Stochastic Bookmark

abstruse unfinished commentary

about correspondence

25.6.09

hiatus not quietus

It's about time I reported in, prompted by the immanent snarkaeologist Mahendra Singh (whose characterization of me as occluded is rather high-flown, as I have not yet lost contact with the ground; and a tip of the copper-sieved-bateau without my capsize? but I quibble). But while he butchers Carrollian maths, I've been synchronistically having a go at a number of more improbable maths (degaussed randomness, order statistics, entropy optimization — bring in da noise, bring in da functional analysis! — also, delving more deeply into Cosma Shalizi's generously provided guidance, which I've been following for over a decade, sup[thx]) intent upon financial application (recent readings in this area: Bruner/Carr's The Panic of 1907 [speaking of the synchronistical, my parallel line of enquiry just preceded its release and the bicentennial historical reenactment], Donald MacKenzie's An Engine Not a Camera [zoom!], and Mandelbrot/Hudson's The (Mis)behavior of Markets, in which the new ingredient is Mr. Market's Bergsonian time — but hey, timing is the secret to both comedy and finance, though volatility changes meaning — anyway, all well worth the time invested), complemented by philosophical meanderings (Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Keefe & Smith's Vagueness: A Reader). Navigating this parenthetical thicket left little time for novels (and less for the internets), but family vacation last month afforded a break (in reading and merit order: van Gulik's The Phantom of the Temple [do I detect a touch of Roussel?], Yourcenar's Alexis [precociously steeped in melancholy], Aira's Ghosts [an episode in the afterlife of an architectural site], and Abish's How German Is It [primed by the short story "The English Garden" from In the Future Perfect]); another break from the maths and philosophy, Roubaud's The Loop, turned out to be a convolution of both with memory, excellent in its own right and prompting me to finally embark on À la recherche du temps perdu — and to ponder larger matters, like cosmology's missing antimatter (404 [And here time forked.]*) — what if the first broken symmetry was Time, at the instant of the Big Bang? and antimatter preferred the arrow pointing the other way? apparently consistent with Loop Quantum Gravity, and could have driven anomolies of inflation — but don't look back, something may be receding from you ...

add: 3QD reminds that past performance is functionally related to future returns.

*... The screen / In its blank broth evolved a lifelike blur, / And music welled.