cdtwigg

This is harder than it looks. "Wait; you're out of frame, could you move left a bit? Okay, don't move your head. Are you out of focus?" Full set here.

It's been a while since I really used my camera, so I dragged it along to the Pride Parade. Fortuitously, it turns out that happy people make for good pix, which more than compensates for the fact that I apparently can't remember how to work the camera half the time. :)









Full set is here.

The true history of VisiCalc, revealed:

This Program was invited by a great man named Benjamin Watt, or in the world of tibia he is known by the name of Blue Cordial the great

I found this article about the risk models that are used on Wall Street particularly compelling. One objection, though: I think that the way everyone brings up NNT's black swan when they write about how Wall Street measured risk is giving traders too much credit. Aliens landing and declaring that all real estate belongs to them by fiat is a black swan. Having home prices fall, on the other hand, belongs to the realm of the ordinary, and was predicted by plenty of economists across the spectrum. Also: the part about how traders gamed the VAR numbers really reminded me of Joel Spolsky's comments on metrics for programmer performance, and definitely points to a failure in the VAR model. It is not difficult, even without any black swan events, to construct an asset for which the VAR amount is small and finite but the expected loss is actually arbitrarily large. Oops!

If we had paid them $50 million a year to go far, far away and leave our financial system alone, it would have been a bargain.

Full link here; h/t Atrios.

I have to second this post by Josh Marshall. I'd go even further though: one of the really weird things about CDSs (as opposed to ordinary insurance) is that you can buy a CDS on a bond even if you have no financial stake in said bond (I didn't really believe this when I first heard it, but both the Wikipedia entry and this terrific video are pretty clear on that point). This is at least part of why the market for CDSs appears at first glance to actually be larger than the market for the bonds they're insuring.

But, look, suppose AIG were to collapse. Unlike, say, homeowner's insurance, CDSs are a completely unregulated market, and there is absolutely no reason for the government to feel any obligation to honor them. Given this, it would be completely legit to put AIG into receivership and unilaterally declare that anyone who holds a CDS without exposure to the actual underlying asset receives nada. They made a bet, they lost. Too bad. Anyone with actual exposure to the asset should receive some fraction of the contracted amount depending on what their actual exposure is. There's no reason why the now effectively taxpayer-owned AIG should be wholly responsible for eating the complete value of every barely legit derivatives contract it's ever written.

Obama has basically the right idea here. Realistically, we can't legislate away $50 million paydays for Wall Street traders, since salaries there have long since become more about measuring comparative manliness than about ensuring a comfortable livelihood. But if they're going to make that much money, society should extract the maximum benefit out of it, and that surely begins by taxing it at a 40% marginal rate which by historical standards isn't even particularly high.

And Euros, I guess.

For the three-day weekend, anchem and I rented a car and drove down the coast to Monterey and Big Sur. We pretty much got rained on the whole weekend but still had a great time. Most of these pictures are of a rookery of seals that were at the very southern end of Big Sur. Full set here.

I thought this was a terrific column from Frank Rich, but my favorite part was actually a quote he attributes to Charles de Gaulle,

The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.

On Tuesday, nealsid talked me into getting up waaaaaaay early to bike out to Sutro Baths and do some photography in the dawn's early light. I didn't get much in the way of pictures, but I'm still glad I dragged myself out of bed (for the bike ride, if nothing else). Full set here.

I was amused by this letter to the editor, apparently written by someone living in the year 1931.

What is needed is a retirement system that combines the best of portable, individually owned accounts with guarantees to help make sure that individuals do not outlive their savings. The system would automatically enroll workers, tie savings increases to raises, include provisions for health care needs, offer objective investment advice to help them plan, and assure a lifelong income base by automatically converting some of their savings to a low-cost annuity at retirement.

Oh! If only someone could come with such a miraculous system! Scrolling down the page, it appears that I'm not the only one. :)

...if you look at the Amazon page for pretty much any of the books in the Landolt-Bornstein: Numerical Data and Functional Relationships in Science and Technology and scroll down to the reviews. Examples here and here.

Set in a post-Armageddon America where food is so scarce that many survivors turned to cannibalism, “The Road” was shot partially in Braddock.

I don't think anybody really understands the weird love I feel for the little towns that dot the greater Pittsburgh area (I'm gonna make an exception here for robots_suck because otherwise I'm sure he'll jump in and object). Personally, I will always associate Braddock with a particularly terrific Flux that was held in the wonderful old Carnegie library there. Anyway, read the article and make sure to watch the video, which is terrific.

These unfortunate folks don't really understand how the game is played. Corporate donations to candidates (as opposed to PAC donations or lobbying efforts which are intended to influence policy) are nothing more than an effort to curry favor. In the absence of an extreme lean by the executive staff (think Rupert Murdoch or Ken Lay or Wally O'Dell), the rational action is to donate to candidates who are actually in office or about to get there. Microsoft's 70-30 split towards Dems is a reflection on the party's current electoral prospects, not on Microsoft's political leanings.

I was sleepy while I set up the lighting, so everybody gets super-bright highlights this year. :) For those keeping track, 2007 is here and 2006 is here (whoa, I had a goatee??)







More after the cut; full set here.

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A while ago, I posted one of these. I decided tonight that I should make it into a series, entitled "Warning signs for my life." Here is the one that should appear next to my sink.

Posted without comment.

Surprisingly, no mention of the starring role played by the couch, but I did like this little blurb:

This is also the type of movie that works less the more you think about it. How can two single, employed people with no kids sharing a rental in Pittsburgh not be flush with cash?

h/t Pam Spaulding.