Song of Songs-Hebrew Bible-translated by Marcia Falk

Stamp me
into your heart,
Upon your limbs,
Sear my emblem
deep
Into your skin.

For love is strong
as death,
Harsh as the
grave.
Its tongues
are flames,
a fierce
And holy blaze.

Endless seas
and floods,
Torrents and
rivers
Never put out
love’s
Infinite fires.

Arrogant Conceit

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/arrogant_conceit.html

Barack Obama wants to use the recession to remake the U.S. economy.

Jon Stossel
"Painful crisis also provides us with an opportunity to transform our economy to improve the lives of ordinary people," Obama said (http://tinyurl.com/67x8ec).

His designated chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is more direct: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste" (http://tinyurl.com/5n8u58).

So they will "transform our economy." Obama's nearly trillion-dollar plan will not merely repair bridges, fill potholes and fix up schools; it will also impose a utopian vision based on the belief that an economy is a thing to be planned from above. But this is an arrogant conceit. No one can possibly know enough to redesign something as complex as "an economy," which really is people engaging in exchanges to achieve their goals. Planning it means planning them.

This is not the first time a president chose reform over recovery.
Franklin Roosevelt did it with his New Deal, and the result was long
years of depression and deprivation. Roosevelt's priorities were
criticized not just by opponents of big government but by none other
than John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose theories
rationalized big government. Before FDR had been in office a year,
Keynes wrote him an open letter(http://tinyurl.com/9f8hb4),
which was printed in The New York Times.

Not Exactly

January 10, 2007 - After bottoming in the fourth quarter of 2006, existing-home sales are forecast to gradually rise through 2007 and into 2008, while new-home sales should turnaround by summer, according to the latest forecast by the National Association of Realtors.

Another Bride.....

The following nouns can be used for creating your own personalized wedding vows.

BEAUTY: attractiveness, charm, elegance, grace, loveliness

CHARM: attraction, fascination, glamour

CONSORT: companion, comrade, mate, partner, soul-mate, spouse

DELIGHT: enjoyment, gladness, happiness, joy, pleasure

DEVOTION: affection, attachment, fidelity, loyalty, dedication

DIGNITY: elegance, grace, stateliness

FOREVER: always, eternity, perpetuity

HAPPINESS: bliss, cheerfulness, contentment, delight, joyfulness

HOPE: faith, optimism, reliance, belief, desire, wish

JOY: bliss, delight, elation, gladness, happiness

LOYALTY: allegiance, constancy, devotion, faithfulness, fidelity

MARRIAGE: matrimony, nuptials, wedding, wedlock, bond, union

PROMISE: pledge, vow

RENEWAL: enlivenment, invigoration, regeneration, revival

RESPECT: admiration, appreciation, esteem, favor, honor, regard

SACRIFICE: dedication, devotion, offering

SINCERITY: candidness, candor, frankness, genuineness, honesty,

SPIRIT: being, heart, mind, psyche, soul, energy, life, verve

WISDOM: wiseness, insight, judgment, knowledge"

Somebody said this?

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim."

"Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe."

"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."

"Religions are not true or false, but better or worse."

All you need is love

"I am reminded of a comment made by the Buddhist teacher Guru Amrit Desai, when he looked out of his car window and saw that he was in the midst of a gang of Hell's Angels. After studying them in great detail for a long while, he finally exclaimed, 'They really love their motorcycles.' There was no disdain in this observation. Guru Desai was truly moved by the purity of their love for the beauty and power of something that was outside themselves."

Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker

Jim Rogers

"McChesney Martin was the guy who said the job of a good central banker was to take away the punchbowl when the party starts getting good. Now [the Fed] - when the party starts getting out of control - pours more moonshine in."

Learn to be a Psychic in 10 minutes

Psychic readings and fortune telling are an ancient art a combination of acting and psychological manipulation. While some psychics are known to cheat and acquire information ahead of time, our ten tips will focus on what is known as “cold reading”—reading someone "cold" without any prior knowledge about them.

For a complete guide from Skeptic-

http://www.skeptic.com/downloads/10_Easy_Psychic_Lessons.pdf

How to Admit a Mistake

Pimco's Bill Gross (http://tinyurl.com/5azy8t) says he was wrong:

Gosh it was only six years ago that I cemented my place in stock market history by predicting that the Dow would fall from 8,500 to 5,000, instead of going up to 14,000 where it peaked in October of 2007. Well, I could use the standard set of excuses: 1) No one else saw it coming, 2) I was misinterpreted, and taken out of context, 3) I was tired, overworked, and had family problems, or 4) I had just come out of rehab. But these days what really works is a full confession. I mean, like, uh, it was totally my fault and I take full responsibility. The fact is I was only off by 9,000 points. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.



by: Robert Frost

Frisky Dogs

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/japanfan/9c89/

summary-

Harley and Duke are naughty dogs. They have a peculiar naughtiness. Whenever they spy a free USB port, they... "go to town." And they won't stop until you separate them from the source of their affections.

Why are they like this? No idea. Oh, and don't worry - if the kids ask what the doggie is doing to your computer, just say, "He's trying to jump over the computer, but he got a little stuck," or "The computer is giving him a piggyback ride." Either will suffice.

Oscar Wilde quotes

"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong."

"But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
... Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all."

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

Coffee and Biofuels

Researchers in Nevada are reporting that waste coffee grounds can
provide a cheap, abundant, and environmentally friendly source of
biodiesel fuel for powering cars and trucks.

In the new study, Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, and Narasimharao
Kondamudi note that the major barrier to wider use of biodiesel fuel is
lack of a low-cost, high quality source, or feedstock, for producing
that new energy source. Spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20
percent oil by weight. That's about as much as traditional biodiesel
feedstocks such as rapeseed, palm, and soybean oil.

Growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee around the
world each year. The used or "spent" grounds remaining from production
of espresso, cappuccino, and plain old-fashioned cups of java, often
wind up in the trash or find use as soil conditioner. The scientists
estimated, however, that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340
million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply.

To verify it, the scientists collected spent coffee grounds from a
multinational coffeehouse chain and separated the oil. They then used
an inexpensive process to convert 100 percent of the oil into biodiesel.

