Video - Dolphin Stampede

This is a remarkable video clip someone sent to me, looks like it might have taken place off the tip of Baja, California.

Why do you cry when you cut onions?

And more importantly, how can you prevent it from happening . . . if you can.

Onions contain a lot of sulfur. When you cut them, the cells burst and release enzymes. These enzymes turn sulfur into a gas. The gas into your eyes and forms sulfuric acid. One way to prevent the tears is to rub a cut lemon on the knife. Watch the Mythbusters prove it here on YouTube

Sports Trivia Question

Who was one of the most famous athlete's of all time to play a role in a movie and not play himself?






Wilt Chamberlain in Conan the Barbarian

learned this from the movie "Shotgun Solutions"

The insignificance of wine ratings

In 1978, a lawyer turned self-proclaimed wine critic, Rober M. Parker Jr. decided that, in addition to his reviews, he would rate wines numerically on a 100 point scale. Over the years most other wine publicaitons followed suit. From the theoretical view point, there are many reasons to quesiton the significance of wine ratings. For one thing, taste perception depends on a complex interaction between taste and ofactory stimululation. Strictly speakig, the sense of taste comes from 5 types of receptor cells on the tongue: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. But if that were all there was to taste perception, one could mimic everything, fortunately there is more to gluttony than that and that is where the sense of smell comes in. The perceived taste of wine arises from the effects of a stew of between 600 and 800 volatile organice compounds on both the tongue and the nose. That's a problem, given that studies have shown that even flavor trained professionals can rarely reliably identify more than three of four components in a mixture.

Let's just say that the quality of a wine's taste is pretty complex. Skeptical of the numbering system yet? OK, scientists have designed ways to measure wine experts taste descrimination directly using a wine triangle (each tastor is given 3 wines, two of which are idnentical). The mission is to choose the odd sample. In many studies over the years, experts could only do it only 2/3 of the time. "On many levels the ratings system is nonsensical," says the editor of Wine and Spirits Magazine. But why does the system endure? Because people are attracted to and have faith more in numbers than other systems of rating.

Ockham's Razor

There is a time-honored principle called Ockham's Razor, which states that the explanation for any phenomenon should focus only on the essential and relevant elements, avoiding as many unnecessary “second-order” factors as possible. Albert Einstein put it this way: “A theory should be a simple as possible, but no simpler.” From the standpoint of economic stimulus, Ockham's Razor suggests that we will fail as a nation to address the current economic crisis if we fail to address the source of that crisis. Again, this means focusing first on bank capital and mortgage foreclosures.

In short, the essential problem is not “insufficient aggregate demand” but rather risk-aversion and anticipatory saving triggered by fear of financial instability. Ockham's razor cuts straight to bank capital and foreclosure risk. We can address a much wider range of interests in the cause of economic stimulus, but if we fail to address the central cause of the present economic crisis, the attempt to increase “aggregate demand” will predictably fail.

Liz atop Arthur's Seat

Arthur's Seat is the main peak of the group of hills which form most of Holyrood Park, a remarkably wild piece of highland landscape in the center of the city of Edinburgh, about a mile to the east of Edinburgh Castle. Here's a photo of my niece atop the peak. Click here to learn more.

Playing for Change - a new way to create and collaborate

The ability to collaborate on music today is amazing. Musicians around the world don't need to be in the same place to make music together. Click here to watch the video "Playing For Change"

Human Perception

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. Human perception, according to Michael Faraday (inventor of the electronic motor and one of the greatest of experimental scientists) is not a direct consequence of reality but rather an act of imagination.

Video - Extras Favorite clip

Ricky Gervais created Extras and this is my favorite clip

Clan Kincaid

Here's a little family history click here

Agnotology

Agnotology: Culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth. What's going on? Normally, we expect society to progress, amassing deeper scientific understanding and basic facts every year. Knowledge only increases, right?

Robert Proctor doesn't think so. A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases. He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance." We need to fashion information tools that are designed to combat agnotological rot. Wikipedia is one of the solutions: It encourages users to build real knowledge through consensus, and the result manages to (mostly) satisfy even people who hate each other's guts. Because the most important thing these days might just be knowing what we know.

