aeronode

"James, I don’t get how you can be an engineer, and not be able to count."

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:46:42 -0800

“James, I don’t get how you can be an engineer, and not be able to count.”

- my trainer

Photo

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:11:26 -0800

"A Carnegie library is a library built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and..."

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:37:41 -0800

“A Carnegie library is a library built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929, including some belonging to public and university library systems. 1,689 were built in the United States, 660 in Britain and Ireland, 125 in Canada, and others in Australia, New Zealand, Serbia, the Caribbean, and Fiji. Few towns that requested a grant and agreed to his terms were refused. When the last grant was made in 1919, there were 3,500 libraries in the United States, nearly half of them built with construction grants paid by Carnegie.”

what my trainer said to me tonight

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:06:11 -0800

what my trainer said to me tonight

"By the fourth year, however, many bankers were a mess, according to the study. Some were..."

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:50:54 -0800

“By the fourth year, however, many bankers were a mess, according to the study. Some were sleep-deprived, blaming their bodies for preventing them from finishing their work. Others developed allergies and substance addictions. Still others were diagnosed with long-term health conditions such as Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid disorders.”

- Hazard of the Trade: Bankers’ Health

“What’s it like to play on the same basketball team...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:05:00 -0800

“What’s it like to play on the same basketball team as Jeremy Lin?” on Quora; his schoolmates answer.

"The enclosed shopping mall, despite still often being considered a dominant scourge that killed..."

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:02:00 -0800

“The enclosed shopping mall, despite still often being considered a dominant scourge that killed downtowns during the middle 20th century, is now in its own slow, drawn-out death spiral, giving way to big box category-killers, open-air lifestyle centers and strip malls. Yet, despite all the controversy surrounding malls in America, they stand as one of the most significant styles of urban development in 20th century America. In many suburbs and small cities, they were (and still are) the de-facto ‘town center,’ a meeting place and local focal point, and for many of us they served as a crucial part of our formative years.”

- Labelscar, the retail history blog. Site authors claim to have visited two thirds of malls in the US.

Wall Street

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:15:00 -0800

By implication, the whole asset management industry is going to consolidate and shrink; its cost and fee structure will also need to adjust to more competitive levels. Meanwhile, the trend toward lower fees and the preference for larger managers pinch smaller funds even more nastily because of the way these developments interact with the second reason for the industry’s fundamental transformation: rising costs.

Days of Easy Money Are Over for Fund Managers, Alice Schroeder, Bloomberg; 18 Jan 2012.

All across Wall Street, financial institutions are suffering their worst results in years. JPMorgan reported last month that fourth-quarter profits were down by $1.1 billion. Goldman Sachs reported profits fell by 56 percent, Bank of America saw its profits drop by 38 percent, and Morgan Stanley reported a 26 percent drop … But as banks cast about for a new business model, the city’s economy will need to find new sources of growth (this is why the Bloomberg administration has aggressively courted the tech and science industries).

The End of Wall Street As They Knew It, Gabriel Sherman, NY Mag; 5 Feb 2012.

I wonder if finance jobs will dry up like legal ones have. JD’s are in trouble, soon also the MBA’s, and PhD’s have been dealing with a glut for decades. Then a majority of liberal arts undergrads are finding BA’s to be in limited demand. We get a discontented, educated class leading to social unrest (OWS, arab spring). And possibly a credit implosion when these new grads can’t pay off their loans, possibly on the scale of the mortgage crunch (get me some CDS’s stat!). On the other hand we’ll have lots of cheap (skilled?) labor. What business can I start that employs a ton of lawyers, some MBA’s, and a million english majors? I got nothing.

Photo

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:07:30 -0800

"I’d tried to explain that if he didn’t give me drugs, I would likely spend the first 20 minutes of..."

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:33:55 -0800

“I’d tried to explain that if he didn’t give me drugs, I would likely spend the first 20 minutes of the flight focused on how at any moment the plane could crack apart like a metal egg in the sky and drizzle a long yolk of passengers out into the ocean, and how I would then urinate in my pants at 30,000 feet before spontaneously passing out, vomiting, then choking on my vomit.”

not gonna lie, i’ve been following jeremy lin and what’s happened has been pretty...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:27:22 -0800

not gonna lie, i’ve been following jeremy lin and what’s happened has been pretty amazing

"You are not responsible for all the things that happen to you, but you are completely in control of..."

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:41:49 -0800

“You are not responsible for all the things that happen to you, but you are completely in control of your attitude and your reactions to them. If you feel annoyance, fear, or disappointment, these feelings are caused by you and must be dug out like a weed. Study where they came from, accept them, and then let them go. If you let outside pressures determine how you feel and what you do, you have abdicated your job as CEO of your own life.”

- 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans, Karl Pillemer

Video

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:36:25 -0800

"Olive-oil fraud continues today, though modern governments are often less thorough and effective..."

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:17:00 -0800

“Olive-oil fraud continues today, though modern governments are often less thorough and effective than the [ancient] Romans at preventing it. Olive oil has historically been one of the most frequently adulterated products in the European Union, whose profits, one E.U. anti-fraud investigator told me, have at times been ‘comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks.’ In America, olive-oil adulteration, sometimes with cut-rate soybean and seed oils, is widespread, but olive oil is not tested for by the F.D.A.—F.D.A. officials tell me their resources are far too limited, and the list of responsibilities far too long, to police the olive-oil trade.”

- Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, review.

"I don’t play chess. I play golf — poorly. I don’t play the piano, but we have a piano and if you put..."

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:01:00 -0800

“I don’t play chess. I play golf — poorly. I don’t play the piano, but we have a piano and if you put CDs in it, it plays itself.”

- Bizarre shareholder conference call from Albert Lord, CEO of Sallie Mae (the largest college tuition lender in the US). He ended it with an audible, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

"Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger..."

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:58:57 -0800

“Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle’s huge rocket boosters could fail … [H]e had paid the stiff price often exacted of whistle-blowers. Thiokol cut him off from space work, and he was shunned by colleagues and managers … He later said he was sustained by a single gesture of support. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, hugged him after his appearance before the commission. ‘She was the only one.’”

- Engineer Roger Boisjoly died on 3 February 2012.

Windowfarms, or how to grow spices and herbs without a lawn.

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:55:00 -0800

Windowfarms, or how to grow spices and herbs without a lawn.

"People seem to have a strange concept of how luck works and how the universe/some deity/karma/their..."

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:55:35 -0800

“People seem to have a strange concept of how luck works and how the universe/some deity/karma/their lucky shoe or how ‘they deserve it’ will mean that things will eventually fall into place for them. You are ‘due’ to win the lottery or will get swept away by prince charming any day now. ‘You deserve it’ (as if others don’t).”

- 29 life lessons learned in travelling the world for 8 years straight. The best advice article I’ve ever read.

"So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living..."

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:27:44 -0800

“So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance to such a degree that he feared suicide, and at the same time firmly laying down his own particular, definite path in life.”

- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

"The atmosphere [Saturn’s moon Titan] is so thick and the gravity so low that humans could fly..."

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 01:11:00 -0800

“The atmosphere [Saturn’s moon Titan] is so thick and the gravity so low that humans could fly through it by flapping ‘wings’ attached to their arms”