Solve for X

I'm a practical guy. I typically don't much see the point of doing something solely for the sake of doing it. For me, the endeavor has to have an ultimate purpose or better yet, use. For example, it would not be very satisfying to me to simply invent a mathematical formula in pursuit of such abstract qualities as elegance, symmetry, or beauty only. I would be much happier developing such an equation whose invention might solve some real world problem like perhaps predicting how a particular stock might perform or how the market might behave over time. Ed Thorp is also such a person. So much so, that he is credited as being the first person to use mathematics to win big at black jack. However, Ed Thorp was not content to limit himself to a life time of counting cards in casinos. His ambitiousness led him to develop similar equations and formulas in an effort to remove, restrict, or hedge against the uncertainty of the stock market. Unsurprisingly, Ed Thorp is also credited with having created one of the first hedge funds.

In a new book entitled, The quants : how a new breed of math whizzes conquered Wall Street and nearly destroyed it, author Scott Patterson introduces use to Thorp, as well as to a new breed of stock brokers who relied on empirical data versus intuition to guide them to great fortunes and financial ruin.

Books by Ed Thorp:

Beat the dealer: a winning strategy for the game of twenty-one: a scientific analysis of the world-wide game known variosly as black jack, twenty-one, vingt-et-un, pontoon, or van-john

Beat the market; a scientific stock market system

Similar titles:

Confessions of a Wall Street analyst : a true story of inside information and corruption in the stock market

Blood on the street : the sensational inside story of how Wall Street analysts duped a generation of investors

Stock market wizards : interviews with America's top stock traders

The pied pipers of Wall Street : how analysts sell you down the river

American Artifact

Tonight, there's going to be a nifty little documentary showing at the Alamo Lake Creek. It features some hometown guys, Frank Kozik and Lindsey Kuhn. Of course, I'm talking about rock poster artists. I blogged about this topic back in March 2008 and I'm still a fan.

This documentary is called American Artifact, and the director lays out the timeline of the modern rock poster, from the 1960s to the present. From the clips, it looks pretty interesting, lots of great interviews and shots of posters actually being made.

Tonight's showing will also feature a little Q&A with the director. Geoff Peveto, Rob Jones and Jay Ryan will also be on hand to answer all your burning poster questions.

The Library has got some great rock poster books. Along with the titles I mentioned in 2008, we've got some new books that are just as exciting. If you want to see some actual work, go to a Flatstock, or both the Center for American History and Austin History Center have very rich poster collections.

Art of the Modern Movie Poster: International Postwar Style and Design -Jeutka Salavetz

Gig Posters. Volume 1, Rock Show Art of the 21st Century - Clay Hayes

Vicious Intent: the Rock 'n' Roll Art and Exploitation of Stainboy Reinel -Stainboy Reinel

Picturing America

On the second floor of the main library, hanging along the north cubicle walls on the west side of the building, has been on display for more than a year an exhibit from the National Endowment for the Humanities called Picturing America. It’s a set of big, glossy photos of North American art from as long ago as 1100 ce, and includes architecture, paintings, sculpture, silverwork, baskets and pottery, stained-glass, and quilts depicting American icons: native-American designs, missions, portraits of founders, and land- and cityscapes.

If you like colorful oversized art books, you might want to come downtown to see these nicely printed Picturing America posters. And if the exhibit whets your appetite for more information about the artists and more reproductions of their work, look for them here:

Indian pottery and baskets
American painters
missions
sculpture
N. C. Wyeth
John James Audubon
photography
architecture
quilts

First American-born Black Communist

The theme for this year's Black History Month is The History of Black Economic Empowerment which coincides with the centennial anniversary of the National Urban League. The National Urban League was founded in New York in 1910 as a collaboration between the city's most prominent professionals, businessmen and reform leaders of both races. It would forego the crusade for civil rights to focus on the needs of individuals as seven hundred thousand blacks migrated north between 1910 and 1920 looking for work. A more radical empowerment movement for blacks is described in Defying Dixie: the Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919-1950. Yale historian Glenda Gilmore's researches the Southern communists, socialists and expatriates who challenged Jim Crow during the three decades following the Bolshevik Revolution. Gilmore argues that the decades between the wars were not a prelude to the more prominent struggle for black equality in the 1950s and 1960s, but instead represent a more complex campaign that had as its goal a fundamental reordering of American society. Liberal and radical Southerners waged an improbable struggle on behalf of civil liberties and labor rights. The civil rights movement's later demand for "jobs and freedom" was, in the end, nothing new.

Gilmore focuses on the first American-born black Communist, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, who died in a Siberian gulag. A native Texan and a Tuskegee graduate, he became very involved in radical politics. After witnessing the Mexican Revolution in the Yucatán and then agitating for socialist causes in Harlem, party officials summoned him to Moscow to teach him about the true nature of the struggle in the American South. There, before an audience that included Joseph Stalin and Ho Chi Minh, he tried to convince them that an interracial coalition of Southern workers would be impossible to achieve. He was overruled by the party leaders, and, for a time, he accepted their vision over what he knew was true. Fort-Whiteman embraced the Soviet Union as a paradise, where Russians would bend over backward to prove their racial egalitarianism. When he returned to the United States, he wore a Russian peasant blouse and knee-high felt boots, his head completely shaved. But he soon returned, in his words, "home to Moscow." Tragically, as Gilmore relates, his new home would prove to be as cruel as the old. In the end, Fort-Whitemn was swept up in the Stalinist purges and sent to a Siberian labor camp where he died a broken man in the winter of 1939.