Read the full story on how this word came into being and it's impact on all of us click here

Mike Doyles says this too

Mike Doyles says

Geithner, the incoming Treasury Secretary ooooops

Treasury Secretary Geithner may be in some trouble, as he failed to pay taxes on his income from his stint at the IMF. This is not an "Oops, I forgot!" The IMF does not withhold income taxes from its employees. However, he was given a memo about the taxes he owed. And he did pay them for two years when he was audited and caught. He clearly knew the nature of the taxes due the two prior years, yet did not come clean on those years. Dumb move for someone on a fast-track career and who clearly has an impressive intellect. He has got to be kicking himself.

The creepy spider

Click here to go to a cool website where you can play around with spiders. Poke and prod the spider with your mouse, also 'grab' one of its legs with your mouse and drag it around the screen. Tell me it's not alive!

Put the cursor anywhere on the map and then hit the space bar and it leaves little bugs. Watch the spider go after them and when she catches them they disappear; this is totally crazy but fun to play!

How did golf get it's name?

In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden.... and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.

The beautiful Ash Tree

In the late 1990s, a pretty, iridescent green species of beetle, now known as the emerald ash borer, hitched a ride to North America with ash wood products imported from eastern Asia. In less than a decade, its larvae have killed millions of trees in the Midwest, and continue to spread. They've killed more than 30 million ash trees in southeastern Michigan alone, with tens of millions more lost in Ohio and Indiana. More than 7.5 billion ash trees are currently at risk. During 1960's Ash was the predominant choice for kitchen cabinets. Click here and learn more about Fraxinus spp.

Don't believe every measurement you read about

like a particular vintage of Cabernet Sauvingnon Napa Valley wine whose grade is called out as 94. When we perform an assessment or measurement, our brains do not rely solely on direct perceptional input. They also integrate other sources of information - such as our expectation!

Video - from the Godfather - drugs are a dirty business

Don Corleone has to say no to a request.

Talk about scams . . . how about this one?

Nothing helps a fraudster more than a big name. Edward Chancellor, in his fine history of financial speculation Devil Take The Hindmost, records how His Highness Gregor, cacique of Poyais, a small territory on the border of present-day Nicaragua, arrived in London to encourage emigration and float a £600,000 loan. The issue was a great success, thanks in part to the services of the notable financier Sir John Perring, a former lord mayor of London.

Yet the country was fictitious and the emigrants found on arrival that the “capital” was a collection of mud huts surrounded by swamps and threatening Indians. For his part, the cacique – whose real name was Sir Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish adventurer and renegade general from Simón Bolívar’s army – fled to France with the bond issue proceeds.

It's all about confidence, isn't it?

“The key goes back to what Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers seem to have forgotten, when your business model has some ephemera at its core and you are so reliant on other people’s good wishes and beliefs, you have to leave a big margin for error … you have to have the confidence of investors, clients and counter parties.”

Barry Ritholz Wall Street Journal 1/14/08

Principles

Principles only mean something if you stick by them when they're inconvenient.

The Year of Investing Dangerously

from Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter . . . a pretty good summary of events

click here

Brokers are superstitious ???? puleeez

I found this curious reference while reading The Drunkard's Walk - -

10/31/03 (CNN/Money) - From wearing the same lucky tie or underwear every day to using the same brand of pen, some traders are very superstitious when it comes to trading. "I never, ever, ever write with a red pen -- red signifies losses," said James Park, senior trader at Brean Murray & Co. "I also keep my desk completely organized. I feel the more organized I am, the better my stocks trade." Park added that when the going gets tough, the tough get food. He said the group at Brean Murray orders a bunch of White Castle burgers with cheese and conducts an eating contest when the market tanks. And there may have been more than one day in the past two weeks that Park and fellow traders stocked up on White Castles. One stock trader said he's entertaining buying more pet fish. "I had fish for a while, and after they died the market didn't do so well," said Brett Gallagher, head of U.S. equities at Julius Baer. Gallagher said one of the portfolio managers in his group believes that a self-contained eco-system, including shrimp that eat plants and whose waste then fertilizes the plants, is key to his success so far. Bond traders may be even more ritualistic. One trader told CNNfn there's a bathroom stall he never uses. "It has a really good track record for losing money," said Alan Palmer, an independent bond futures trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Experts said that superstitions generally run high in jobs that involve risk. "Traders have a very high-pressure job and it's very intense," Dr. Bennett Leventhal, professor at the University of Chicago, told CNNfn. "I think that for many of them the superstitions and the little rituals help them decrease the level of the pressure, the tension and the anxiety."

Be hopeful your broker isn't superstitious about his trading . . . . if he is, move on.

What we spend on food . . .

