A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits

- by Matt Taibbi


On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle?utm_source=daily-newsletter&utm_medium=email

How Your Brain Works (mayo clinic slideshow)

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/brain/BN00033/RETURNTOLINK=1&RETURNTOOBJID=87550A09-A5DC-4475-BFE663DE6EAF63F1&slide=1

Seth's blog

Seth Godin consistently posts some of the most interesting and thought provoking blogs on the web.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Inventor creates inexpensive self-adjustable eyeglasses

It was a chance conversation on March 23 1985 ("in the afternoon, as I recall") that first started Josh Silver on his quest to make the world's poor see. A professor of physics at Oxford University, Silver was idly discussing optical lenses with a colleague, wondering whether they might be adjusted without the need for expensive specialist equipment, when the lightbulb of inspiration first flickered above his head.

What if it were possible, he thought, to make a pair of glasses which, instead of requiring an optician, could be "tuned" by the wearer to correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them?

More than two decades after posing that question, Silver now feels he has the answer. The British inventor has embarked on a quest that is breathtakingly ambitious, but which he insists is achievable - to offer glasses to a billion of the world's poorest people by 2020.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/22/diy-adjustable-glasses-josh-silver

Red vs Blue

Studies show that people who work in environments that display the color red show more caution and care in their work, while people working in a blue environment display more creative thinking.

This suggests that the colors you surround yourself with actually matter.


There are also studies that show that referees subconsciously favor a team wearing the color red over the color blue.

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - by Matt Taibbi

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine?utm_source=daily-newsletter&utm_medium=email

Have You Ever Had To Answer These Interview Questions?

http://glipress.blogspot.com/2008/12/5-interview-questions-that-mean-youre.html

The "Good Enough" Revolution

Robert Capps wrote an interesting article for Wired called "The Good Enough Revolution" that was published in Sept. 2009 Edition of the North American version of Wired magazine.


"What consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high quality"."


This is what makes mp3s better than CDs. This is what makes DVD better than Blu-Ray, and instant netflix streaming videos better than DVD. This is what makes a 3 megapixel digital camera better than a $5000 35mm film camera.
This is what makes digital streaming over the internet better than physical, tangible objects.


http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough