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LES PÊCHEURS D’HOUAT (1983), 2012 reprint
My first book, Les pêcheurs d’Houat, adapted from my anthropology Ph.D. thesis, had been out of print for many many years. Éditions du croquant have been kind enough to offer a reprint. Monique Woodward has translated here my foreword for the 2012 edition.
I have lived on the Isle of Houat from February…
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And then Paul Jorion created a Theory of Prices
Original Post : And then Paul Jorion created a Theory of Prices.
It’s the ‘rentrée…
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How wars get started
When in 1975 I became a student at Cambridge University my parents visited me there. It was actually their first stay in England. My mother was enchanted with the country. I wanted to know why and she explained that houses were “normal”, people behaved “normally”, everything in England was so essentially “normal”. I pressed her…
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Stock prices and the shape of randomness
I remember an illustration in an article by Heinz von Foerster in the 1960s. In the first picture, a set of tiny cubes were represented, piled up in a random manner. The reader was told that these were steel cubes magnetized on one of their sides. The second picture showed what had happened after the…
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Old-style publishing a paper
Now when you want to publish an article, you write it, you put it on your website and within days hundreds if not thousands of people have read it. Sometimes someone will approach you and ask if they can publish it in the old-fashioned way, in a journal, and you’ll say “Why not?” In the…
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The un-American solution to the subprime mess
Among the remedies mentioned for the subprime crisis, I haven’t seen listed the system I went through when getting a mortgage in England back in those days. Here is how it worked: the first step would be for you to open an account with a building society; then you would start saving, sending a check…
