a few links

Is the Efficient Market Hypothesis equivalent to P=NP? Bizarre (and probably wrong) but intriguing idea:
http://arxiv1.library.cornell.edu/abs/1002.2284

Nice visual representation of 2011 budget breakdown:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html

The Dalai Lama on Technological Change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CgZ2qkRSpo

I have a ticket to see the Dalai Lama speak in person 2 months from now in Indiana. I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say. In the above link, he sounds a lot like a transhumanist when he says he thinks one day humans should be improved by becoming part machine and "that would be good". Out of context I can't tell what exactly he means by that. But it's an interesting comment.

my XKCD favorites

I should preface this by saying that I haven't read nearly all of them... so there are surely good ones out there I don't know about. And also it's biased towards more recent ones since I didn't start saving links to them till fairly recently and have probably forgotten a lot of good ones by now. But here's what I've got as far as the "best of the best":

1st Place:

(I've been meaning to put this on my profile for a while... maybe I will finally do it now.)

Sheeple http://xkcd.com/610/

2nd Place:

Godel's secret fetish http://xkcd.com/468/

3rd Place:

Explosion http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/principle_of_explosion.png

Runners up:

October 30th http://xkcd.com/656/

Regrets http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/regrets.png

Neutrality http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/neutrality_shmeutrality.png

Psychic http://xkcd.com/628/

Locke and Demosthenes http://xkcd.com/635/

Creepy http://xkcd.com/642/

Legos http://xkcd.com/659/

Two Party System http://xkcd.com/661/

Sympathy http://xkcd.com/660/

Revolutionary http://xkcd.com/675/

XKCD is the first (and unfortunately only) comic I have ever found to be reasonably funny. Although it's sad to say that, even with XKCD I think only maybe 20% of them are very funny. Most comics it's somewhere between 0% and half a percent at best. I think about this a lot... how come I find a lot of movies good, and a lot of music good, but almost never find comics funny outside of XKCD? It either says something about me or something about the world we live in, probably both. (Incidentally, when I say "comics" I'm only talking about comic strips, not stand up comedians... I do find plenty of them funny.)