The Great Recession

Dear Forbes.com readers:

This will turn out to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the worst U.S. recession in decades.

I first said so in August and, since I wrote those words, financial and economic conditions have deteriorated further--and severely. Stock prices are sharply down and there is a risk of a market crack. Interbank and credit spreads are wider than ever since the beginning of this crisis, Lehman Brothers (nyse: LEH - news - people ) and Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER - news - people ) are gone, and soon enough Morgan Stanley (nyse: MS - news - people ) and Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people ) will need to find a larger partner with deep pockets or they risk getting into severe trouble.

The biggest insurer in the world--American International Group (nyse: AIG - news - people )--is teetering near bankruptcy and has been bailed out by the taxpayer at an astronomical expense. The biggest U.S. savings and loan, Washington Mutual (nyse: WM - news - people ), is effectively insolvent and close to going bust, while dozens of other banks are near bankruptcy.

There is the beginning of a silent bank run as depositors are nervous about their assets. The panic is mounting in the financial markets, and the credit default swap market is frozen because of the Lehman collapse and the state of affairs at AIG, WaMu and other financial institutions. Many hedge funds are now teetering as their losses mount. Investors in fixed income--including preferred stocks--have experienced massive losses and the financial turmoil is becoming global as stock markets all over the world plunge. Worst of all, policymakers are running out of bullets. Think Spaghetti Westerns and a parched desperado in a dry gulch.

The Lehman collapse is leading to the risk of a generalized run on the shadow banking system. The policy reaction is to try to build a new set of levees after the financial perfect storm of the century destroyed the first set. This reaction includes the following steps.

First: The Fed is accepting even more toxic collateral for the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) and Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), including even equities. So now, after having nationalized the mortgage market via the takeover of Fannie Mae (nyse: FNM - news - people ) and Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE - news - people ), the government is also starting to manipulate the stock market directly. This started with the SEC restrictions on naked short sales of primary dealers, so the process of turning the U.S. market system into a socialist system controlled by the government is now in full swing. By its effective purchase of equities, the Fed takes massive credit and market risks.

Second: The Fed is waiving Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act, which restricts how much commercial banks can re-lend liquidity to their investment banking affiliates. These restrictions are sensible prudential rules aimed at making it difficult for banks to subsidize their broker-dealer affiliates with insured deposits. Now this prudence is thrown to the wind, so Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ), JPMorgan Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people ) and Bank of America (nyse: BAC - news - people ) can happily use or raid their FDIC-insured deposit to support bankrupt broker-dealer operations. This is reckless, and is a form of connected lending that eventually caused the Japanese financial and banking crisis.

Third: An attempt to bail-in the private sector and provide private lender-of-last-resort support to the financial system is at work. Ten major global banks will fork out $7 billion each to create a $70 billion fund. Each of these firms could borrow up to a third of such a fund, or $23 billion. But this private lender-of-last-resort (LOLR) facility will not work. If any firm were to access this facility in case of a run on its liabilities, panic will ensue--as the use of it will signal severe trouble--and the run will continue.

The IMF created a similar facility to deal with liquidity runs on sound and solvent but illiquid countries, but no country ever used or signed up for such facility as it would have been associated with "stigma." Also private LOLR facilities need to come with rules on their use ("conditionality"), otherwise an illiquid and insolvent broker-dealer could access the facility with no restrictions and bankrupt the fund and the other members. But the new facility apparently does not come with any conditionality, so it is flawed in its design.

Fourth: Since Lehman has gone bust, the new line of defense was the BofA takeover of Merrill. After taking over the insolvent Countrywide, Ken Lewis is making another reckless gamble by taking over, at a vastly inflated price, another distressed broker-dealer. This is dangerous behavior for BofA. The lesson for Mack of Morgan Stanley and Blankfein of Goldman is that they should find a buyer today. After the collapse of three major broker-dealers in six months, Morgan Stanley and Goldman will be next unless they find a large financial institution with a large commercial bank that provides stable FDIC-insured deposits. As I predicted months ago, no independent broker-dealer will survive.

Fifth: Fed rate cuts will make no difference to the fundamental solvency and credit problems of the economy. The economy does not suffer only from illiquidity. More seriously, it suffers from severe credit and solvency problems that the Fed cannot address in any way.

Therefore, any rally from Fed actions will be short lived. When Bear Stearns was rescued, the financial market rally lasted two months. When the Fannie and Freddie legislation was proposed in July, the rally lasted a few weeks; when the actual nationalization of Fannie and Freddie occurred a week ago, the rally lasted only one day. The ability of policy authorities to prop up financial markets is rapidly eroding as market participants see that policy makers are desperate and running out of options.

At this point the perfect financial storm of the century cannot be contained.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor at the Stern Business School at NYU and chairman of Roubini Global Economics, is a weekly columnist for Forbes.com.

The Great Recession (Dr. Nouriel Roubini, writing at Forbes.com, 18 September 2008)

Six impossible things before breakfast

Lewis Carroll’s White Queen “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. Traders could use that skill. Here are six things we have been asked to believe since markets closed on Tuesday.

First, the US Federal Reserve is lending $85bn to American International Group to stop it from going bust. AIG is an insurer, not covered by the Fed. The action is without precedent. Does it damage the decisive move against moral hazard when Lehman was allowed to fail? Arguably not. AIG was of greater systemic importance. And Wednesday’s market response suggests that it in no way dampened aversion to risk.

Second, a US money market fund has “broken the buck”, or dropped below a nominal value of $1. For decades US savers had thought this impossible.

Third, the yield on the world’s safest investment, three-month Treasury bills, dropped to 0.15 per cent, its lowest since Pearl Harbor. Safety has not been so expensive since the war.

Fourth, the US Treasury had to bolster the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve, the anchor of the world financial system.

Fifth, Wall Street’s last two independent investment banks, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, will stay independent for days at most, judging by the price of their equity and credit.

And sixth, the risk that the US itself defaults, according to credit markets, has quadrupled in the past six months. Its triple-A rating, according to one rating agency, is “not God-given”.

All six things appear to be true. A seventh, pushed by contrarians, is that it is time to buy. The last rally, in July, started when restrictions on short-sellers were announced; draconian measures against shorts were unveiled on Wednesday. And extreme panics generally precede rallies. But this panic must be resolved first, and it looks different from the panics that have preceded it this year.

The Short View: The cost of safety (John Authers, Financial Times, 17 September 2008)

I virtually never reproduce an entire article when I blog... but, like the Federal Reserve said when they bought AIG without, you know, strictly speaking having legal authority to do so, I claim exigent circumstances in this case.

How many shares of AIG stock do I get when I file my 2008 taxes?

Want to understand the ramifications of the recent market chaos?

