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

A Memestreams Feature Request: integrate with Twitter. I'm sure plenty of us use twitter on a frequent basis. For me, I somehow ended up making twitter the center of my contact universe: I rarely log into facebook, because my tweets go there; I rarely have the attention these days to post to livejournal, and so my tweets are consolidated there. I know that my audiences there are listening to my tweets, and keep that in mind.

But I like the memestreams update/reputation system. I don't necessarily have an audience here that I care about more than facebook, or livejournal, or twitter, but I like the tools and I like the stuff that percolates to the front page (which, of course, I read on livejournal via rss).

Anyway, when I update here with a link, it is normally something of Interest to me that would probably be my interest to the rest of the people who casually read my feeds. But fewer people are subscribed to my syndicated rss feed on livejournal, and that's not always an overlap with twitter, etc.

Most blog platforms these days have integration with Twitter (see a list of wordpress tools). I could (and maybe just will) use something like TwitterFeed. But a more memestreams significant twitter linkup would be cool.

Memestreams Feature Request - twitter linkup

If you have not been listening to the "This American Life" episodes on the financial situation, you owe it to yourself to do so. They are phenomenal. While the top posters here might have been coming to grasps with the what why and how, here is a resource (spread over three episodes so far) which effectively explains a lot of it in a presentation style that should be accessible to all.

This American Life

Show 1: The Giant Pool of Money
Show 2: Another Frightening Show About the Economy
Show 3: A Better Mousetrap 2008

Matt Groening:

...Over the decades we've bought, received, worn, played with and stared at an endless series of Peanuts books, greeting cards, sweatshirts, shoestrings, coin banks, figurines, adverts and TV shows. (Lest you think this is a knock, remember I'm the Simpsons guy, and we've allowed Bart asthma inhaler holders and Duff Beer fishing lures.) But clear away the insurance commercials, billboards, dolls, apparel, stickers, soap dishes and the rest, and we're left with the real thing: the Peanuts comic strip itself, Charles Schulz's brilliant, angst-ridden, truly funny, 50-year-long masterpiece of joy and heartbreak...

We especially loved copying the Peanuts kids, because they seemed simple enough at first glance. But those giant heads and dots for eyes were trickier than they looked. Our Charlie Browns weren't sweet and impassive. In our wobbly hands, Charlie Brown's big, round head turned into a macrocephalic oval, his eye dots drifted apart, and his body got fatter and more squished. No matter how much we practised, our Charlie Browns looked like freaks.

Jonathan Franzen:

But what if Schulz had become a toy salesman rather than an artist? Would he have lived such a withdrawn and emotionally turbulent life? I suspect not. I suspect that Schulz the toy salesman would have gutsed his way through a normal life the same way he'd gutsed out his military service. He'd have done whatever it took to support his family - begged a Valium prescription from his doctor, had a few drinks at the hotel bar.

Schulz wasn't an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life - to grind out a strip every day for 50 years; to pay the steep psychic price for this - is the opposite of damaged. It's the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make. The reason Schulz's early sorrows look like 'sources' of his brilliance is that he had the talent and resilience to find humour in them. Almost every young person experiences sorrows. What's distinctive about Schulz's childhood is not his suffering, but the fact that he loved comics, had a gift for drawing and was the only child of good parents.

Oh boy, Charlie Brown: Matt Groening and Jonathan Franzen pay tribute to Peanuts | Books | The Guardian

It’s a startling thing to hear from Ms. Silverman, who in January created an Internet sensation with a music video in which she declared, in the starkest possible language, that she was having a torrid affair with the actor Matt Damon

"Starkest possible language".

Sarah Silverman’s Message to Your Grandma - Vote Obama - NYTimes.com

Pushing back against what it calls McCain's “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign overnight began e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday.

Gloves are off in both campaigns now.

Exclusive: Obama to hit McCain on Keating Five - Yahoo! News

A new remote sensing technology has peeled away layers of mud and rock near Peru's Cahuachi desert to reveal an ancient adobe pyramid, Italian researchers announced on Friday at a satellite imagery conference in Rome.

Ancient Peru Pyramid Spotted by Satellite : Discovery News