Jonathan Brun

More Global Warming Zealots

Building on Dyson’s Heretics article, here is a piece about the various players who hate global warming skeptics (read NOT deniers).

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/15/opinion/edjacoby.php?page=1

Interesting article on P/E Ratios

Here is an interesting article on Graham and Dodd's (Warren Buffet Mentor)
P/E ratio philosophy. They argue the ratio should be taken over a longer
period than the current 12 months. This fits well with Nicholas Taleeb's
philosophy of being fooled by randomness.

Long Term Long Term Long Term.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/14/business/view.php?page=1

More Open-Source

More action on the open source front. I was watching the movie layer cake and one key line I retained was, “Being good at business is being a good middleman”. That is exactly what the open-source gurus have done. Wikipedia’s Walsh, eBay’s Skoll, Linux’s Torvald, Craigslist’s Craig, Facebook’s Zuckerberg…

Its all about providing tools for other people to do work for you. That is why I see such a great combination between open-source and micro-finance – hence the site Kiva. A great place to lend money – not donate – to help people lift themselves out of poverty. Another fascinating move in society is the similtaneous shift towards capitalism as a poverty alleviation tool and collaboration – the theoretical anithesis to capitalism – for the sharing of ideas and the development of products at low cost.

Here is a great TED talk by Leadbeater on open-source:

Leadbeater has also posted the first 5 chapters of his book for comments, it is a worthwhile read.

Humility and Global Warming

Excellent article here on the potential pitfalls of the current global warming modeling. I am not arguing that global warming is not occurring or that we cannot prevent it, we must simply remember that we still do not know all the variables in the equation.

Canadian scientist David Suzuki was recently being interviewed on the radio when a global warming skeptic called in. He became furious at the mere thought that global warming was not tied to industrial activity. Refusing to engage in a possibly futile, but useful, debate, he stated that the debate was over and walked off the show.

This seems very unhealthy and not likely to win friends. The truth is, as E.O. Wilson has explained, we are so ignorant of our natural world that we do not even know what we do not know.

A little humility and scientific discussion can go a long way.

Think Different, Think Better

Pooling ideas from multiple disciplines and creating a coherent picture is at the heart of genuine progress. The greatest contributers are often people working outside their apparent expertise – Einstein, Ghandi, MLK, Yunnus, Picasso, and all the ones who never made it through school, Hughes, Gates, Jobs….

Hence the renaming of my blog to “The Beekeeper”, which hopefully expresses my fascination with gathering thoughts from a wide spectrum of the human collective à la Tipping Point, Gun’s Germs and Steel, and Freakonomics. The TED conference (www.ted.com), which gathers luminaries from all fields to share big – nay I say huge – ideas, is one of my favorite sources of information.

However, going against the societal grain often means being wrong for extended periods of time and being ostracized. And the difference between a loon and a genius is simply success as demonstrated here: Here

A favorite childhood bedroom poster of mine stated, “Beaten paths are for beaten men”.