Assorted links

I’m surprised that Boston is so (relatively) high on the list of financial centers.

The one good thing about W|A is that hopefully the general public will learn to no longer take Wolfram seriously. His claim to fame, Mathematica, was never anywhere near as powerful as its main competitor, Maple. Nonetheless, many people found the GUI to be easy to use and visually appealing.

Leveraging Mathematica’s popularity, Wolfram set about, through his book and a series of lectures, to convince the stat learning and NLP communities that cellular automata was the next big thing. Very few researchers took him seriously largely because the CA approach to training is to sit around and pray for these cells to magically orient themselves to give the correct classification. That Wolfram Alpha, which was built around CA ideas, works so poorly comes as no surprise.

“Over the last decade or so Boston has had all of its home grown multinational banks taken over, so it no longer has a world class bank headquartered there.”

State Street Bank is headquartered in Boston.

I agree that CAFE standards are an inefficient way to reduce fuel usage, because of McArdle’s (and many other people’s) point that higher mileage will encourage more driving by lowering the marginal cost of driving. BUT: McArdle (and others) also makes the point that the new standards will raise the cost of cars, so to be intellectually honest, one has to factor in the increased fixed purchase cost and thus depreciation cost of a car into the future cost per mile of driving. For example, the cost per mile of my minivan’s depreciation is already much higher than my gas use, perhaps 2x. If the price of replacement minivan’s rises 10% to meet the new standards, then I would have to save roughly 20% on gas costs just to break even on per mile driving expense. So, the increased driving effect is surely overstated. Gas taxes would do the trick more efficiently, but critics can’t have it both ways.