The New York Times is running one of the best (and simplest) interactive information graphics I've seen in a long time.

Static snapshots below, which don't begin to do justice to what they've built.

Market cap of 29 selected financial firms in October 2007:



...and the 27 surviving firms in September 2008:

Hedge Fund

On a morning where there's nothing but bloodletting in the financial markets, a little comic relief, courtesy of I Can Has Cheezburger?:

Making GPS irrelevant

[Researchers] used magnetic scanners to explore the brain activity of taxi drivers as they navigated their way through a virtual simulation of London's streets.

Different brain regions were activated as they considered route options, spotted familiar landmarks or thought about their customers.

[...]

Earlier studies had shown that taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus - a region of the brain that plays an important role in navigation.

Their brains even "grow on the job" as they build up detailed information needed to find their way around London's labyrinth of streets - information famously referred to as "The Knowledge".

"We were keen to go beyond brain structure - and see what activity is going on inside the brains of taxi drivers while they are doing their job," said Dr Hugo Spiers from University College London.

[London] Taxi drivers 'have brain satnav' (BBC News, 13 Sept 2008)

If McCain wins in November

...Tina Fey has a regular gig for at least the next four years, if she wants it.

Weathering Ike

The Houston Chronicle's bloggers (and commenters) are covering the aftermath of the storm.

I think there's something in there about him being a Harvard grad, too

On 9/14/08 8:17 AM, XXX wrote:

According to The Book of Revelations:

The Anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal....the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, he will destroy everything.

Hey, XXX – I hope this note finds you well. We are all okay, but always wish there were a few more hours in the weekend and a few less in the workweek...

I have seen the above repeated in a lot of places lately... Makes it easier for me to believe that old saying about the Bible being one book that everybody has in the house but nobody reads.

Revelation doesn’t describe or even use the term “anti-Christ” (though it is used elsewhere in the Bible); the figures of evil in Revelation are beasts that, when you read about them (see below) don’t really even sound like human beings to me, much less like a 40-year-old Muslim male. (Also: The Muslim faith was not founded until many hundreds of years after the last book of the Christian Bible was written...)

I’m not a big fan of Obama, to be honest. I was a Republican for most of my adult life before switching my registration to Independent a few years back, and I think there are plenty of valid reasons to prefer McCain, Barr, or not voting, over voting for Obama.

Arguing that he is some kind of Secret Muslim Anti-Christ is just silly, though.

- bc

New International Version, Revelation chapter 13:

¹ And the dragon[a] stood on the shore of the sea.

The Beast out of the Sea

And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.


²The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.


³One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was astonished and followed the beast.

⁴Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, "Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?"

⁵The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for forty-two months.

⁶He opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven.

⁷He was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them. And he was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation.

⁸All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.[b]

⁹He who has an ear, let him hear.

¹⁰If anyone is to go into captivity,
into captivity he will go.
If anyone is to be killed[c] with the sword,
with the sword he will be killed. This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of the saints.

The Beast out of the Earth

¹¹Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon.

¹²He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed.

¹³And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men.

¹⁴Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth. He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived.

¹⁵He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.

¹⁶He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead,

¹⁷so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.

¹⁸This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.

Now listening...

"Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven" - Godspeed You! Black Emperor, 2000



Systems/Layers by Rachel's, 2003

Clean laundry makes him happy

Me, too.

Where do the neurotics live? New York. Duh.

Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.

What's more, it turns out these personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster. And how they cluster tells us much: What city someone might want to move to, the broader character of regions, and even the creative and economic futures of broad swaths of the nation.

Drawing on a database of hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys compiled by psychologists Jason Rentfrow, Sam Gosling, and Jeff Porter, my team and I were able to map the distribution of personality types across the United States. The result is a fascinating new way of looking at the country's terrain.

Interestingly, America's psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a center for the manufacturing industry, has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams.

The Northeast corridor, including Greater Boston, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin, are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. While it is hard to identify which came first - was it an initial concentration of personality types that drew industry, or the industry which attracted the personalities? - the overlay is clear.

Where do all the neurotics live? (Boston Globe)

---

Update, 8:15 PM:

In the comments, Phil points us to an online version of the inventory:

Want to take an inventory?

http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j.../ ipipneo120.htm

I've posted my results (the survey declared me to be only an average neurotic, while in actuality I lost my amateur status years ago, so I do worry about the integrity of the method.)

If you feel inclined to overshare the deep secrets of your psyche in the comments, please do so.

Jobs swims the Yangtze

Apple's big event today in San Francisco left many people wondering: What the heck was that was that all about? Normally, the great Steve Jobs uses his time on the podium to delight and surprise the masses. But today he gave little more than a preview of the new holiday line of iPods, and the TV ads that will accompany them.

You don't have to be as cynical as me to understand the real reason this event was staged: It was so the world could watch Jobs swim the Yangtze River.

Surely you remember that bit of masterful 20th-century propaganda? In 1966, Mao Zedong, the communist leader who united China and brought it back from the brink of ruin, famously swam the Yangtze. This stunt confounded the China hands and others who had believed that Mao was either dead — done in by his rivals — or dying of some illness, as had been rumored. (He was 73 after all.) But, no, the Leader was alive and astoundingly healthy: On a day in July, the Chairman appeared in his bathrobe on the riverbanks in Wuhan, accompanied by 5,000 young people. He was photographed smiling and waving; the Party-controlled press reported that he swam nearly nine miles downstream, in a little over an hour — which is doubtful.

But it's certainly true that he lived for another decade.

When Jobs, who battled pancreatic cancer four years ago and has been the subject of whispers of ill health since he appeared looking gaunt at the Macworld conference in June, took the stage today, it was in front of a giant slide that said, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

Steve Jobs: Not Dead Yet (Time.com)

I suppose some things are so obvious as to not need saying, but making the Jobs/Mao analogy without continuing to connect the dots to the concept of personality cults is a strange omission.

The laughable redneck notions that made the United States what it is

If only the Democrats could contain their sense of entitlement to govern in a rational world, and their consequent distaste for wide swathes of the US electorate, they might gain the unshakeable grip on power they feel they deserve. Winning elections would certainly be easier – and Republicans would have to address themselves more seriously to economic insecurity. But the fathomless cultural complacency of the metropolitan liberal rules this out.

The attitude that expressed itself in response to the Palin nomination is the best weapon in the Republican armoury. Rely on the Democrats to keep it primed. You just have to laugh.

The Palin nomination could still misfire for Mr McCain, but the liberal reaction has made it a huge success so far. To avoid endlessly repeating this mistake, Democrats need to learn some respect.

It will be hard. They will have to develop some regard for the values that the middle of the country expresses when it votes Republican. Religion. Unembarrassed flag-waving patriotism. Freedom to succeed or fail through one’s own efforts. Refusal to be pitied, bossed around or talked down to. And all those other laughable redneck notions that made the United States what it is.

