Best of the Stewart takedowns

Just in case you're one of the five people who haven't seen this one ... Jon Stewart Takes On CNBC - The Atlantic Business Channel.

He rips CNBC and Santelli into tiny shreds, then puts them in a grinder, liquefies, then bakes, tears ...

You get the picture.

Brilliant, and a terrific guide to our little bit of history.

I understand, however, why Santelli backed out of appearing on the show.

Incidentally, the Flash 10 technology used here is impressive. The full screen video was very good, and played well on my now ancient G5 iMac.

Bush. Not as bad as most thought. Worse.

The Cheney/Bush torture and tyranny memos have been at least partly released: This Modern World: You think we were kidding?.

It's boring, but it still needs to be said.

If Clinton had been responsible for these policies the Party of Limbaugh would be screaming, howling, and arming barricades.

I bet we still don't know the half of it.

Absurdly close asteroid (DD45) miss

Not a Dino killer, but big enough to take out Manhattan and more (emphases mine) ...

PASADENA, Calif. — An asteroid about the size of one that leveled more than 800 square miles of forest [jf: about 40 meters diameter] in Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth. The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth when it zipped past early Monday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported...

... "This was pretty darn close," astronomer Timothy Spahr of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said Wednesday...

... Scientists at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia spotted 2009 DD45 and began tracking it in late February when it was about 1 million miles away.

Spahr said he knew within an hour of that discovery that it would pose no threat to Earth.

Of the known space rocks, the next time an object will get closer to Earth will be in 2029 when an 885-foot [jf: about 270 m] asteroid called 99942 Apophis comes within 20,000 miles, said Donald Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena...

So, yeah, it's too bad about the meltdown of world markets, but imagine if DD45 had been a wee bit closer than this ...

The astonishing thing is that we can spot these things and estimate impacts so precisely. Anophis is vastly bigger and vastly more lethal -- and it will pass even closer a mere twenty years from now. (Are we really that good at prediction? Sheesh.)

More coverage ...

Asteroids: Uh, We Almost Got Asteroided Yesterday

A 30-50 meter-wide asteroid just passed seven times closer to us than the moon, glowing so bright you could see it through a cloud. If it had hit the ocean, it would have tsunamied....

The Sydney Morning Herald says that if it had been headed toward a populated part of the world, we would have had 24 hours to act and evacuate...

To put it into perspective, here's io9's list of scariest asteroid attacks on Earth, not including this one...

I recommend the io9 list.

We really do need to be grateful at having missed this one. The galaxy is not kind; sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

Brilliant Morford rant

I was wondering how Morford could keep his wonderful rants going in a post-Bush world.

I need not have worried. This is one of his best in a while, and he whacks at the left whiners and the panicked "moderates" alike ...

Ode to the unhappy / Conservatism let you down? Obama nothing more than Bush II? Oh, you poor thing

... This is, quite possibly, the most amusing thing I am hearing from the furious fringe: That Obama's plan will wreak hell on the deficit for generations to come. It's a bit like hearing a Catholic priest scold you on the perils of child abuse. I'm sorry, did you just say that it was fine and good to rape the Treasury for the past decade and worship Big Oil and waste two trillion on a failed and useless war, but redirecting those sums into science, health care, children and alternative energy is a terrible and costly idea?...

...Which leads to the biggest question of all: Can Obama actually be both? Can he truly be a radical Muslim socialist dedicated to destroying the American ideal, and just another empty suit, a cleverly disguised corporate drone enslaved, like every president in history, by the great Matrix of the capitalist machine? Could be, could be.

There is one more option, of course. And that is: Obama, and the America that's following him so passionately right now, are neither of those things in the slightest. And the fact that his extraordinary, nation-altering agenda is right now infuriating the hard right and the hard left, exasperating the Wall Street sycophants and confounding armies of TV pundits and prognosticators, even as he inspires millions of "regular" Americans to get off their butts and do more with their lives, well, this is perhaps the truest sign of all.

