Edouard Chazal

Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”

On the resurgence of one of my favorite artist :

“He’s a dead man,” the talent agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar declared of Frank Sinatra in 1952. “Even Jesus couldn’t get resurrected in this town.” Maybe not, but Frank Sinatra could. Literally overnight—after the Academy Awards ceremony on March 25, 1954, where he won best actor in a supporting role for From Here to Eternity—Sinatra brought off the greatest comeback in show-business history. And he had done it all in Hollywood, a ruthlessly Darwinian company town that reviles losers but has the sappiest of soft spots for a happy ending. His Oscar underlined the fact that he was also a freshly viable recording artist with a new contract at Capitol Records, where he and a brilliant young arranger named Nelson Riddle had begun creating the string of groundbreaking recordings that would revolutionize popular music in the 1950s.

On a more personal level :

Frank’s restlessness—in his art, his personal relations, in everything—was his genius and his illness, and a permanent condition. There was always the dark undertow—the inner voices that told him that underneath it all he was nothing and nobody, a little street guinea from Hoboken. The furies that would frequently blind him when his vulnerabilities were touched. The terrible impatience—with the incompetence and stupidity that were so rife in the world, with things he needed to happen instantaneously, and so rarely did. The realization that he was like nobody else, and therefore destined to be alone. His terrors: of aloneness itself; of sleep, the cousin to death. And always, always, the vast and ravening appetites.

→ Vanity Fair

How Much Money Does the 1% Have Hidden in Tax Havens?

Hard to tell how much, but according to Gabriel Zucman, the combined increased of tax havens is 25% since 2009 — when countries of the G20 held a summit in London and decreed the “end of banking secrecy.”

Accepting the status quo seems irresponsible. Each country has the right to choose its forms of taxation.But when Luxembourg offers tailored tax deals to multi-national companies, when the British Virgin Islands enables money launderers to create anonymous companies for a penny, when Switzerland keeps the wealth of corrupt elites out of sight in its coffers, they all steal the revenue of foreign nations. And they all win—fees, domestic activity, sometimes great influence on the international stage—while the rest of us lose. In the end, the taxes that are evaded have to be compensated for by higher taxes on the law-abiding, often middle-class households in the United States, Europe, and developing countries.

→ Naked Capitalism

Inflation Targeting And Expectations

Anchored expectations should be such that one perceives little risk of either high or low inflation in the future. Hence, the range of possible outcomes for inflation considered realistic by agents should be quite limited if expectations are well anchored, and their confidence in their forecasts should therefore be relatively high. To quantify this notion, we assessed the degree of uncertainty in New Zealand firms’ forecasts by asking managers to assign probabilities to a range of possible inflation outcomes. Using these distributions, we computed the standard deviation of each manager’s forecast. The average standard deviation is 2%, implying that firm managers have a lot of uncertainty around their forecasts. Furthermore, there is considerable heterogeneity in the degree of uncertainty associated with individuals’ forecasts.

→ VoxEu

Was Steve Jobs An Artist ?

With the help of Marc Newson, this Mac Pro was auctionned $977’000.

“Art” is a capacious term. We typically imagine artists to be solitary people creating art by hand. But many artists work in more expansive, disembodied ways. We all recognize that film directors are artists, even though, in its substance, the work of directing often involves the management of teams and budgets on a corporate scale. Jeff Koons employs a hundred and fifty people, and the art works those workers create, at his direction, sell for tens of millions of dollars. Clearly, a vast distance separates Koons’s studio from the world of high-tech device manufacturing, but—at least in theory—the difference could be one of scale rather than kind. If a giant sculpture built to order by a team of employees can be a work of art, it’s at least possible that mass-produced computers could be art works, too.

→ The New Yorker

How To Build A Search Engine For Mathematics

Ultimately, it all comes back to counting things, and counting is a universally handy tool. Which in turn makes the encyclopedia handy, too. “Suppose you are working on a problem in one domain, say, electronics, and while solving a problem you encounter a sequence of integers,” said Manish Gupta, a coding theorist by training who runs a lab at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology. “Now you can use the encyclopedia and search if this is well known. Many times it happens that this sequence may have appeared in a totally unrelated area with another problem. Since numbers are the computational output of nature, to me, these connections are quite natural.”

→ Nautilus