...martingales will play. A funny way to analyze the financial crisis.

Slate's Jordan Ellenberg likens the financial crisis to flipping a coin in a cogent and wry way. Read it.

Also quite good was an article he linked to about a Stanford professor who started as a high school-dropout traveling magician and went on to be a discipline-crossing intellectual matchmaker of a statistician. (He also, apparently, proved that flipping a coin is only ~49% fair.)