Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

Highmarking is the dopey practice of trying to see how high you can ascend on a steep mountain slope without getting stuck, flipping, or, say, causing an avalanche and dying.  Let’s just call highmarking a couloir, however, complete idiocy, as you’ll see at the end of the following sequence.

Someone at this weekend’s Berkshire Hathaway love-in should ask Warren Buffett if he knew when he hired David Sokol if he knew about his role in the “Social text” affair. That should cause delightful post-modern amusement.

Surreal and astonishing video of the speed with which the Japan tsunami struck the Sendai airport. From dry runway to helicopter floating by in no time flat.

Great deck on the major sociotechnical shifts underway in China at 300m users join the interweb:

• Preliminary rare EF-5 tornado in Monroe county Mississippi (Source)
• Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service: Paducah: Mississippi River at New Madrid (Source)
• Chinese Citizens on Tour in Europe : The New Yorker (Source)
• Adventures in Domain Names: Follow the Typos – Bloomberg (Source)
• Better a Seller Than a Buyer of Tail Risk, Be – Bloomberg (Source)

Nothing like having an easily-confused airline code:

Kirsch Municipal Airport carries an unfortunate IATA identifier code and, if this comment to the Google Maps forum is genuine, it’s starting to wind up the local jet charter firm.

‘IRS’ is the common abbreviation for the Internal Revenue Service but, in Google’s geographic database, a search for ‘IRS’ doesn’t bring up the US Government’s mighty tax machine but rather a small airport in the northwest corner of Sturgis, Michigan.

“About two months ago we started receiving phone calls from individuals wanting to contact the Internal Revenue Service,” says the forum poster, whose name ‘raijets’ matches that of a Kirsch air charter company.

“We get 20-50 calls a day for the Internal Revenue Service – even after hours and on weekends.

More here.

I’m not in the natgas cornucoppian camp, but this Peter Tertzakian piece is still worth a read. The key is this graph:

Love this BMW iDrive app, but I have to assume they’re gated by movement. No Facebook/Twitter updating on the road, right?

We should fact-check the apocalypse more often:

On ABC’s “This Week,” the Rev. Franklin Graham was wrong when he said that earthquakes, wars and famines are occurring “with more frequency and more intensity.”

The preacher, who is the son of the Rev. Billy Graham and president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, discussed the prophecy of Armageddon with host Christiane Amanpour during a special Easter edition of the Sunday talk show.

Graham, April 24: I believe we are in the latter days of this age. When I say “latter days,” could it be the last hundred years or the last thousand years or the last six months? I don’t know.

But the Bible, the things that the Bible predicts, earthquakes and famines, nation rising against nation, we see this happening with more frequency and more intensity.

On all three counts, the preacher is wrong. Today’s famines and armed conflicts are fewer and relatively smaller than those in the last century, and the frequency of major earthquakes has remained about the same.

Read on.

Posted this earlier over on Posterous, but here it is again: Skier outjumps avalanche.