The resulting coffee-based fuel — which actually smells like
java — had a major advantage in being more stable than
traditional biodiesel due to coffee's high antioxidant content, the
researchers say. Solids left over from the conversion can be converted
to ethanol or used as compost, the report notes. The scientists
estimate that the process could make a profit of more than $8 million a
year in the U.S. alone. They plan to develop a small pilot plant to
produce and test the experimental fuel within the next six to eight
months.

What Bernanke said about subprime mortgages in 2007

From http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2008/12/finding_the_exi.html

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke in 2007 attributed this increase in access to mortgage borrowing to technological improvements in the lending process:

the expansion [in subprime mortgage lending was] spurred in large partby innovations that reduced the costs for lenders of assessing andpricing risks. In particular, technological advances facilitated creditscoring by making it easier for lenders to collect and disseminateinformation on the creditworthiness of prospective borrowers. Inaddition, lenders developed new techniques for using this informationto determine underwriting standards, set interest rates, and managetheir risks.

Presumably one of the things we can agree upon today is that Bernanke's analysis on this matter was incorrect. These new loans weren't smarter and better, but stunningly stupid.

Do dieters seem dumb?

A new study from the psychology department at Tufts University shows
that when dieters eliminate carbohydrates from their meals, they
perform more poorly on memory-based tasks than when they reduce
calories, but maintain carbohydrates. When carbohydrates were
reintroduced, cognition skills returned to normal.

"This study demonstrates that the food you eat can have an immediate
impact on cognitive behavior," explains Holly A. Taylor, professor of
psychology at Tufts and corresponding author of the study. "The popular
low-carb, no-carb diets have the strongest potential for negative
impact on thinking and cognition."

While the brain uses glucose as its primary fuel, it has no way of
storing it. Rather, the body breaks down carbohydrates into glucose,
which is carried to the brain through the blood stream and used
immediately by nerve cells for energy. Reduced carbohydrate intake
should thus reduce the brain’s source of energy. Therefore,
researchers hypothesized that diets low in carbohydrates would affect
cognitive skills

Washington Bailout Moves from Dumb to Dumber

From Net Gain Real Estate

http://tinyurl.com/5qguu4

It’s official: On December 1st, 2008 (one year late), The National Bureau of Economic Research, said the United States economy has been in recession since December 2007......

Meanwhile, executives who’ve mismanaged their corporations can look forward to the federal government providing tax dollars to bail them out. Additionally, those individuals with questionable credit who overextended themselves with mortgage debt can look forward to the federal government providing tax dollars to bail them out. Not to worry - the politicians who are overseeing all this tax money being used for bailouts are the same politicians that are responsible for the biggest monetary losses in the history of the planet.

Currently, the government appears to have a three-pronged approach to kick-start the economy: (1) Provide cheap mortgages to avoid foreclosures. (2) Keep poorly run companies afloat to avoid increased unemployment. (3) Provide government supported jobs to fix America’s infrastructure. All warm, fuzzy, feel good programs. Meanwhile, there is no mention of creating civilian jobs supported by well run companies that make products which are in demand.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of the easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

by: Robert Frost

Loopy - Web Personalities

Loopy's messages are incomprehensible to all but himself. Loopy is easily aroused and exuberant in battle and fearlessly flings himself at any Warrior - even Kung-Fu Master. Loopy's main weapons consist of a disarming array of nonsequiturs, tautologies, and bizarre metaphors, which can often gain him an advantage in the initial stages of an attack. Combatants very quickly realize, however, that Loopy is a certifiable nut case and generally avoid further engagement. Jerk and Evil Clown revel in egging Loopy on for their own amusement. CAUTION: Loopy cannot be defeated with conventional weapons - any response to his attacks will provoke a fusillade of incoherent messages, so Loopy is best left undisturbed.

Being High Maintenance, not Bitchy -Where it's more about class, than titties and ass

http://highmaintenancewoman.blogspot.com/

High maintenance site on economizing:

Holiday season is full of parties and chances to dress up. However, buying a new holiday party dress can be quite expensive and fill your closet with dresses that you only wear once a year. Instead of splurging this year on yet another fancy Christmas and NYE dress, why not spruce up one of your go-to dresses with some new jewelery? Accessorizing is the classic way to revamp that old LBD, or to glam-up semi-formal clothes into something special.

About the High maintenance blog writer:

I like shopping, clubbing, doritos, skirts with pockets, Pookie from Garfield, waffles, sleeping till noon, the ocean.I dislike morning people, line budgers, celery, nylon, ugg boots, and camel toe.


The good news: she doesn't have your charge card.

"A Change is gonna come!"

From Reggie Middleton (http://tinyurl.com/6bejzb):

Tribune filed for bankruptcy today. This, by a very smart man who sold his $12 billion commercial and residential real estate portfolio at the very tippy top of the CRE bubble, only to be sucked into another bubble bursting. The Tribue Cos. have sold off a lot of assets, fired a lot of professionals and cut back on a lot of production....they are much lesser a producer of actual original content and will shrink further as time goes on.

....the advertising model (as it stands) is flawed with the advent of free flowing information on the Internet and extreme cycles in our economy that are bound to introduce significant volatility in ad spending and revenues (I'm sure Mr. Zell can attest to that). I believe it is time to retool in order to create content that people are willing to pay for, but that content has to be A) truly useful and value added, or B) truly entertaining, and not a bunch of stereotypical fluff.

People are still willing to pay for things, even with the Internet in full boom. They pay to go to the movies, they pay for my blog, some of us even paid to get Bush out of office. People will pay if they believe they are getting true value for their dollar. I have paid for Calculated Risk ...Roubini's site, and ignore the ads. I pay .... because I believe they offer quality content that is worth more than I am paying.

Chapter 11 is the right road for US carmakers

Financial Times By Joseph Stiglitz

http://tinyurl.com/5z89kj

The debate about whether or not to bail out the Big Three carmakers has been mischaracterised. It has been described as a package to help the undeserving dinosaurs of Detroit. In fact, a plan to bail out the carmakers would benefit shareholders and bondholders as much as anybody else. These are not the people that need help right now. In fact they contributed to the problem.

Financial markets are supposed to allocate capital and monitor that it is used to good effect. They are supposed to be rewarded when they do that job well, but bear the consequences when they fail. The markets failed. Wall Street’s focus on quarterly returns encouraged the short-sighted behaviour that contributed to their own demise and that of America’s manufacturing, including the automotive industry. Today, they are asking to escape accountability. We should not allow it.

