Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

• Am also increasingly sure sudden abdominal fat in middle-aged males is really just a dislocated ass. Should be treatable, like a trick knee. ->
• Increasingly convinced asslessness in males is the cause of aging, rather than other way around. Terrible affliction. ->
• Am on SkyWest flight that's code-shared as United by Continental. Bet that's what they told Flight 19 over Bermuda Triangle in 1945 too. ->
• Alone on a sun-blasted airport shuttle with Barry White blasting over top of a/c. As auguries go, it's a downer doozie. ->
• UBS' George Magnus On Marxist Existential Crises And The "Convulsions Of A Political Economy" – http://t.co/0XtRuDx /via @nouriel ->
• Partly at @wrongologist's urging, am reverting to childhood and reading "The Golden Compass". ->

Excellent George Magnus.

UBS-ByGeorge_The Convulsions of Political Economy2011!08!16

via Zero Hedge

Fascinating Nature piece on the scholarly paper archive “arXiv” at 20. A graphic from the piece showing its growth and makeup.

ArXiv at 20 : Nature : Nature Publishing Group.

• Marc Andreessen on Why Software is Eating the World http://j.mp/o6yIeE ->
• Can VCs Time the Market? No — http://t.co/hKHTQdf ->
• Latest Richard Koo slidedeck on austerity, debt and Japanification – http://t.co/ViB2TDl /via @richardjpf ->

“Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown — the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

via The Physics of Finance: Coping with chaos — with false certainty.

Moody’s is going to need a bigger boat:

My name is William J. Harrington. I was employed by Moody’s Investors Services (“Moody’s) as an analyst in the Derivatives Group from June 1999 until my resignation in July 2010.

Lots more in an SEC filing here. None of it good for Moody’s.

From Paul Mason on the current scurry to come up with ideas … or something:

So why is the thinking beginning to change?

One of the most brilliant observations in Alistair Cookes memoir Six Men concerns the difference he observed in Edward VIIIs mien, with and without access to intelligence briefing.

Cooke wrote:”Daily possession of the papers is, in fact, the main and most deceptive perquisite of high office”. Cooke A, Six Men, 1977Without them, Edward would fume as they hustled him onto a plane at the outbreak of war: “We know damn all about what is happening.”

That is the situation for most of us today. I interpret the sudden flurry of blue skies thinking as a sign that those who do get “daily possession of the papers” are bracing themselves for more trouble in the autumn – banking trouble, real-economy downturn trouble and political protest trouble.

via BBC News – What to do if the double dip is real?.

Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis

While humanity has not yet observed any extraterrestrial intelligence ETI, contact with ETI remains possible. Contact could occur through a broad range of scenarios that have varying consequences for humanity. However, many discussions of this question assume that contact will follow a particular scenario that derives from the hopes and fears of the author. In this paper, we analyze a broad range of contact scenarios in terms of whether contact with ETI would benefit or harm humanity. This type of broad analysis can help us prepare for actual contact with ETI even if the details of contact do not fully resemble any specific scenario.

via [1104.4462] Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis.

Snow on Cuba Mall in central Wellington (HD) on Vimeo on Vimeo

• Nice Trulia visualization comparing renting vs buying homes across U.S. Upshot: Buying mostly wins out. http://t.co/P0leW9s ->
• Zenvo brings its 1,250 hp ST1 50S supercar to the U.S. Price: $1.8m. http://t.co/iFjXWS1 /cc @umairh ->
• "Perpetual fear" and the sophomore serial entrepreneur – http://t.co/bH4oGdM ->
• Say you wanted to get a first-person HD perspective of crashing a BMX bike on a ramp. Your chance follows. http://t.co/sN3tkwa ->