Did China’s pandas know the quake was coming? -NewScientist
the pandas at Wolong roused themselves in the minutes before the quake struck and began acting "in a strange manner".
Most of the "evidence" is anecdotal, but it can be compelling. Buffalo were said to have stampeded to the top of a hill just before the Asian [...]
A Brave Army of Heretics -economicprincipals.com
For the last 125 years, however, ever since the views of Leon Walras and other theorists of general equilibrium became encoded in a famous textbook of Alfred Marshall (or, rather, partially encoded), technical economists have viewed the economy as a system in which individuals deal with one another only [...]
How Fairness Is Wired In The Brain -ScienceDaily.com
Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place. The concept of fairness, they found, is processed in the insular cortex, or insula, which is [...]
French police arrest former EADS chief -Guardian
Two judges and the French market regulator, AMF, have been investigating allegations that 17 current and former EADS executives, including Forgeard, exercised stock options when they were party to privileged information about deteriorating profits at Airbus.
Landowners trampled in gas rush -CNN Money
Unsuspecting property owners around the country are getting [...]
Gawker, paraphrasing a Wall Street Journal article regarding JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, posts Anecdotes Prove Bear Stearns Savior Is A Jerk.
…two of the best anecdotes in the piece do nothing but make him look like a snippy asshole…
Tell us something we don’t know Gawker. You don’t become ruler of the House of Morgan by [...]
Is that a nanotube in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
I can’t help it, Crocs cracks me up.
The Wall Street Journal MarketBeat column reports Ski Slope Chart of the Day: Nexcen. I love the ski slop analogy.
If Nexcen is a ski slope chart, then Crocs went extreme skiing right off a cliff and landed in mogul field.
The odds are stacked against us - Guardian
The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity’s natural
tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We’re just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.
I’ll prove it. If we were good at understanding statistics, then here’s what would happen when [...]
4 Bold Business Scams (And Why They Failed Miserably) - mental_floss
Starting a legitimate business is hard, boring work. There’s paperwork to fill out, employees to hire, and all sorts of other drudgery, not to mention the biggest hurdle of all: providing a product or service for which customers are willing to pay. In all likelihood, [...]
As fuel prices soar, rustlers pilfer barrels of used cooking oil to make biodiesel - IHT
A few years ago, drums of used french fry grease were only of interest to a small network of underground biofuel brewers, who would use the slimy oil to power their souped-up antique Mercedes.
Now, restaurants from Berkeley, California, to Sedgwick, [...]
Scuttlebutt - Wikipedia
Water for immediate consumption on a sailing ship was conventionally stored in a scuttled butt: a butt (cask or small barrel) which had been scuttled by making a hole in it so the water could be withdrawn. Since sailors exchanged gossip when they gathered at the scuttlebutt for a drink of water, scuttlebutt [...]
You Can’t Afford To Go To The Movies. Thanks, Ethanol!
Ethanol, the stupid fuel that the government loves for some reason, is going to take up 40% of next year’s corn crop. Movie theaters make nearly half of their money from concessions, and a third of that money comes from popcorn sales. When concession prices [...]
Talks Joshua Klein: The amazing intelligence of crows
Even crows succumb to ever-changing-cycles. Besides being a fascinating display of the crow’s intelligence, notice how once one learns a new trick, they all learn the trick, in some cases ruining a good thing for the inventor.
Gin, Sitcoms and the Cognitive Surplus
The classic example of cognitive surplus [...]
Whenever people ask me about investing in China, which they do a lot, I ask them would they be so willing to invest in a bunch of U.S. companies they know absolutely nothing about? Then why are they so willing to invest in companies they really know nothing, in most cases majority owned by [...]
Wikipedia defines economic elasticity as follows:
In economics, elasticity is the ratio of the proportionate change in one variable with respect to proportional change in another variable, such as the responsiveness of the price of a commodity to changes in market demand or visa-versa. In terms of elasticity, a market or good can be described as [...]
It’s Fortune magazine, August 2000, Special Investors Issue, Retire Rich
Article: 10 Stocks to Last the Decade
And here’s the list:
Stock
Ticker
Price
P/E
Comment
Broadcom
BRCM
$237
255
Maker of chips used in the next generation of entertainment devices
Charles Schwab
SCH
$36
56
Former discount broker that has grown up along with its boomer clients
Enron
ENE
$73
51
Biggest online broker for coal, oil, and gas; next up — broadband
Genentech
DNA
$150
128
Offers a huge pipeline [...]
Sub-notebook PC market
The computer manufacturers are just figuring out that not just 3rd world countries want cheap compact computers. They were slow on the uptake, but are finally getting it. On the success of the ASUS Eee, which lets face it, is really a crappy little computer, they are all rushing to bring out new models. [...]