of some of the myths about the history of Pixar.

The Gruffalo

"A gruffalo? What's a gruffalo?"

"A gruffalo! Why, didn't you know?"

A wonderful recent (last night!) discovery that boys and I loved: The Gruffalo written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler.

Of Particular Significance

Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist and professor at Rutgers University, recently launched his excellent science- and particle physics-related website Of Particular Significance.

Top 5 reminiscences of Steve Jobs

Following the death of Steve Jobs earlier this month, the Internet has been flooded with reminiscences of the man, very many of them with vanishingly small signal-to-noise ratios. There are a few exceptions though, and in this post I present the best five that I have come across. It's worth noting that not all of the following accounts were written in response to Steve Jobs's death (specifically, Vic Gundotra's wasn't), but in a certain sense none of them were. They were all written in response to Steve Jobs's remarkable life:

1. Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011 by Steven Levy
   
Steven Levy first met Steve Jobs in November 1983, when he conducted the first of his many interviews of Jobs over the years. I get the disctinct impression that the two men were friends, or least friendly, so this is probably not the most objective obituary. Still, it is the best one I've read.




2. Icon Ambulance by Vic Gundotra
   
This anecdote by Vic Gundotra, Google's Senior Vice President, Social, illustrates Steve Jobs's legendary attention to detail as well as his sense of aesthetics and design.




3. Steve Jobs: A Few Memories by Stephen Wolfram
   
Stephen Wolfram, like Steve Jobs, was something of a wunderkind. Here he shares some memories of his personal and business interactions with Jobs. WolframAlpha, Wolfram's "computational knowledge engine" is integrated into Siri on Apple's latest iPhone 4S.




4. What I Learned From Steve Jobs by Guy Kawasaki
   
Guy Kawasaki had two stints at Apple, in the 1980s as a software evangelist and in the 1990s as an Apple Fellow. Here he distils the 12 most important lessons he learnt from working directly with Steve Jobs.




5. Memories of Steve by Ben Rosen
   
Ben Rosen first met Steve Jobs in late 1977. Rosen was 44 at the time, Steve Jobs, at 22, was exactly half Rosen's age. Rosen's piece is by far the best of these five reminiscences of Steve Jobs. It presents a delicate and tender portrait of the extremely complicated and contradictory man that was Steve Jobs. Rosen writes beautifully. Although he's now 78, judging by his very accomplished and varied career and the virtuosity of this piece, Rosen can readily achieve new success as a writer.

One more thing:
Overall, all of the above reminiscences are extremely positive about Steve Jobs, and with some justification. However, much of the posthumous commentary on Steve Jobs has been little more than unthinking, regurgitated, platitudinous idol worship. (I heard one star-struck fan refer to Steve Jobs as are our present-day Thomas Jefferson. I think he meant Thomas Edison.) This, I am quite certain, is something Steve Jobs himself would deeply disapprove of. After all, if he was anything, Steve Jobs was an iconolast. And it would be entirely inappropriate for the world, after his death, to turn him into an icon (or iCon). So in that spirit, I offer this slightly less flattering appraisal of Steve Jobs's contribution to one of his most celebrated products, the Macintosh:

• Holes in the Histories by Jef Raskin

Acceleration due to Energy

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." Nobody yet understands what causes this (the acceleration, not the expansion), but the cause, whatever it is, has been given the name dark energy. The UC Berkeley page on Saul Perlmutter (awarded half the prize, with the other half jointly awarded to Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess) has some interesting discussions on the subject. Among other things, Prof. Perlmutter's passion for physics shines through.

Greatly Insane: Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

The version of this famous ad that went on air is the one with the voice-over by Richard Dreyfuss. Here's the same ad with a voice-over by Steve Jobs:

Insanely Great: Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Steven Paul Jobs
(24 February 1955 - 5 October 2011)