Democrats must learn some respect (Clive Crook, writing in The Financial Times, 7 September 2008)

Oh my gravy!

Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej has been ordered to resign after being found guilty of violating the constitution over a TV cookery show.

[...]

Thailand has had its fair share of crises recently, says the BBC's Jonathan Head in Bangkok, but this is one that even the Thais are baffled by.

[...]

Mr Samak, a self-proclaimed foodie, hosted a popular television cooking show, Tasting and Grumbling, for seven years before becoming prime minister.

He continued to present the programme for two months after becoming prime minister, but said that any money he received was only used to cover his expenses.

Protesters accuse Mr Samak of being a proxy for former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in an army coup in 2006 amid accusations of corruption and abuse of power.

Court says Thai PM "must resign" (BBC News)

(1) "Tasting and Grumbling" is a terrific name for a TV cooking show.

(2) In addition to being a foodie, I have something else in common with the Thai Prime Minister: Any money that I receive from my employment goes to cover my expenses, as well.

That's right, friends, money means nothing to me; I tend to give it away in exchange for goods and services.

(3) I wonder if Rachael Ray has ever considered a political career? She has, famously, declared: "I have no formal [training in] anything... I'm completely unqualified for every job I've ever had."

O tempora, O mores

A study by University of Maryland economists makes the case that her endorsement alone was worth more that one million votes in the Democratic primary.

Mustard-based sauce is still an abomination

Jason Perlow posts a lovely photo-essay and appreciation of North and South Carolina barbecue.

Over the summer months in 2008, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Carolinas, in particular, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area (The Triangle) and also the Columbia, South Carolina area. Two cities which are as different as can be from a cultural and socio-economic perspective, but which do share something in common — Barbecue.

Even if you are trying to shed the pounds like I am, when you travel, maintaining discipline can be extremely difficult, especially when you are surrounded by co-workers who want to go out and have a good time. And when you’re in the South with a bunch of out-of-town males, particularly in the Carolinas, evening entertainment can usually be classified into two distinct areas — ones which involve Pork and ones which do not. I’m not going to get into the details of the ones which do not, because that could get me in trouble with the wife.

Here are all my Carolina Barbecue sins exposed, some of which I am proud of and would repeat again, and some of which I would not.

Off the Broiler: The Finger-Lickin' Ginormous Carolina Q Post

Hexayurt

"Take 12 sheets of standard industrial board material, cut six in half, tape or screw them together, and move in," Gupta said. "Boom, there’s your global housing revolution."

Hexayurt/CitiesGoGreen

Related: The Bucky/Gandhi Design Institution

Mike Huckabee's Parable of the Desk, explained

It's amazing how many layers of meaning you can pack into a little sermon if you know what you're doing. I know: sermons are my stock in trade. And they're also the primary arsenal for aw-shucks just-plain-folks evangelical Republican Mike Huckabee, who stumped for John McCain at the Republican National Convention with a speech that made my jaw drop.

Let me explain why. Excerpts of Huckabee's homily follow, in fine sermon style; toward the end of his speech, he pulled out a seemingly-unrelated story, then called forth a moral and a theme, and then wove that theme back into his prior subject matter, the imperative to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket. The first parts of his oration are basically irrelevant boilerplate about how Barack Obama hugs terrorists and blushingly gives them boxes of candy. And then he gets into the oft-told tale of McCain's capture and torture, following with remarks about McCain's efforts to lift his arms and how he gave for us, so we should all be grateful. That's when Huckabee slides smoothly into Sermontown:

Allow me to tell you about someone who understands this type of sacrifice better than anyone.

McCain? No, not yet: a schoolteacher who is in no way a stand-in for Sarah Palin, a young woman who overcomes doubt and skepticism to teach people about how we ought to be more grateful to veterans like a certain J.M.

Taking Steps: Did someone whistle? I couldn't hear it.

(via)

My time in right field

It will astonish my wife and most of my friends to learn this, but for a single season, in junior high school, I played on the baseball team. I don't talk about it much. :-)

My wife, the pro baseball fan, who has to explain the intricacies and rules and fine points to me whenever we watch a game (she's very patient and kind about this) must be absolutely flabbergasted at this point: how could someone with such a weak theoretical grasp of the game ever have played?

Well, it goes like this.

I was a student in a small parochial school that wanted to field a baseball team. There weren't enough actually interested players, and a few kids got shanghaied (dragooned?) into service.

They found some ex-jock-gone-to-seed to coach the team as a part-time gig; I think he might have also been qualified to teach something like Driver's Education (that was a popular combo down South for a long time.) He was certainly qualified to chew tobacco and take regular pulls on the bottle of Four Roses that he kept in the glovebox of his car, and for all I know he actually might have known something about baseball.

We had baseball practice three times a week, which was utter confusion for me, because I really had no well-formed idea of how the game was played (I got the "you hit the ball and run around the bases" part, but the subtleties were lost on me) and everyone else clearly already understood everything they wanted to know about baseball by then.

They put me at the bottom of the batting order - and on defense, I was out in right field.

I mentioned, I think, that it was a parochial school. By this I mean that it was formally affiliated with the Episcopal Church, not that it was provincial in its point of view, although an argument can certainly be made.

We prayed at chapel service every schoolday, but I had never prayed as fervently about anything in my young life, up to that point, as the prayer I said, over and over, on every game day, as I trotted out to right field with an antique baseball glove that used to belong to my dad:

Lord, I hope the percentage of left-handed hitters on their team is low
And that our pitching is good and their hitting is weak
And I would really prefer it if no baseballs came my way today.
If perchance someone should hit the ball in my direction, it would be really decent of You to help me give a good accounting of myself.
Thanks. Amen.

I don't think I hit the ball in an actual game all season long.

I do remember making at least one good catch, and thank God there was nobody on base at the time, so I didn't have to work out all the permutations of where I should be throwing the damn ball.

Experiences like this are what led me into a life of process wonkery. I am the kind of person who really prefers to understand the theoretical underpinnings of what I'm doing.

Making sure you can get five bars in Hell

Denis O'Brien professes not to understand why Wall Streeters think his telecom business is risky. He says this while sitting in an office in Papua New Guinea that is protected by razor wire and a half-dozen guards carrying shotguns and pistols. O'Brien's Jamaica-headquartered company, Digicel Group, began offering cheap cell phone service recently in this Pacific hellhole. The murder rate in PNG is one of the highest in the world, corruption is rife, and the government recently threatened to seize 130 cell towers that O'Brien had erected at a cost of $120 million.

