April 2009
27 posts
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The End of Wall Street's Boom →
Former Wall Street bond salesman (and current journalist) Michael Lewis returns to his 1980’s investment experiences to analyze the roots of the subprime mortgage crisis through the figure of Steve Eisman, one of a handful who saw through the BS and bad behavior in the New York financial world.
Both Daniel and Moses enjoyed, immensely, working with Steve Eisman. He put a fine point on...
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The Quiet Coup →
Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the IMF, on the harsh reality of what he thinks needs to be done to right the sinking ship of the American (and global) economy.
He says banks should be broken up and nationalized, like what would normally happen in a corporate bankruptcy scenario: take control, clean up bad debt, replace failed management, resell to private sector:
Cleaning up...
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Computer self-discovers Newtonian Laws of Motion →
This is amazing:
Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very...
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The birth of The Wire
Jason Kottke posted a link to several scripts from episodes of The Wire, along with a copy of the pitch document David Simon sent to HBO to create the show. The overview section is interesting because it demonstrates that the extreme depth of The Wire that was the main reason for its creation. The show’s analysis of each component of the American City was always intended to be broken down...
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CitiesXL Beta begins soon →
Register yo spot, fool.
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Free as in "Me" →
Read this, internet peoples.
(It might be ironic that I’m linking to this, not sure.)
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Tumblr, iPhone'd
Those Tumblr guys have done it again. This iPhone app is gorgeous.
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“Your new high energy security is impossible to read and I cannot login to your...”
– Mangrove Software support inquiry regarding new captcha feature
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Interview with Ben Heck, the God of modding →
“When I was a kid, anything I had, I would take it apart, but I would usually put it back together. And I had a rule that you should always have some screws left over, because everything is over-engineered anyway.”
I had no idea that some of his creations had been bought as manufactured 3rd-party devices.
(Pardon the horribly annoying paginated OXM article.)
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Creative Screenwriting Podcast →
The Creative Screenwriting magazine podcast is fantastic. Includes roundtables and interviews with feature screenwriters.
Highlights I’ve heard so far: David Hayter and Alex Tse on Watchmen, Andrew Stanton on WALL-E, Rob Siegel on The Wrestler, John Patrick Shanley on Doubt.
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The man behind Deadwood →
David Milch, interviewed by Salon.
On the lawlessness of Deadwood:
Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a study of the common law, said that the law develops out of society’s need to minimize the collateral consequences of the taking of revenge. What that means is, if I kill your horse, and you come and kill my horse and my family and burn down my house, the disruption to society of the...
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URL Shortener Decoder →
For those that get annoyed with the overuse of short URLs, use this Greasemonkey script to resolve the URLs inline on a webpage. This script looks like it currently has support for every URL service I’ve ever seen.
More interesting reading about the ramifications of URL shortening from Josh Schachter, founder of Delicious. I hear he knows a thing or two about links.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki, BTDT →
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on 6 August 1945 when a US plane dropped the first atomic bomb.
He suffered serious burns and spent a night there before returning to his home city of Nagasaki just before it was bombed on 9 August.
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One Sentence →
True stories, in one sentence.
Some are funny: tying a tie, ecstasy, Preparation H.
Some are serious: Pop Tarts, fathers, little brother.