What needs to be done is to help the automakers get a fresh start and allow them to focus on producing good cars rather than trying to juggle their books to meet past obligations.

Rebel without a Clue - Web Personality Types

Rebel Without a Clue's deep seated and infantile hostility to authority motivates his random and seemingly gratuitous attacks on list owners, Admins, Nannies or anyone else who attempts to maintain order and civility in discussion forums. Differing markedly from Rebel Leader, he is unattached to any cause other than petulance for its own sake, and will therefore seldom inspire general insurrection. In his frequent and ineffectual attacks on the established order he will often cite the Bible, or the US Constitution to support incoherent arguments. Rebel Without a Clue NEVER reads forum FAQs , and loudly decries as fascism any enforcement whatsoever of forum rules.

Cheech and Chong Indicator

Cheech and Chong are a dope-smoking comedy duo from the 1970s.

As it turns out, there's a pretty strong correlation between Cheech & Chong's career arc and structural and cyclical bear markets. So it should come as no surprise that Cheech & Chong recently announced that, after 25 years, they're reuniting for a tour and a possible new feature film. There you have it: The Minyanville Cheech & Chong Indicator says the market has not bottomed.

http://tinyurl.com/5qgbd8

The Worst Car in Creation

Competition is tough for The Worst Car in Creation, but the Yugo easily trumps the others for unadulterated incompetence and unintentional hilarity.

The subcompact car was based on the Fiat 127 and 128 - not a good move it you intend to build a car for the ages, or even just something with 4 wheels and an engine. You might say the only thing wrong with the Yugo was everything.

Callers to “Click and Clack," the Tappet Brothers' radio show on NPR, summed up the Yugo experience like this:

“The Yugo’s first stop after the showroom was the service department: ‘Fill ‘er up and replace the engine!’”

Another caller said, “I once test drove a Yugo, during which the radio fell out, the gear shift knob came off in my hand, and I saw daylight through the strip around the windshield.”


www.minyanville.com/articles/index.php?a=18395

Cutting back on expenses? Perfect Generic Therapy Substitute

Do you suffer from boredom,
depression, anxiety, malaise, stress and/or fatigue? If so, you could
benefit from a daily dose of Toy Therapy. Hang the package up in your
home or office and when you feel one of the symptoms, simply tear open
the corresponding area on the package and be temporarily distracted by
the small novelty prize inside. Cheaper and more fun than actual
therapy! Six plastic prizes in each 7-1/2" x 10-1/4" package.

Meatball Bubble Gum - Gift for Idea for Xmas

These meatball-shaped, bubble gum flavored gumballs are super tasty and
extra chewy. If you don’t believe us, just look on the back of each
package where Manny the Meatball proclaims, “Atsa chewy meatball.” How
can you doubt the emphatic assertion of a talking meatball?

http://www.mcphee.com/items/11898.html

Web Personality Types -Therapist

Discussion forums on the web have created new kinds of bizarre behavior. Flaming is the most obvious example. Flaming is the hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users.

Therapist can be a highly annoying and therefore very effective Warrior. Instead of making a frontal attack, Therapist attempts to shift the focus of the conflict to the combatants' psychological motivations and problems. He will freely speculate about other Warriors' insecurities, personalities and relationships, but he will almost never directly engage the subject of the dispute.

http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm

Unintended Consequences of "Worthy" Laws

In the New York Times, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt offered a few potent examples. One study that examined the effect of the Endangered Species Act found that property owners who suspected their land might attract protected species rushed to clear-cut the trees (despite low timber prices) to avoid losing their investments.

Another study found that employment of disabled people actually fell after the Americans with Disabilities Act was adopted, because employers -- afraid they wouldn't be able to discipline or dismiss an incompetent worker who happened to be disabled -- stopped hiring them altogether. This isn't to say these weren't worthy laws, only that they can engender unintended results.

from Laura Rowley

http://tinyurl.com/6bcyqv

Advice: Don't go to a nightclub with a gun.:)

Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress will face weapons charges after shooting himself in the leg at a nightclub Friday night. Burress is one in a long list of professional athletes making news in the last few years that contained the words nightclub and gun. These situations happen so frequently that it must almost be statistically significant.

If these guys removed their gun from the equation I suspect there would be less shooting. If they did not go to the nightclub, then the odds of gun trouble would diminish greatly. But for some reason they want to go to nightclubs, and when they go they want to take a gun. Maybe they can't help themselves?

Market participants do things in their portfolios that are the equivalent of going to a nightclub with a gun. This can include intentionally lopsided bets, panicking out at the bottom, panicking in at the top, getting talked into doing something by reading an article or listening to someone on TV.

Everyone goes to a nightclub now and then, but if you don't go often and you don't
take your gun with you, you're probably going to have fewer problems in your portfolio.

R. Nusbaum

http://tinyurl.com/59txyr

Dowdification

Dowdification defined by www.samizdata.net

Used as noun or verb. The willful omission of one or more

words so the meaning of the statement is no longer understood but that
the statement suits the needs of the writer in launching an ad hominem
attack whether or not the construction is truthful or grammatically
complete.

Named after Maureen Dowd, based on her manufacture of a quote attributed to President Bush in her May 14, 2003 column (as first reported by Robert Cox on TheNationalDebate.com).

The term and the practice are often found in the Blogosphere.

(Coined by James Taranto)

Graphing Malware

Graphing Malware - Netsky.AD vs Buchon
Author(s):
Ero Carrera, Gergely Erdelyi
Institution:
F-Secure Corporation
Year:
2004
URL:
http://tinyurl.com/58o24
Project Description:
Windows binary malware has come a long way. Today's average worm is often tens or hundreds of kilobytes of code exhibiting a level of complexity that surpasses even some operating systems. This degree of complexity, coupled with the overwhelming flow of new malware, calls for improvements to tools and techniques used in analysis.

Tree

tree
Author(s):
Christian Riekoff
Institution:
(unknown)
Year:
2004
URL:
http://www.texone.org/tree/tree.php?id=applet
Project Description:
tree is a translation program. the simulation of real space by software as a starting point and basic question characterizes the search for an algorithm (design specification) which illustrates a real tree. tree interprets each html page as a design specification; the html space determines the algorithm and generates the visual world of the translation beyond simulation.

visualcomplexity.com | Ecotonoha

Ecotonoha is a project to nurture a virtual tree collaboratively, and at the same
time contribute to the actual environment to cope with global warming.
As one makes Ecotonoha's leaves, by leaving a message on the virtual
tree, it keeps on growing. And as Ecotonoha grows, real trees will be
planted by NEC.


