more cool nature photos...

Sperm Whale Eats a Giant Squid! (click through for more photos)

Insider trading.

Carly and I are currently dog-sitting in midtown for my aunt and uncle. They live next door to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge-fund manager (he founded Galleon Group) and number 236 on Forbes' list of the richest Americans. Raj is also notable for his fantasy football league, which has a $100,000 entry fee and awards a total of $1,000,000 to the top three teams each year.

Early this morning his apartment was raided by the FBI and Raj was hauled in on insider trading charges alleging he earned over $20,000,000 illegally. Apparently the FBI is good at quiet raids, because Carly and I slept through the 6am arrest and apartment search.

**Correction: Raj was arrested Friday morning, not this morning. Carly and I still heard nothing.

1M Frames Per Second

The video is very long, and I recommend you skip to random points throughout it, as the type of bullet and the material being impacted are changed. The end features cutouts of animals being hit with barrages of bullets.

Pretty charts. Ugly news.

A few pretty and devastating graphs.

First: Percentage job loss from peak during post WWII recessions (Calculated Risk):

Second: year-over-year delinquency rate changes, where red indicates an increased rate and green indicates a decreased rate (New York Federal Reserve):

Third: the current delinquency rate as of the second quarter of 2009, where a darker color indicates a higher rate (ibid):

Obama wins Nobel Peace Price

All I am saying is this: do we really live in a world where the Arizona State commencement speech committee has more stringent standards than then Norwegian Nobel Committee?

Google Wave

Not nearly as cool as they think it is, but still one of those "finally!" moments for the internet.

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/closed.html

Owned!

Chicago eliminated in first round of Olympic 2016 voting. Obama's reputation as being unable to get things done will be solidified by the time you go to bed tonight. Happy 2010 elections! (Oh, and good luck on Iran!)

Mapping Sin

Useless but entertaining "sin map" from Wired:

"We're gluttons for infographics, and a team at Kansas State just served up a feast: maps of sin created by plotting per-capita stats on things like theft (envy) and STDs (lust). Christian clergy, likely noting the Bible Belt's status as Wrath Central, question the "science." Valid point—or maybe it's just the pride talking."

Internet Meme Timeline

The title is self-explanatory. Be careful: this site can waste all of your time if you let it.

"How to Write Well"

[Note: everything in the post except for this note, including the title, is taken directly from Greg Mankiw's Blog. Rather than linking to it I figure it is easier for me to just copy the text and cite the source. For those of you outside of the world of economics, Mankiw (sometimes referred to as variations on N. Gregory Mankiw) is a famous economist who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under Bush 43 from 2003 to 2005 and teaches at Harvard. The original post can be found here.]

When I was CEA chair, I sent the following guidelines to my staff as they started drafting the Economic Report of the President. A friend recently emailed me a copy, and I thought I would share them with blog readers. They are good rules of thumb, especially for economists writing for a general audience.

ERP Writing Guidelines

• Stay focused. Remember the take-away points you want the reader to remember. If some material is irrelevant to these points, it should probably be cut.
• Keep sentences short. Short words are better than long words. Monosyllabic words are best.
• The passive voice is avoided by good writers.
• Positive statements are more persuasive than normative statements.
• Use adverbs sparingly.
• Avoid jargon. Any word you don’t read regularly in a newspaper is suspect.
• Never make up your own acronyms.
• Avoid unnecessary words. For instance, in most cases, change
  o “in order to” to “to”
  o “whether or not” to “whether”
  o “is equal to” to “equals”
• Avoid “of course, “clearly,” and “obviously.” Clearly, if something is obvious, that fact will, of course, be obvious to the reader.
• The word “very” is very often very unnecessary.
• Keep your writing self-contained. Frequent references to other works, or to things that have come before or will come later, can be distracting.
• Put details and digressions in footnotes. Then delete the footnotes.
• To mere mortals, a graphic metaphor, a compelling anecdote, or a striking fact is worth a thousand articles in Econometrica.
• Keep your writing personal. Remind readers how economics affects their lives.
• Remember two basic rules of economic usage:
  o “Long run” (without a hyphen) is a noun. “Long-run” (with a hyphen) is an adjective. Same with “short(-)run.”
  o “Saving” (without a terminal s) is a flow. “Savings” (with a terminal s) is a stock.
• Buy a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Also, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Read them—again and again and again.
• Keep it simple. Think of your reader as being your college roommate who majored in English literature. Assume he has never taken an economics course, or if he did, he used the wrong textbook.

Speech! Speech!

Assuming you saw the President's address to Congress last night. Apparently The Daily Beast has highlights from it. I thought it was a bit professorial, and painfully fast-and-loose with the facts, but overall a pretty decent speech (with quite a finish).

