The binomial model is common in textbooks because it's intuitively appealing, but if you only apply it to basic European (exercisable at expiry) options then there really are better ways of getting a closed form solution i.e. the Black-Scholes (or Bachelier-Thorp ....) formula. If you want half decent pricing methods for more general cases then you'll end up with Finite difference or Monte-Carlo methods depending on dimensionality, at which point you've already given up on a closed form solution. One of the reasons that TFA is so unintelligible is it's an academic treatment of half of the theory of a non-problem. (and as others have already pointed out - it has nothing to say about how the finance industry operates).

I thought TFA said that it had no whois data - but use seem to know it's run by someone called Viola. Maybe her surname's Walla.

After the "linux doesn't handle it story" a couple of weeks ago http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/02/14/1541244/Linux-Not-Quite-Ready-For-New-4K-Sector-Drives I wondered if the mis-alignment was what was causing my poor postgres performance on the WD Caviar Green. After quite a lot of effot moving things around I didn't actually see any noticeable difference. Now I'm left wondering whether the mis-alignment effect is dwarfed by the effort of reading 3.5K of a 4K block for every random 0.5K block write. The fact that the disk is lying to the driver is the big deal here. Does anybody know how to force the linux sd driver to use 4k blocks regardless of the what the disk tells it about blocksize?

It's an interesting test looking for something you know, but you do have to be careful extrapolating the quality of the data from some edge cases. For those who don't know London well, Barkingside is an eastern suburb about 15 miles from the centre, where a lot of the original "East Enders" moved after the war. If you did a similar test for New York you'd be doing something out past Newark NJ. It's not exactly where you'd start your mapping effort.

It's not just that it doesn't need to have a neatly tied up ending - it's that it doesn't have to spoon feed it to you. The Sopranos are trying to break you out of the bad Hollywood habits like making sure that everybody in their demographic can understand it instantly. Go and watch some European cinema for example. You actually can't resolve who did what in Hidden (Caché) - and it doesn't matter - it isn't what it was about.