When you piss off those kinds of people? You know you're onto something good....

Yes, the piss off test is one of the best.

There's no way Obama is a saint. Anyone who can thrive in American politics has to be both a Machiavellian genius and an egomaniac. What's unique about Obama is that his heritage and pigment obscured the reality that he's a brilliant geek.

America thought they were electing a "black man" and an orator. America mostly missed the fact they we were also electing a Machiavellian genius geek intellectual.

Doesn't mean he's a saint. No bloody way. Means though that we're much luckier than we deserve.

AT&T fraud - slowing the EDGE network

Speaking of fraud and the occult inflation of diminished quality, my wife's Blackberry Pearl web browser is now useless in the Twin Cities. It loads very slowly and frequently gives up.

On the other hand, my iPhone 3G performance just keeps improving.

It's not coincidental ...

AT&T slowing EDGE to force customers to switch to 3G?

.... Been holding on to that now-antique EDGE device to keep from extending your contract with AT&T? Well, if you've been experiencing some sluggishness -- and not just general EDGE sluggishness, mind you -- you might have more to blame than just those recent outages.

Open for Business reports that AT&T has been quietly lowering EDGE signal strength to give more 3G love to all you iPhone 3G and Bold users. To add to the shadiness of the situation, AT&T reps are all offering up the same solution -- buy a 3G device.

Unsurprisingly, AT&T's Mark Siegel has denied Open for Business's claims, and says that the mega-carrier is not requiring anyone to switch to a 3G phone. We'll put on our Sherlock Holmes outfits and try to do some digging, but it's not like we actually expect these guys to admit to a move that would definitely lead to a lot of backlash."

Once upon a time, in a different era, I thought we had too many lawyers and too many class action lawsuits.

Oops.

Come back lawyers! Come baaaacccckkkkk....

In the meantime, we'll see if AT&T will pony up a full discount on a new phone, and if they don't we'll open a ticket with the state Attorney General (currently Lori Swanson in Minnesota).

Sometimes these AG offices can be surprisingly effective. AT&T has been running a mobile phone rebate scam for years, but the NY AG's office (yay Cuomo!) just whacked them for it.

So when we contact Lori Swanson's Minnesota office we'll be sure to mention that we were hit by both AT&T mobile scams (EDGE and rebate card)...

What if ours were a crisis of currency and quality?

From Iceland to AIG, innovators seem to have figured out how to print money ...

Gordon's Notes: The Icelandic antidote to optimism

...Financial operators around the world seemed to have discovered a way to effectively print money, a role usually reserved for central banks and counterfeiters....

I think a mass counterfeiting operation is supposed to cause huge inflation, since there's more money chasing the same goods.

But we haven't seen that inflation.

But what if, for some reason, one couldn't raise prices? Then one would have to sell fewer goods for the same money, but make it appear they were the same goods.

That would be occult inflation, such as the occult inflation of diminishing quality. Occult inflation as seen in ...

...the pencil sharpener test for economic recovery ...

So then our crisis is not a new thing, it is a very old thing. It's the crisis that first came when smart people figured out how to adulterate silver coins ...

Update 3/5/2009: As of Mar 5, 2009 there are 7 posts hits when I search on "occult inflation" and "quality" but 2,970 when I search on "hidden inflation" and "quality" including this 1994 comment by Batara Simatupang on the Polish Economic Crisis (click to read bitmap text) ...

In an economy with rigid price controls, inflationary pressures convert to fraud and diminished quality. So in a globalized economy where prices cannot be increased ...

Perhaps some intrepid journalist might want to track down Mr. Simatupang, and ask his comments on the global economic crisis of 2008 ...

(Yes, I love the web.)

Update 3/14/09: This 2007 post is related. Lots of threads. I'd like to stick a word in here about the last few years of fraud in science and research too. It's never one thing...

