Category Archives: Curiousities

Hans Rosling’s 200 Years of Global Health in Four Minutes

I’m of the school that PowerPoint has served as the breeding ground for many misguided efforts to gussy up simple messages with unproductive or even worse, confusing and misleading graphics. This is an example of the opposite, a very good use of visualization of a large and complex data set by Hans Rosling, who has made a near art form of this sort of thing. Notice how the tradeoff between wealth and life expectancy flattens once a reasonable level of wealth has been achieved.

Reader Nominations for Best and Worst Predictions for 2011

It’s the time of year where pundits and professional forecasters pull out their crystal balls and offer their prognostications for the new year. I’ve never been keen about forecasting. Even though we offer views of what might happen, it usually falls in the realm of applying well established patterns to new fact sets (as in […]

Google Rates Website Wonkiness

This post’s headline misrepresents the apparent intent of a new Google filter in its advanced search function. Per the SearchEngineLand report, “Google Lets You Dumb Down Your Search Results With “Reading Level” Filter,” the aim is apparently to allow web surfers to steer clear of pages that might be too taxing.

“So You Want to Be a Journalist”

Some comic relief, hat tip reader Scott:

Seeking Reader Help with Evil Site Scrapers

In classic the cobbler’s children go unshod fashion, I do a horrible job of monetizing the site (but I have made some progress on that front) and have even fallen behind on the sort of thing I normally do religiously, submitting for expense reimbursements (still haven’t sent receipts off to my publisher for what they’d […]

Econoparody: The Dollar and Its Diving

From the folks at Versus. Enjoy!

Guess about Mish

Various commenters have noticed that Mish’s blog has vanished. My guess – a spurious “terms of service violation”. Google’s robot spam monitors sometimes screw up by giving false positives – something like this happened to Yves (see para 3) back when NC was on Blogger. I can’t imagine they’ll shut up Mish for long and […]

“The Blue Ocean in RED”

A short film by Howard Hall (hat tip reader Sundog) The Blue Ocean in RED from Howard Hall on Vimeo.

QE2: Bernanke Cuts Geithner Off at the Knees

The Fed’s announcement of $600 billion of intermediate and long Treasury purchase, informally dubbed QE2, teed off a peppy rally in stocks, and led to further weakening of the dollar. These trends were already well in motion thanks to the central bank’s winks and nods that it was going to embark on another round of […]

We are Number One on Technorati!

Well, at least we are number one as of yesterday, when Richard Smith noticed our rating, and today among business blogs. Don’t know how long this will last. But look how we beat blogs with a lot more people as dedicated contributors! And if you look at the Technorati ratings for business blogs + news […]

ForeclosureMom Raps

Warning: this is rap by a middle aged white woman, so adjust your expectations accordingly. There have been a number of reports of cases like hers, of borrowers told to become delinquent to qualify for a mod. They often fail to get the mod and lose their homes.

Field of Schemes: David Einhorn’s latest short

Einhorn is the famous Lehman short of 2008; he got a lot of flak from Clueless Charlie Gasparino for that. I seem to remember our own Lehman bear, Yves, getting snarled at by Charlie G somewhere along the line, too. But of course, Einhorn, via his vehicle Greenlight Capital, had it right; as did Yves […]