Is there anyplace as inhospitable to capital as PNG? Haiti would qualify. O'Brien has put money in there, too--several hundred million dollars. Five of his workers in Haiti have been kidnapped so far. In East Timor O'Brien is pursuing a license despite a rebel uprising this year that left the country's president with a bullet in his chest. And then there's Fiji, where he had to abandon cell towers for a time after a coup.

He concedes a bit to the worrywarts by noting that his experience in Fiji was a "nightmare." But he's not about to stop putting capital in dangerous places. "If you just focus on risk, you can't do a thing," he says. A swashbuckling entrepreneur of 50 who swears often in his Irish brogue, O'Brien has built a $2.2 billion personal fortune by dominating the mobile business in a dozen poverty-stricken countries (in all, he's in 27 countries and territories). Combining shrewd political instincts, a relentless drive to cut costs and a little Irish charm, he's put phones into the hands of 7 million people in seven years.

Babble Rouser (Forbes.com - from Forbes magazine, 11 August 2008)

(via)

You can pay Uncle Sam with the overtime

For many American professionals, the Labor Day holiday yesterday probably wasn’t as relaxing as they had hoped. They didn’t go into the office, but they were still working. As much as they may truly have wanted to focus on time with their children, their spouses or their friends, they were unable to turn off their BlackBerrys, their laptops and their work-oriented brains.

Americans working on holidays is not a new phenomenon: we have long been an industrious folk. A hundred years ago the German sociologist Max Weber described what he called the Protestant ethic. This was a religious imperative to work hard, spend little and find a calling in order to achieve spiritual assurance that one is among the saved.

Weber claimed that this ethic could be found in its most highly evolved form in the United States, where it was embodied by aphorisms like Ben Franklin’s “Industry gives comfort and plenty and respect.” The Protestant ethic is so deeply engrained in our culture you don’t need to be Protestant to embody it. You don’t even need to be religious.

But what’s different from Weber’s era is that it is now the rich who are the most stressed out and the most likely to be working the most. Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do. Since 1980, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work long hours (over 49 hours per week) has dropped by half, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano. But among the top fifth of earners, long weeks have increased by 80 percent.

Rich Man's Burden (New York Times, 2 September 2008)

Understanding Google Chrome

Google commissioned comic-book artist and theorist (yes, really) Scott McCloud to explain the design philosophy behind Google Chrome in graphic novel form.

Google Chrome

Windows-only at this point, so I'm running Google Chrome under VMware Fusion.

Light, fast.  I like it.

Large Hadron Rap

"I have to confess that I was skeptical when Katie said she wanted to do this, but when I saw her previous science rapping and the lyrics, I was convinced," Gillies said. "I think you'll find pretty close to unanimity among physicists that it's great."

- CERN spokesman James Gillies, on the Large Hadron Rap

Central Park Labor Day 2008

Central Park Labor Day 2008
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

Carrie and I packed a bag (and an old blue-striped bedsheet to use as a groundcloth) and hung out in Central Park for a few hours today.

Green is such a soothing color to the human eye, and there's precious little of it in the City. Hanging out in the the park is restorative for a lot of reasons.

We found a place to sit in the shade of a big old tree, about 200 meters behind a jazz combo that was playing next to the 72nd St Traverse. The music, and the peoplewatching, were both prime.

I had brought along the newspaper, along with some magazines neither one of us had a chance to read yet. We each got a hot dog from a park vendor, and then, after circumnavigating the Great Lawn and making our way out of the park and back downtown...

Ww had a (very) early supper at the neighborhood diner, which sometimes fancies itself a sophisticated sidewalk cafe. :-)

(The cheeseburgers are still good.)

Thank God it's not basketball season yet

To truly understand the UNC-Duke rivalry, you have to understand how close together (geographically) the two schools are.

How close are they?

Someone dropped in unexpectedly at the Duke game on Saturday.

About an hour before kickoff against James Madison, two parachutists landed at the 35-yard line at Wallace Wade Stadium with a game ball, according to a story in the Raleigh News & Observer.

The Blue Devils hadn't scheduled the event, however. The jumpers were supposed to land eight miles down the road in Chapel Hill, N.C., before the North Carolina game.

"All we know is, they must have missed their jump site,'' a Duke team official said, according to the newspaper.

UNC assistant athletics director for promotions Michael Beale told the Observer that the plane had decided to cancel the jump into Kenan Stadium due to bad weather. A break in the clouds, however, revealed a stadium and the jumpers made their leap after all. They didn't realize that they were over the wrong stadium until it was too late.

When informed of the gaffe, UNC associate athletics director Rick Steinbacher called Duke to apologize.

"In about five years, maybe this will be funny,'' Steinbacher said, according to the newspaper. "Right now, I'm just glad no one was hurt."

ESPN - Parachutists land at Duke by mistake

Related: Aerial Delivery Goes Awry (News and Observer.com)

Also related: Google Maps driving directions from Wallace Wade Stadium, Durham, NC, to Kenan Stadium, Chapel Hill, NC (showing both stadiums on a labelled aerial view.)

Restrain these immoderate rains, we humbly beseech thee

I grew up on the Episcopal Church's 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer.  It was the prayer book in use at the parochial school I attended, and our congregation was among the last in the diocese to switch (under protest) to the 1979 revision.

Anyway.  As I watched the news tonight, and saw the grim projections of Gustav's landfall in the Gulf Coast by morning, I recalled a prayer from the 1928 prayer book.  We must have said it countless times in our North Carolina parish; hurricanes and bad storms were not infrequent occurrences in our part of the country. 

It contains good stiff-upper-lip understatement, but gets the point across:

For Fair Weather.

ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech thee, of thy great goodness, to restrain those immoderate rains, wherewith thou hast afflicted us. And we pray thee to send us such seasonable weather, that the earth may, in due time, yield her increase for our use and benefit; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Wasilla City Hall

Wasilla City Hall
Originally uploaded by djcn0te.

Picture: From the comments thread of a post at Washington Monthly, courtesy of Carrie.

All by way of pointing out that there's a really good comment thread here... enrevanche regulars Phil, wtf, Chap, and Buck all chime in.

In America, soon, social network finds you

Bradley Bloch has a great idea: develop social networking software that tracks the relationships of the world's movers and shakers; kind of an interactive Who's Who for the 21st century:

Last week, the New York Times reported that Rielle Hunter’s lawyer, who issued a statement in December that Hunter was not carrying John Edwards’ child, and Andrew Young’s lawyer, who shortly thereafter issued a statement that Hunter was carrying his client’s child, were not unconnected to each other. Instead, both had worked on legal cases with Fred Baron, the influential trial lawyer and former finance chairman of Edwards’ presidential campaign. The link between two supposedly independent players via a key Edwards advisor suggests that attempts to control the scandal have been much more extensive than first reported.

