Note: red sparkline bars indicate aggregate losses on IEM vote share contracts by month. Blue sparkline bars indicate aggregate gains. Since my last post about the discreet charms of gambling on election outcomes, I was kindly directed by IEM to its historical vote share contract prices for the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The table above shows that with these additional data, traders had still tended to overvalue Democratic candidates from August through October, while undervaluing Republican candidates. The extreme overvaluations of Hilary Clinton in 2016 still exert an influence, but it is much less pronounced. Excluding 2016 prices, Democratic candidates would still be overvalued in each month, but never by as much as 2%. Republican candidates would not be undervalued at all, except in August by about 3%. Hence from a gambling perspective, the IEM market appears reasonably accurate to the extent that there are not many information gaps left to exploit. Let...
Reproduction of Ligier Richer's "Transi de René de Chalon" (1547), La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, 16th Arr. During the Renaissance period, transis --so-named because they showed the transition of mortal remains in the process of decomposition--became a fashion in burial art. One of the most evocative is the transi of René de Chalon, Prince of Orange, who was mortally wounded during the defense of Saint-Dizier (now part of the Haute-Marne department) in 1544, and who died soon after at age 25. Rather than opt for a heroic memorial, the Prince requested to be represented as a cadaver, in the same manner as his father and uncle who held the title before him. Originally, the cadaver's left hand held aloft the Prince's desiccated heart. At the time, burying nobles' body parts in separate places was a common practice, to better distribute the great person's glory. However, at some point, the heart went missing. The theft was blamed on that traditio...
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