http://oddquanta.com/ Strange bits of irreducible phenomena. en-us 2008-08-16T16:51:08-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000319.php Check out the title of show widget!... BradRubenstein 2008-08-16T16:51:08-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000318.php I was completely blown away by the first preview of [title of show] yesterday at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway. Check out the action at the stage door after! Heidi was gorgeous (and what a voice!), Hunter was lovable, Jeff beamed (and his tunes move me as much as when I first heard them!), and Susan made the show matter. Larry got so much applause when he first walked out on stage that I was afraid he wouldn't be able to start the show. Wow. It's been a long journey. I'm proud of y'all. This is funny, I found... BradRubenstein 2008-07-06T10:24:04-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000316.php I'm looking forward to joining The North American Welsh Choir in October on a singing trip to Welsh Patagonia. I'm not Welsh, but I am North American.... BradRubenstein 2008-05-05T02:01:10-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000315.php Stumbled upon, at blog.pmarca.com: Age and the entrepreneur, part 1: Some data. Research by Dr. Dean Simonton of U.C. Davis: [C]reativity is a probabilistic consequence of productivity, a relationship that holds both within and across careers. Within single careers, the count of major works per age period will be a positive function of total works generated each period, yielding a quality ratio that exhibits no systematic developmental trends. And across careers, those individual creators who are the most productive will also tend, on the average, to be the most creative: Individual variation in quantity is positively associated with variation in... BradRubenstein 2008-04-30T06:42:34-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000317.php I went the other night to see Laurence Fishburne in his one-man show Thurgood at the Booth Theatre. Sat in the first row. The entire stage set consisted of the big table and lectern from behind which lawyers stood before the court. It was extraordinary storytelling; great script, great acting. He talked at length about the behind-the-scenes arguments at the NAACP before and during Brown v Board of Education, and it brought back memories of driving around Knoxville with Glenn Reynolds hearing about the classes in Constitutional Law he was teaching.... BradRubenstein 2008-04-27T02:06:41-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000314.php Mom noticed that I hadn't posted anything in the month of February, and was worried about me. She can rest easy. It's not because there is nothing going on, rather there is way too much. Our indie horror flick Red Hook is coming along nicely, and we have engaged Quentin Chiapetta to compose the movie score, which is going to be amazing. At the same time, I'm working with Red Hook's director, Elizabeth Lucas, to make a new Sci Fi feature, called Fade To White, which we've been filming in central park in the snow. Just beautiful. So, in... BradRubenstein 2008-02-29T12:05:24-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000312.php From Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris: Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency. Hat tip to Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion is on my nightstand. (Sam's book was on my nightstand a few months ago, but I didn't notice this choice snippet then). Interested in civic action for... BradRubenstein 2008-01-31T20:30:38-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000311.php I was musing about this as I was reading about how naked Société Générale must be feeling after having stripped off 7.5 yards of capital in (so it seems, but the night is young...) trader fraud. I used to think that, when Wall Street Foreign Exchange traders sold Yen "by the yard" (meaning 109 yen, a U.S. "billion"), I presumed that the New Yorkers were making a humorous and self-deprecating comparison between their business and the rag trade, next door on the Lower-East Side. In fact, it is Londoners who invented it. They were abbreviating the word "milliard", the... BradRubenstein 2008-01-26T11:01:47-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000310.php Sometimes I have to remind myself how poor people in the United States are: In the middle of a Yahoo Finance article on Social Security, I notice: As many as 40 million U.S. households either have no bank account or make little use of banking services, according to an estimate from the Chicago-based Center for Financial Services Innovation. The current U.S. population is about 299,400,000 people (2006 est.), with about 2.59 persons per household. That means over 1 in 3 households don't use a bank. Wow. But then, we note that over 1 in 8 people in the United States... BradRubenstein 2008-01-17T13:05:10-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000309.php -Que me conseillez-vous d'aller visiter? demanda-t-il. -La planète Terre, lui répondit le géographe. Elle a une bonne réputation... "내가 어떤 별을 가보면 좋을까요?" 그가 물었다. "지구에 가봐. 지구는 평판이 좋거든." 지리학자가 대답했다. "Kion vi konsilas, ke mi vizitu?" li demandis. "La planedon Tero," respondis la geografo. "Ĝi ha- vas bonan reputacion..." "What place would you advise me to visit now?" he asked. "The planet Earth," replied the geographer. "It has a good reputation." Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry... BradRubenstein 2007-11-18T12:20:08-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000308.php Is this right? ItemPricePer-day The computer itself, is totally cool. You'll want to (or have to) replace it in five years.$2,000.001.0958 Broadband - Road Runner$50/month1.6438 Online Backup - Carbonite$4.95/month0.1491 Virus Protection - McAfee$40/year0.1095 Total$2.9982... BradRubenstein 2007-11-09T13:09:06-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000307.php Goodness, where's my soap box. Even some of my tech savvy friends are leaving their home computers without backup. Then they have a computer or disk crash (or they lose their laptop), and their files are gone. Boom. Is that you? Stop it! Right now! As we put more and more of our "important papers" (financial papers, precious photos, personal phone books, e-mail, $10,000 worth of downloaded music, etc) onto our computers and nowhere else, leaving that at the mercy of a disk crash doesn't make any sense. I have a feeling my friends simply underestimate the frequency of... BradRubenstein 2007-11-09T12:36:11-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000306.php BradRubenstein 2007-10-17T00:40:26-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000305.php All my well meaning friends and relatives who send me funny stories, how do I tell them they are, um, not funny? Now research shows it is because they are egocentric. Duh. From the - New York Times: In an article to be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication. One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative,... BradRubenstein 2007-10-12T17:11:41-05:00 http://oddquanta.com/archives/000304.php My friend Marc recommended that I take a look at The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. It is actually a fun read, mostly because Tim is crazy about living a good life, and his enthusiasm is contagious. The topic is retirement, in a manner of speaking. There's a lot in common between his and my points of view, even though we are pretty different (think extroverted cage fighter vs introverted nerd "with excellent coping skills"). There's also common ground in the decisions we've made, including trading in a work-a-day life for mini-retirements and exciting projects. When I stopped working my... BradRubenstein 2007-10-06T19:53:03-05:00