Here are the two best blogs you're (likely) not reading:

• Bronte Capital. John Hempton has an awe-inspiring winner here. This recently-launched blog by a former fund manager is everything you could hope for: lucid, smart, analytical, bemused, and self-critical.
• The Science of Sport. I am reasonably sure I was a sports medicine doctor in another life, so my fascination with all things related to sports science is understandable. Nevertheless, this blog is excellent, with two young researchers tearing into all aspects of sports science.

I'll try to highlight deserving sites on a more regular basis henceforth.

It's apparently awards time again, and I see I'm nominated for a BusinessWeek award.  The rest of the nominees are people I've never heard of from low-traffic sites -- Scobleizer, TechCrunch, etc. -- so be sure to vote early and often to keep these usurpers at bay.

(I'm kidding about Scoble, Arrington, et al. Really.)

Great post by John Hempton on the real roots of China's penchant for savings: Its one-child policy.

In most poor jurisdictions there is a simple method of saving for old age. Have six kids. They will have a few each and if you survive there will be lots of grandkids trained to respect their elders who will look after you.

This does not work in China. Indeed if everyone has only one child there will potentially be four grandparents per grandchild. You can’t expect to get supported.

In most developed countries people trust the system to look after them. Mutual funds are well developed, there is often a social security savings net, and a lot of people (perhaps falsely) expect to sell their house and live in clover.

But in China you can’t trust that either. So you save. And save. And save…

Chinese families save because they have a gun at their head. They save an amount that is almost incomprehensible by Western standards.

Read the whole thing.

Hurricane Gustav is strengthening south of Haiti and looking like a bad guy as it heads WNW. According to the most recent storm track, it will wend its way past Cuba and into the Gulf of Mexico, complete with at least Cat 2 hurricane status.

Some live analysis here of the likely impact on Gulf of Mexico oil production.

You never know what you'll find on arXiv, so I was amused today to see this chart of the current "oil super-bubble" (their words), as plotted by three Polish physicists. They claim to have predicted "to an amazing accuracy" the date when the current oil uptrend ended -- July 11th -- and they also claim that the current super-bubble will end around the middle of 2010.

Cool. Dziękujemy, dudes.

Source: Criticality Characteristics of Current Oil Price Dynamics (arXiv)

I have been sent the following "dot corn" chart more times than I get Britney Spears spam these days. Not generally being a fan of such things -- you can create bubble-ish looking charts of anything that moves quickly -- I hadn't bothered posting it. But does anyone know who is the original source and put together the annotated Bloomerg dot-corn figure below?

Best financial paper title du jour goes to this one:

Higher-order potential forces observed in bubbles and crashes in financial markets

Is that spooky, or what? It is like some combination of Jedi mind tricks, van der Waals forces and creationism.

[via arXiv]

There is good news and bad news about Tropical Storm Fay. On the bad side it has caused a surprising number of deaths, plus significant property damage. I don't want to take anything away from any of the preceding, because that is awful stuff.

Nevertheless, there is some mildly positive news in here. Compare the 7-day precipitation map for the U.S. southeast with the UNL drought monitor map. As these figures show, the storm had a hydrologically useful post-Florida trajectory.

Love this California real estate quote -- and be sure to check the date:

In all the new states of the Union, land monopolization has gone on at an alarming rate, but in none of them so fast as in California, and in none of them, perhaps, are the evil effects so manifest.

-- Henry George in 1870, as quoted in  The Great American Land Bubble (1932)

Plus ca change, plus ca meme, etc.