Neanderthals were ‘keen on tech’ BBC
Kiwi scientists make atomic ‘breakthrough’ Stuff
Former Air Force Officers: UFOs Tampered With Nuclear Missiles AOL News (hat tip reader Marshall)
UN to appoint Earth contact for aliens News.com.au (hat tip reader John D)
Comic company launching ‘Silver Scorpion’, a disabled, Muslim superhero Raw Story. A tad quixotic.
U.S. Is Working to Ease Wiretaps on the Internet New York Times
Time to spit out more praise for Apple Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times
The Battle of the Bulbs New York Times. I had to value a light bulb business once, in the 1980s and visited the plant. It was very sad, clearly no one had invested in it in a very long time.
Spill Payments Irk Alabama Business Wall Street Journal
US Treasury stumbles selling Citi shares Financial Times. So the officialdom is starting to be hoist on its own petard of phony, manipulated markets. Guess what? They have no depth.
Is Andy Xie Blaming The Chinese Government For Ruining His Property Crash Prediction? Clusterstock. When bears throw in the towel, it can mean the top is just about in.
China raises antidumping duties on U.S. chicken MarketWatch
Banks Trade Below Liquidation Value With Smallest Gain Bloomberg. That says that no one believes their books.
Sizable Paycheck for Citi’s Prize Hire Wall Street Journal. “Sizeable”? How ’bout “Unseemly”?
Leaving the Plaza Accord behind Chevelle
Antidote du jour:
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@ UFOs and Nukes
ha ha ha, those Magonians, they’re always having fun somehow. Used to be Victorian airships and now its saucers. wonder what it’ll be next, maybe angels again like in the bible. anyone who really looks into the UFO phenomenon will get their brain scrambled like eggs in the morning.
YT,
Professor DT Tremens, PhD Eschatoloy
3 whites and one whole, scrambled on a bun, with salt and peppr.
So a student asks for information about one of your products and the recommended response to the student is to…be a dick?
Did she just reveal some sort of psychological blindspot among journalists? (well, of course you have to bow and scrape to corporate media relations and/or the CEO so that you can get info…wait…)
Review of Econned in Monthly Review:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100901duboff.php
(It’s actually a double review along with Michael Perelman’s The Confiscation of American Prosperity.)
Here’s a few excerpts:
The capstone chapter of Econned shows, better than anything written to date, how three interrelated types of innovations in a deregulated financial sector—securitization (most dangerously in the form of collateralized debt obligations or CDOs), repurchase agreements (repos), and credit default swaps—created a shadow banking system that led to the credit crisis of 2008 and economic breakdown in 2009…
Econned comes with a compendium of topics that add real value to this book—on structured finance (the basis of CDOs), neoclassical economics and the incoherence of its demand function, Gaussian distributions (hijacked for false promises of estimating the odds of default in large groups of securities), and shorting subprime bonds in large quantities. Like Perelman, Smith notes how brand-name economists support any kind of income and output generating scheme that “grows” the gross domestic product, even when the rewards flow to the rich and leave everyone else even worse off. While that result may be an extreme, “rising income inequality has been rationalized as an inevitable and acceptable outcome of lower [international] trade barriers and the application of technology that promotes overall growth.”…
Together, these two works, one (Perelman) in the tradition of Marxian political economy, the other less so, comprise a history of the great boom of 1982-1999 and the great bust still with us.
Is it just me projecting or do those animals look tired?
the monkey looks like a retired and exhausted psychiatrist. the dog is the stubborn patient who just can’t take the cure, but his insurance policy is still paying out. bowaha.
The Chimp: What am I doing here?
The Monkey: I know why I am here. I am here for the paycheck.
But wouldn’t that first line have to be more like:
The Chimp: What am I doing here? And why do I look like an orangutan?
In any case, this is clearly Dr. Zaius trying to enjoy playing with his dog after a long, hard week of experimenting on humans.
I liked the story about the new comic super hero a lot. Popular culture does matter.
“UN to appoint Earth contact for aliens
The United Nations: We’re even more useless than you previously imagined.
“Coming up with a functioning Somali government in a place full of anarchy draining the resources of global navies as they fight piracy from the seas because there is no functioning government on the mainland? Coming up with a solution to the Cyprus problem? No, we’ve failed miserably on those two fronts. But we will come up with a pointman if aliens land.”
Matt Taibbi is worried about BP declaring bankruptcy because of all the CDSs, CSOs and CSO squareds that reference BP. And of course bankruptcy would allow them to wriggle out of reparation payments.
What are the pros and cons of declaring bankruptcy for BP?
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/204277?RS_show_page=0
What scientists don’t tell you is that Neanderthals ran trade deficits with Homo Not-So-Sapiens Not-So-Sapiens who took Neanderthals women to rectify that little imbalance.
Sorry about the off-topic: What happened to the Atom feed? It was operational as of 9AM (West Coast) time today.
It is (was?) perfect for my mobile RSS reading. Using the RSS variant(s) and clicking through to get the content really doesn’t fly on a 3×2 inch screen and not-always-great connectivity.
The iCub robot is taught how to hold the bow and arrow, but then learns by itself how to aim and shoot the arrow so it hits the center of a target.
Rebecca Boyle, “Video: Using New Learning Algorithm, Archer ‘Bot Learns How To Aim and Shoot A Bow and Arrow”
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-09/video-using-new-learning-algorithm-archer-bot-learns-how-aim-and-shoot-bow-and-arrow
Nice to see some humanoid robot action happening elsewhere than Japan. In this case it’s Italy, whose demographics are nearly as dire.
Funny they didn’t choose to outfit the thing as a Mongol archer from the 12th century.
Gotta admit “Augmented Reward Chained Regression” rings my chimes (or would that be chains?).
No worries. By the time it learns to use a belt-fed .50 to target young women wearing jeans in Tehran street demos, it’s facial recognition algos will be immune to Stuxnet. Sleep well.