Des petits trous, des petits trous, toujours des petits trous…

I attended two excellent jazz events last week, jazz being one thing the Chicago music scene excels at (*).
The first was “Brazilian Nights” with Paulinho Garcia and some very talented NU jazz students, at the Regenstein Hall in the NU campus.
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Wine of the Year: Saxum, James Berry Paso Robles 2007

I believe it is the first time since I know it– though it might well be first time ever–that Wine Spectator’s top 10 is dominated by New World wines. The winner is Saxum, James Berry Vineyard Paso Robles 2007, “[a]n amazing wine, dense, rich and layered, offering a mix of power and finesse, with concentrated dark berry fruit, mineral, sage, herb and cedar notes that are pure, intense, focused and persistent.
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Weekend econlinks: The quest for perfection

  • Gelman writes a useful overview on causality and statistical learning (caveat lector: I have only read through Angrist and Pischke’s book, among the three Gelman mentiones; that one is very well written, but aimed at junior graduate students at best: hence, the book’s tag “an empiricist’s companion” is overselling it; and that has nothing to do with Josh Angrist kindly “advising” me to change my PhD topic/focus, sometime in my beginning graduate years, because ‘nobody serious would be interested in structural modelling’ :-)).
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On Noncommutative Geometry, String Theory, and the EU vs. US academe

All this in a 2005 interview with Alain Connes, in Iran (initial link to the PDF of the interview via Tyler Cowen, on MR).

First, I think this is a very welcome, very open interview (several questions/comments are just great, congrats to the interviewers!)  → Read more