We would have known all this from the start if the three lawyers, like so many millions of other people, had set up profiles on a social networking site such as LinkedIn or Facebook and connected to each other. But, of course, high-profile lawyers don’t tend to spend much time on such sites, and when they do, they’re not likely to announce connections they’d rather the rest of us not know about.

[...]

Most of us have our own networks of friends, classmates and colleagues – largely invisible to the outside world – that we vigorously tap when looking for a new job or trying to get our children into selective schools. Even so, we never fail to be surprised, if not shocked, when other people’s invisible connections turn out to play an important role in explaining events. We rarely think to look at the world through a network lens except when we want something or when things don’t go as we expect.

Indeed, a remarkable number of our after-the-fact analytical activities, from investigative reporting to seething about being passed over for a promotion, are ultimately attempts to piece together other people’s networks, even if we don’t always recognize them as such. We would be better off if we assumed from the start that networks and connections play an ongoing role in shaping people’s priorities and behaviors, including our own.

Taking Facebook to the Next Level (Bradley W. Bloch, Los Angeles Times, 24 August 2008)

I can't wait for the public beta. :-)

Be everywhere now

Quicksilver fans, rejoice: a new project, Ubiquity, takes the Quicksilver experience and places it on any platform that can run Firefox.

Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web.

You're used to telling Firefox where you want to go by typing Web addresses into the URL bar:

With Ubiquity installed, you'll be able to tell Firefox what you want it to do by typing commands into a new Ubiquity input box.

The commands are pretty straightforward, but you can define your own and then chain them together and do things that are pretty mindsnappingly powerful.

Having a browser that "understands" natural language has enormous potential. Ubiquity is in the earliest of prototype stages, but seems stable and is already a useful tool in my online kit.

Related: Introducing Ubiquity (Mozilla Labs blog - August 2008)

Not as much traffic in these parts since the new Interstate came through

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

[...]

Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say [post-Patriot Act US interception and filtering of Internet traffic] may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.

“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”

Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass The US (John Markoff, New York Times, 29 August 2008)

Gilding the lily

31 Aug: Updated, because I mangled Greg's comment in the original version.

Greg sends:

Cats love cardboard boxes, but they don't look nice strewn around the house—so the Evil Mad Scientists DIY site details how to assemble a hilarious cardboard box "chaise lounge" for your favorite kitty. All it takes is a few boxes and some cutting and folding, and they offer a PDF pattern download to get it just right. Once your feline's chaise is done, she'll love having a cardboard box to lounge in and you'll have a conversation-starter in your liviing room.

Cardboard Cat Chaise [Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories]

Lifehacker: Weekend Project: Make Your Own Cardboard Cat Chaise (30 August 2008)

Greg comments: "Every cat I have ever known is perfectly happy with the original box."

Me too.

It's Palin for VP

I think McCain made a canny choice. It was a bold one, anyway: this move is either going to look nuts or brilliant in under a month.

Depending on the polls you believe, between 20% and 30% of Hillary Clinton voters were self-reporting as "likely to vote for McCain," and that's *before* JMC picked a woman as running mate. So there's the obvious, transparent and cynical appeal to disgruntled Clintonistas. But the thing is, this might work!

Independents are still very much in play. McCain himself, though pro-life (as is Palin) can best be described as a moderate social conservative with occasional tendencies towards actual tolerance, and Palin has been described as "as libertarian as you can get and still be on a major ticket" by no less than the editor of Reason magazine.

Plenty of people have modestly libertarian views (including many independent voters!) - economically conservative but socially tolerant.

Best punditry I've seen so far:

Michael Barone

Marc Armbinder

"When I get angry, I stamp my feet..."

Therapy and healing for disappointed Clinton supporters, via Jon Stewart:

True 'til it ain't funny

By the way, the best line of the convention so far? Ted Strickland of Ohio, when he echoed the 1988 Democratic convention joke about George H.W. Bush, that he was born on third and thought he hit a triple. Strickland said of George W. Bush that he was born on third and then stole second. It didn't get much attention in any of the commentary, but it's all people were talking about in the bars of Denver that night.

"Declarations" - Peggy Noonan writing in The Wall Street Journal, 28 August 2008

Patience is whittled away; sarcasm often ensues

Sometime over the course of a person’s first year in New York, there usually comes that moment. It can happen in the first days or weeks, or after 10 months. It can happen repeatedly, or without people noticing, at least not at first.

Newcomers suddenly realize either that the city is not working for them or that they are inexorably becoming part of it, or both. They find themselves walking and talking faster.

The subway begins to make sense. Patience is whittled away; sarcasm often ensues. New friends are made, routines established, and city life begins to feel like second nature. In other words, newcomers find themselves becoming New Yorkers.

“It can be lonely, very lonely, and I knew I would find it hard,” said Lisa Phin, 25, who moved to New York from Dallas in late May, and is building a network of friends through events listed on Web sites like Meetup.com. “But if you can stick it out for one year, you’re home free.”

Newcomers Adjust, Eventually, to New York (New York Times, 27 August 2008)

Well, maybe. As of Labor Day 2008, I will have been a full-time resident of NYC for 12 years.

I developed the love-hate relationship with the City almost immediately ("...suddenly realize either that the city is not working for them or that they are inexorably becoming part of it, or both...") but I didn't really self-identify as a New Yorker for maybe a year and a half. (I was impatient and sarcastic long before I moved here, so that particular diagnostic doesn't work for me.)

I have seen *much* quicker transitions, though, and not necessarily from people who are moving here from other large cities.

Basically, you're a New Yorker the moment that you self-identify as being one, and that's conceptually one of my favorite things about the city I now think of as my hometown.

Behaving badly on vacation

Speaking of travel:

“They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit,” Malia’s mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview. “It is only the British people — not the Germans or the French.”

Some Britons Too Unruly for Resorts in Europe (New York Times, 26 August 2008)

A travel life list

Phil has posted his wanna-visit list at Archer Pelican, and asked around for others to share theirs.

Because I am an old married guy :-), elements of this list are on Carrie's life list and/or mine. If they're in italics, I've visited them at some point; bold italics, she and I have visited them together.

Major cities I think we'd enjoy hanging out in:

• Amsterdam
• Atlanta
• Bangkok
• Barcelona
• Beijing
• Berlin
• Boston
• Cairo
• Chicago
• Copenhagen
• Hong Kong
• London
• Madrid
• Manila
• Melbourne
• Mexico City
• Milan
• Montreal
• Mumbai
• Nairobi
• New Delhi
• Oslo
• Paris
• Rome
• San Francisco
• Shanghai
• Singapore
• Stockholm
• Sydney
• Tokyo
• Toronto
• Vancouver
• Vienna

Place my wife is determined to visit and beats the hell out of me why but I'm game and we're planning on doing this:

Antarctica

The perfect attack dog

To keep track of how the Presidential candidates are reaching out to their supporters (and also as a little experiment to gauge whether the various campaigns are keeping their privacy pledges--so far, all of them are), I've signed up at each major candidate's campaign site under a trackable pseudonym; at Obama's site, I'm "Joe Gauche"; for McCain, "Joe Droit," and at Bob Barr's place, "Joe Liberté".

