Atlanta Location: Mail Recovery Center 5345 Fulton Industrial Boulevard SW Atlanta, GA 30378-2400
Directions: From Interstate 20 East or West, exit at Fulton Industrial Boulevard and continue South for approximately 3 miles. After 3 miles, exit right onto Bucknell Drive, then right at the next street which is Bucknell Court. Follow this drive around to the stop sign and the Mail Recovery Center will be on the right.
Inspection of Merchandise: 8:30 am - 10:00 am Auction Time: 10:00 am - Completion
Friedman Writes Back » China and the Arabian Peninsula as Market Stabilizers
Topic: Business
4:05 pm EST, Dec 19, 2007
It is the only explanation for what we are seeing. The markets should be selling off like crazy, given the financial problems. They are not. They keep bouncing back, no matter how hard they are driven down. That money is not coming from the financial institutions and hedge funds that got ripped on mortgages. But it is coming from somewhere. We think that somewhere is the land of $90-per-barrel crude and really cheap toys.
Many people will see this as a tilt in global power. When others must invest in the United States, however, they are not the ones with the power; the United States is. To us, it looks far more like the Chinese and Arabs are trapped in a financial system that leaves them few options but to recycle their dollars into the United States. They wind up holding dollars — or currencies linked to dollars — and then can speculate by leaving, or they can play it safe by staying. In our view, these two sources of cash are the reason global markets are stable.
Energy prices might fall (indeed, all commodities are inherently cyclic, and oil is no exception), and the amount of free cash flow in the Arabian Peninsula might drop, but there still will be surplus dollars in China as long as it is an export-based economy. Put another way, the international system is producing aggregate return on capital distributed in peculiar ways. Given the size of the U.S. economy and the dynamics of the dollar, much of that money will flow back into the United States. The United States can have its financial crisis. Global forces appear to be stabilizing it.
The Chinese and the Arabs are not in the U.S. markets because they like the United States. They don’t. They are locked in. Regardless of the rumors of major shifts, it is hard to see how shifts could occur. It is the irony of the moment that China and the Arabian Peninsula, neither of them particularly fond of the United States, are trapped into stabilizing the United States. And, so far, they are doing a fine job.
The entire cast of Karate Kid (minus Miyagi) re-assemble for this music video re-creation of the climactic events depicted in the film, with a surprise ending.
Being bilingual protects against some age-related cognitive changes, says new research - Baycrest
Topic: Science
11:42 pm EST, Dec 17, 2007
It is established that learned knowledge and habitual procedures (crystallized intelligence) hold up well as people age, said lead author Ellen Bialystok, Ph.D., of York University, but abilities that depend on keeping one’s attention on a task (fluid intelligence) actually decline as people get older. But in her study, Bialystok found that those who have been bilingual most of their life were better able to manage their attention to complex set of rapidly changing task demands as measured by an experimental task – The Simon Task – that purposely distracts the test takers.
* Sunday, December 16, 2007 at 11:06:10 UTC * Sunday, December 16, 2007 at 05:06:10 AM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones Location 14.698�N, 91.798�W Depth 97.1 km (60.3 miles) Region GUATEMALA Distances 35 km (20 miles) WSW of Quezaltenango, Guatemala 55 km (35 miles) ESE of Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico 140 km (85 miles) W of GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala 945 km (580 miles) ESE of MEXICO CITY, D.F., Mexico
Woman heard sirens in DF and felt it. I slept through it.
Mechanical Construction and Production - Bird Strike Tester
Topic: Technology
11:03 am EST, Dec 15, 2007
The experimental setup is shown at the right. It can launch an impactor with a mass of up to 2 kilograms at a velocity in the range of 50 to 400 m/s. The maximum speed depends on the impactor mass (maximum kinetic energy : 40 kJ).
Propels roast chicken at 400 mph. Give this to the boys in Iraq.
In the USA, remains of the bird, usually a bloody goo called snarge, are sent to the Smithsonian Institution's Feather Identification Laboratory to determine the species.
and...
Strangely enough, vehicle-animal air collisions also sometimes include species that cannot fly. The Smithsonian Institution's Feather Identification Laboratory has identified frogs, turtles, and snakes as the animal in the "bird" strike. On one occasion they identified a cat at high altitude and on another a rabbit at a height of 550 metres (1800 feet).[1]
The most likely explanation for this incongruity is that the animal identified had been either eaten or carried aloft by a bird of prey, though there are also meteorological explanations, such as raining animals.
The single biggest challenge in scaling an Internet service is the database. In my experience, the ways things generally work is like this: you put up an Internet service using a single instance of a basic database, like MySQL or BerkeleyDB. Everything is run off that single database. As you grow, the database becomes overloaded, and then you begin an endless cycle of scaling work. First, you split the single database into multiple, unrelated databases. You also need to worry about reliability, and so start looking at things like hot backups. Then you look at adding read-only copies of your databases, and with those you have to worry about keeping things in sync and other related hassles. And of course you start implementing in-memory caches using something like memcached, which are great, but have their own issues as well (cold caches on restarts being the biggest I can think of off hand). All of this takes a lot of work, a lot of expertise, and a lot of maintenance.
Two items relating to databases caught my eye this week. The first was the benchmarking of a RAID consisting of Solid State Drives, or SSDs. An SSD is basically a chunk of non-volatile RAM in a package with a disk-drive interface. They're designed to replace standard hard drives with something with the performance of RAM. While SSDs have been in development for a few years, I think they're really starting to become interesting for use in databases. They provide orders of magnitude speedups over hard drives in some areas, like seek performance. They're not perfect, but if I was in the situation where I needed to scale a database immediately, I'd definitely look at using an SSD.
The other item was the announcement of Amazon's SimpleDB. This is a new web service that goes along with the existing S3 and EC2 services. SimpleDB provides a robust, simple, scalable database system. If it offers high performance and high reliability, as they claim, then this could be a very big deal. In combination with the other services, it would eliminate the vast majority of scaling issues facing an Internet service. It's only in limited beta right now, but once it goes live (and works as advertised), I think I'd be hard pressed to not recommend that a new startup host their entire site using Amazon. This further reduces the cost structure associated with an Internet startup (both in terms of money and in terms of talent needed) and lowers the barrier to entry for new services. Like I said, a very big deal.
