Insuring against the end of the world

A fascinating development ...

Credit protection madness - Paul Krugman - NYTimes.com

Marketwatch reports:

The cost of buying protection against the risk that the United States will default on its mounting debt has surged in the past months, outpacing the rise in corporate-credit costs, now that the government has absorbed more private-sector debt...

... the people buying these contracts are crazy. A world in which the US government defaults would be a world in chaos; how likely is it that these contracts would be honored?..

The fundamentals are insane, yet "serious" people are offering this product. The comments on the post are quite good, particularly this one by "TC":

The price of CDS on the US may not necessarily be driven by outright purchases of CDS on the US. Rather, these contracts are often used as part of more complex arbitrage strategies. This could cause the price of a CDS contract to deviate from theoretical fair value by a significant amount...

So this development is fascinating because ...

• In the esoteric world of finance 2.0 there's an angle from which this "makes sense" -- probably the same angle used by AIG's wizards in 2007.
• The people who are selling this know they'll never have to pay out -- because if the US collapsed we'd be using seeds as currency.
• There exist buyers who are either speculators betting on delusional customers or currently delusional customers.

So it's a bit of a mini-review of the past year in one news report.

The Apple Chromestellation Netbook: OS X mobile + Safari + MobileMe. What role AT&T?

Peter Burrows almost has it right. He forgets that the iTouch is running OS X (albeit a strange spinoff of 10.x at this time) but he's close ...

The Big Question About The Rumored Apple NetBook: Will It Run MacOS? - Peter Burrows BusinessWeek

Dow Jones Newswires is confirming reports yesterday that Apple plans to introduce a Netbook. The story says that Taiwanese display maker Wintek Corp. is providing 9.7 to 10 inch screens to huge PC contract manufacturer Quanta Computer, and that the device will be on the market in the second half of the year.

.. One good guess is that it’s the world’s biggest iPod Touch, rather than the world’s smallest Mac. Such a device would not run the MacOS ... better for browsing the Net and watching your movies and such via iTunes, not to mention less demanding games and other graphically-oriented programs found on the App Store. And if the device had a real keyboard...

Everyone's responding, as they should, to the collapse of the laptop pricepoint and to the coming Google branded Chromestellation netbook. Microsoft will give away a Netbook version of Windows 7 tied to Windows Live, so what will Apple do?

A zillion people have noted that the Apple iTouch is basically a keyboard-free $230 small display netbook, now with about 25,000 App Store applications including the Amazon Kindle.

Add a keyboard and a bigger display and Apple has a $300 Netbook with a browser that uses the same AppKit engine that powers Chromestellation. This can compete with a $200 generic Linux netbook.

Apple also has a currently feeble (albeit slowly improving) online companion - MobileMe. They also have something called AppleTV with video distribution via another product called, I think, "iTunes".

So it seems Apple can't help but sell an iTouch/Netbook with media distribution and, probably, a tie to MobileMe.

The interesting question is what role AT&T or other mobile carriers might play. What does Apple's AT&T contract let them do? Will Apple and AT&T sell a carrier-subsidized MobileMe bound Netbook with embedded GSM 3G wireless? Will there be special prices for bulk school purchases? Will school books start being sold electronically via Amazon for display on the MacNetbook Kindle.app?

We should know by the 2009 back to school buying season.

Gordon's 2nd law of happiness

Gordon's 1st law of happiness : "The secret of happiness is ... editing."

Gordon's 2nd law of happiness: "As soon as you're ahead, declare victory."

Good news for the gray of hair

The other day I teased my 7 yo. "What do you mean Dad has gray hair?!" I said for the benefit of a bystander. She replied, "It's not gray, it's gray-white".

So this is good news ...

Well - Unlocking the Secrets of Gray Hair - NYTimes.com

... Notably, scientists haven’t found a link between signs of aging in hair and real aging in the body. A major study of 20,000 men and women in Copenhagen looked for any links between heart-disease mortality and physical signs of aging like gray hair, baldness and facial wrinkles. They found none.

