SAN FRANCISCO — Federal authorities accused William Del Biaggio III, 41, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and part owner of the Nashville Predators hockey team, of defrauding investors and using the money to buy his $25 million stake in the professional sports team.

S.E.C. Charges Venture Capitalist With Fraud - NYTimes.com

When I was in the minor leagues, I had the brilliant idea to work for some extra spending change over the holidays. So I took a job at a Barnes and Noble in North Jersey. (Although I was a first-round bonus baby, we only made $850 a month my first pro season, which was quite a shock.) I had an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania, so in many respects I was considered overqualified for my job as a cashier. Still, I figured I was a ballplayer who was keeping busy and making some Christmas money.

That was until a guy walked into the store wearing a Penn Engineering hat. He was young, maybe a sophomore, and when I told him that I had graduated from the engineering school, his face fell. Then I pieced it together: I had shaken his hope for getting a job commensurate to his Ivy-league degree.

But I was only doing what ballplayers do in the off-season: something that makes no sense whatsoever.

Op-Extra Guest Columnist - Heading Home - The Endless (Off-) Season - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

2. Perhaps we vote in the same spirit in which we buy lottery tickets. After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

Why Vote? - New York Times

GREAT cornering and eye-popping acceleration make Porsche’s cars popular among thrill-seeking bankers and hedge-fund managers. Now its clients are discovering that the carmaker itself has an unexpected talent for cornering markets. In a few tumultuous days it is thought to have made a cool €6 billion-12 billion ($7.5 billion-15 billion) on the share price of Volkswagen (VW)—a coup that has roiled the world’s financial markets.nullnullnull

Porsche breaks the hedge funds | Squeezy money | The Economist

Satellites are achieving unparalleled efficiency with a new protocol, DVB-S2. The performance of DVB-S2 satellite systems is very close to the theoretical maximum, defined by the Shannon Limit. That efficiency could be pushed even further by network optimisation tools and equipment recently developed by European researchers.

Satellites approach the Shannon limit

“Any modification to the exterior or electronics requires new certification,” Mr. Zornetzer said. So the Googlers brought in the fighter jet. “The Alpha Jet they are bringing on board is considered an experimental aircraft, so we don’t have the same issues as with a passenger plane,” he added.

Mr. Zornetzer said the Alpha Jet will spend most of the next few months in Seattle being converted from military to civilian use.

Google Founders’ Fighter Jet Will Fly NASA Missions - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

What a difference three months can make. In late July, we thought we could solve the housing crisis in a revenue-neutral way. Parts of the "Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008" are brilliantly constructed. However, in order to get the bill passed and signed into law, the sponsors agreed to compromises and contortions that make it almost unworkable. It is time to fix those flaws.nullnullnullnullnullnull

John H. Vogel Jr.: Share the Pain: How to Deal with the Housing Crisis

Silver doesn’t know all that much about high finance; these days, he’s spending most of his energy on his political Website, FiveThirtyEight (the total number of Electoral College votes), where he uses data analysis to track and interpret political polls and project the outcome of November’s election.

I am really enjoying FiveThirtyEight (and not just because it comforts me about the direction of the voting).

And as more and more people started wondering who he was, in May, Silver decided to unmask himself. To most people, the fact that Poblano turned out to be a guy named Nate Silver meant nothing. But to anyone who follows baseball seriously, this was like finding out that a guy anonymously running a high-fashion Website turned out to be Howard Cosell.

How Nate Silver Went From Forecasting Baseball Games to Forecasting Elections -- New York Magazine

From the man who both presidential candidates indicated as a plausible Secretary (...as if). Mr. Buffett makes another attempt at being the JP Morgan for this depression.

So ... I’ve been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I’m talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but United States government bonds. (This description leaves aside my Berkshire Hathaway holdings, which are all committed to philanthropy.) If prices keep looking attractive, my non-Berkshire net worth will soon be 100 percent in United States equities.

Op-Ed Contributor - Buy American. I Am. - NYTimes.com

Claims of widespread sleep deprivation in western society are nothing new - in 1894, the British Medical Journal ran an editorial warning that the "hurry and excitement" of modern life was leading to an epidemic of insomnia.

Even then it probably wasn't true. The fact is that most adults get enough sleep, and our collective sleep debt, if it exists at all, has not worsened in recent times.

Despite my best efforts, even post-sleep apnea I tend to fall into weird patterns. Lately I have found it harder to sleep in on weekends than weekdays; I don't know what that means.

Time to wake up to the facts about sleep - being-human - 16 October 2008 - New Scientist