Sorry for not notifying you that i would be away for a while. I have been traveling in Europe with my wife and a granddaughter during her vacation week. Something I never did. Times have changed. We visited the Netherlands where I spent a year teaching in 2001. That was like coming home. Then a quick trip to F�rth in Germany to show her the house where my wife was born and left in 1939. I have a few days work to get through and I will get back to posting to this website.
Continue ReadingPassover Thoughts
Last night my wife and I celebrated Seder with cousins as we have in the past. I find this occasion a relatively rare opportunity for reflection on my Judaism. What I mean here is that, although age does bring more reflection, my thoughts only rarely rest on my religious upbringing and practices. This Holiday celebrates the liberation of the Jews from slavery under Egyptian rulers and their long journey to find a place to settle that followed. As so often, I am triggered by what David Brooks has written in the NYTimes. His [column](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/opinion/a-long-obedience.html?hp&rref=opinion) today focuses on Passover, and, more… Read More
Continue ReadingStealing or Merely Profiting from One’s Smarts
The news media have been buzzing with stories of the piles of money that some traders have been amassing using the sophisticated method called high frequency trading (HFT). The NYTimes magazine carried a story last Sunday about a small group that discovered the secret behind the success of HFT and set out to defeat it returning sanity and fairness to the financial world. Concurrently, the author Michael Lewis has just published a book on the same subject. I tried to work through the technology involved but got bogged down. In a nutshell, these traders relied on minuscule gaps in the… Read More
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