.

Who's the anti-intellectual?

http://sandefur.typepad.com/freespace/2008/11/whos-the-anti-intellectual.html#more

Timothy Sandefur

Liberals have lately been making much of the purported anti-intellectualism of conservatives in the late election. No doubt they’re right. But I must say I find it laughable that this charge would come from liberals of all people. The left in this country has had a long and dismal history of embracing a wide variety of anti-intellectual credos.

Start with the most obvious: the left has long been the welcoming home of fashionable postmodern nonsense like deconstructivism and moral and cultural relativism. Under these doctrines there are supposed to be different kinds of “logics” (male logic, female logic, &c.) and none is more valid than the other. All of them are simply clever masks for a brutal competition for wealth and power. This is a profoundly anti-intellectual strain of pseudo-thought which avoids the need to take any arguments seriously, because such ideas can simply be accused of corruption. When Sandra Harding called Newton’s Principia a “rape manual,” she did so from the left, not from the right.

The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same

from The Aleph Blog by David Merkel

I’ve been asked by a number of readers for my opinion on the economic team being put together by the incoming Obama administration.  I’m not that excited, but then Bush Junior’s economic team was pretty consistently disappointing.  What we have is a bunch of Clinton-era retreads in Summers, Orszag, and Geithner.  Bob Rubin may not be there, but those that learned from him are there.

And, this is change.  I have sixty cents sitting next to me.  That’s change also.  Moving from Paulson to Rubin’s students is exchanging one part of the intellectual framework of Goldman Sachs for its cousin.  As Ron Smith said to me off the air when I was recently on WBAL, the economic advisors of Bush and Obama are members of the same intellectual country club.  There is little real change there.

BloggingStocks

BloggingStocks: "Houghton Mifflin to stop publishing new books


"Publishing powerhouse Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced that it will not be acquiring new books until further notice."

Thanksgiving Message from Epictetus

Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word,everything which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, everything which is not our own doing.

Things in our power are by nature free, unhindered, untrammeled; things not in our power are weak, servile, subject to hindrance, dependent on others. Remember then that if you imagine that what is naturally slavish is free, and what is naturally another’s is your own, you will be hampered, you will mourn, you will be put to confusion, you will blame gods and men; but if you think that only your own belongs to you, and that what is another’s is indeed another’s, no one will ever put compulsion or hindrance on you, you will blame none, you will accuse none, you will do nothing against your will, no one will harm you, you will have no enemy, for no harm can touch you.

http://www.humanistictexts.org/epictetus.htm#_Toc483370055

Epictetus (about 50-130 CE), one of the most influential teachers of Stoicism, is believed to have
been born a slave in Phyrigia, Asia Minor, and was given his freedom at perhaps the age of 18. His master, Nero’s administrative secretary, sent him to be educated by a leading Stoic teacher. When he was about 40, Epictetus was exiled from Rome along with other Stoic philosophers
by the Emperor Domitian.

More voting, less freedom

"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place." - H.L. Mencken


"Every election is an advance auction sale of stolen goods." - Henry Louis Mencken

"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress."

- John Adams.

"Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" - Chico Marx

Remember Mr. Market - How to Look at the Markets

http://www.sandmansplace.com/Mr_Market.html


....you should imagine market quotations as coming from a remarkably accommodating fellow named Mr. Market who is your partner in a private business. Without fail, Mr. Market appears daily and names a price at which he will either buy your interest or sell you his.

Even though the business that the two of you own may have economic characteristics that are stable, Mr. Market's quotations will be anything but. For, sad to say, the poor fellow has incurable emotional problems. At times he feels euphoric and can see only the favorable factors affecting the business. When in that mood, he names a very high buy-sell price because he fears that you will snap up his interest and rob him of imminent gains. At other times he is depressed and can see nothing but trouble ahead for both the business and the world. On these occasions he will name a very low price, since he is terrified that you will unload your interest on him.

Mr. Market has another endearing characteristic: He doesn't mind being ignored. If his quotation is uninteresting to you today, he will be back with a new one tomorrow. Transactions are strictly at your option. Under these conditions, the more manic-depressive his behavior, the better for you.

Idiotarian

noun. A term of abuse for an advocate of what are deemed to be irrationalist and subjectivist values that have very little reference to the workings of the real world. Idiotarians are often socialist (quintessentially Noam Chomsky), but can also be paleo-libertarian or paleo-conservative. The defining phrase of idiotarianism is "it is all the fault of the United States": this is usually applied to geopolitics but is sometimes encountered with regard to cultural issues, economic issues, environmental issues, the weather, socks lost in the laundry etc.

barking moonbat

noun. Someone on the extreme edge of whatever their -ism happens to be.

(coined by Perry de Havilland)

Usage:"Definition of a 'barking moonbat': someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency"
-Adriana Cronin

Although the term (often rendered simply as 'Moonbat') is very popular with conservative and libertarian bloggers who appropriately use it to describe the Chomskyite Left, it was always intended as a much more ecumenical epithet and has been correctly used to describe certain paleo-conservative and paleo-libertarians views. (also see 'idiotarian').

Simon Says

I only see Simon at an annual party on the upper west side of New York City.

Simon said:

First thing in the morning, Elaine says, "You're very cruel to me in a dream I had last night." My first thought was it's her dream. I can't control her dreams. But then I looked at her face. I said I was sorry.

At next year's party, Simon said:

Elaine has this new habit of starting sentences with, "I know you don't want to hear this, but . . . . " I mentally ignore any sentence that starts with those words.

At the following year's party, Simon said:

Has your your girlfriend ever said say something awful about you in public?
When you get home she says she was only kidding. She says, "Don't you have a sense of humor?"

The next year, Simon said:

Elaine ran off with her therapist. Best thing she ever did for me.

The three branches of government are not the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.

Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

"It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI's civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned," said Josiah
Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI.

French smart aleck

In other words, a democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

Alexis de Tocqueville

In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Alexis de Tocqueville

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Tracking Somerset

On this web log, I put a comment about a fine story, Mr. Know All
by Somerset Maugham . The story involves prejudice and how a European
man changes his ideas about foreigners. Anyway, the story got a
large number of hits and I looked into the tracking program to see
why. All the hits came from Vietnam! My guess is the story was assigned by a teacher for an essay subject. So students went on the web to search for ideas. What do you think?


http://maugham.classicauthors.net/knowall/

Fiscal Fast

Getting rid of clutter, both mentally and physically, will help in the process of paring down.

