adrian monck

Category: Off Topic

  • Off topic: Crews control

    Currently reading Frederick Crews’ Follies of the Wise. If I needed a new motto for this blog it might come from him: “we do not have things to say. We acquire them in the process of working on definite problems that catch our attention.” This is from his intro to Follies: My aim in telling…

  • Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan – a Turkey

    I have just finished Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan. What a crock. There is a lot wrong with Taleb’s book, not least the dismal neologism of the Black Swan. History is littered with less esoteric (i.e. banal) examples of Taleb’s restatements of the bleeding obvious – Montezuma’s reception of Cortes, anyone? Still, let’s ignore the hackneyed…

  • Light blogging

    A dead Mac to blame.

  • Off topic: laptops – now just bloody great big handsets

    The thing that has really revolutionised my MacBook in the past fortnight is a 3G USB modem. Inspired by tech whizz and City colleague Bill Thompson, I took advantage of a sudden price drop. £15 a month now buys me 3GB of access. If macs came with SIM cards, of course, I wouldn’t have to…