A friend asked me how I could differentiate my wish from my intuition. She made me think, how there was a thin line when it came to defining what we wish and what we assign a certainty, too; an intuition. The human thinking was based on subjective patterns, which either we understood (intuition), or wished…

When I saw this research paper, it attracted me like a headline. It had a catchy headline. The decade-old paper by Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer and Vohs goes about explaining how life is full of bad and good instances and how bad was predictive, underestimated, more lasting, more pervasive, elicited more processing, got more attention, was…

Benner’s Prophecies – Future up and down in prices was written in 1875. Samuel Benner was a prosperous farmer wiped out financially by the 1873 panic. He turned to wheat farming in Ohio and took up the statistical study of price movements as a hobby to find, if possible, the answers to the recurring ups…

Elinor Ostrom died recently. Her work on the tragedy of the commons earned her the Nobel Prize. The tragedy of the commons is a term coined by scientist Garrett Hardin in 1968, describing what can happen in groups when individuals act in their own best self-interests and ignore what’s best for the whole group. A…

I revisited a friend at his Balaton lake house last weekend. Balaton is the largest lake in Central Europe also known as the Hungarian sea. Just 500 kilometers away and the weather was warmer than the snow-packed Cluj. I had the sun, the view and more than a stack of books at his lakeside house.…

Do you know how many times you use “Probably” in a day? The word is a part of our colloquial expression because society embraces uncertainty, disorder, and randomness as natural. Whether it’s a rolling die, a tossing coin, or an event, uncertainty is everywhere. This is why the society believes that a butterfly’s wings in…

The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason in November 1894. He was sentenced to life for allegedly having passed French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. What happened? In 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated…

The societal quest for value is continuous, repetitive, similar, connected with cooperation and patterned. I don’t know who is better, Clint Eastwood or Rajkumar Hirani. I saw two films back to back — 3 Idiots on Thursday and J Edgar on Friday. Though this non-confirms my (self-proclaimed) film buff status, I took a while to…

We took — and still take — pride in writing about ideas that could not be found on Google. Getting indexed was a great feeling. But then search engine optimization happened, and the fun sport became big-buck soccer. It was not about what content you created, it was more about how well-tagged and searched and…

The philosophy of war is linked to psychology, timing, and calculation of chance. This can help both in life and markets. We look at Sun Tzu’s timeless work from the perspective of life and markets.