Yeager recommends a "weeklong fiscal fast" to get in touch with your spending.

"Go a week without spending any money. It's a chance to use up the food in
your cupboard and the bottles of shampoo from hotels we've all been
saving for 20 years," he says.

The spending detox will reveal how most people spend and waste money in a normal week.

rest of article:

http://tinyurl.com/5heg8f

Druid Vow of Friendship

HONOR YOUR PATH
I drink from your well.
I bring an unprotected heart to our meeting place.
I hold no cherished outcome.
I will not negotiate by withholding.
I am not subject to disappointment.

Marcus Aurelius

"Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region it takes place. The whole earth a point in space - and most of it uninhabited." (iv.3)

To make a dadaist poem

How To make a Dadaist Poem -Tristan Tzara

- Posted: 10.Oct.2006.

To make a dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.

The 11 Habits of the Really Awful Bosses

Posted by David Silverman on July 26, 2008 9:05 PM

1. Change your mind. Change it several times a day. When reviewing a report, be sure to make comments that run counter to previous ones. Leave the employees guessing. It keeps them alert.

2. Be sure your employees don’t know what's important to you. You want the best work possible, period. You don’t want them cutting corners just because something isn’t very important. Everything is important. Always.

more-

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/silverman/2008/07/the-flip-side-of-leadership.html

Country Con Man - transplanting goat testicles

John Brinkley, who grew up poor in rural North Carolina but attended Rush Medical College in Chicago, got his start touring as a medicine man hawking miracle tonics and became famous for transplanting goat testicles into impotent men. Brinkley built his own radio station in 1923, hustling his pseudoscience over the airwaves and giving an outlet to astrologers and country music. His nemesis was Dr. Morris Fishbein, the buoyant, compulsively curious editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association whose luminary friends included Sinclair Lewis, Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken. Fishbein took aim at Brinkley in JAMA, lay publications and pamphlets distributed by the thousands. Even after the Kansas State Medical Board yanked his medical license in 1930, Brinkley ran twice for governor of Kansas and almost won. Finally, Brinkley sued Fishbein for libel and lost in a spectacular showdown.

only three types of forecasters in politics, finance and climate change

1. Those that don't know.

2. Those that don't know they don't know.

3. Those that know they don't know but get paid a lot of money to pretend they do.

Self help advice from a Roman Emperor

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius defines several such practices. For example, in Book II, part 1:

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill... I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together...

Mail Goggles for e-mail - like trigger locks on firearms

For years, judges have ordered drunken-driving offenders to install computerized breath-analyzers linked to their car’s ignition system to prevent them from starting their vehicles when intoxicated.

Mail Goggles requires any user who enables the function to perform five simple math problems in 60 seconds before sending e-mails between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on weekends. The idea is to restrain you from sending a crazy drunken e-mail message to an ex or a co-worker in the middle of the night. Interviews with people who confessed to imbibing and typing at the same time — sometimes with regrettable consequences — showed a clear need for such a program.

What did he say?

Bill Clinton, President of the United States:

When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans ...
If you read the Constitution, it's rooted in the desire to limit the ability of government's ability to mess with you, because that was a huge problem. It can still be a huge problem. But it assumed that people would basically be raised in coherent families, in coherent communities, and they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare.

What's happened in America today is, too many people live in areas where there's no family structure, no community structure, and no work structure. And so there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities.

Baseball statistics and health care

Can the sport's information revolution help boost evidence-based medicine?

By Kristen Gerencher, MarketWatch

Last update: 7:05 p.m. EST Nov. 4, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- What can doctors and hospitals learn from baseball managers?

Plenty says an increasing number of health-care professionals who are looking at the revolution in baseball statistics -- "sabermetrics" most famously employed by Oakland As manager Billy Beane to build better teams with cheaper players -- to question traditional medical practices and to help develop better and less expensive health care.

It's called evidence-based medicine, and it's the development of best health-care practices based on data that shows which treatments and protocols work and which do not. So far it's generated more interest than adoption among health-care providers who rely solely on their experience and expertise.

http://tinyurl.com/5t22tx

Politics :):)

“If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, / then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.”
Chapman

T Shirt

But guess what: Nobody moved in.

The St Petersburg Times reports from Florida. “Tampa Electric lost more customers than it added in the third quarter, an unprecedented reversal that slashed the utility’s profits and promises to delay power plant building. ‘We’ve never seen this since I’ve been working at Tampa Electric,’ said Gordon Gillette, who has been with the company for 26 years. Vacant and foreclosed homes turned out the lights, and fewer new customers replaced them, Gillette said.”

“‘A lot that got built, as we know now, turned out to be vacant properties, but they had electric meters,’ Gillette said. ‘We counted those properties as they were getting built as new customers. But guess what: Nobody moved in.’”

A Liberal sees the Light or has the Devil got him ?

Robert Reich denounces Corporate Social Responsibilty as a dangerous diversion that is undermining democracy, not least in his native America. Mr Reich, an economist who served as labor secretary under Bill Clinton and now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, admits to a Damascene conversion, having for many years “preached that social responsibility and profits converge over the long term”. He now believes that companies “cannot be socially responsible, at least not to any significant extent”, and that CSR activists are being diverted from the more realistic and important task of getting governments to solve social problems. Debating whether Wal-Mart or Google is good or evil misses the point, he says, which is that governments are responsible for setting rules that ensure that competing, profit-maximizing firms do not act against the interests of society.

He Heard, She Heard

By Constance Holden
Adolescent males and females appear to use somewhat different brain areas when processing language tasks, according to a study appearing this week in Neuropsychologia. The finding could lend support to different educational approaches for boys and girls.

It's well established that girls score higher than boys in most tests involving language, such as verbal fluency and word memory. So cognitive scientists Douglas Burman and James Booth at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, sought to see if there are differences in brain activity that underlie these sex differences.

The researchers administered several word tests to about 50 children aged 9 to 15, half of them girls. Paired words were either flashed on a screen or spoken, and subjects had to judge whether they rhymed, for example. Subjects' brain activity in response to each task was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures blood flow to various parts of the brain. The researchers found that girls showed significantly greater activation of the language areas of the brain than did boys. The boys showed greater activation of the specific sensory brain areas--visual or auditory--required by the task.

