How Many Murderers Will You Walk Past?
Note: the below is an exercise in Fermi estimation, which is a great way of making accurate, if not precise,...
The Value of the Qualitative Experience: Reversing Neural Networks
As a child, I would often stare at the clouds and assign identities to their shapes. There were clouds that...
Beer Panaché, or Shandy
It’s summer now in Portland, and that means the drinking culture changes. Portland’s always been a big beer town and...
Why is Fintech disrupting ACH?
We have an intern at work and I am the primary person that he goes to for maintenance tasks that...
Jimmy Lee: The First Crowdfunder? (In Memoriam)
James “Jimmy” Lee, a giant of the private equity industry, died suddenly today at the age of 62. The business of...
Bikes I Ride: Soma Double Cross
It’s summer outside, which means that my bikes that don’t have fenders are getting a lot of action right now....
Duqu 2.0: To Attribute or Not?
As I said before, the latest revelation in the world of cybersecurity, at least of this writing, is the re-emergence...
Teaching a Computer to Play Video Games
One of the coolest new videos making the rounds is a video by Seth Bling where he introduces a scheme...
Value Creation and High Finance
The popular discourse these days seems to have turned very squarely against high finance. Banks and hedge funds are largely...
How Small is Big Data?
A quick exercise in market sizing It’s a pretty wild world out there. If you ask IBM, they’ll tell you...