Mr. Gauche got the text message announcing Obama's pick of Joe Biden early this morning, followed by an e-mail.

Real Clear Politics has been collating the published responses in the major media, and so far I think the New York Post, of all places, has the analysis nailed: Blowhard Could Be Just What Obama Needs.

Biden is, um, articulate to a fault... and he'll make the perfect attack dog, if his performance in the primary debates is any indication. (His one-sentence takedown of Rudy Giuliani -- "He only ever says three things: a noun, a verb, and 9/11" -- was pitch-perfect.)

If the campaign staff can keep Biden anything close to on-message, he'll be very effective.

Housecats: Not conservation-minded.

Lake County, California reports that a mysterious problem with high water bills for a residential customer has been definitively diagnosed.

Hat tip: deVille.

An appreciation of a "natural"

One of the best teachers it has ever been my privilege to know, Don Houpe, died unexpectedly on Tuesday, at the far-too-young age of 67:

[Dr. Houpe] was the foreign language coordinator at the school, where Ginger Wilson, dean of humanities, said he was a very kind and caring teacher and person.

"He was a real linguist in that he was interested in the structure of the language," she said. "He had a tremendous impact on the students. He was somebody who was exceedingly patient with students, always willing to go the extra mile. He was probably one of the most dependable people you'd ever meet in your life. He loved this school, he loved teaching."

His wife agreed.

"He loved teaching and the School of Science and Math," she said. "It was like his second home. He said that he knew he, as a teacher, he was supposed to challenge the student. But he said in actuality the students were challenging him to be a better teacher."

Dr. Houpe was my Russian teacher at the NC School of Science and Mathematics (where he was a founding member of the excellent faculty) in the early 1980s, but he was much more than that; he was actually a one-man foreign language program unto himself. This gentle, funny, brilliant man was fluent in something like a dozen languages, including the artificial language Esperanto (which he taught as a seminar during "Special Projects Week" at NCSSM back in the day.)

I learned more about the structure of language from studying with Don Houpe than I ever realized at the time. He loved language, and he loved teaching.

A man of his intellect and caliber could've had any job in the world. That he chose to teach high-school students speaks volumes about his character and values.

Dankegon, Dr. Houpe. You will be missed.

"Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the "naturals," the ones who somehow know how to teach." -- Peter Drucker

Oh, wait, now she's in remission / I guess that means I have permission.

Edwards: The Musical @ McSweeney's.

Just go. Now.

Hat tip: Carrie

So you showed up for four years and your tuition checks didn't bounce... okay...

Charles Murray:

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time (Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal op/ed)

Murray's proposed solution? Certification exams in various competencies, modeled on the CPA exam and similar professional licensure schemes, which wouldn't require a degree (or even a traditional college education) to sit for. You want to prep by taking online classes or just sitting in a public library and reading books? Fine!

I think the man has a good point here.

Perhaps poking the bear with a stick was not such a good idea

Pat Buchanan can usually be counted on to raise some fairly awkward but thoughtful points at key moments in history:

American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia started this fight -- Russia finished it. People who start wars don't get to decide how and when they end.

Russia's response was "disproportionate" and "brutal," wailed Bush.

True. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in response to a border skirmish where several Israel [sic] soldiers were killed and two captured? Was that not many times more "disproportionate"?

Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush. But did not the United States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force it to surrender a province, Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic claim than Georgia had to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi?

Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?

When the Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, we celebrated. When Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo broke from Serbia, we rejoiced. Why, then, the indignation when two provinces, whose peoples are ethnically separate from Georgians and who fought for their independence, should succeed in breaking away?

Are secessions and the dissolution of nations laudable only when they advance the agenda of the neocons, many of who viscerally detest Russia?

Blowback from Bear-Baiting (Patrick Buchanan at HumanEvents.com)

Navigating Beijing

English-language maps of Beijing are not so plentiful, so comprehensible, or so reliable that the existence of a good one should go unmentioned.

[...]

This very detailed map, from MapMatrix, is a 4.6MB PDF file with the following virtues: It is zoom-able, so that as you look at a certain neighborhood the street names appear. It is pan-able, so you can see an overview of the whole city and understand relative locations. And it is search-able, which is a true godsend.

[...]

Weller Cartographic offers this and similar maps free, but gently requests a $2 - $5 contribution to underwrite its efforts. That's less than 14 - 35 RMB -- and I've paid much, much more than that for much, much worse Chinese city maps. I've chipped in and hope others will too.

James Fallows: My gift to Olympic visitors: great web-based PDF map of Beijing (August 12, 2008)

Detail from the map, below:

Thought for the day

"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars.  The rest I just squandered."

- George Best (legendary English footballer)

Federal court upholds Creative Commons-style licenses

So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge.

[...]

In non-technical terms, the Court [of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over intellectual property law issues - bc] has held that free licenses such as the [Creative Commons] licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Lawrence Lessig - lessig blog - huge and important news

The comments are absolutely worth reading, by the way, or were as of the writing of this post, anyway.  Mr. Lessig has some very smart and interesting readers.

Who were those masked (little) men?

Thank God schadenfreude isn't taxable

For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened, or why.

The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed, reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.

How did things look on the inside, as they unraveled?

To find out, I approached a number of current and former Clinton staffers and outside consultants and asked them to share memos, e-mails, meeting minutes, diaries—anything that would offer a contemporaneous account. The result demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard. Everything from major strategic plans to bitchy staff e-mail feuds was handed over. (See for yourself: much of it is posted online at www.theatlantic.com/clinton.)

Whew.

Joshua Green: The Front Runner's Fall (The Atlantic, 19 August 2008)

Related: The Hillary Clinton Memos

Vintage computer ads

If you've been interested in the computer industry for a while, BoingBoing has assembled a collection of 101 vintage magazine ads that will be a real stroll down memory lane.

Just let me get my walkin' cane.

Below, what looks to be a newspaper circular ad for one of the best computers I ever owned, bang-for-the-buck, and considering existing technology at the time: the Radio Shack Model 100 was an ultraportable machine that ran on AA batteries (!) and was a writer's dream.

