Paul Jorion's Blog

Author: Paul Jorion

  • An experiment in Wikiology

    I marvel at Wikipedia. There is hardly a day when I don’t go and check their site, looking up some concept, often mathematical, sometimes financial, or finding out about any other question I happen to be asking myself, about Joachim Pateniers or the bodhisattva.

    In the beginning, I would only fix the typos I was…

  • Beijing’s Food Palace

    The girl who was taking us to the opera asked where we intended to have dinner and we told her we would be going for the third time in a row to the Golden Tripod Attic. There was some sneer in her voice when she said “But that’s a normal place!” And she was right:…

  • Where did the housing bubble come from?

    In today’s Wall Street Journal, Andy Laperrière, a managing director of the Washington office of the ISI Group, wrote a piece on the crisis in the mortgage industry, I wrote to the Journal’s editor, the following letter:

    In his “Mortgage Meltdown” (Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2007), Andy Laperrière assigns the residential real estate bubble…

  • Malaise in the subprime sector

    In today’s Wall Street Journal, Alex J. Pollock a former President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago wrote a piece on the subprime industry, I wrote to the Journal’s editor, the following letter:

    “In his “Credit Crack-Up” (March 12, 2007), Alex J. Pollock offers a perceptive summary of the…

  • Optimistic and pessimistic views on immortality

    Religions are most often associated with a representation of the after-life where immortality, which is clearly unattainable in the nether-world, is ultimately achieved.
    Other widely held belief systems don’t share that view, in particular Taoism, the “atheistic religion” or “philosophy” of the Chinese people over the ages. Indeed, some disparagingly called “superstitious” versions of…

  • The safest financial world of all

    A recurrent theme in Alan Greenspan’s speeches, either when he was head of the board of governors of the Fed or now in his capacity as an invited speaker, has been that the financial world has become in recent years a much more sturdy, much more robust and let’s say it, a safer place, because…

  • Artificial reason and the heart

    So, Marvin Minsky has just published a new book called The Emotional Machine (Simon & Schuster 2007) where he states that Artificial Intelligence should rest on the observed feature that intelligence is emotional by nature. This of course rings a bell, as some twenty years ago an audacious AI engineer, traveling between Martlesham Heath (Suffolk)…

  • “Combinatorial Magic”

    “Combinatorial Magic”Download

  • “Combinatorial Magic” Logic – Proof of Concept

    Loss-less 4-scalar encoding × 175 memory reduction × 1-cycle decode

    Claim: Any simple sentence can be loss-lessly encoded into 4 scalars
    (3 UTF-8 strings ≤ 16 bytes each + 1 uint8) while preserving
    agent / patient / possessor roles and 10 categories + 4 causes.

    1. 4-D Vector Definition

    …
    Dim