I would normally delete the Interactive Investment e-mail as spam, but a headline on the most recent one caught my eye- Benoit Mandelbrot on the mathematics of the market.

According to standard theory you would not expect to see a 6.8% fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 100,000 years of trading says Mandelbrot in his book. It fell 6.8% on 31 August 1998. It also fell heavily on two earlier occasions that month (odds of all three: one in 500bn) and on 19 October 1987, just a decade earlier, it dropped 29%. The odds of that? “You could span the powers of ten from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the breadth of the measurable universe – and still never meet such a number.”

(The (mis)Behaviour of Markets – Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson)

Alan sent me this link to an article where music video directors talk about their work. There’s a bit of moaning about how budgets are now down to the low hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than $million, and a lame “It’s all the fault of downloaders” argument, but I don’t have any sympathy for them.

Seriously, give me ten grand and I could make a great music video- give me �50k and I could probably do that film I’ve been threatening for years. They’d be obviously lo-fi but far superior to things costing tens of times as much.

For various reasons I’ve run out of new pages for Deputised Experts. I’m going to try and get back on track and producing two updates a week ASAP. And then I’m going to cheat when webcomicsnation comes properly online and go back to the beginning to capture new readers.

So there it is. the Hunting Ban is official. Not even Tony’s vain attempts to keep it from messing with the election were a great surprise.

To be honest, I really don’t care. Neither side appeals to me. The Countryside Alliance are selfish bastards who only became interested in rural problems when their “sport” was in danger. Anti hunt campaigners are clueless as to the realities of country life and can’t comprehend that foxes are still going to be killed- and in ways just as inhumane- because they’re a danger to livestock.

There are more important issues in the countryside (transport, jobs, agriculture) and the country (do I really need to start a list?) that have been ignored because of the fuss over a cause championed by minorities on each side.

I should probably print this out several times and stick it up all around the house- How to hack your way out of writer’s block

via BoingBoing

This week’s theme is Patterns–