“People with premature graying of the hair don’t die any sooner than anybody else,” said Dr. Leo M. Cooney, professor and chief of geriatrics at Yale University School of Medicine. “I think the study shows that gray hair has something to with your genetics and very little to do with premature aging...

Obama replies to Buffett - change can't wait

Warren Buffett recently complained that the Obama administration is trying to do too many things at once, that they should simply focus on the economy.

This reads like a reply ...

The White House - Blog Post - Taking on Education

In the opening of his speech today at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the President met critics head on who complain of too much change, too fast:

Every so often, throughout our history, a generation of Americans bears the responsibility of seeing this country through difficult times and protecting the dream of its founding for posterity. This is a responsibility that has fallen to our generation. Meeting it will require steering our nation’s economy through a crisis unlike any we have seen in our time. In the short-term, that means jumpstarting job creation, re-starting lending, and restoring confidence in our markets and our financial system. But it also means taking steps that not only advance our recovery, but lay the foundation for lasting, shared prosperity.

I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time. They forget that Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of Civil War. Likewise, President Roosevelt didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war. President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon. And we don’t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.

The Kennedy comparison is unfortunate, maybe he probably should have paid more attention to Vietnam and less to the moon landing.

I trust Obama on this one. Bush and the GOP laid waste to much more than most people imagine. We're on a boat with a thousand leaks, we can't patch them one at a time.

Americans who don't like this should have voted for Al Gore in 2000.

PS. On reflection, I think America is now discovering that they've elected a geeky intellectual who meant what he said. That must be unsettling.

Influencing the world - a ranking

Technorati has published a list of The 50 Publishers That Blogs Link To Most. Excluding YouTube (#1) here are the next ten or so (emphases mine, I assume this excludes Chinese blogs?).

1. New York Times
2. BBC News
3. CNN.com
4. MSN
5. guardian.co.uk
6. Washington Post
7. Yahoo! News
8. Reuters
9. Los Angeles Times
10. Telegraph.co.uk
11. MSNBC
12. The Wall Street Journal

The WSJ is behind a paywall, so it's not surprising it ranks relatively low. The NYT may be more or less bankrupt, but at #1 I don't think it's going away.

Yahoo News is just an aggregator of course, but it reminds us how much traffic Yahoo! gets. Google News isn't nearly as prominent.

Note how highly The Guardian ranks. They've really been up and coming over the past year, rising to become a major world paper. I read their feeds - excellent stuff. Between the BBC, The Guardian and The Telegraph the UK is still a big player in the English language market.

Be good to see a curve to find out how quickly things fall off after the top five or so. I'd guess pretty darned quickly ...

Is Google search becoming less effective? Is it Google, or the net?

It's just a feeling, but lately my Google searches seem to be less effective.

When I search on topics I get large volumes of "me too" news and announcement blog postings, but fewer results that contain real knowledge or insight [1] It's not so much that I get obvious splog sites, more lots of boring results.

Anyone else wondering about this?

If it's real, then, like most things in the world, I suspect some multi-factorial cause.

I wonder if Google is currently losing the war with spam and spam blogs; if they've been forced to retune their algorithms in a direction that makes them less useful.

Maybe people who used to contribute insight are doing something else. Maybe they're wasting time on Twitter [2] or starting new businesses or digging gardens in case Limbaugh's dreams of national failure come true [4].

Maybe Google is cutting back on the depth of their searches to save money. I've noticed a sharp drop in how well they index my personal contributions [3]. Perhaps by emphasizing the topical and recent they're reducing the value of their search engines.

Perhaps it's simply the gloomy weather and the annihilation of the world economy. Could be. Or could be something really is wrong.

I'm hoping it's just a passing ailment, but for the first time in ten years I'm going to see if other search engines are giving better results.

[1] When I search on tech topics, and keep finding my own tech.kateva.org posts in the top 10 even with "personal search" turned off, something is weird (the site has only a mediocre page rank).

[2] Yes, I'm now a freshly minted Twitter-value skeptic. I've come off the fence. Twitter reminds me of the Segway -- good, but vastly overhyped. Remember the Segway hype during the crash of 2000? Anyone remember the crash of 2000?