The researchers conclude that girls rely more on universal language-processing machinery that operates regardless of how they receive the information, whereas boys process information depending on the sensory mode. These differences don't necessarily persist into adulthood, according to Burman's team. It might just reflect the fact that males take longer to mature than females. But the findings could have implications for education--suggesting, for example, that separating the sexes in middle school may not be a bad idea, Burman says.

Psychologist Ruben Gur of the University of Pennsylvania calls the study "an important contribution." There are a lot of studies on sex differences in cognition and a lot of studies showing sex differences in the brain, he says. "But it's very rare" to have a study in which the two types of findings are correlated. Brain imager Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine, adds that the conclusions "fit nicely" with findings he has reported on sex differences in the brain areas used in intelligence tests. "This paper is part of a growing awareness that not all brains work the same way," he says.

Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
Alexis de Tocqueville


In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Enamored of Equality

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers." Nikita Khruschev

"The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words. "- National Review

"Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom." - Alexis de Tocqueville - "Democracy in America" (1835)

Indistinguishable from a Streetwalker

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so." ~Gore Vidal

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker." - H.L. Mencken

"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain, Notebook 1904

Be Obvious

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
- Isaac Asimov

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
- Will Rogers

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.
- William Shakespeare

How long will it last? :):)

From Political Calculations website:

Although we don't go there often, we're not ones to shy away from personal topics here at Political Calculations. We are, after all, the only blog out there that gets into your paycheck, goes into your house to see if you should switch to compact fluorescents and helps you figure out how much diet soda your system can safely handle.

Go to calculator at - What Are the Chances Your Marriage Will Last? - to find if you are headed for marital bliss.

Paul Graham on Cities and Ambition

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.

Rest of the essay-

http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

Parisian Opera and the Laugh Track

In 1820, two Parisian Opera fans named Sauton and Porcher created the forerunner of the "laugh track." Under the business name of L'Assurances des Succes Dramatiques, they sold the service of guaranteed fake applause at opera performances. The professional applauders were so effective in stimulating the audience into bursts of "spontaneous" applause and cheers that they created a thriving business.

Sauton and Porcher had discovered the power of social proof. When we are uncertain, we look to others before acting. Bartenders often put a few dollars in the tip jar at the beginning of their shift as encouragement. Street con men have fake "customers" who seem to win lots of money. A empty dance floor may fill up suddenly, once a couple takes the plunge. Monkey see, monkey do.

For C, the teacher.

20 reasons you're not rich

A list worth considering - 20 reasons you're not rich .

1. You care what your neighbors think.
2. You are not patient.
3. You have bad habits.
4. You don't have goals.
5. You aren't prepared.
6. You're trying to make a quick buck.
7. You rely on others to handle your money.
8. You invest in things you don't understand.
9. You are financially afraid.
10. You ignore your finances.
11. You care what your car looks like.
12. You feel entitlement.
13. You lack diversification.
14. You started too late.
15. You don't do what you enjoy.
16. You don't like to learn.
17. You buy things you don't use.
18. You don't understand value.
19. Your house is too big.
20. You fail to take advantage of opportunities.

No, I will not fix your computer.

My favorite physicist

Mr. Feynman won a Nobel Prize for Physics, not for playing the bongo drums. I think he is saying something about "having his orange juice."


Excerpt: Richard Phillips Feynman ( May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as work in particle physics (the parton model was proposed by him). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, together with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely-used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams.

To learn more-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

Why I left California

I am sometimes asked why I didn't stay in California.

Merle Kessler gives a good answer.

Most people in California came from somewhere else. They moved to California so they could name their kids Rainbow or Mailbox, and purchase tubular Swedish furniture without getting laughed at. It's a tenet also in California that the fiber of your clothing is equivalent to your moral fiber. Your lifestyle is your ethic. That means in California you don't really have to do anything, except look healthy , think good thoughts and pat yourself on the back about what a good person you are. And waiters in California want to be called by their first name. I don't know why.

Orwell on Kipling

But because he (Kipling) identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which "enlightened" people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are "enlightened" all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our "enlightenment," demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep."

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/Orwell.htm

The Trouble with Democracy

From R.V. - an expatriate who lives in London -

Dr. S.: Do you believe in democracy?

John Q. : Yes. Democracy is the best political system.

Dr. S.: Did you know the majority of Americans are either Democrats or Republicans? Only one quarter of all adults consider themselves Independents. 1

John Q. : I suppose so. I am a Democrat.

Dr. S.: Do you know any Republicans?

John Q. : Yes, but they always think they are right. It's annoying.

Dr. S.: You're a Democrat. Can you tell me of a Republican policy or action that you consider to be good?

John Q.: I suppose Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was O.K..

Dr. S.: That was 150 years ago. Can you think of something within the past fifty years?

John Q. : I'd have to think about that for a while.

Dr. S.: Just one.

John Q. : No, I'll think about it.

Dr. S.: So your view is that the Republicans have been consistently wrong for the past fifty years.

John Q.: Yes. I suppose so. I will give them points for consistency.

Dr. S.: I am a bit puzzled. The Republicans have been in error for fifty years, why not dispense with them? What is the point in listening to ideas so consistently mistaken?

John Q.: I see your point. Maybe I was wrong about democracy being such a great system.


1 http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=548

"Youth is properly dedicated to error."

Jubal E. - from Macon, Georgia - sent me this item:



http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/09/09/the_vision_of_the_left

The Vision of the Left
by Thomas Sowell

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left.

Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities.Even fewer would prefer a world in which vast sums of money have to be devoted to military defense, when so much benefit could be produced if those resources were directed into medical research instead.

It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left. The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

Most of us learn that from experience-- but experience is precisely what the young are lacking.
"Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

Money Quotes

". . . money, like romance, is only partly an intellectual experience. Money, like sex, brings out some thought -- but also much heavy breathing and little stored knowledge. In finance, the process is cyclical. Some people learn from their ancestors, but mostly they repeat the same mistakes. Thus it has always been and thus it will always be . . .."

