July 2009
McSweeney's: Status Updates Since My Mother Became... →
“Again, the white knight was the government. It turned out that Goldman’s...”
– Joe Hagan in Tenacious G (via quotingthecrisis)
The globe will soon be geezer central... →
Will those age 65-plus have enough money to live on? And what about all those widows? What will happen to all the government pension programs around the world? What’s a good growth business to get into: geriatric-care management? Or perhaps a business retrofitting homes to make houses more livable — after all 90% of use want to age in place?
The 204-page report [issued by the US...
High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to... →
givemesomethingtoread:
Ship captains spend their careers trying to avoid a collision or grounding like this. But for Habib, nearly every month brings a welcome disaster. While people are shouting “Abandon ship!” Habib is scrambling aboard. … [H]e’s the senior salvage master — the guy who runs the show at sea — for Titan Salvage, a highly specialized outfit of men who race around the world...
The Biological Threat of Stress: From the Jungle... →
A final line of evidence has to do with the speed of our reactions and our conscious awareness of them. Our stress responses react so quickly that we often do not become aware we are reacting until after we have already started the process. We literally start running away from an aversive stimulus before we are even aware we are moving.
The End of Giftedness - David Shenk →
Shenk’s blogging for The Atlantic! About intelligence, talent and science. Cool.
“The bottom line is that those who believe Zappos was forced to sell can probably...”
– The long woo between Amazon and Zappos… [footnoted.org]
sometimesagreatnotion:
Monster Ballads - Josh...
“Unfortunately for Google, there aren’t many models for it to emulate....”
– Why Is Obama’s Top Antitrust Cop Gunning for Google? [Wired]
“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To...”
– Rilke (via yvonnegeorgina) (via sometimesagreatnotion)
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why,...”
–
Another koan of sorts from Cat’s Cradle and the Bokononist religion (which phrases many of its teachings as calypsos, as part of its absurdist bent), this piece of doggerel is simple and catchy, but it unpacks into a resonant, meaningful philosophy that reads as sympathetic to humanity,...
“Perhaps a lot of the disagreement over healthcare reform, and maybe other policy...”
– Greg Mankiw: Trust
Just when I think there’s little value in following unfiltered economist posturing and blog squabbling, one of them comes up with something thought-provoking that reminds me they’re the kinds of thinkers I appreciate.
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of...”
– Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (via dutyfreesins) (via isthisblood) (via datatimesemotion)
WatchAdam Fehr: I Agree. Completely. Good lord.
WatchLykke Li and El Perro Del Mar - Dance Dance Dance as filmed by the roundly awesome Take-Away Shows. Take-Away Shows won me over to many musicians I otherwise would have dismissed as one-album hype.
Traders Profit With Computers Set at High Speed -... →
High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits — and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.
High-frequency traders also benefit from...
If it looks like a wolf and drags babies off like...
lisawilkins:
“When his parents looked outside later, they saw their pet, a 4-year-old mixed breed called a Native American Indian dog, holding the baby in his mouth, said Jessamine County chief deputy sheriff Allen Peel.”
Memories of WaMu… [footnoted.org] →
While most of the slides aren’t all that different from the earnings release, a few definitely stood out. We particularly liked slide #10, which showed a sharp (and scary) increase in 30-day delinquencies for so-called prime borrowers. At the end of June, that number was running around 9%, compared with around 5% at the end of 2008 — yet another indication that the rosy economic headlines lately...
Children's ideas of Christianity
ascendingcoherence:
I just finished reading “Like I Was Jesus: How to Bring a Nine-Year-Old to Christ” by Rachel Aviv in the August Harper’s. It’s a story about the Child Evangelism Fellowship, but (relatively rare for Harper’s) it isn’t just another “ack! Evangelistic Christians are totally scary!” piece. The most interesting thing about the story is her look at how children conceive of...
Miguel Cotto, Manny Pacquiao agree to November... →
Hey, little brother, we’re going to Vegas for this, right?
The New York Times trashes Robert H. Goddard in... →
On 17
July 1969, when the Apollo crew was on the way to the first landing
of man on the Moon, The New York Times finally printed a correction:
A Correction. On Jan. 13, 1920,
“Topics of the Times,” and editorial-page feature of the The New
York Times, dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in
vacuum and commented on the ideas of Robert...
Why Generation X Has the Leaders We Need Now →
fling:
Tammy Erickson points out how some of the traits of Generation X are perfectly suited for the needs of today. (via dave)
This reads like a horoscope or Meyers-Briggs profile to me. Figure out the Gen X population on Wall Street 12 months ago and then listen to generation-wide attributes. There’s earnestness underlying the argument but it rings generic to lump all Gen X as some...
“You can tell people they are wrong by a look or an intonation or a gesture just...”
– Dale Carnegie, via @ario
“There are going to be some people who say that some of this stuff isn’t...”
– Matt Taibbi - Taibblog - The real price of Goldman’s giganto-profits - True/Slant (via quotingthecrisis)
RT @HunterSThompson: We were somewhere around...
(via seoulbrother). Twitter would have been epic had the real Hunter S. embraced it.
