Canonical

via Robert Reich:

…President Obama’s “attack” on private equity is neither a personal attack on Mitt Romney nor a generalized attack on American business.

It’s an attack on a particular kind of capitalism… Using other peoples’ money to make big bets which, if they go wrong, can wreak havoc on the economy. It’s the substitution of casino capitalism for real capitalism, the dominance of… financial innovation rather than product innovation. It’s been terrible for the American economy and for our democracy…

The JPMorgan Chase debacle would have been prevented if the Volcker Rule were sufficiently strict, prohibiting banks from using commercial deposits to make bets, except on a narrow class of trades.

As a practical matter, the Volcker Rule is hopeless. It was intended to be Glass-Steagall lite — a more nuanced version of the original Depression-era law that separated commercial from investment banking. But JPMorgan has proven that any nuance — any exception — will be stretched beyond recognition by the big banks.

There’s no alternative but to resurrect Glass-Steagall as a whole.

Even then, the biggest banks are still too big to fail or to regulate. We also need to heed the recent advice of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve…

Emphasis mine, and particularly this:

Resurrect Glass-Steagall

technoccult:

In my rant about the new aesthetic of the future, I complained that there were few, if any, genuinely new visions of the future coming out of science fiction. Post-cyberpunk Author Neal Stephenson has been complaining about the lack of innovation in science fiction. Sci-fi author Charlie Stross …

Charlie Stross was more innovative, no, let’s just try “clairvoyant” about the near future than I would have ever thought possible.

How many people had any foreboding about Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991? Well, probably some people in military intelligence, the United Nations and human rights advocacy groups. “The Taqrit Horror” (a term used by Stross in his science fiction) was hardly visible in mainstream Western (or most other) media in the late 1980’s. Yet Charlie Stross wrote A Colder War (full text) a short story, well, more of a novella,  about it. It is one of the scariest works of near-future science fiction I have ever read. There are heavy Lovecraftian overtones.

Stross contributes regularly to a blog-of-sorts. It is good reading, even though it isn’t science fiction.

Young Oiran and her Cat by ~Cushi-Wu

I like ukiyo-e so much.

This is in the style of Utamaro Kitagawa. Utamaro often chose people as subjects, rather than nature scenes.

gregmelander:

SLIGHT WIGGLE

A slight wiggle definitely grabs your attention, even more than a big wiggle actually. :)

It is true. A slight wiggle is captivating, every time.

I just wish this particular polyhedron were somewhat more symmetric. It looks lopsided, whether it truly is or not. However, the delightful wiggle eclipses any possible  shortcomings.

Get your fill of tumblr hipsters.

Full plate, main course or side-dish, it’s your choice.

via the not-so-plain PlainFlavored.

Open data is a wonderful thing!

Yet this may be better, or equally wonderful:

A Guide to Making Data Meaningful

The Making Data Meaningful guides are intended as a practical tool to help managers, statisticians and media relations officers in statistical organizations use text, tables, charts, maps and other devices to bring statistics to life for non-statisticians.

First there is a guide about writing well-motivated stories with numbers (as opposed to abstractions). This guide is written in four languages, English, Spanish, Croatian and Japanese. A very important distinction should be made though. The versions that are not written in English were actually written by Spanish, Croatian and Japanese statisticians, not translators!

Next is a guide, in the same four languages, about how to prepare effective tables, charts, maps, and other forms of visualizations, with many examples. A highlight:

It offers advice on how to avoid bad or misleading visual presentations.

The third guide book in the series will help producers of statistics to get their message across, and communicate effectively with the media.

Attention to detail

All three books in the series are available, for free, as PDF downloads from the website. However, they are ALSO available in print version, free of charge. No self-addressed, stamped envelope is required. Postage is provided, courtesy of the UNECE, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.

What more could one ask for?

IMG_0009 by robennals on Flickr.

Spectacular Chihuly at the DeYoung Museum in September 2008

The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations … 

Reader submitted photograph (front jacket cover) for Amazon listing of N.N. Taleb’s The Black Swan, First Edition, April 2007.

I noticed this today. It is the entire first chapter of N.N. Taleb’s The Black Swan as it appeared in The New York Times in April 2007. It remains a worthwhile read,  particularly since it is free!

I have mixed opinions about the entire body of Taleb’s body of work. That will follow in my next post, which I wrote over on Blog Central some time ago.

The Web Malware Collection Project

A collection of web application backdoors and malware, in PHP, JSP, ASP, etc. 

cabbagebot:

I used the jQuery diet plugin and lost 10kg in a week

vivekhaldar:

At just the right time, the cloud cover actually let us see the solar eclipse with naked eyes.

dhotson:

A 25th Anniversary GIF Mashup set to 8-bit Dubstep | Off Book | PBS by PBSoffbook

A more accurate description is a virtual S/360, or rather, System 390.

Lars, the kindly webmaster of beagle-ears.com, recounts the history of the IBM systems 360, 370, 3090 and 390, otherwise known as mainframes or Big Iron. He describes the open-source, free (though not supported) Hercules simulator for systems z/OS, for Linux. 

Of course, it is VM rather than MVS, for developers.

UPDATE

I just noticed the the footer on Lars’  webpage:

$Log: ibm360.htm,v $
Revision 1.7  2001/10/26 13:28:00 lars
Replaced CMC -> Beagle-Ears

Yes, that was the most recent update to the page, in October 2001. There is a great deal of interesting content though. Unfortunately, many of the links no longer work, which is hardly a surprise. 

This was a surprise: An extremely active Yahoo Group (founded in October 1999) with over 6600 members, busy bringing Hercules 390 up to spec. It is a fully open source project. 

hercules-390 · Discussion group for users of the Hercules ESA/390 mainframe emulator

The heading for the most recent message of 17 May 2012 made me smile … a lot:

Build Hercules tcp/ip on Apple MAC OS X 10.7.4?

could you give me some direction? Any help will be appriecated.

It is only satire, not real. Not for now.

News Corp announced yesterday that it has acquired the troubled Oxford English Dictionary and its struggling holding company The Entire English Language LLC, which is in receivership, giving the media conglomerate exclusive rights to more than 995,000 English words. An exultant Rupert Murdoch… explained: “Every bozo is chasing digital content on a dozen platforms, but we’ve gone in the exact opposite direction to grab the ultimate root menu: the language all that content’s written in. Which we now own.” 

Yes, that would mean paying a per-word fee, based on frequency of usage and difficulty of spelling…

summoning-ifrit:

The Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, c. 1477-1482; a classic example of Italian Renaissance painting.

via FT Alphaville: On the plus side, no Mongol invasions in Europe this year

Gorgeous timelapse of European state-making, 1000-2003:

Does it, er, say anything about the eurozone or sovereign finances in 2012? Yeah we think so - if only to remind that it took centuries to make little fiscal unions all over Europe.

evgenymorozov:

The essay below runs in the April 5 issue of the London Review of Books. I post it here for educational purposes only!

==

In Your Face

Evgeny Morozov

Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance by Kelly Gates

NYU Press, 261 pp, £15.99, March…

adamlaiacano:

Drew Conway and John Myles White posted the code used in their O’Reilly book Machine Learning for Email on github. Check it out to see implementations (all in R) of priority inbox, spam classification, and other algorithms.

undergroundeconomist:

For the past several years, a surplus of other people’s ideas has been a recurring theme in my life. I knew one guy who was writing down his ideas constantly as if they were worth a fortune, then dutifully opening bugs for each and every one. These bugs would then languish in the bug tracking…