Ultimately, I don't see this changing much. And I believe Joe "You Lie" Wilson, for all his lack of manners, probably did an excellent job of undermining Obama. If you think about the subset of people who came into the speech against Obama's reform efforts but were warming up to it as the speech went on, that sort of outburst is exactly the sort of thing to snap one out of the increasing level of trust building between the speaker and viewer throughout the speech, reminding viewers that there was a reason they opposed this guy before, and his "sweet-talk" shouldn't necessarily win them over now.

As a side note, it is sort of terrifying how divisive this issue has been, given that there's so much everyone agrees on (like pre-ex's). I mean, even the school speech was a bitter partisan issue. And Drudge Report is reporting higher readership than at the same time a year ago, which is astounding given that a year ago we were in the height of the election season (and about two weeks into the Sarah Palin Era).

news bloopers

I enjoy bloopers of all sort, because I like watching others embarrassed, so these news bloopers from HuffPo are enjoyable (someone needs to teach me, again, how to embed video) . A few are dumb, but the "Terrifying Criminal Mastermind" is pretty hilarious. Also, as per usual, I love Anderson Cooper.

Making the USA look great.

As you may or may not know, Iceland is one of few places in the world that has made the USA look financially responsible and risk-averse during the turmoil of the last few years. Basically, Iceland privatized and monetized its fishing industry in the 1970s, and the new-found free time allowed the country to turn into "[...] a machine for turning cod into Ph.D.’s." Unfortunately, this led many (extremely overconfident) Icelandic men to jump into finance with no training or experience; hilarity ensued, if hilarity can be equated to financial and economic ruin.

I recommend reading this (admittedly lengthy) article by Michael Lewis, written for the April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair: "Wall Street on the Tundra." Aside from describing the logic behind the rise and fall of Icelandic financiers and banks, this article supplies what I always desire in travel writing: a picture not only of the beautiful scenery and buildings of a country, but also of the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the population.

Send rescue!

Below is a video that includes the 911 call made by a police officer who confiscated some marijuana and baked brownies with his wife. After eating the brownies, the cop calls 911 because he and his wife think they have overdosed and are dead ("Time is moving really really really really slowly"). Highly entertaining, though it makes me question how well police are educated about the illegal substances from which they supposedly 'protect' the general public.

"Who Gains from President Obama's Stimulus Package...And How Much?"

I recommend everyone at least read this summary of a recent publication by two economists at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College (summary taken from this website):

"In this Special Report, Levy scholars Ajit Zacharias, Thomas Masterson, and Kijong Kim provide a preliminary assessment of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), a package of transfers and tax cuts that is expected to provide relief to low-income and vulnerable households especially hurt by the economic crisis, while at the same time supporting aggregate demand. By the administration’s estimate, ARRA will create or save approximately three and a half million jobs by the end of 2010; while the ameliorating impact of the stimulus plan on the employment situation is surely welcome, say the authors, the government could have achieved far more at the same cost by skewing the stimulus package toward outlays rather than tax cuts. Their analysis points toward the necessity for a comprehensive employment strategy that goes well beyond ARRA. The need for public provisioning of various sorts—ranging from early childhood education centers to public health facilities to the “greening” of public transportation—coupled with the severe underutilization of labor, naturally suggests an expanded role for public employment as a desirable ingredient in any alternative strategy."

If you are interested in reading the complete article (only four-and-a-half pages), it can be directly downloaded here.

The world is ending!

The world seems to be going completely crazy, as evidenced by the following:

Reason 1: GMail is experiencing a complete outage, including POP and IMAP servers. Fucking weak.

Reason 2: Alberto Gonzales agrees with the investigation into abuse of prisoners by US personnel.

Reason 3: I was accepted into The New School's MS in Economics program.

Water slide.

This is a video Katie emailed to some people. I just uploaded it to YouTube and am posting the link. Enjoy.

Photoshop, circa 1902

The first photo was created in 1902 out of 3 others, below.






This comes from a cool article about early photo fakery.

"The Next Breadbasket?"

... "How Africa could save the world - and itself," from The Atlantic. The article is really short and interesting, and I like this graph a lot, but I wonder about some of the things not elaborated on - why is Germany so awesome at growing wheat, for example?

The more things change...

I think all of you will be glad to know that The South is still The South. Yesterday in Marion, Alabama two families escalated their years-old feud into "'[...] a full-scale riot [...]'" involving up to 150 people (though other reports put this number closer to 300) and leading to eight arrests and two hospitalizations. The major source of the feud is unknown, but the the day of the riot two members of the involved families were arrested at the local high school for fighting. After these arrests, family members followed the police to city hall, where the riot erupted. According to a police sergeant, people were "'throwing jack irons, throwing tire irons, anything they could get their hands on.'" Maybe the funniest line of the AP blurb: " The town's police chief was hit in the head with a crowbar but was OK."

The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons would be proud, though none were killed in Marion.