-- James Grant, editor, Grant's Interest Rate Observer

"Regrets . . . I have always taken full responsibility for my actions and never blamed anybody else for what went wrong. As a result I have no regrets. However, lending money to friends has been a disappointing experience since neither has ever any of the money lent ever been returned nor did the friendship continue!" - by Mark Faber

"Buffett once told me there are three 'I's in every cycle. The 'innovator,' that's the first 'I.' After the innovator comes the 'imitator.' And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot."
-Theodore Forstmann, quoting Warren Buffett

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others."

"Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example."

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."

"No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong."

Self Help Book from 1908

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett

excerpt:

Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say "lives," I do not mean exists, nor "muddles through." Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the "great spending departments" of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? [...] Which of us is not saying to himself -- which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: "I shall alter that when I have a little more time"? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics

In science fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics are a set of three rules written by Isaac Asimov, which almost all positronic robots appearing in his fiction must obey. Introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", although foreshadowed in a few earlier stories, the Laws state the following:
“
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.


The Three Laws form an organizing principle and unifying theme for Asimov's fiction, appearing in his Robot series and the other stories linked to it, as well as his Lucky Starr series of science-oriented young-adult fiction. Other authors working in Asimov's fictional universe have adopted them, and references (often parodic) appear throughout science fiction and in other genres.

Nonsense

Let’s say that you’ve run out of beer and for some awful reason you can’t go get more. What could possibly taunt you more than a beer filled USB drive? I swear it would not surprise me in the least to see a news bulletin somewhere, where a guy decided to try to suck the beer out of his USB drive. It’d likely start with one guy either daring or offering up some small fund to do it, like a dollar. It really wouldn’t take much for someone to do it. Well luckily there are no links to actually purchase this USB drive, instead it is just an example of all the cool things a certain company can do with USB drives.

Useless

Are We Failing Our Geniuses?

We take for granted that those with IQs at least three standard deviations below the mean (those who score 55 or lower on IQ tests) require "special" education. But students with IQs that are at least three standard deviations above the mean (145 or higher) often have just as much trouble interacting with average kids and learning at an average pace. Shouldn't we do something special for them as well? True, these are IQs at the extremes. Of the 62 million school-age kids in the U.S., only about 62,000 have IQs above 145. (A similar number have IQs below 55.) That's a small number, but they appear in every demographic, in every community. What to do with them? Squandered potential is always unfortunate, but presumably it is these powerful young minds that, if nourished, could one day cure leukemia or stop global warming or become the next James Joyce--or at least J.K. Rowling.

In a no-child-left-behind conception of public education, lifting everyone up to a minimum level is more important than allowing students to excel to their limit. It has become more important for schools to identify deficiencies than to cultivate gifts.

Efficient Frontier

Excerpt:

During a recent CFA Institute conference, the brilliant Robert Merton, at the conclusion of a talk on the use of quantitative risk-management techniques and derivatives, was asked if his experience at Long Term Capital Management had taught him any lessons. He sniffed:

I have not spoken about it publicly. If there were some new theory of finance that was discovered because of the LTCM event, however, I surely would have relayed it to everyone a long time ago.

Were we able to resurrect Karl Marx, he might just as well have responded that the events of 1986-1991 had not changed political theory. So, one more eternal verity: investing has always been, and will remain, an operation in which wealth is transferred from those without a working knowledge of financial history to those who have one. No matter how elegant the theory, no matter how rigorous the analysis, from time to time things will go totally off the rails. Further, most of the time this will happen in a novel way. Those who take history seriously will need no fancy models to survive; those who rely instead on black boxes should at least factor in a very, very fat tail.

Winchell Quotes

I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret.

The same thing happened today that happened yesterday, only to different people.

Gossip is the art of saying nothing in a way that leaves practically nothing unsaid.

Economics

"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."

-Joan Robinson, Cambridge University

Irrelevant Calculations

Floyd Norris NY Times

Leverage World:
“The September 2008 return on high-yield bonds represented an extreme predicted by statistical theory to occur only once in 27,777.8 years. Owing to structural imperfections in the market, however, extreme returns have been more frequent than theory predicts.”

........................................................

............it seems to me that number could not be calculated, and any program that coughed it out should be doubted. When I read on, I learned that they had 265 months of data to generalize from, which is less than 23 years. What is the chance that the first 23-year period you look at is representative of 22,777.8 years? Do they consider ice ages in the computation?

........................................................

Any model that did not take into account the possibility that people would be lulled into a false sense of security by computer models could not have predicted what has actually happened. The people who programmed these models had never read Hy Minsky, the economist who explained why stability could be destabilizing.

Paul Graham - What You Can't Say

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it-- that the earth moves.

Rest of the essay-

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Ooops.

"The problem with macro [economic] forecasting is that no one can do it."— Michael Evans,Chase Econometrics


"A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."-
Segal's law

"People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching cold."
John J. Chapman

Odor removing toilet

Odor removing toilet

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And Groucho never did say his most famous quote

A contestant on Groucho Marx's 1950s TV quiz show tells him that she has 10 children, and Marx asks why she has so many. The woman answers, "Because I love children and I love my husband." Marx replies, "I love my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while."

P.J. O'Rourke

If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.

I think I'll have a salad today.

Word salad is a string of words that vaguely resembles language, and may or may not be grammatically correct, but is utterly meaningless. An example of word salad would be:

"Tramway flogging into my question, it was thirty letters down under peanut butter."

The consequences of cheap

What happens when things get (nearly) free?" You waste them, be they transistors or megabytes of bandwidth capacity. You use them extravagantly, irresponsibly. You shift out of conservation mode and get into exploitation mode. You do crazy things like offering people the ability to put their whole music collection in their pocket, or promising the average email user that they'll never have to delete another message to conserve space. ...

about backtested models

You can always find a correlation between two sets of data if you have a computer look hard enough. Trouble is, you can as easily find a correlation between unrelated datasets ... (astrology, anyone?). If your algorithm (model) can’t make predictions, it’s worthless.

If it can make predictions, you test the predictions. Testing can easily falsify your model, but can’t actually prove it (a black swan could always show up in the next test). However, the more successful predictions a model makes, the more it makes sense to rely on it... provided ... the stuff you don’t put into your model isn't going to be important in the future .... (a big if).



http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/10/backtested-mode.html


Example of problems with data mining: Children with big feet are definitely better spellers.
Can you figure out why?