[3] Which, by definition, must contain lots of insight and not, say, be unworthy.

[4] The blogs I follow continue to be insightful, but their volume is down significantly. So I do think there's some input volume reduction in addition to possible quality and search issues.

The nature of time - essential reading for reality hobbyists

Are you an amateur epistemontologist? Curious about the nature of reality? Not willing to accept the illusions of the senses?

Then you've got reading ...

The Envelope Please… | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

The results are in for the Foundational Questions Institute essay competition on “The Nature of Time,” which we discussed here. And the winners are:

... Julian Barbour on “The Nature of Time”

... Claus Kiefer on “Does Time Exist in Quantum Gravity?”

... Sean Carroll on “What if Time Really Exists?”...

Love it.

Why we need a reformed GOP: Helping small business

Amidst all the stimulus package discussions, I haven't heard anything much about helping small business -- much less anything like my proposal for a national small business generation service.

The good news is that Obama is pressing for affordable healthcare coverage. That will be a big help for small businesses and start-ups.

Still, this is the sort of cause Republicans used to care about. In the 90s the GOP, instead of voting as a block against the stimulus package, would have pressed for small business support.

Not so much now.

Another reason why we need a replacement for the Party of Limbaugh.

The Machiavellian Dems ...

It's true. We've been studying The Prince (free for iPhone btw).

Charles Blow - Three Blind Mice - NYTimes.com

... The Democrats know the Republicans are afraid to confront and disavow Limbaugh, so they keep poking him, and he keeps snapping like a rabid dog. This is a brilliant bit of Machiavellian strategy on the part of the Democrats. (I didn’t know that they had it in them.)..

Alright, I'll confess. This strategy was so obvious it just emerged. It didn't take any cleverness to come up with.

Sigh. We commie-pinkos-liberal-socialists know it's bad. It's bad because we're toying with people, which is certainly not nice -- and we do so want to be nice.

On the other hand, it's such fun. And now the Party of Limbaugh is supposed to be "Going Galt", which is taking comic timing to a whole new level.

We need to stop soon. Really. It's bad for us. Besides, we know the nation desperately needs a reformed GOP or, and this will take too long, a new party to replace the GOP.

Poking Limbaugh isn't helping the GOP reform.

Or maybe it is.

Poke.

BTW. Charles Blow has a NYT blog, and it's quite good.

Misreading Atlas Shrugged

Pompous idiots of America, who are so innumerate they can’t grasp the concept of marginal tax rates, and so ill read they can’t remember Clinton era taxation, have decided to  ‘Go Galt’ in retaliation for … ummm … something.

It’s all so much fun, nearly as much fun as watching the Party of Limbaugh kiss the bum of the Great Bellow. Just imagine Malkin and her kin greeting winter in some Wyoming retreat …

It gets better. I’m told, by a reliable source who refuses to let me use her name, that this isn’t only hysterically funny, it’s also sadly ironic.

Allegedly, the needy adults (no children or disabled persons in Rand’s world) and politicians where not the most despicable characters in Atlas Shrugged. The worst of the worst were corrupt businessmen who bought politicians and sold fraudulent goods to credulous dupes.

The villains, in other words, were the corporate titans of Wall Street Malkin and Limbaugh worship. The Heroes would be more like Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett – major Obama supporters.

Alas, I can’t verify this personally. I don’t deny Rand, though a certified loon, nonetheless had some marvelous insights – but I can’t stand her writing.

Can anyone confirm my source’s recollection? I should add that on matters of this sort I’ve never known her to be wrong.

Netbook doom - Google drops a hammer

The shark's fin has breached the surface. Emphases mine (thanks Andrew):

Google boss backs subsidized Linuxbooks • The Register

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hinted that his company - or at least its partners - will one day subsidize the purchase of extra-low-cost Linux netbooks in an effort to promote the use of its myriad cloud online services.

"What's particularly interesting about netbooks is the price point," Google's Willy Wonka told a room full of financial types this afternoon at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in downtown San Francisco. "Eventually, it will make sense for operators and so forth to subsidize the use of netbooks so they can make services revenue and advertising revenue on the consumption. That's another new model that's coming."

