Sunday, December 25, 2011
Climate Scientists Hampered in Study of 2011 Extremes - NYTimes.com
Portal Xmas tree
Some unknown genius (possibly redditor Tmyakal) created this insanely great Portal-themed Christmas Tree that presents the illusion of a tree being shoved through one of the interdimensional portals in the kick ass Valve game.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier
Vanity Fair's Charles C. Mann walked through Reagan International Airport with Bruce Schneier, noting all the ways in which "security" adds expense and inconvenience without making us safer. By the end of the trip, he concluded:
To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”
Smoke Screening
(via Kottke)
Hypnotic folk dance
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Hypnotic folk dance
Found by @nomatterband and Robert Popper, who notes that one must watch to the very end.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Maker of 10-lb marzipan pig decides it's too gruesome to give to his daughters
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Maker of 10-lb marzipan pig decides it's too gruesome to give to his daughters
spindelmann says: "Jonas Laberg made a 10 kg marzipan pig for his five- and seven-year-old girls. It turned out pretty evil."
Cool kite made from 3D printed parts
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Cool kite made from 3D printed parts
This otherwordly kite is made from "1700 3D-printed connectors linking carbon fiber rods that support cubenfiber aerospace fabric sheets." It doesn't look like it flies very well (at least based on this video) but it certainly looks good! (Thanks, Rob!)
What College Rankings Really Tell Us : The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier
Sent to you via Google Reader
Walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier
Vanity Fair's Charles C. Mann walked through Reagan International Airport with Bruce Schneier, noting all the ways in which "security" adds expense and inconvenience without making us safer. By the end of the trip, he concluded:
To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier's view, would be to forget most of the "lessons" of 9/11. "It's infuriating," he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. "We're spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do."
Smoke Screening
(via Kottke)
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Boy pulls own tooth by tying it to the round in a nerf gun, yanking trigger
In this video, an enterprising young fellow ties his loose tooth to the projectile in his Nerf Big Bow and fires the weapon, taking his tooth out in one glorious, nearly painless instant.
Complex Systems Institute claims "bear raid" market manipulation crashed the global economy
A paper from the New England Complex Systems Institute claims that they have found evidence that traders executed a "bear raid" on Citigroup in 2007, precipitating the financial collapse. A "bear raid" is a market manipulation technique in which short sellers conspire to dump huge quantities of borrowed shares into the market all at once, driving the price down (short selling is a stock-trading technique in which shares are borrowed for sale; the short seller makes money when the value of the borrowed shares declines).
"Bear raids" have been considered a risk to markets since the Great Depression, and a financial regulation called the "uptick rule" was instituted in 1938 to prevent the tactic. The uptick rule was repealed in in July, 2007, and the alleged bear raid took place in November, 2007.
On November 1, 2007, Citigroup experienced large spikes in short selling and trading
volume. The number of borrowed shares—short interest—increased by approximately 130
million shares to 3.8 times the 3-month moving average. The total trading volume jumped
from 73 million shares on the previous day to 171 million shares, 3.7 times the 3-month
moving average. The ratio of the increase in short positions to volume was 0.77. This is the
fraction of the total trading that day that may be attributed to short positions held until
market closing. The total value of shares borrowed on November 1 was approximately $6.07
billion. Adjusted for the dividend issued on November 1, 2007, Citigroup stock closed on
November 1 down $2.85 from the previous day, a drop of 6.9%.
The number of positions closed on November 7, 202 million, was 53% larger than the
number opened on November 1. The short interest before the increase on November 1 and
after November 7 are virtually identical, the larger decrease corresponding to an additional
increase in short interest between these dates. The mirror image one-day anomalies in short
interest change suggest that the two are linked. We can conservatively estimate the total
gain from short selling by multiplying the number of short positions opened on November 1
by the difference between the closing price on November 1 and closing price on November 7
($4.82), which yields an estimated gain for the short sellers of $640 million.
Evidence of market manipulation in the financial crisis (PDF)
(Thanks, Dan!)
Monday, December 19, 2011
Street Art Utopia's photo gallery
Street Art Utopia posted a gallery of "106 of the most beloved Street Art Photos – Year 2011." (Photo by Sandrine Estrade Boulet)
Friday, December 16, 2011
Nonsense Shopping List Prank
Fancy Boy lip glitter, fish poison, left-handed washing glove, turtle mix, non-alcoholic whiskey, daddy butter, and an eye removal kit. These are just a few of the items Greg Benson and Ryan Smith of Mediocre Films asked employees of Target and Walmart to help them find on a recent shopping errand. Also, Greg wrote Ryan's list without Ryan reading it before Ryan entered the store, and vice versa. (Via Laughing Squid)