Pundits have been comparing our current economic times to those of the Great Depression, and while food prices are on the rise, American spending on food today pales in comparison. In 1933, we spent 25 percent of our income on food; last year, only 9.8 percent. It's true - food prices are increasing, but when you look at the numbers, the growing cost may not be as significant as you might think. $719 The current U.S. median weekly income. $70.50 Current average weekly food expenditure in the U.S. 60% The increase in the prices of commodity foods - such as corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, etc. - over the last two years.

The first law of probability

The probability that two events will both occur can never be greater than the probability that each will occur individually. Why not? Simple aritmetic: the chances that event A will occur = the chances that events A and B will occur + the chance that event A will occur and event B will not occur.

Surprising Volatility Data Point

The S&P 500 Index rose or fell more than 5% on 17 trading days in 2008. Not impressed? You must have gotten used to it? Well, it only happened 17 times in the previous 50 years!!!

On chance or randomness or LUCK

"When we look at extraordinary accomplishments, we should keep in mind that extraordinary events can happen without extraordinary causes. Random events (luck) often look like non random event and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two." -----Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk

Real Estate Syndicate history time

My brother in law observed the following . . . . . Over my career I say many "investment" bubbles, almost all of which were attributable to the greed of Wall Street.

I first saw it with real estate syndicates. As originally conceived, they were carefully analyzed real estate projects, pieces of which were sold to a few investor partners. But when the big bokerage houses discovered this salable asset, their commission salesmen loved them. Not because they were good for their customers, but because they paid HUGE commissions, and were a relatively easy sell to high bracket customers. And so an enormous demand for product grew among the sales force, and the brokerages were determined to satisfy that demand. So the quality of the product declined dramatically, until lots of the syndicated stuff was trash.

But for a while, everybody loved it. The brokerage houses liked the commissions, and the real estate developers loved having an unquestioning market for their projects. And, as it turned out, the bigger the project, the better the brokerages liked it, because it saved them time in explaining the deal to their salesmen. And, of course, developers loved the bigger projects, because they made more money on them.

The reality, of course, is that there are a finite number of good real estate developments, and that if they are really good it is a lot better for the developer to sell it to one purchaser than it is to suffer the expense of marketing it to the public. And so, predictably, the quality of what the public could buy kept declining, even while the demand was growing.

Just as the girls all get better looking at closing time, deals that are clearly not up to standard start looking pretty good when the sales force is demanding more product. And so, with time, the real estate syndicate became a highly suspect investment.

Just so with bundled mortgages. Disinter mediation started out as a good thing. But once the brokerages discovered they could get IPO commissions by peddling packages of mortgages, even sub price loans started looking pretty good. So good that the brokers apparently took non-recourse, or at least limited recourse, assignments of junk mortgages, and dumped them into the public market--after fees and commissions, of course.

The results, just as with real estate syndicates, was that LOTS of really back bundles of loans were created for the public, while the good stuff was marketed to better informed buyers. Fannie and Freddie deserve blame for their failure to evaluate the junk they were taking, but they were certainly not the only market for the stuff that was being sold around.

Good Questions to ponder

Shouldn't the consumer, after decades of over-consumption, be allowed to digest the over-indebtedness and save, rather than be encouraged to take risk?

Shouldn't companies, no matter what state they reside in from a political point of view, if run poorly, be allowed to fail or forced to restructure?

Should taxpayer money be used to make up for the mishaps at financial institutions or should we allow them to wallow in their own mistakes?

Shouldn't free markets be free?

When did Socialism make its way to our shores?

How do we choose who is bailed out and who loses?

Shouldn't we place blame on the politicians, bureaucrats and other "decision makers" and put skilled people in place that know how to run the businesses?

Shouldn't investors, led blindly down the primrose path of "buy and hold, diversify and don't open your brokerage statement except once every 10 years" be allowed to follow the Prudent Man Rule?

What's the difference between Madoff and Satyam?

Nothing except that one is in India where they don't put up with that crap, the other in the US where everyone is presumed innocent and officials let the two brothers who are sons of the Bernie and most likely the ones who helped perpetrate the fraud go off to wherever? Now I don't know how correct it is to pursue the accountants as they are usually the last to know about a fraud taking place (people who defraud usually don't let their accountants know what they are doing, do they?).

here's what's going on in India . . .

Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Satyam Computer Services Ltd. chairman Ramalinga Raju and his brother Rama were arrested and the remaining directors of the software exporter sacked, as India started investigating an alleged $1 billion fraud.

The brothers were detained on charges including forgery, breach of trust and criminal conspiracy, Inspector General V.S.K. Kaumudi told reporters in the southern city of Hyderabad.

