Trying and trying again.

The Information Machine | Charles & Ray Eames for IBM

Thu, 17 May 2012 19:43:58 -0400

The Information Machine | Charles & Ray Eames for IBM

"Because i did not have a design degree, many in the office felt that I shouldn’t be there, but..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:38:56 -0400

“Because i did not have a design degree, many in the office felt that I shouldn’t be there, but Charles [Eames] had a different attitude. And he said this to me: “I can teach you to draw. If you can think and you can see — and you can prove that to me — you can work here.””

- Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter | PBS

Things that lead to froth: Celebrity angel investors Pseudo-celebrity institutional...

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:56:00 -0400

Things that lead to froth:

Celebrity angel investors
Pseudo-celebrity institutional investors
“Sure thing” incubators
A compelling narrative for why this time is different
Ready tales of overnight success

Things that lead to bubbles:

Hidden correlations
Rapid deregulation
A large, opaque, and poorly understood asset class
Human nature
$$$

"So what about Facebook? Like Blackstone, a great company and a leader in its field. Also a..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:24:38 -0400

“So what about Facebook? Like Blackstone, a great company and a leader in its field. Also a beneficiary of scarcity value given that there isn’t a public company quite like it that represents an opportunity for institutional or retail investors. And while its principals might not be the market-driven sharks like those running Blackstone, their investors firmly fall into this category. And while its business is indisputably powerful, the multiples being applied to its revenues and cash flows stress the imagination. Might it grow into its IPO price? Certainly. Are there significant risks to achieving this? Absolutely.”

- Information Arbitrage: Is FB the next BX?

The FT oped Roger mentions in this post can be found here.

"Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its and..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:49:48 -0400

“Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its and it’s issues or reminding you of the rules regarding that or which. Here’s the rub: there is a compiler and it’s fucking brutal. It’s your readers. Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back - failure is a lonely silence. Python is looking pretty sweet now, right?”

- Rands In Repose: Please Learn to Write

"There are no tiny features when you’re doing things properly."

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:46:03 -0400

“There are no tiny features when you’re doing things properly.”

- There are no small changes | The Contrast Blog

"Manually RT-ing praise to “reply” to a follower/fan is the single most masturbatory way to receive a..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:41:23 -0400

“Manually RT-ing praise to “reply” to a follower/fan is the single most masturbatory way to receive a compliment. You think it makes you look receptive, modest, and kind, but it actually makes you look like a self-obsessed lunatic. It is the sort of thing Genghis Khan would have done, if he had survived into the Twitter ages.”

- 11 Ways You’re Annoying On Twitter

Buzzfeed, I love you.

"A guy called Ray Kurzweil said a kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more knowledge than..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:21:01 -0400

“A guy called Ray Kurzweil said a kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more knowledge than the president of the United States 20 years ago. His words resonated with me because that’s absolutely true. Google is the most important teacher in my life. You can learn about anything. Free. And you get amazing results. You get 16-year old programmers. You get musicians without ever taking a lesson. You get innovators. This kind of power didn’t exist a decade ago.”

- Youth: What is it like to be a young person (10 to 18 years old) now? - Quora

Everything about this answer gives me hope.

Aesop Rock - Zero Dark Thirty

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:18:00 -0400

Aesop Rock - Zero Dark Thirty

So how did we get to this point? Back in the 1920s, when blimps and other airships seemed like a...

Sun, 13 May 2012 15:45:09 -0400

So how did we get to this point? Back in the 1920s, when blimps and other airships seemed like a useful military technology, the United States set up a national helium program. In the 1960s, it opened the Federal Helium Reserve, an 11,000-acre site in the Hugoton-Panhandle Gas Field that spans Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. The porous brown rock is one of the only geological formations on Earth that can hold huge quantities of helium. And the natural gas from the field itself was particularly rich in helium — a relative rarity in the world.

By 1996, however, the Helium Reserve looked like a waste. Blimps no longer seemed quite so vital to the nation’s defense and, more important, the reserve was $1.4 billion in debt after paying drillers to extract helium from natural gas. The Republican-led Congress, looking to save money, passed the Helium Privatization Act, ordering a sell-off by the end of 2014.

There was just one small hitch. According to a 2010 report by the National Research Council, the formula that Congress used to set the price for the helium was flawed. Bingaman has dubbed it a “fire sale.” The federally owned helium now sells for about half of what it would on the open market.

And, since the Federal Helium Reserve provides about one-third of the world’s helium each year, this has upended the entire market. There’s little incentive to conserve, recycle or find new sources of helium. Instead, we’ve been frittering it away. And once helium escapes into the air, it can’t be recovered. That’s partly why, since 2011, the world has been running into shortages, as demand has outstripped supply.

Fascinating read.

Passion Pit - Take a Walk Unexpected (in a good way).

Sun, 13 May 2012 14:10:52 -0400

Passion Pit - Take a Walk

Unexpected (in a good way).

"Modern societies need current, detailed social and economic statistics; the US is losing them."

Sun, 13 May 2012 08:47:08 -0400

“Modern societies need current, detailed social and economic statistics; the US is losing them.”

- A Future Without Key Social and Economic Statistics for the Country | Director’s Blog

"The aspiration of this blog is not cure the world of cognitive biases. Rather, by trying to put..."

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:01:16 -0400

“The aspiration of this blog is not cure the world of cognitive biases. Rather, by trying to put global macro issues and markets in a more behavioral context, the hope would be that we might be able to better recognize situations in which our biases are likely to surface so that we—whether as analyst or risk taker—can make that extra effort to try to avoid the systematic pitfalls inherent in the human condition. Not everything will have a behavioral angle to it either; I intend to splash down ideas wherever I think my background might lend itself to insight into current economics, finance, or politics.”

- Behavioral Macro

Love to see practitioners blogging

"17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being..."

Sat, 12 May 2012 05:38:22 -0400

“17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.”

- via Laws of Spacecraft Design…

These are all great.

Iron Sky is a 2012 Finnish-German-Australian science-fiction...

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:43:08 -0400

Iron Sky is a 2012 Finnish-German-Australian science-fiction comedy film directed by Timo Vuorensola. It tells the story of Nazi Germans who, after being defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth.

Lightplot - Dancer Test (by Ben Cowell Thomas)

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:34:59 -0400

Lightplot - Dancer Test (by Ben Cowell Thomas)

World’s Fastest Everything (by DNATS)

Thu, 10 May 2012 05:50:22 -0400

World’s Fastest Everything (by DNATS)

"John Watson composes his blog in Times New Roman and Helvetica. Acceptable. But I refuse to believe..."

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:06:32 -0400

“John Watson composes his blog in Times New Roman and Helvetica. Acceptable. But I refuse to believe that Sherlock Holmes views the world in Verdana. Ridiculous.”

- “A Scandal In Belgravia” | Sherlock | The A.V. Club

Bravo.

CubeStormer II - Dave Gilday & Mike Dobson - ARM TechCon...

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:54:22 -0400

CubeStormer II - Dave Gilday & Mike Dobson - ARM TechCon 2011 - YouTube

"It’s like the fellow who leads a huge bear on a chain into the town square and, for a small..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:44:12 -0400

“It’s like the fellow who leads a huge bear on a chain into the town square and, for a small donation, will make the bear dance. The townspeople gather to see the wondrous sight as the massive, lumbering beast shambles and shuffles from paw to paw. The bear is a really terrible dancer, and the wonder isn’t that the bear dances well but that the bear dances at all.”

- The Inmates Are Running the Asylum | Alan Cooper