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Exactly.......Wrong

A well-known American economist, drafted during World War II to work in the US Army meteorological service in England, got a phone call from a general in May 1944 asking for the weather forecast for Normandy in early June. The economist replied that it was impossible to forecast weather that far into the future. The general wholeheartedly agreed but nevertheless needed the number now for planning purposes.

Similar logic lies at the heart of the current crisis. Statistical modeling increasingly drives decision-making in the financial system while at the same time significant questions remain about model reliability.

The reason is that market participants react to measurements and therefore change the underlying statistical processes. The modellers are always playing catch-up with each other. This becomes especially pronounced when the financial system gets into a crisis.

This is endogenous risk, which emphasises the importance of interactions between institutions in determining market outcomes. Day-to-day, when everything is calm, we can ignore endogenous risk. In crisis, we cannot. And that is when the models fail.

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Easy in Principle

Mr. Buffett points out, investing is much like dieting: It is simple, but not easy. Everyone knows what it takes to lose weight. (Eat less, exercise more.) Nothing could be simpler, but few things are harder in a world full of chocolate cake and Cheetos.

A guide: what to complain about

1. When you don’t have any money, complain about hunger.
2. When you have money, complain about sex.
3. When you have food, sex and money, complain about your health.

Groucho for President

"Wives are people who feel they don't dance enough."

"I remember the first time I had sex - I kept the receipt."

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

"Before I speak, I have something important to say."

I mean Groucho not Karl

Too much government authority:
The $700 Billion rescue plan gives Treasury power unchecked by courts –
so who is overseeing the overseer? With all this economic, regulatory
and political power, do you think the government will easily give it up
- particularly under a pro-government control democratic
administration? Furthermore, if the government is so good at managing
debt, why do we already have the highest national debt in recorded
history? Joshua Rosner, an analyst at the independent research firm
Graham Fisher & Co. in New York, stated:

The
proposal is a clear abdication of all oversight and fiscal authorities
to a Secretary of Treasury that has bungled this crisis from the
beginning. This is Marxism. And I mean Groucho not Karl.

From Improbable Research site: Compared to What?

An Impartial Price Survey of Various Household Liquids as Compared to a Gallon of Gasoline

With the price of oil surging past $100 per barrel recently, consumers and the media in the United States have been in an uproar over the outrageous price of gasoline. In my opinion, however, they have failed to place this cost in context to other common, household liquids. Thus, I decided to perform an informal price survey.

I visited my local grocery store, where I recorded the prices and respective volumes of 22 off-the-shelf fluids. Then, after returning home, I computed the price per gallon of each item, and arranged them in ascending order by cost, as shown in Table 1.

New York Times: Political Contempt

Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, that it’s liberals who are less open to other points of view.

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/no-laughing-matter/index.html

Charitable Giving - Show me the money

The child of academics, raised in a liberal household, Arthur C. Brooks has written a book that concludes religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals to all sorts of charitable activities, irrespective of income.

He cites extensive data analysis to demonstrate that values advocated by conservatives -- from church attendance and two-parent families to the Protestant work ethic and a distaste for government-funded social services -- make conservatives more generous
than liberals.

The book is titled "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism" (Basic Books, $26).

Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University and 2004 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, does not know Brooks personally but has read the book. "His main finding is quite startling, that the people who talk the most about caring actually fork over the least," he said. "But beyond this finding I thought his analysis was extremely good, especially for an economist. He thinks very well about the reason for this and reflects about politics and morals in a way most economists do their best to avoid."

Lambert

The only motel in Lambert was the International Inn. Lambert was a thousand miles from any foreign country, but I suppose if you buy a place, you can name it whatever you like. I stayed at the motel in April, which was the slow season. In the evening, the owner became the bartender. He served drinks and told stories.

"In the 1920s, the original hotel on this land was a truck stop," he said. "The drivers needed to sleep and eat. The story goes the top floor was a brothel. The roads here get iced over in winter. One night in October there was a snow storm. With zero visibility, a restaurant supply truck skidded through the river bridge, ending up in the kitchen, starting a fire. The fire spread and the hotel burned down. A year and a half later, the hotel owner collected on the insurance. By then, the depression had hit and the owners decided not to reopen the hotel."

The Good Book

I stopped overnight at the Stay in Style Motel. The place was cheap; the rooms were clean, After I checked in, I walked outside by the parking lot and found a wooden bench. A guy was sitting at one end. His t shirt said "Jimbo." He looked up at me, nodded and pointed at the empty space. He said, "You're welcome to it."

I sat down. "Jimbo" perched at the edge of the bench whistling. He whistled four notes and then stopped. He turned to me and said, "What's your favorite book in the Bible?"

I said, “New or Old Testament?”

“Either one.”

I said, “I'm partial to Ecclesiastes.”

He thought a while and then started whistling those four notes and stopped.

I said, "If you don't mind me asking, who is the Jimbo on your t shirt?"

He said, "Oh, not me. Jimbo is my dad. He's been in Joliet Correctional since I was born. I'm going to see him soon and get him out of jail." He started whistling again. He finished the whole song.

Cowboys

The sign said Cowboy City, population 7539. I pulled into the Shell gas station and put ten gallons in the tank. I went inside the office to pay.

I said, "Is this Cowboy City?"

"Yes."

"Are there any Cowboys here?"

"No."

"Why was it named Cowboy?"

"The owner of the Read'em and Weep store thought it was a good idea."

"Who is the owner of the store?"

"That would be me."

"And your name is?"

"My name is Paul D. Depaul."

"Hard to pronounce, don't you think?"

"You think so? My original name was Qwerty."

"Qwerty?"

"My mother repaired typewriters. You know, Qwerty are the letters at the top of a keyboard. Mom was a prankster. She named my brother Palindrome. I think my father left because he couldn't take it. Puns for breakfast. Cryptograms for lunch. Anagrams for dinner."

Another Sunny Honeymoon

I was walking through the Botanical Gardens and came upon a wedding party.

The bride said, “All unmarried women prepare to catch the bouquet.”

A woman walked to the open space in front of the bride. She said, “I’m the only girl.” She looked at her boyfriend.

The bride said, “Maybe I should just hand you the flowers.”

“No, don't do that,” the woman said.

A young boy said, “I'll try to catch the flowers too.” The young boy jumped in front and caught the flowers, like he was intercepting a football pass. He stopped, looked at the flowers and dropped them on the ground.

The groom said, “Now, I’ll throw the garter.”

The boy said, “What's a garter?”