Find the star
28/11/08 09:16 Filed in: games
The universe, logarithmically
23/11/08 15:29 Filed in: description
Wall Street and the three decades of the 1980's
Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, investigates the recent financial explosion. Mindboggling, terrible, and yet relieving; I admit that little of Wall Street has ever made sense to me. A few pieces:
In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.
Eisman stuck to his sell rating on Lomas Financial, even after the company announced that investors needn’t worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market risk. “The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst,” says Eisman, “was after Lomas said they were hedged.” He recited the line from memory: “ ‘The Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.” A few months after he’d delivered that line in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.
Groups kicking the habit
Christakis and Fowler find more interesting social aspects in the Framingham cohort, this time in how people stop smoking. The nutshell visualization is here.
Self-reported moods from the 2008 US election
15/11/08 22:00 Filed in: politics
The New York Times surveyed readers’ mental states during Election Day, 2008, and produced a dynamic summarizing graphic (a `word train’) which is worth perusing.
Height and the complexities of societal health
06/11/08 16:53 Filed in: health
`The Height Gap’ ( Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker, April 5, 2004): how the average height of a country’s people appears to reflect a greater societal wellbeing. Eat well, grow well.
A spreadworthy message
05/11/08 19:20 Filed in: contagion
An excellent viral video from a recent political campaign.
Recipients of this video (with of course their own name inserted) could easily send the video to friends by entering first names, last names, and email addresses. In my view, the cost of passing on this joke, like all good jokes, was low and due to the pieces quality and creativity, the incentive was high (not for everyone of course).
Recipients of this video (with of course their own name inserted) could easily send the video to friends by entering first names, last names, and email addresses. In my view, the cost of passing on this joke, like all good jokes, was low and due to the pieces quality and creativity, the incentive was high (not for everyone of course).
Corporate contagion
The diffusion of retail establishments
05/11/08 19:17 Filed in: contagion
The spreading of certain buildings across the United States.