Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Monday, June 4, 2007

Amazing.

What a cold, lots of work, an impending deadline and the second printer to go south on me in two months can do for one's blogging....

At any rate, town meeting is on once again (will they or won't they with the school budget?) with a special golf course edition planned for Wednesday for some local action and commentary. We have a dust up over casinos on the state level and can consider if the gov's municipal partnership act is in fact DOA. Nationally the Repubs look like they've found another pretender for prez (not that we don't have one now) and the Dems sorta think that it's Bush's war even though they keep enabling him.

The back cover of my copy of "The Black Swan" says that Nassim Taleb is temporarily the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at UMass. If you haven't read his book "Fooled By Randomness" you should -- it's a mind expanding exploration of the impact of random events on our lives and how that planned purposeful success that turned someone into a millionaire may well be dumb luck. I'm not doing the book justice. Now I'll have to check the UMass web site to see if he's doing any public presentations, if he's still at the university (funny, they never mention things like this when the alumni fundraising letter arrives).