December 2008
CrossingWallStreet.com: Six Degrees of Madoff →
Bernie’s latest victim, Kevin Bacon.
We’d heard that along with Hollywood boldfacers Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, Bacon and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, lost money in Madoff’s devastating $50 billion Ponzi scheme, and Bacon’s rep, Allen Eichorn, confirmed it for us. “Unfortunately, your report is true,” he wrote.
Come to think of it, the Madoff...
Boston Globe: Its Girls’ Fault that Boys are... →
Reconsidering the various educational groups that presented at our jr. high and high school assemblies for twisted subtext.
“On Christmas Day 2007 Facebook reached a peak in traffic that wasn’t surpassed...”
– Hitwise Intelligence UK: Social Xmas: Facebook’s busiest day ever, YouTube overtakes Hotmail, Social networks = 10% of UK Internet traffic While I’m sure this is supposed to predict something about Facebook’s 2009 growth, I prefer to think of it as the death of the holiday...
What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About... →
Customers with unlimited plans, like diners bringing a healthy appetite to an all-you-can-eat cafeteria, might think they’re getting the best out of the arrangement. But the carriers, unlike the cafeteria owners, can provide unlimited quantities of “food” at virtually no cost to themselves — so long as it is served in bite-sized portions.
Sep 15, 2009: Adaptive Path's UX Week at The... →
UX Week is the premier user experience conference, and in 2009 we look laterally at the disciplines that have influenced us. With a mix of inspiring talks from recognized thought leaders and hands-on…
NASA - Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth →
On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth’s magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or “reconnect,” forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. The European Space Agency’s fleet of four...
“Not many folks are trying these days. Hence, the crisis in the Internet...”
– Guest Post: Happy Holidays, Mercenaries! Love, The Idealists - TechFlash That fits every conclusion I’ve made about the startup phase of my career, said by the CEO of one of them. Remarkable.
Fidelity Investments: Research: Stocks: Utah... →
Go, Lightning Dock! Go, new leases! Hurry up before gas prices make us stupid again.
Penn Neuroscience Boot Camp →
I wonder if Naomi would let me stay on her floor for a week.
Instead of resolutions...
I’m setting up Google Alerts for the phrases “raid on the U.S. Treasury”, “Where’s Ted Stevens when we need him?” and “emotionally underwater”.
WatchTechnology Review: Bootleg Battle Lines Even more ridiculous, they have a Flash app to demonstrate mashups. OMG geeks.
“To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to...”
– In the meadow, we can pan a snowman - Roger Ebert’s Journal
Scandals to Warm To (Frank Rich) →
It won’t last forever, of course. Exposés of financial chicanery will lose their novelty, less colorful chiselers will take the stage (or the tumbril), and someday soon enough, sex scandals will be back (ideally, with a Wall Street C.E.O. canoodling with call girls on his soon-to-be repo-ed company jet on his way to an about-to-go-bankrupt luxury resort in St. Barts).
The End (Portfolio.com) →
I’m sure I’ve noted it before, but a conversation today sent me back to reread it. (It was also on someone’s list of the top pieces of journalism of 2008, too.)
The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out...
How a Brownstoner.com Commenter Became the Online... →
The What, no matter who he is, or where he lives, no matter how wrong (or right) he turns out to be, exists as a pure distillation of a fear that’s forever, distinctly New York: the fear that you’re too late, too slow, too dumb, too white, too black, too leveraged, too poor, priced out, left behind, not street smart, not sharp, stretched too far, freshly trapped, out of options, lost in debt,...
The Best Journalism of 2008 | Culture11 →
I’m glad to find I read a few during the year. …Of course I now have around ten new tabs open.
“As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put it: “Do not spoil what you have by...”
– Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard: Scientific American I like that this will be cheerful to those who *don’t* read the article. @jimray already quoted the good bits, anyway.
Why History Can't Wait →
givemesomethingtoread:
The place has a vaguely familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and nondescriptitude. You can’t quite put your finger on it …
“It’s like the set of The Office,” someone offers.
Bingo.
It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems — some old, some new, all ugly —...
Fallond Stock Picks: New KIVA loans →
A financial blog I follow uses membership and ad revenue to fund Kiva microfinance loans, which is pretty cool. Currently the site is funding 88 people on Kiva. As a Kiva lender myself, it’s a really compelling project. But this made my (snowy) day:
It should be noted I have experienced only 4 defaults (4.24%) which is above the average of 2.85% but I still think is real good considering...
Hey Ponzi: What’s Your Exit Strategy, Exactly?... →
4) Get elected to Parliament. After scamming millions of Russians in the 1990s, Sergei Mavrodi promised his broke investors that he would get their money back with taxpayer funds if they elected him to the Russian Duma. He was, in fact, elected. And voilà, his election gave him parliamentary immunity from criminal prosecution.
Admittedly, this exit strategy has limited applicability.
Watch“While we may understand this, its good to hear it summarized so clearly.”
Here, in 12 minutes, he talks about needed changes in newsroom culture — how adopting new technologies and hunting for a new business model, important as those are, won’t be enough. He calls for a real rethinking of how [journalists] view [their] audience.
“Magnolia Bakery, where queues of weirdly excited and messianic women wait...”
– The “Sex and the City” Tour By AA Gill. Yes, that AA Gill. Who makes the UK theater, restaurant and cultural scenes cry on an admirably regular basis.
“Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting...”
– Also Consider the Philosopher, which made me choke on my beer.
Are journalists too obsessed with the decline of... →
slateinbrief:
Yes.
I like SlateInBrief.
Does She Love You? →
If at Halloween you’re invited to a TV- and movie-themed party and she dresses up as Winnie Cooper and you dress up as Paul Pfeiffer, mainly because you already have the glasses, and at the party some guy who’s a dead ringer for Fred Savage saunters up, peels off his mole, and says, “Get lost, Paul, Winnie’s mine,” and you’re left standing there while the two of them go off dancing to the...
