Edouard Chazal

The Kid’s A Natural

Father to son :

The fact that my son is showing a prosperous interest in the hobby that I love makes me, as a father, happy to see the future generation of model builders develop. Building models isn’t such a popular hobby anymore and I get that. But he sees me doing it and thinks it’s cool. I do realize that he’ll likely move on, like I did, and find other hobbies to enjoy. That’s perfectly okay. These initial builds will certainly mean more to me than him. He’s learning the ins and outs and at a very astute pace.

This remind me of an Alpha Jet I built when I was a kid. I enjoyed it quite a lot, my father not that much when I tainted his cherish desk, while painting the wings of the aircraft to the colors of the French national flag. Nonetheless, it leaves a lasting memory on its antique furniture —I guess.

→ Amateur Airplanes

Agressive HFT And Institutional Trading Activity – Who Leads Market Crashes ?

Hallelujah, high-frequency traders didn’t short the market that much :

Our analysis of trading on August 24, 2015, shows that while there were bursts of aggressive HFT activity during the sell-off, it was the institutional activity, not the HFT activity that led and dominated the sell-off. Specifically, the events have appeared to unfold as follows: institutions would sell particular securities, creating acute selling pressure in the markets. Aggressive HFTs would then step in and sell the market further, but only for a relatively short period of time.

→ Traders Magazine

The Age Of Loneliness

There’s just so much in this longform that I could not settle for just one or two paragraphs :

In the time I’d been gone, there had been a shift. Of course I had changed, and the trees had grown taller, but a greater swing—the kind that happens on a geological timescale of thousands or millions of years—was beginning to be widely acknowledged. Some scientists were becoming urgently vocal about the need to recognize that, in recent centuries, the world had entered a new epoch. They called it the Anthropocene. Planet Earth was now defined, they said, by the complete and utter dominance of human beings.

***

“It’s no longer us against ‘Nature,’” Paul Crutzen wrote in 2011. “Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be.”

My favorite part — I love birds :

I stared down at my charge at the bottom of the basket. It was just a bird, but a bird that couldn’t be found anywhere on the East Coast forty years earlier, when DDT was so abundant that every falcon nest failed, the eggshells thinned beyond survival. This bird was hope. There in a room far above the famous Riverside Church sanctuary that gives so many people a place to put their faith, I looked into the bird’s dark eyes and found a place for my own.

A beautiful conclusion by Meera Subramanian. My thanks to her for this remarquable journey :

There is no trail going forward. We have to follow the lay of the land. We need to remember that when we leave the woods, it is not so easy to find our way back.

Credit : Steve McCurry, Canada

→ Guernica Magazine

A Different Approach To VC

Fred Wilson :

I wrote this to my partner the other day. I’m not going to provide the context. It doesn’t matter. It could have been about almost anything in the startup sector right now.
“the biggest thing that is wrong with the startup sector right now is entrepreneurs and their teams are too focused on valuation and not enough focused on business fundamentals”

→ A VC

Why Science Needs Metaphysics

Those who say that science can answer all questions are themselves standing outside science to make that claim. That is why naturalism—the modern version of materialism, seeing reality as defined by what is within reach of the sciences—becomes a metaphysical theory when it strays beyond methodology to talk of what can exist. Denying metaphysics and upholding materialism must itself be a move within metaphysics. It involves standing outside the practice of science and talking of its scope. The assertion that science can explain everything can never come from within science. It is always a statement about science.

→ Nautilus