2008 11 20

Paulson's Martial Law Threat Senator James Inhofe has revealed that Henry Paulson was behind the threats of martial law and a new great depression prior to the passage of the bailout bill, having made such warnings during a conference call on September 19th, around two weeks before the legislation was eventually approved by both the Senate and Congress. Link

2008 11 19

Winter Blues

2008 11 19

Apophenic Basis of Religiosity We measured visual attentional capture in a reaction time experiment, and correlated it with scores on questionnaires about religious and other beliefs and about meaningfulness and surprisingness of coincidences. We found that visual attentional capture predicts a belief in meaningfulness of coincidences, and that this belief mediates a relationship between visual attentional capture and religiosity... We conclude that (a) religious people have a stronger belief in meaningfulness of coincidences, indicative of a more general tendency to maintain strong schemata, and that (b) this belief leads them to suppress, ignore, or forget information that has demonstrably captured their attention, but happens to be inconsistent with their schemata. Link

2008 11 18

Fiber to the Home in San Francisco Sonic.net Fiber DIA is the next generation of scalable high-speed business connectivity. In addition to offering low-cost symmetric connections at speeds from 5Mbps to 1Gbps, the line will integrate seamlessly into your existing network through a flexible fiber connection that terminates as simple Ethernet. Link Sonic quoted me $1500/month for symmetric 5Mbit and $50K/month for symmetric 1Gbit. In Japan, you can get 1Gbit to the home for $62/month.

2008 11 17

Minimalist Showcase Link via Alex Payne

2008 11 17

Panic It seems to me that a withdraw rush is an irrational panic when: bank investments > deposits And a rational response to insolvency when: bank investments < deposits Though I've noticed that when the media discusses withdraw rushes, it always labels them "panics" without looking at the bank's balance sheet. From this perspective, the so-called "liquidity" crisis is actually a solvency crisis as the balance sheets of many of the banks and financial companies (AIG, Fannie, Freddie, etc) involved are actually negative.