Fifty years ago today the modern Lego brick was patented.
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via the Google search page.
Get your lite-brites ready – we have a major anniversary coming up later this week…
Hooray for the Christiansens
Category Archives: random stuff
What am I missing?
Talks in New York with the unnamed banks are part of Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo’s effort to stabilize the bond guarantors and bolster the market’s finances, said agency spokesman Andrew Mais in an interview. Insurers MBIA Inc. gained 33 percent in New York trading and Ambac Financial Group Inc. soared 72 percent.
New capital may help preserve the top credit ratings for the bond guarantors such as MBIA, the industry’s largest, and halt any erosion of investor confidence in the $2.4 trillion of assets they guarantee. Ambac, MBIA’s biggest rival, lost its AAA grade from Fitch Ratings this month on concerns that losses tied to subprime mortgages may increase. *
Let me see if I’ve got this straight… Banks/financial institutions hold a lot of iffy CDOs (aka Big Shitpile/matryoshka lemons) – bundles of loans that likely contain sub-prime stuff that may default. They’ve covered themselves against the possibility of the loans going bad by buying insurance from monoline insurers (MBIA and Ambac are the ones in the news). Now, loans are going bad – it’s hitting the fan. The worry shifts to the insurers – how are they going to make good? Because folks are thinking that the MBIAs of the world aren’t going to be able to cover the CDO losses, their stock price tanks. Low stock price = even less capital in reserve at the insurers. If the monoline insurers go tango uniform (toes-up tits-up – de-bowdlerized by audience request), the balance sheets of the institutions holding the CDOs take awful hits. So, lets have the banks (some of whom have got to be holding the paper in question) bail out the people who are insuring them.
Seems a bit circular to me – my guess – only a matter of time before I, as a taxpayer, have the privilege of bailing out Wall Street…
Update – check the comments if you are interested in the topic. Prof. Kleiman replies to my email query:
…if the monolines’ guarantees are seen to be worthless, the shitpile grows. (I love “matryoshka lemons,” by the way.) And they could suffer from a kind of “run on the bank” even if they’re actually solvent. So it’s possible that pumping more equity capital in would actually stabilize the situtation, whether it’s the banks’ capital or someone else’s. But the banks have an especially strong reason to want to stanch the bleeding.
More LOC Flickr
All Library of Congress photos tagged “newmexico” here.
This is gorgeous – I had to post it:
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And these pictures remind me of a favorite movie – Where the Rivers Flow North – though these shots are 14 years after the time portrayed in the film. Put it on your to-see list – Rip Torn and Tantoo Cardinal are fantastic in it. Cardinal especially – her character talks in a way I’ve heard just a couple of times – from really old Quebecois/native woods folk.
Backstage at the girlie show:
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The barker:
Infoglut
Bring it! The Library of Congress Flickrstream:
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Above: Lewis Tewanima
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Via WWdN.
Update – this sounds interesting:
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Sir Genille, twelfth Baronet of his line, has had a checkered career. Born a second son of the eleventh Baronet he ran away to set [sea?] in 1883 when 13 years old, later enlisting as a private in the army and fighting in several battles in Egypt, was wounded, captured and escaped. After a sad experience with money lenders in London [!], he hunted big game in Africa, wandered about the Orient and finally turned up in San Francisco. Society made a fuss over him but he disappeared to be found again, this time in Kansas City, as a day laborer. * (warning – pdf)
Quote of the day
I watch what I do to see what I really believe.
– Sister Helen Prejean *
It’s impossible to get into another person’s head. Why may be interesting, but what is the thing that I can measure and judge. Just sayin’…
Wolverton
A Basil Wolverton pamphlet from the DMNH archives can be found here. I’ve come to prefer his Spacehawk strip over the ugly folk, but when I was a kid his stickers were all over my lunch box. Garbage Pail Kids, eat your hearts out.
Drinking from a fire hose
My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives. –
HedyHedley Lamarr
Between self–publishing, ubiquitous computing
Seasonal bits
- Less than a week until the NH primary. It can’t come soon enough for me – the steady diet of the same political commercials over and over and over is the least of it; more intrusive are the phone calls. I’m getting (order of magnitude) a dozen calls a day from campaigns, unidentified 800 numbers and “out of area” caller IDs. I’ve stopped even looking at the caller ID to see if I should answer…
- It has been snowing like mad here. If we hadn’t gotten some rain a week or so back, the snowbanks would be overhead. It was the snowiest December on record and we started the new year with six inches or so of wet snow yesterday afternoon/evening.
Snowfall on Monday [12/31/07] helped set a new record for snow in December, with 44.5 inches falling in Concord. That broke the record of 43 inches set in 1876. *
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Taken at dawn this morning.
It’s the happiest day of the year
There will be more daylight tomorrow and more the day after, and so on. Hooray!
Geminids
A skywatching note, courtesy of New Scientist:
The Earth is expected to pass through the thickest part of the cloud of debris at 1745 GMT on Friday 14 December. Observers in Europe will see the best display on Friday evening.
For observers in North and South America, the peak occurs during daylight hours. For them, the display will be best before dawn on Friday morning, when a few dozen meteors per hour should be visible from a dark site at mid-northern latitudes.
The weather doesn’t look like it’s going to cooperate here in NH but I’ll probably get up extra-early Friday morning, just in case.
Update – Well, that was a bust. Wall-to-wall clouds at about 1000 feet – I did get most of the driveway shoveled, though. We got six inches of snow yesterday afternoon and evening. Heavier snow to the south made last night’s commute nightmarish for those poor folk going in and out of Boston. One nice bit – on the way to work this AM, I saw a southbound freight train. Each boxcar had an identical little vortex of spindrift coming off the trailing edge of the roof – really pretty under the slate gray dawn.
Nice Hair!
!Warning – contains minimal original content!
Some pix from recent web wandering united by funky pelage. In order of discovery:
Telstar Logistics’ Flickrstream yields a screencap from Gerry Anderson’s UFO.
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As a commenter notes, it’s important to keep your utility belt fully stocked with golf tees. I believe one of these lovelies will be featured a little further on…
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Via FLOG, Chris Butcher shows us a rockabilly ‘do that… words fail me. I’ll bet this guy smokes cigarettes as part of the persona – he’s taking his life in his hands every time he fires one up.
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Yhancik – billions of blistering blue barnacles! There are some Tintin pix in this post – about halfway down.
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More MoonBase loveliness from Poletti’s Flickrstream (worth looking at – lots of great images):
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Two musical notes (sorry)… The actress pictured above is Gabrielle Drake. The musical tie-in? Nick Drake was her brother. And – while nosing around for more background on UFO, I fell over a new-to-me early electronic instrument: the ondes Martenot.
Germs
Some semi-random thoughts/impressions after finishing 1491:
- Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel
- Still with the Diamond comparo – 1491 gives a much different impression when it comes to food crops. If grains are the only thing compared, then the Old World wins big time – wheat, barley, rice, oats, rye vs. corn (maize) and quinoa. It would be interesting (I’m sure someone has already done it) to compare the caloric and protein output of milpas, medieval European farms, Andean potato plots, etc. and see if Diamond’s suggested European advantage exists.
- Passenger pigeons. I’m leaving this as a teaser – fascinating… (Or you can click here – a post from before a personal 1492: my discovery of Querencia. In fact, searching Q for ‘1491’ – not a bad idea.)
My two biggest takeaways from the book are, first, how deeply rooted and deeply wrong the popular image of the Indian – and pre-Columbian America – is and, second, how much permaculture went on in the Americas, especially in the Amazon basin. If you haven’t read it – highly recommended.