What works best for lower back pain

The surprising thing about this study is that anyone thought it was surprising …

What's the best Rx for lower-back pain?: Scientific American Blog 

We did an evaluation of high quality studies on the prevention of back problem episodes in adults [and] found that, surprisingly, exercise is the only intervention that works, and other popular interventions don't work," says Stanley Bigos, emeritus professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle, and lead author of the analysis published recently in The Spine Journal. .. 

… Exercises such as lifting free weights and doing leg and trunk lifts to fortify core muscles proved effective at staving off pain, Bigos says. The studies in the review focused mainly on exercises to build muscle strength and endurance – not intense cardio workouts, but Bigos says that speed walking, cycling, and other activities that increase heart rate and improve overall fitness also benefit back health.

Only an orthopedic surgeon could be surprised by this study.

My recollection is that exercise and fitness has been considered the best way to manage lower back pain for at least fifteen years. What’s a bit more controversial is how much strengthening is really needed (and thus worth paying for). When I finally decided to rehab my own back I opted for the extreme strengthening approach of a local team – the Physicians Neck and Back Clinic.

I suspect their regimen is far beyond anything Bigos looked at, but I think they’re probably on the right trail.

The Icelandic antidote to optimism

I was feeling oddly optimistic the other day, as though we were turning the corner in the global economic meltdown.

Then I read the ubiquitous Michael Lewis in (yes) Vanity Fair – describing a world class lunacy. The lunacy of the The Rise and Fall of Iceland (emphases mine) …

Wall Street on the Tundra | vanityfair.com

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power?…

… Just after October 6, 2008, when Iceland effectively went bust, I spoke to a man at the International Monetary Fund who had been flown in to Reykjavík to determine if money might responsibly be lent to such a spectacularly bankrupt nation … a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history..

… In 2003, Iceland’s three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years they grew to over $140 billion …

… From 2003 to 2007, while the U.S. stock market was doubling, the Icelandic stock market multiplied by nine times. Reykjavík real-estate prices tripled. By 2006 the average Icelandic family was three times as wealthy as it had been in 2003, and virtually all of this new wealth was one way or another tied to the new investment-banking industry…

… When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market…

… In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.)…

… The point is reinforced by a 26-year-old Icelander I’ll call Magnus Olafsson, who, just a few weeks earlier, had been earning close to a million dollars a year trading currencies for one of the banks….

… That was the biggest American financial lesson the Icelanders took to heart: the importance of buying as many assets as possible with borrowed money, as asset prices only rose. By 2007, Icelanders owned roughly 50 times more foreign assets than they had in 2002…

… They bought stakes in businesses they knew nothing about and told the people running them what to do—just like real American investment bankers! For instance, an investment company called FL Group—a major shareholder in Glitnir bank—bought an 8.25 percent stake in American Airlines’ parent corporation…

Nor were the Icelanders particularly choosy about what they bought. I spoke with a hedge fund in New York that, in late 2006, spotted what it took to be an easy mark: a weak Scandinavian bank getting weaker. It established a short position, and then, out of nowhere, came Kaupthing to take a 10 percent stake in this soon-to-be defunct enterprise—driving up the share price to absurd levels. I spoke to another hedge fund in London so perplexed by the many bad LBOs Icelandic banks were financing that it hired private investigators to figure out what was going on in the Icelandic financial system. The investigators produced a chart detailing a byzantine web of interlinked entities that boiled down to this: A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since the entire world’s assets were rising—thanks in part to people like these Icelandic lunatics paying crazy prices for them—they appeared to be making money. Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. “They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,” says a London hedge-fund manager. “This was how the banks and investment companies grew and grew. But they were lightweights in the international markets.”

On February 3, Tony Shearer, the former C.E.O. of a British merchant bank called Singer and Friedlander, offered a glimpse of the inside, when he appeared before a House of Commons committee to describe his bizarre experience of being acquired by an Icelandic bank.