Schmidt called netbooks the "next generation" of the low-cost machines produced by Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. "Products today are not completely done. Things are missing. It's perfectly possible that operating systems that are Linux-based will become a significant player in that space, whereas they have historically not been a significant player in the PC space...

..... Such devices could rule the world, Schmidt said, because cloud online apps are the future. "Cloud computing is one of those changes that are going to happen - regardless of whether or not companies in the ecosystem want it to," he said. "IT systems today are so slow in the way that they evolve...We now have an opportunity to build a whole new generation of applications that cycle much faster.".....

Good reporting to this point, but the Reg is dead wrong with this prediction ...

... If Google taps into this plan, you'd have to assume that Googlicious netbooks will be sold by someone other than Google. As the company has shown with its open-source Android mobile stack, Google prefers to keep the direct-sales biz at arm's length...

Right. And Android has been a great hardware success.

Google will not manufacture, but Google will specify and they will brand their Netbook. It's the Google brand that will boost the price just enough to get in minimal quality. Google will be responsible for the entire experience, they can't leave this up to bottom line hardware vendors.

Google has a Data Liberation team

I discover via Google OS that Google has a "Data Liberation team".

Who knew?

Luke Blanshard is a member ...

Gmail Email filter export

... Posted by Luke Blanshard, Software Engineer and member of the Data Liberation team

He looks like a respectable guy, though I didn't realize Google hired people who are *cough* around my age.

Turns out, he's not entirely alone (unless the Front and the Team are different ...)

Google Blog Converters

By J.J. Lueck, Data Liberation Front

This is why I love Google. They understand the evil power of "data lock" and have decided to explicitly oppose it ...

...... We build a very good targeting engine and a lot of business success has come from that. We run the company around the users–so as long as we are respecting the rights of end users and make sure we don’t do anything against their interest, we are fine,” Schmidt said. He noted that history has shown that the downfall of companies can be doing things for their own self interest. “We would never trap user data,” he said....

This "Data Liberation" thingie may be a bit covert (is it a two person org?), but I want a T-shirt anyway.

Long live the Data Liberation Front (team)!

Update 3/8/09: Thanks to a semi-anonymous comment and another by Luke Blanshard I now know ...

• Luke is much younger than me.
• The DLF lives in the capital of fly-over land (Chicago), just down the road from me (Twins)
  
• the DLF has a tweeter (I'm a follower ...)
  
• the DLF has a goals statement:

Liberate data across web services.

Make that data portable across cooperating web services.

Allow users to own their own data which is submitted to the Cloud.

Do anything else to allow users to have fine-grained, easy access, and control of their data

Slate asks why no 9/11 repeat?

I suspect it's several things, including luck, al Qaeda alienating all their dangerous geeks, and a lot of military and police action.

Why not luck? We had awful luck on 9/11 -- there were many ways the attacks could have failed. Luck can be good too.

Slate asks the question of "experts": Why hasn't America been attacked since 9/11? - By Timothy Noah.

Quantum madness. Chapter IX.

Lovecraft was wrong.

Madness is not to be taught at Nyarlathotep Academy, it to found in the contemplation of the quantum ...

Quantum physics and reality | I'm not looking, honest! | The Economist

... In the 1990s a physicist called Lucien Hardy proposed a thought experiment that makes nonsense of the famous interaction between matter and antimatter—that when a particle meets its antiparticle, the pair always annihilate one another in a burst of energy. Dr Hardy’s scheme left open the possibility that in some cases when their interaction is not observed a particle and an antiparticle could interact with one another and survive. Of course, since the interaction has to remain unseen, no one should ever notice this happening, which is why the result is known as Hardy’s paradox.

This week Kazuhiro Yokota of Osaka University in Japan and his colleagues demonstrated that Hardy’s paradox is, in fact, correct...

Update: To be fair to physics, I dimly believe that "unseen" is a bit of an overstatement -- just about any interaction with the universe will collapse these indeterminate states.