Props to Sudoku Slam

Sudoku Slam, the best Sudoku site on the web (and free!), is ready to go. It's also getting lots of attention, both on digg and del.icio.us. Congrats to splag and Bill for a job very well done.

More on The Wire

There is way too much to read about The Wire these days:

• Heaven and Here is a blog dedicated entirely to the show. Watch out for spoilers: they sometimes comment on episodes before they've aired (they are available early on HBO On Demand).
• Tim Goodman has been doing episode breakdowns on his blog.
• Slate has a TV Club feature breaking down the episodes.

I found a couple of these links via Matthew Yglesias, a fellow addict.

The Wire will be completed

I just saw that The Wire has been renewed for a final 5^th season. Hooray! Now I just hope they actually make those two two-hour Deadwood movies to give some closure; the end of Season 3 was satisfying, but definitely not as an end to the show.

David Remnick profile

It's here (via Emdashes), for all you fans of The New Yorker.

calendar for Cal home football games

I made up a calendar on 30 Boxes with all the Cal home football games, so I know when to not move my car :). It's here (ICal file) if you'd like to use it; I successfully used that link to import into Google Calendar. Let me know if it doesn't work.

Gillian Welch on Pandora

I've been using Pandora a bunch lately, and I'm starting to really like it as a radio alternative. I made this Gillian Welch station with just a few of her songs, and it seems to generate a really nice mix. The only downside is (as usual) you can waste a lot of time, tinkering with stations and reading about bands.

Only a couple days left...

Tim Goodman seems to like the fourth season of The Wire, which was provided to critics in its entirety; it almost makes me want to change careers.

investing tidbits

I've been reading a lot about investing lately, as I need to make some financial decisions in the near future. I started with The Intelligent Investor, which was very interesting. I then sought out a discussion of index vs. actively-managed mutual funds on the web, and at first couldn't find much useful, impartial information. Then, I hit upon a great resource: Google Scholar. I found a bunch of interesting papers, both on actively-managed funds and on market anomalies, i.e., phenomena that, at least on the surface, seem to contradict the efficient market hypothesis. Here are some of the more interesting things I came across (you may need various subscriptions to actually read the papers):

• Another Puzzle: The Growth in Actively Managed Mutual Funds shows that many investors consistently choose mutual funds that beat the market, later termed the "smart money" effect.
• Profitability of Momentum Strategies: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations is a recent paper on an anomaly termed "stock return momentum": briefly, a portfolio that buys recently-rising stocks while shorting recently-falling ones is consistently profitable (ignoring transaction costs, I think).
• Does Stock Return Momentum Explain the "Smart Money" Effect? answers the question posed in its title in the affirmative.

I also found this page, which documents various stock market anomalies.

So, what did I conclude? I'm now fairly convinced that a smart person that devotes a lot of time to research can beat the market, in the long term. I'm also pretty convinced that I don't want to spend that kind of time on investing, and even if I did, I may be too risk-averse to be successful. So, for the most part, I'm sticking to index funds.

Vaguely related: this Business Week article on adjustable-rate mortgages is worth a read. Looks like a lot of people made bad decisions with these things.