Officials have seized documents and the nation’s accounting body is examining auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC’s local unit, Corporate Affairs Minister Prem Chand Gupta said.

“The developments so far indicate that the current board of Satyam has failed to do what it was supposed to do,” Gupta told reporters in New Delhi. “The government is committed to punish everyone found guilty, including the auditors.”

Demand for crude oil storage is soaring

The world’s biggest owner of supertankers, said oil traders want to charter as many as 10 vessels to stockpile crude to take advantage of higher prices later in the year. About 25 supertankers were already hired for storage and there are enquiries for 5 to 10 more.

The traders would buy crude now and sell it for delivery later, profiting from a futures market situation called contango where prices are higher as the year progresses. The vessels could handle as much as 20 million barrels, or about what is produced by OPEC member Algeria in 15 days. They would add to as much as 50 million barrels already hoarded at sea, for a combined amount equal to almost five days of European Union demand.

“I’ve never before seen storage demand on this scale,” said Didier Labat, a Paris-based shipbroker at Barry Rogliano Salles who has worked in tanker markets for about 20 years.

Thirty-five supertankers represent about 7 percent of the global fleet of very large crude carriers, according to data from London-based Drewry Shipping Consultants Ltd. Storing oil in tankers may buoy rental rates that fell by a record 78 percent last year as slower economic growth sapped demand for energy. Traders are seeking to lease ships for three to nine months, Jensen said. Crude oil for December delivery traded at $61.90 a barrel as of 10:49 a.m. in London, $13.66 more than the February contract. Oil companies and traders may be able to profit from storing the oil, assuming shipping, insurance and financing costs are covered.

A supertanker would cost about 90 cents a barrel a month for storage depending on the length of the rental, according to data last month from shipbroker Galbraith’s Ltd.

Iran, the second-largest member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries after Saudi Arabia, idled as many as 15 of its biggest ships in May to store crude oil. That contributed to three consecutive months of higher rental rates for ships.

The cost of delivering Middle East oil to Asia, the world’s busiest route for supertankers, rose yesterday for the first time since Dec. 5, according to the Baltic Exchange in London.

Time Warner and AOL

It was January 10, 2000 when Time Warner bought AOL in an all stock transaction valued at $160 billion dollars. Time Warner traded as high as $90. Roll forward to today, Time Warner is trading at $10 and it's just announced a write down of AOL assets of $25 billion. This might eclipse the disaster merger of Daimler with Chrysler, don't ya think?

George Freeth update

from the Easy Reader in Manhattan Beach giving an overview of 2008 . . . "the iconic bust of Redondo's original surfer dude was stolen from the pier in August, police were unable to identify a suspect in the theft of the broze bust which had been a part of the pier landscape since 1977; the high price of scrap metal and high incidence of metal thefts maybe have been a motive to steal the approsimately 100 lb bronze bust. A native of Hawaii, Freeth came to Redondo in 1907, where he was acclaimed for both his many rescues as a life guard and for helping poularize surfing here on the mainland."

a replacement statue has been cast and the new bronze statue is in place!

Awful year for US Auto Makers

2008 will be the first year in which the U.S. automakers combined market share was less than 50% of total US auto sales

Left Brainer ????

People who are logical thinkers, prefer classical music, are good at math and like to read (preferably in total quiet), like dogs, read realistic stories but prefer to write nonfiction, can only remember things specifically studied, almost never absentminded, great storytellers, think better sitting down.

Right Brainer ???

People who are good at (or enjoy sports) or art, dream about things that will probably never happen, can be hypnotized, prefer visual instructions with examples, enjoy clowning around, prefer rock music, can listen to music or TV while studying, good at geometry, prefer to be in groups, like to act out stories and think better lying down; occasionally, they are absentminded, spontaneous, unpredictable and philosophical, solve problems intuitively and prefer to learn through free exploration.

Oh how we love to predict . . . .

on the subject of predictions . . . . click here

some great predictions from 2008

• Elaine Garzarelli, president of Garzarelli Capital, Business Week’s Investment Outlook 2008
Buy some of the most beaten-down stocks, including those of giant financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch.
As of January 1, none of these firms will still exist.
• James J. Cramer, “Future of Business” New York Magazine
“Goldman Sachs… finishes the year at $300 a share. Not a prediction — an inevitability.”
Goldman Sachs’ share price was $78, and the firm announced its first quarterly loss — $2.2 billion.