Daniel Lubetzky

In spite of efforts by the High Fructose Corn Syrup Lobby to allege otherwise, more and more evidence is coming in linking it to the obesity and diabetes epidemics.  A new study shows it can lead to leptin resistance.

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From an email I got…

It’s ironic that these guys are more insightful than Paulson et al about exposing the idiocy of the market abuses and follies.

And these comedians highlighted this half a year before the Wall Street pundits…

See also this excellent one:

Lost in Translation…

Some neat things at the office of the Sundance Film Institute:

A Collection of Waters from Seas Across the World

A Museum Exhibit of Airplane Barf Bags

A Politically-Correct Moose Head – inflatable

From an article in the New York Times quoting George Dyson:

Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth.

And:

“The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good,” George Dyson writes. “The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments.”

Also fascinating from the same article:

Here’s a frightening party trick that I learned from the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:

But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. … Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto.

Yes, Theodore Kaczinski was a homicidal psychopath and a paranoid kook, but he was also a bloodhound when it came to scenting all of the horrors technology holds in store for us. Hence his mission to kill technologists before machines commenced what he believed would be their inevitable reign of terror.

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Is it just me, or are these logos clearly like Hebrew letters?

They are supposed to be icons for Exchange, Powerpoint, Word, and Excel.   But they have very little connection to that.

They are NOT supposed to be connected to hebrew letters – pei, kuf, shin, and alef. But they are identical to that…

I got this over email and thought it was funny:

Here is an interesting article about the new frontier of automated trading. Algorithms tracking and reacting to market moves are no longer ‘fast enough.’ Increasingly, algorithms aggregate raw sentiments from newspapers and blogs and issues orders based on them, bypassing human interpretation.

The system may indeed be at the cutting edge, but it is dangerously susceptible to easy manipulation. You can imagine the next wave of robo-crawlers artificially pumping up a news story designed to highlight a false vulnerability that will depress shares of a sector or stock that the manipulator shorted. Very dangerous.

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Amr Hamzawi provided an unusually frank self-admonition in Al Ahram Weekly about writing what his audience wanted to read, rather than what he truly felt, resorting to common scapegoats (ie, the West) rather than piercing through tougher truths.  This problem is particularly acute amongst Arab academicians and commentators, but it plagues all societies to some degree, and the advent of the internet has in a sense actually exacerbated the phenomena of media sources that "affirm" rather than "inform" beliefs.

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