Singer and Friedlander had been around since 1907 and was famous for, among other things, giving George Soros his start. In November 2003, Shearer learned that Kaupthing, of whose existence he was totally unaware, had just taken a 9.5 percent stake in his bank. Normally, when a bank tries to buy another bank, it seeks to learn something about it. Shearer offered to meet with Kaupthing’s chairman, Sigurdur Einarsson; Einarsson had no interest… When Kaupthing raised its stake to 19.5 percent, Shearer finally flew to Reykjavík to see who on earth these Icelanders were. “They were very different,” he told the House of Commons committee. “They ran their business in a very strange way. Everyone there was incredibly young. They were all from the same community in Reykjavík. And they had no idea what they were doing.”

He examined Kaupthing’s annual reports and discovered some amazing facts: This giant international bank had only one board member who was not Icelandic, for instance. Its directors all had four-year contracts, and the bank had lent them £19 million to buy shares in Kaupthing, along with options to sell those shares back to the bank at a guaranteed profit. Virtually the entire bank’s stated profits were caused by its marking up assets it had bought at inflated prices…

… In a sane world the British regulators would have stopped the new Icelandic financiers from devouring the ancient British merchant bank. Instead, the regulators ignored a letter Shearer wrote to them. A year later, in January 2005, he received a phone call from the British takeover panel. “They wanted to know,” says Shearer, “why our share price had risen so rapidly over the past couple of days. So I laughed and said, ‘I think you’ll find the reason is that Mr. Einarsson, the chairman of Kaupthing, said two days ago, like an idiot, that he was going to make a bid for Singer and Friedlander.’” In August 2005, Singer and Friedlander became Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander, and Shearer quit, he said, out of fear of what might happen to his reputation if he stayed. In October 2008, Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander went bust…

… Icelanders—or at any rate Icelandic men—had their own explanations for why, when they leapt into global finance, they broke world records: the natural superiority of Icelanders. Because they were small and isolated it had taken 1,100 years for them—and the world—to understand and exploit their natural gifts, but now that the world was flat and money flowed freely, unfair disadvantages had vanished. Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, gave speeches abroad in which he explained why Icelanders were banking prodigies. “Our heritage and training, our culture and home market, have provided a valuable advantage,” he said, then went on to list nine of these advantages, ending with how unthreatening to others Icelanders are. (“Some people even see us as fascinating eccentrics who can do no harm.”) There were many, many expressions of this same sentiment, most of them in Icelandic. “There were research projects at the university to explain why the Icelandic business model was superior,” says Gylfi Zoega, chairman of the economics department. “It was all about our informal channels of communication and ability to make quick decisions and so forth.”

“We were always told that the Icelandic businessmen were so clever,” says university finance professor and former banker Vilhjalmur Bjarnason. “They were very quick. And when they bought something they did it very quickly. Why was that? That is usually because the seller is very satisfied with the price.”

You didn’t need to be Icelandic to join the cult of the Icelandic banker. German banks put $21 billion into Icelandic banks. The Netherlands gave them $305 million, and Sweden kicked in $400 million. U.K. investors, lured by the eye-popping 14 percent annual returns, forked over $30 billion—$28 billion from companies and individuals and the rest from pension funds, hospitals, universities, and other public institutions. Oxford University alone lost $50 million…

It’s flat out insane, and it makes me rethink the ordering of my 10 causes of the collapse of 2008. As Lewis wrote previously …

… when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”...

Financial operators around the world seemed to have discovered a way to effectively print money, a role usually reserved for central banks and counterfeiters. There’s been so much money floating around, it periodically dumps millions and billions here and there.

No wonder Geithner is very reluctant to tell us how bad things are.

Incidentally, my favorite part of the story was how the newly wealthy people of Iceland rationalized their success. I’d love to know the “nine advantages”, though I sympathize. It’s only human to assume success is merited and failure is not.