(via Gizmodo)

Returning to the global stage after its "century of humiliation"

Thomas P.M. Barnett watches the Beijing Olympics, and opines:

Returning to the global stage after its "century of humiliation" and the tortuous insanities of Mao Zedong's long rule, China naturally views the Games as its coming-out party. To that end, Beijing seeks to control every possible aspect, seeking to burnish the image of the "China model."

[...]

But the harsh costs of China's model are also inescapably put on display -- to wit, Beijing's now-legendary smog. The Communist Party wants the world to focus on medals hanging around the necks of Chinese athletes, but the Games' dominant image will undoubtedly be the pollution-filtering masks attached to many competitors' faces.

[...]

Beijing's frantic attempts to manipulate the weather for smog-clearing rain speak to a wider human hubris: that we can easily engineer our way out of the problems associated with global climate change. Again, the biggest social trade-offs are inherently political questions, not simple equations for unelected technocrats to solve one afternoon sitting around a table -- no matter how supreme their mandate seems.

Thomas P.M. Barnett (Scripps Howard News Service)- What Beijing Olympics Tells [sic] Us About Our World

P.S. Tom also really, really likes "Mad Men" - the cable series, not Ahmadinejad and Kim.

A 24/7 downtown

Tarus (Down Under for the next few weeks) e-mailed me a link to a story he knew I'd love:

We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

Trading Places: The demographic inversion of the American city.
Alan Ehrenhalt, The New Republic
Published: Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Topo Maps, then and now

35-50.697N, 78-42.426W


40-44.225N, 74-00.194W

Take the phone off the hook, pour a cold one

Ta-Nehisi Coates lets us know about the impending arrival of pure crack for politics junkies.

Jim Cramer's famous rant, one year later

Cramer Day is upon us. This weekend marks the anniversary of former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer’s outburst on CNBC that the Federal Reserve was “asleep” and that there was “Armageddon” in the fixed income markets.

It was possibly the most entertaining five minutes of financial television ever broadcast. Those who do not work in a Wall Street trading room and have not watched the excerpt repeatedly over the past year, can watch it on YouTube, where it is a popular view.

[...]

The outburst signalled for the first time to the general public in the US that the largely technical problems for the credit market could have serious repercussions for them.

[...]

Reviewing the rant, we can see it set the template for all that followed.

[...]

Finally, Cramer wanted to pin the blame on Alan Greenspan, who had left the Federal Reserve with an impeccable reputation early in 2006. He pointed out, correctly, that Greenspan had encouraged borrowers to take out mortgages at low “teaser” rates and then proceeded to raise rates.

Those comments have become the new orthodoxy. The easy money with which the Greenspan Fed responded to the bursting of the tech bubble at the beginning of this decade is now deemed a mistake.

This was the first crisis to afflict the YouTube generation. The “Rant That Shook The World” as CNBC called it, will be an important item in financial history years from now.

Long view: Jim Cramer’s TV outburst that will last for ages (Financial Times, 1 August 2008)

"Browser History" analyzes your habits, guesses at your gender

One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user’s browsing history to estimate age and gender. Of course the idea is definitely not new, in fact Xerox (of all companies??) has a patent on the whole process and I’m certain plenty of networks already do something of the sort… but what the heck, let’s have some fun!

So what I did is I modified the SocialHistory JS so that it polled the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited. I then apply the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determine a guestimate of your gender...

Mike on Ads: Using your browser URL history to estimate gender

Mike's algorithm estimated that there was a 98% chance that I'm male, 2% chance that I'm female.

Not that I'm an effeminate fellow at all :-), but I was surprised that my browsing history indicated only a 2% chance of me having two X chromosomes...

(via Megan McArdle)

Free topographical maps

Kevin Kelly @ Cool Tools:

The easiest way [to obtain free topo map data] is to download a free nifty app for Google Earth, called the Topographical Overlay, that will add a KMZ "layer" of official US topo maps on Google Earth. Once installed you can toggle it on or off. When on, the Topo Overlay displays the standard 7.5 minute topos as one seamless map of the country. This makes it very easy to center your interest in the middle of your custom map. (You can buy a similar service on a not-cheap set of CDs from National Geographic, but you get the same thing here for free.) For browsing, this arrangement is hard to beat. You can zoom in, or out, and scroll forever. Its major drawback is printing. I have not been able to get the displayed map to print larger than one half of a standard letter page.

[...]

...You can download, for free, a high resolution PDF file of any US topo map made. These are the same maps that the Google Earth app is using, but here they are dished out one by one in PDF format. Go to the USGS Map Locator page, and search for the quad you want. You can type in an "street" address just like in Google. Click on the appropriate miniature map and then choose which scale map of the area you want to download. The PDF files of the standard 7.5 minute topo map will be between 6 and 16 megs. You'll need Photoshop or equivalent to crop and size them. Be prepared to use some heavy duty processing power. These are big, very detailed maps.

Goodbye, Norma Jean

I've been participating in a blogger program with the Encyclopedia Britannica folks, and as part of my subscription I get an "on this day" e-mail every morning. 

It's just the sort of thing I'd need if I were a small-town AM radio DJ, and since being a blogger is not *totally* unlike that, I have occasionally found it useful.

This morning, they kind of stepped in it, though. 

Under "born this day," they list Marilyn Monroe, aka Norma Jean Mortenson/Baker.

August 5th is actually the day she died of an overdose, y'all.

Marilyn Monroe
American actress Marilyn Monroe who achieved stardom as a sex symbol in such films as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and later became a cultural icon died on this day in 1962 after taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Re nao-able energy

“This is going to be the biggest festival ever in China,” said Qi Jianlan, as she finished taking photos of her husband with the stadium in the far distance. “It’s going to be even more ‘re nao’ than the New Year,” she added, using the phrase Chinese use to describe their favorite atmosphere – “warm and noisy.”

For Chinese, it's the teflon Olympics (Christian Science Monitor, 3 August 2008)

A warm, personal gesture from senior executives to themselves

When even the Wall Street Journal is delicately holding its nose while describing how your company is funding its executive pension scheme, you know trouble's on the way:

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.

In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.

The practice has drawn scant notice. A close examination by The Wall Street Journal shows how it works and reveals that the maneuver, besides being a dubious use of tax law, risks harming regular workers. It can drain assets from pension plans and make them more likely to fail. Now, with the current bear market in stocks weakening many pension plans, this practice could put more in jeopardy.

Companies Tap Pension Plans to Fund Executive Benefits (WSJ, 4 August 2008)

Sidearm-swingers from Brooklyn

Joe Mitchell would have loved this story:

“Vic was probably the best ever,” he said. “Just a towering, towering figure in New York City handball, which is the best handball in the world.”

