December 2007
33 posts
It takes 21 days
for a habit to form. This was determined by Dr. Maxwell Maltz who noticed it took 21 days for amputees to cease feeling phantom sensations in the amputated limb. To form a habit, brain circuits take engrams, or memory traces, and produces neuropathways and neuroconnections if the circuits are bombarded for 21 days in a row. This means our brain doesn’t accept new data and change habits...
2 tags
1 tag
“Despite threats of death, I will not acquiesce to tyranny, but rather lead the...”
– Benazir Bhutto
1 tag
Game Theory predicts Russian President
Just reread an interesting article in Good Magazine about the chairman of NYU’s Department of Politics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who uses game theory to predict future political and foreign policy events. Amazing! Sure you’ve seen the explanation in A Beautiful Mind, but to briefly define game theory - it’s a branch of applied mathematics that defines how in strategic...
1 tag
more on gold
Gold is the basis for the monetary standard under the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is used to back currency. Under the gold standard, a certain weight of gold was given the name of a unit of currency. The US government originally set the US dollar to 1 troy ounce=$20.67 in the 1800s. In 1934 President Franklin Roosevelt saw the need for gold to adjust for inflation. He forced US citizens...
WatchDavey Dance Blog
“It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig...”
– Warren Buffett on gold.
Fortune Magazine's 101 Dumbest Moments in Business...
Some of my favorites: Eli Lilly, the global pharmaceutical company, to make doggie Prozac - chewable beef-flavored pills to treat separation anxiety in dogs. Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal plays 20 rounds of golf in Aug and Sept, including three rounds on three different courses in a single day. In October, he retired with a comp package of $161.5M. (meanwhile, they layoff thousands) ...
“We look at everything very carefully. The really crazy ones do really well. The...”
– Salman Ullah, Google’s former top dealmaker and director of corporate development. from bloomberg
1 tag
1 tag
Google's RE
Google’s at it again! This time in the energy department. Google plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to create renewable energy, an initiative dubbed “Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal.” This is awesome! It wants to make renewable energy to combat global warming. Google participates in offsetting its own carbon footprint by buying carbon credits, but now it wants to...
1 tag
Oil Oil Oil
I was waiting until the price of oil hit $100 to discuss it, but since it doesn’t look like that will happen for a while, I’d better write about it now. If you recall, a couple of weeks ago oil prices hit a $98 high. I would have put money on it rising to $100 by the end of the year. That is, until OPEC announced it produces 3-4 M barrels in excess every day. I find the political, social, and...
study: men with deeper voices have more children
Here’s a study of the Hazda in Tanzania that shows that men with deeper voices have more children. Interesting, no?
Speaking of snow, find out how green your favorite... →
1 tag
Hedge Funds - what are they and how do I start...
Hedge funds. You hear about them, you read about them, your friend works for one. But you don’t know what they are. Well neither did I until recently! First off, wow, hedge funds were started in 1949. Who knew? A hedge fund isn’t just a fund that hedges, (definition of hedge: get rid of or offset risk). It’s actually a professionally managed portfolio of investments that uses complex investment...
1 tag
Water Rights Trading
Sounds a bit esoteric, right? Well, listen up cause it may affect you and the rest of the world pretty soon.
You may not be aware that there is a whole market that buys and sells the rights to water. It doesn’t involve the trade of actual water, but just the ownership of the water. It’s a commodity, just like the pork bellies and frozen orange juice you say in Trading Places. In most areas, the...
1 tag
GDP shmeeDP
If you haven’t heard, GDP is up! To 4.9%, one of the highest numbers we’ve seen (and will ever see) But what is GDP and why does it matter? GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product. It is an indicator of the growth of the economy and is measured each quarter. It’s backward looking data, so often people are not too excited by it. It just gives us an idea of how fast our economy is growing, or rather...
1 tag
WatchFinally - a new time lapse.
1 tag