Update: In a separate article in VF Icelanders point out quite a few egregious errors in the article. Happily, the errors were in sections I didn't excerpt. Incidentally, Vanity Fair (!) has an article entitled Madoff's World. It deserves to be read alongside the Iceland story to get the full flavor of our era.

Apple again delivering value for the dollar

Last January Apple's value proposition was out of whack -- with the sole exception of their almost invisible plastic MacBook ...

Gordon's Notes: iMacs are expensive

We'd like to reorg our home office. That means I need at least the same computing capability in half the space.

The best way to do that is to ditch my 5 yo big-old XP box and monitor, and replace it with a 24" iMac that will run Fusion/XP and OS X, using the monitor as a 2nd display...

Problem is, that will cost me about $2,400 with appropriate RAM.

Or I could get a Mac Mini and forgo the 2nd display. There the price is quite good, but the memory capacity and processor speed are currently on the low side -- and rumor is that the next generation will sacrifice CPU to make the Mini smaller and cooler. Of course Apple will also drop the firewire connection, so performance will take another big hit.

I'd buy a more powerful Mac Mini that would sell for, say $800 base and $1000 or so with 4GB. I'd attach an external firewire hard drive and/or a NAS....

So how's the Mac Mini look today?

If I use Apple's memory (historically costly, now reasonable) I can get

• 4 GB RAM
• Firewire 800*
• 2 GHz Core 2 Duo
• iLife '09

for $750 (list, direct from Apple Store).

Well, I'm impressed. That's $250 less than what I thought would be good value in January.

And an iMac with 4GB and 24" display? At $1,500 my desired machine is $900 less than it was two months ago.

That's aggressive pricing for my "market of one".

* So is Apple admitting they made a mistake dropping Firewire from the MacBooks without at least offering USB 3?

Update 3/3/09: The bargain iMac doesn't have a dedicated GPU; in that regard it's a step back from the the $2,400 Jan price. So it's not really a $900 savings for the same machine; maybe it's a $700 saving. Still, pretty darned good. I'm curious as to whether Snow Leopard will be able to make use of the GPU computing engine on the $1,500 iMac.

Update 5/3/09: It's not clear how well Aperture runs on the lower tier iMacs. The more I look at them the less impressive they seem. Apple fooled me on this one.

Against the crash - why I'm optimistic

Just a few months ago Paul Krugman thought 2010 looked pretty good...

Krugman - Life Without Bubbles - Dec 2008

... Late next year the economy should begin to stabilize, and I’m fairly optimistic about 2010....

Not so much recently ...

Failing the test - Paul Krugman Blog - Mar 2 2009

It’s a depressing spectacle: on both sides of the Atlantic, policy-makers just keep falling short — and the odds that this slump really will turn into Great Depression II keep rising.

In Europe, leaders rejected pleas for a comprehensive rescue plan for troubled East European economies..

... Oh, and Jean-Claude Trichet says that there is no deflation threat in Europe...

... On this side of the Atlantic, Tim Geithner seems committed to the view that banks should stay private even if they’re bankrupt, because — well, just because...

Personally, I'm strangely optimistic. I even suspect Krugman is more optimistic than he seems -- he has to keep the heat on because he can. I don't have to worry about misusing influence.

So where does the optimism come from?

Quickly ...

