dippin

He is certainly cool as hell. And this from a cultural perspective as well, as he is neither condescending nor disrespectful to the places he visits. He never treats things as a freak show ("look how weird their food is") and he approaches things in a non-ethnocentric way. His show on Lebanon (when Israel started its attack) was one of the most interesting shows Ive ever seen.


Now, since I don't want to threadjack, let me add my insights as well. I am an economist/stock broker turned sociologist/academic:

- If you are investing in the stock market, beware of overconfidence. Even the best economists in the world lose money or go broke. The fact that you've made money on the stock market during an expansion doesnt mean that your "system" works, that you are good at it, or that you can beat the market when things go south. Both prior to the 2000 crash and to this latest recession, people would always tell me of how much money they made on the market, how easy it was, blahblahblah. Most of them are undergoing serious financial hardship right now. So always be mindful of the risks, and dont risk what you cant stand to lose.

- This is for the women. Beware of overworked gynecologists. One of the grants I was involved in was a major research project for the CDC related to HPV vaccination. One of the shocking things we learned during our research is that there is a very significant number of false negatives for HPV from pap tests mostly caused by "worker fatigue."

- As bad as it sounds, who you know matters more than what you know for most careers. The biggest difference between going to harvard and going to local state U is who you meet there, not what you learn.

- Science (be it social science or "hard" science) is messy and complex. Don't make major decisions regarding your health, lifestyle, career or family life based on news reports of scientific results. Oprah, journalists, talk show hosts and so on often either get it wrong or oversimplify things to the point of being useless.

- If you are looking to make money off of derivatives markets instead of just using it to hedge against risks, keep in mind that in the end they are not very different from gambling in Vegas. In fact, before the Chicago Board Options Exchange existed, there were numerous gambling houses in Chicago taking bets on what essentially has become the futures market.