Wall-E

We watched Wall-E this past weekend. I liked it a lot. Pixar is good at what they do. Rod Dreher has an interesting, though spoiler-filled, review.

It makes you want to go out run through the brambles a little.

Redirect

This venue has been valuable for me, and hopefully any readers who came across it. I will be moving however. I have joined The Captured Perspective, a brand new blog featuring a variety of voices on issues of politics, culture, economics, the media, and various other topics. This is exciting in that it will provide a more interactive thinking and writing experience, which will likely appeal to readers more as well. This blog will remain, though not in its current form. I anticipate it becoming more personal, telling some of the stories of our life as it goes. So without further ado, I retire Sparse Representations and unveil Alex and Peter's Blog.

Already?

I just heard a "Give a, give a, give a Garmin" advertisement for the first time this year.

Similar to this but not quite the same:

Stochastic Calculus makes it to Prime Time

This quote has been making the rounds.

Arnold Kling:

My main beef with economists is that standard macroeconomics does such a poor job of describing what is going on. The textbooks models are pretty much useless. Where in the textbooks is "liquidity preference" a demand for Treasury securities? Where in the textbooks does it say that injecting capital into banks is a policy tool?

Graduate macro is even worse. Have the courses that use representative-agent models solving Euler equations been abolished? Have the professors teaching those courses been fired? Why not?

I have always thought that the issue of the relationship between financial markets and the "real economy" was really deep. I thought that it was a critical part of macroeconomic theory that was poorly developed. But the economics profession for the past thirty years instead focused on producing stochastic calculus porn to satisfy young men's urge for mathematical masturbation.

Economists ought to admit that we do not know much about what is going on today.

It is true though that these brilliant folks thought they could model economies and predict the markets. And they were pretty good. But then the infinite dimensionality of real life got in the way and even the best models looks a little handwavey. I don't think stochastic calculus will take it personally. Maybe said young men and woment could become engineers and put their urges to good use in a field where it actually works. In the class I had on stochastic calculus we didn't look at applications in macroeconomics so much as market modeling. These people who are employed to predict random movements will likely find it hard to keep their jobs when their models deviate far from the truth. We can hope they land on their feet.

It would be a positive shift to see more of the mathematically-inclined graduates pursue success in engineering fields than finance. Many agree that the financial sector has grown too large for the economy it serves. There are thousands of interesting and potentially revolutionary fields to work in. Here are twenty-three problems that DARPA finds important. I hope that more capable minds get nurtured and encouraged to take on problems like these, instead of trying to eke out another 0.1% gain for the customers of a fancy hedge fund.

Obama Campaign photos

Callie Shell's photo collection shows a look inside Obama's campaign from the lonely back roads of his Illinois Senate race to the mania in Berlin and Denver.

Deficits and Balancing

The New York Times keeps us aware of the size and growth rate of the federal debt. They mention that balancing the budget has been moved to the bottom of most Washington agendas. John McCain, meanwhile, said in the last debate that he would be able to balance the budget in his first term. Does he even believe this? Or maybe he was slipping into one of those square peg talking points in this round hole situation.

It just isn't the kind of thing that inspires confidence in him, especially given his relatively thin economic credentials.

Thank You Gen Powell

As well as Cpl Kahn.

Colin Powell:

I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards--Purple Heart, Bronze Star--showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.