• Yes, the big banks and most of Wall Street was crazed and stupid, and we're funneling money from the worst to the almost as bad. On the other hand, although much value was illusory, some people won real things. So at the end of the day who's far ahead, in real terms, of where they were in 1994? China, Russia and India. That's a lot of poverty alleviated, and a lot of creativity engaged.
• Based on share price we're more or less back in 1997. Does anyone think our productive and global capacity is the same as 1997? No bloody way. Shares were a bit out of line in 1997, but they didn't go crackers until 1999. Today shares are underpriced.
• There's a huge amount of technological innovation in the pipeline, and we're going to need it to survive climate changes and population explosion. So there's innovation supply, huge innovation demand, and work to do.
• We've only begun to exploit the power of computing and communications technology. We're roughly at the same stage as early electrification or the early telephone. The big gains are ahead.
• The world is more or less at peace these days.
• Obama. Damn, we didn't deserve that piece of luck.
• The causes of the crash are fixable: My best take is that there were at least 10 reinforcing contributing factors. In other words, the crash of 2008, like murder and abortion rates and mega-terrorism, was a non-linear (chaotic system) outcome. It's not fully predictable, but, given the reinforcing causes it was highly likely. That means, like murder rates, it can reverse course dramatically.
• Marketarianism: Sure, I mock the Marketarians and their mystical belief in the power of markets to solve problems. On the other hand, we're in the territory where self-preservation and markets tend to line up. Krugman isn't in a position to say "we don't understand the economic system we exist in", but since I know far less about economics (but perhaps more about humility?) I can say that. We don't understand the vastly complex world economic system. That leaves some room for Marketarian optimism.
• The X-Factor: I really don't see how a swarming nest of violent primates survived the development of fusion weapons. There's clearly something going on here I don't get.
• Limbaugh and the Party of Limbaugh are outraged by Obama's fixes. So they must be good.
  

So color me optimistic.

Dow 9000 by November 2009.

Hydrotouring via Lunocet

Why not?

Dolphin-Inspired Man-Made Fin Works Swimmingly: Scientific American

.... Using the Lunocet, some swimmers are close to being able to breach completely out of the water, like whales. Ciamillo envisions a new high-speed, free-diving community of swimmers united around 'hydrotouring': long-distance swimming expeditions using Lunocets to cover dozens of miles a day, with participants carrying streamlined, waterproof packs containing only a global positioning system (GPS), satellite phone, and enough food and water for a few nights on shore...

What did the GOP lose besides the election?

Talking Points Memo | Non-Custodial Visits?

Dems gloat after Rush awards himself sole custody of Steele's testicles.

Ok, so maybe Olympia Snowe still has a testicle or two. The rest of the party sings soprano now.

St Paul Pioneer Press listed on the next 10 to die list

My home town paper slips onto the list next to biggies like the SF Chronicle and the LA Times ...

The Next 9 Newspapers To Die

...St. Paul Pioneer Press – Circulation: 184,973 (3% decrease since 2007)...

Minneapolis, our sister city, has the Star Tribune. It's bankrupt of course, but for the moment it only has to outlive the Pioneer Press.

Both papers are a shadow of their former selves.

In my Canadian childhood we had record players, tape recorders, carbon paper, broadcast ad-supported television, VCRs, pay phones, pay toilets (!) and I delivered 3 different varieties of heavy newspaper by bicycle (I must have been stronger than I remember).

All anachronisms (nobody misses the pay toilets).

It's absurd to schlep newsprint from printer to doorstep. I personally won't miss the end of the newspaper.

The trick will be to kill the newspaper but, somehow, preserve the business of written news.

When giants walked the earth ...

Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, Nobile ... not the same breed as me ...

Looking for Amundsen - NYTimes.com

... In March 1912, before it was clear that Amundsen had beat Scott to the South Pole (and that Scott had died after reaching it), the explorer Ernest Shackleton sent a cable to The Times, wondering whether Amundsen had marched to the pole “in northern furs or in the light, windproof burberry that we found successful.” The answer was northern furs. In the end, the most important equipment for all these explorers was their indomitability.

What will we learn if Amundsen’s plane is found? Where things went wrong and perhaps also what. The tribute we pay to great explorers is to send other explorers out in search of them. That’s how it is for Amundsen. As for Nobile, he was eventually rescued and died at the age of 93 in 1978.

Pages for the scrapbook - NYT Business page this morning

A few clippings for the digital scrapbook from Business and Financial News - Mar 2nd 2009 - The New York Times...

 

I like to read history, but I prefer not to live history.