On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the world’s tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. James Marsh’s documentary brings Petit’s extraordinary adventure to life through the testimony of Philippe himself, and some of the co-conspirators who helped him create the unique and magnificent spectacle that became known as “the artistic crime of the century.”

Man On Wire

The researchers found that rising home prices up to 2003 could be explained by economic fundamentals, such as low unemployment rates, expanding household incomes and population growth. These factors fueled housing demand and, in turn, increased U.S. home prices. During this time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac actively issued and purchased conventional, conforming mortgage-backed securities.

But in 2003, political, regulatory and economic factors – including accounting irregularities that led to their senior officers’ resignations and the capping of their retained loan portfolios – forced the two entities to significantly slow their lending volume. Private funding in the form of asset-backed securities and residential mortgage-backed securities replaced conventional, conforming mortgage-backed securities as the prevalent source of mortgage capital.

The new credit environment allowed looser underwriting standards and increased tolerance for riskier, high-yield loan products. Such products included adjustable-rate mortgages with low initial “teaser” rates, Alt-A loans that did not require income verification and nonowner-occupied investor products. This borrowing climate provided previously marginal borrowers with additional access to credit. The credit market shift led to a record increase in total mortgage volume and pushed up home prices with momentum characteristic of a bubble.

The researchers also determined that interest rates did not significantly affect house prices. The finding defied conventional wisdom that ties interest rates directly to the monthly cost of housing and assumes an effect on purchase prices.

“These findings help us understand that the government can have a major role in affecting the mortgage and housing markets,” Vandell said. “It’s important policymakers consider this influence when they attempt to shape the markets in the future.”

Subprime lending not main trigger of real estate bubble

I find this article somewhat amazing. On the one-hand, you have a DEA agent who is clearly trying to do his best to combat the opium crop in Afghanistan. He wants to do good by the world. He has many trials and tribulations, and his mission to eradicate opium from Afghanistan is ultimately a failure due to narco-corruption at the highest levels of Afghani government. Up to and including the current president. And a good dose of American bureaucracy and political infighting.

On the other hand, you have everyone, including the government of Afghanistan, much of the US government, and most of the US Military, EVERYONE except this guy refusing to do anything about the opium crop because they know it will hurt the poor Afghan farmer and destabilize the government. He does not believe this. He goes on and on about how they aren't growing the plant because they are poor, but because they are rich, and he has some UN report that agrees with him.

But in the end I find him unconvincing on that point, and so his entire argument breaks down. He is a DEA agent, and by definition they do not care about hurting the poor to enforce drug policy. War on poor addicts is DEA policy back home, and he has no trouble applying it to Afghanistan and writing off the suffering of the Afghan farmer wholesale. In fact, he expresses moral outrage that the military objects to our extending the same kind of poverty-persecution that we have in American cities to the poppy fields of rural Afghanistan. Its just the rich guys farming, he says. We need to really show Afghanistan who is boss and eradicate the poppies.

So they can grow some place else. Personally, I think it shows HOPE that Afghanistan is not repeating our mistakes and I wish them well on their poppy capitalism. I only hope that we achieve a sane drug policy that will drive the price down enough that they will grow enough wheat to be self sufficient.

Is Afghanistan a Narco-State? - NYTimes.com

About

WebShell screenshot (actual size on a 100 dpi computer screen)

WebShell is a web-based ssh shell.

It runs on any browser capable of JavaScript and AJAX. You can use it from any computer or iPhone/smartphone.

The server is written in Python and is very easy to set up on Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, Solaris, and any Unix that runs python 2.3.

WebShell is based on Ajaxterm.

If you have any questions, use the forum.

WebShell

Create a disease. Infect the world. Kill everyone.

FUN!

Pandemic 2 - CrazyMonkeyGames.com

Explanation: What's large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured above on the left, the gravity of a normal white galaxy has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy. More normally, such light bending results in two discernable images of the distant galaxy, but here the lens alignment is so precise that the background galaxy is distorted into a nearly complete ring. Since such a lensing effect was generally predicted in some detail by Albert Einstein over 70 years ago, such rings like SDSSJ1430 are now know as Einstein Rings. SDSSJ1430 was discovered during the Sloan Lens Advanced Camera for Surveys (SLACS) campaign, an observation program that inspected lens candidates found by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with the Hubble Space Telescope's ACS. Strong gravitational lenses like SDSSJ1440 are more than oddities -- their multiple properties allow astronomers to determine the mass and dark matter content of the foreground galaxy lenses. Given these determinations, SLACS data has now been used, for example, to show that dark matter fraction increases with overall galaxy mass. The inset images on the right depict, from top to bottom, a computer reconstructed image of what the background blue galaxy really looks like, just the white foreground galaxy, and just the lensed blue background galaxy.

APOD: 2008 July 28 - SDSSJ1430: A Galaxy Einstein Ring

You've probably heard of Jonathan Ive: darling of the technology and industrial design worlds, and El Jobso's handsome, mountain of a right hand man in product design since the CEO's second coming at Apple. You might also know him as the dude that birthed the iMac, titanium Power Book and MacBook (Pro), iPod, iPhone, and just about every decent-looking Apple product in the last decade. Well, he's also apparently the guy the most people seem to be pontificating -- whether officially or not -- as Jobs's successor, according to the Times. Of course, there's another obvious, prominent theory about why the ever tight-lipped Apple hasn't done as most publicly traded companies and made a formal contingency plan for succession of the CEO gig: Jobs is immortal. As if you didn't already know that. There can be only one!nullnullnullnullnull

Jonathan Ive being groomed to take over for Jobs one fateful day? - Engadget

search
for the foods you eat
and activities you donull

As I tend towards obese, a couple times in my life I've been really serious about my weight. And yet I've never known precisely how many calories I consumed every day.

This site makes that easy. You search for what you ate, it comes up, and you click I ate it. Its that simple. They have most anything you can think of, and you can enter your own custom foods too. Then they plot your daily intake of all the relevant nutrients. I've been using the site for two days, and they have every food and meal I have eaten so far in their database, including tonight's delicious "turkey stuffed peppers," for which I found a very similar recipe.

But its better than that. You enter your current weight, your desired weight, your activity levels, etc. and it will tell you how many calories you can eat to achieve your desired weight in X time.

Another neat feature is that when you enter a meal you ate, it will suggest lower calorie meals. There are then recipes for those meals. Really neat.

This site is really, really cool. I highly recommend it to anyone watching their diet.

Calorie Counter, Diet Tracking, Food Journal, Nutrition Facts at The Daily Plate

Here's the thing about John McCain, and it's never easy to tell whether this is a good quality or a bad one. He's a shitty liar. He may be willing to change his position on anything from immigration to torture to campaign finance at the drop of a hat to win votes, and he may have no problem aiming below the belt — below the knees even — to impugn an opponent's patriotism. But this is not a guy who can get up in front of a churchgoing crowd in Asscrack, Arkansas, and start weeping to Jesus. In fact, he appears to deeply resent the implication that he needs to genuflect to the baby savior at all. As in, "Hell, I already lived through five years of torture! You want me to do more?"null

John McCain can't stand sucking up to the Christian right. Is this the end of the GOP's unholy alliance? | The Smirking Chimp

W. is directed by Oliver Stone (Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Nixon, Alexander) with a screenplay written by Stanley Weiser (Project X, Wall Street). Lionsgate recently picked up the distribution rights to W. and will be releasing it on October 17th just before the election.

Hahahaha

Must Watch: Oliver Stone's W. Teaser Trailer � FirstShowing.net