Benjamin Tegarden

Environmental topics:

Which is the lesser evil: coal or nuclear power?

Is “shelter-in-place” home-building the solution to California’s annual wildfires?

Education reading:

Is education a placebo?

Yes, it’s still possible to be successful without going to college.

Judging the USPS by comparison to kiwifruit.

Speaking of food, people pay less for it nowadays.

Monday mockery:

H. L. Mencken’s obituary (certainly not a eulogy) for William Jennings Bryan.

Using quotes from the Founding Fathers against modern-day politicians.

Phew. I’m back from my Canada / New England vacation. Now, I need to fit in some power-relaxing over the weekend before heading off again Sunday evening for a work recruiting trip.

Vital statistics:

• Time: Seven days
• Distance driven: 1400 miles
• Countries: Two (United States, Canada)
• U.S. states: Seven (New Jersey, New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut)
• Canadian provinces: One (Québec)
• Pictures taken: 877
• Number of poutine-related calories ingested: Too high to count

Despite what I assume is raging popularity among my “Daily Reading” articles, I’ll be on hiatus for (at least) the next week as I travel north to visit Canada for the first time (specifically Québec, where I’m a tad concerned the only French I end up remembering from high school will be remembering the province’s accent aigu).

Some finance-y stuff:

In defense of algorithmic trading. Of course, I’m not exactly a disinterested third-party on this topic .

It’s one thing to claim the existence of a bubble, it’s quite another to predict when the bubble will pop. We’ll need to wait another month to see how it all turns out, but so far this seems to have been pretty spot-on with a ~20% drop so far. [6-month graph]

Blogs ’bout banking:

Visualizing failed banks.

Speaking of failed banks, maybe it’s time to dismantle the Fed.

Long-ish computer-related stuff:

All about Moore’s Law: where does it apply and why?

A good broad introduction to the P vs. NP problem, one of the most important unsolved problems in theoretical computer science.