Ruby Obert, 74 — who with his two older brothers, Carl, 76, and Oscar, 77, made up a renowned trio of sidearm-swingers from Brooklyn — said Mr. Hershkowitz was a New York City fireman and would sometimes show up at tournaments straight from work, wearing his heavy uniform and a mask of soot. Then he would light up the court. Mr. Hershkowitz’s secret weapon, Mr. Obert said, was his ambidexterity.

“He could play equally well with either hand,” Mr. Obert said, leaning against the chain-link fence and eyeing some of the younger players. “Guys would die to have Vic’s left hand, which was just as good as his right.”

Not everyone at this Coney Island landmark known as the Seaside Courts was aware of the legend of Mr. Hershkowitz or that he died on Monday in Plantation, Fla. But Mr. Obert had heard the news, and he could talk about Vic Hershkowitz all day, if it were not for his natural tendency to turn the spotlight on himself and his brothers and their 36 total combined world and national championships. Oh, and did he mention that each had been inducted into the United States Handball Association Hall of Fame?

“That’s because I’m a handball player,” Mr. Obert readily admitted. “None of us can talk about anyone but ourselves.” A small ego makes a small player, he said, and by that logic, there were very few small players around the Coney Island courts on Friday, where the boardwalk and sand and scrubby pines edge right up to the courts.

Want to Play Handball? Better Not Forget Your Ego (New York Times, 28 June 2008)

Hat tip: Carrie, who belatedly but thankfully called this to my attention.

Lunch at the Red Hook soccer field on Sunday

Dining al fresco, from the food trucks surrounding the Red Hook soccer field in Brooklyn, NY:

lunch at the redhook ballfields on sunday
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

Pictured: Dave, Melissa, Max and Carrie (l-r) sample pupusas, tacos, grilled corn, and various tasty beverages, including horchata and agua de tamarindo.

(Max travels with his own Cheerios and crackers, which were not on offer from the trucks.)

India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan

Robert Kaplan, writing in The Atlantic:

The India-Pakistan rivalry is often misconstrued by Americans. For average Indians and Pakistanis, the hatred is far milder than that between Arabs and Jews. Pakistanis speak openly of their high regard for India's democracy and hope that they can emulate it. And especially now, with regular Pakistani troops moved away from the Indian frontier to deal with the terrorist-infested Afghanistan border, there is the false perception that the India-Pakistan rivalry belongs to the past. It doesn't—not because of the attitudes of the general public in each country, but because of the subculture of those manning the intelligence services in New Delhi and Islamabad.

In the mind of the ISI, India uses its new consulates in Afghanistan to back rebels in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is only a few hours' drive from Kandahar. When India talks of building dams in Kunar, the ISI thinks that India wants to help Afghanistan steal Pakistan's water. Karzai's open alliance with India is nearly a casus belli for the ISI. So elements of the ISI have responded in kind; they likely helped in the recent assassination attempt against the Afghan president.

In the midst of all this, both Bush and Barack Obama talk simplistically about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. The India-Pakistan rivalry is just one of several political problems in the region that negate the benefit of more troops. As in the past in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we are in danger of conceiving of war in narrow military terms alone, and thus getting the politics wrong.

Behind The Indian Embassy Bombing (The Atlantic, Dispatches, 1 August 2008)

(via Sepia Mutiny)

May we all deal with old age as gracefully...

...and with as many good friends, as Elizabeth Goodyear:

She has taken dance lessons from Martha Graham, had drinks with Duke Ellington, spent a couple of hours with George Balanchine and his cats, and accompanied Gypsy Rose Lee, actress and burlesque entertainer, on a game show. One visitor recalled listening to Ms. Goodyear’s stories and then racing home to Google unfamiliar characters.

[...]

Ms. Goodyear now has an aide from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to help bathe, move and feed her. Her only medications are a monthly shot of vitamin B12 and one daily Tylenol her doctor prescribed because, as she put it, “I guess I have to do something.” Because she can no longer leave her apartment without an ambulette, her doctor makes house calls — once a year.

“He says he has to worry about his younger patients,” Ms. Sandleben said.

[...]

A couple of weeks after her 101st birthday, her refrigerator contained five bottles of Champagne and dark chocolate in truffle and bar forms. 

In Strangers, a Blind Centenarian Finds a Literary Lifeline (New York Times)

Tip of the beret to Carrie.

Has MIT invented the Shipstone?

This is cool:

MIT is in a twisted, propeller-capped knot this morning heralding a new discovery it says will unleash a solar revolution. However, the "revolutionary leap" inspired by photosynthesis is not on the glamorous front-end of energy collection, rather, it's related to a simple, highly efficient and inexpensive way to store that energy when the sun doesn't shine. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," says Daniel Nocera, MIT neomaxizoomdweebie who with Matthew Kanan developed the unprecedented approach to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases using the sun's energy. The gases can then be recombined later inside a fuel cell. The key components to the process are a pair of catalysts (one consists of cobalt metal, phosphate, and an electrode; the other, platinum) which produce the O and H gases at room temperature and in neutral pH water (i.e., tap water). While similar solutions exist for industrial use (primarily), these are very expensive and require specialized environments.

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis at Imperial College in London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem." Nocera concedes that further engineering is required to commercialize the approach but hopes to see it implemented in household fuel cell systems within the next 10 years.

Video: MIT develops solar storage nirvana (Engadget)

As for the Shipstone reference in the post's title... Heinlein fans will know what I'm talking about; for the few regular visitors who aren't members of the intersection of the sets "enrevanche readers" and "classic sci-fi fans," let me explain:

Shipstone

1. Common power source. It involved intensive solar collection and energy storage but was not otherwise described. It apparently replaced almost all other sources of energy. The name also applied to the conglomerate that apparently owned most of the corporations on and off Earth, including Daniel Shipstone Estate, Inc.; Muriel Shipstone Memorial Research Laboratories; Shipstone Tempe, Gobi, Aden, Sahara, Africa, Death Valley, Karroo, Never-Never, Ell-Four, Ell-Five, Stationary, Tycho, Ares, DeepWater, Unlimited, and Ltd.; Sears-Montgomery, Inc.; Prometheus Foundation; Coca-Cola Holding Co.; Intraworld Transport Corp.; Jack and the Beanstalk, Pty.; Morgan Associates; Out-Systems Colonial Corporation; Billy Shipstone School for Handicapped Children; Wolf Creek Pass Nature Preserve; Año Nuevo Wild Life Refuge; and Shipstone Visual Arts Museum and School. In effect, Shipstone controlled the entire economy. A feud among different factions resulted in the overthrow and disruption of many Earth governments, particularly in North America.

(Friday)

RAH was clearly having some fun with the concept, imagining the industrial behemoth - a combination of GE and the oil companies - that would result from a revolutionary battery technology. Not much of a leap here to think that hydrogen to power fuel cells, made from water and sunlight, could have a similar impact.