Links for Thursday, January 12, 2008

• Stephen Roach: America’s Inflated Asset Prices Must Fall – “A sharp decline in asset prices is necessary to rebalance the US economy. It is the only realistic hope to shift the mix of saving away from asset appreciation back to that supported by income generation. That could entail as much as a 20-30 per cent decline in overall US housing prices and a related deflating of the bubble of cheap and easy credit.“
• Good Math, Bad Math: The Genius of Donald Knuth: Typesetting with Boxes and Glue – “I don’t know of any other software other than TeX implemented in the 1970s that remains absolutely and unquestionably dominant in its domain. And the glue-and-boxes model of text layout was a piece of absolute genius – one of the most masterful examples of capturing an extremely complex problem using an extremely simple model. It’s beautiful. And it’s typical of the kind of thing that Knuth does.“