From asakiyume.livejournal.com.
Very cool link about a couple of MIT students who sent a camera up 97,000 feet to take a picture of the curvature of the earth for $150 bucks. Make sure you click through to the the project’s webpage for a time lapse video of the camera’s entire trip.
Cold enough for the first homemade mac and cheese of the season last night. With brats! Yum.
“For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.”
From Maureen Dowd, whom Sam-Who-Likes-Nothing normally doesn’t like.
Apparently the Brooklyn Book Fair is getting hip enough to add a little genre into the mix through a partnership with NY Comic Con.
Sometimes it pays to live in NYC.
Here’s my schedule.
Panel:
Sci Fi and Fantasy in NYC
12:00 pm -1:00 pm
Is there anything hotter than Sci Fi and Fantasy right now? We don’t think so. Join authors S.C. Butler, Peter Brett, Brian Slattery, Anton Strout and Dave Roman as they discuss all that is paranormal in NYC.
Autographing:
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Autographing Table 3
I’ve said it before - I’m no Krugman fan. But his piece today in the NY Times Magazine today does an excellent job of blasting the last forty years of macroeconomics. Then again, I’ve thought macroeconomics was pretty much balderdash since I took Econ 1 in college thirty-six years ago. The last great example of academic theoreticians with aboslutely no experience in the real world. (I didn’t have any real world experience either, but I was already old enough to know that nothing is perfect, especially not people.)
My favorite quote from the article is an answer to the folks who think markets are always efficient and self-correcting (which then leads one to the mistaken idea that they can be self-regulating as well): “Probably the most influential paper in this vein was a 1997 publication by Andrei Shleifer of Harvard and Robert Vishny of Chicago, which amounted to a formalization of the old line that “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” As they pointed out, arbitrageurs — the people who are supposed to buy low and sell high — need capital to do their jobs. And a severe plunge in asset prices, even if it makes no sense in terms of fundamentals, tends to deplete that capital. As a result, the smart money is forced out of the market, and prices may go into a downward spiral.”
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” People who work in the markets know this in their bones (or at least some of them do). Perhaps anyone seeking a PhD in economics should be required to serve a two-year stint as a clerk on a trading desk so they can learn it too.
Everyone - run, don’t walk, to the nearest video store so you can rent the
GREATEST MOVIE SCENE EVER!!!!
The movie? Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus!
Can’t beat that title, can you?
The scene? About twenty minutes in, when Mega Shark takes a cruising 747
OUT OF THE SKY!!!!!
Yes! The giant shark sounds 30,000 feet into the air to gobble up a
FLYING PLANE!!!!
I love the Syfy Channel.
So investment banks now want to create a new class of asset backed securities where the asset is old (and preferably sick) folks’ life insurance policies.
Money quote: “A bond made up of life settlements would ideally have policies from people with a range of diseases — leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s. That is because if too many people with leukemia are in the securitization portfolio, and a cure is developed, the value of the bond would plummet.”
What the article fails to mention is that for these bonds to have any value to the investor, the seller (the Alzheimer patient, that is - whom we can safely assume is not at the top of her investment game) has to sell the policy for less that it’s worth. If she sells it for more than it’s worth, then there’s nothing there for the investor to buy.
A truly revolting idea in oh so many ways.
Here’s a link to the article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/business/06insurance.html?pagewanted=1&hp
I’d heard this flick gives W. a fairly brutal beating, and what I’d heard was right. After starting very slowly (and cringingly - luckily the movie spends very little time in Guantanamo), things start to pick up at about the thirty minute mark. And then they just keep getting better and better! Dougie Howser returns! Harold and Kumar smoke up with a sitting president! The governemnt nerd has his moment, then wrecks it by falling (literally) back into nerd-dom.
In a lot of ways, this movie was the opposite of its predecessor, which started hysterically and gradually stopped being funny. And the satire was pointed more at the bullying Bush style of government than at W himself. Very broadly done, but very funny.
Had it not been for the beginning, I could even say I liked the whole thing.
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