American Public Media’s show Marketplace put it best when host Kai Ryssdal began the show when they said:
Any lingering doubts you might have had that this was a global economy should be gone by now… Even before traders hit the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, you know which way the arrows were going to go, you just didn’t know where things would land before the closing bell rang. Listen.
Today’s fall was the worst since the attacks on 9/11 and affected markets worldwide all because the Shanghai Stock Exchange fell by almost 9% last night. The main market indices in Euronext lost at least 2% today. Australian indices lost more than 3%. The Dow, Nasdaq and the S&P 500 all lost at least 3% with Nasdaq almost approaching 4%. Analysts are not sure whether this was a one day thing or the beginning of a “major market correction” but only time will tell.
Technorati Tags: dow, euronext, financial, nasdaq, stocks
Last night I posted about the impending closure of High Tech High Bayshore. Now I have learned a bit more about the situation and the fallout in the blogosphere. The families and students are out in force trying to muster up all of the support they can get. The school on the other hand is (at its present condition) is losing $500,000 a year. It is probably pretty hard to manage a school from a few hundred miles away, especially with all of the hype going down to San Diego.
More postings:
Update: Another High Tech High kid by the pseudonym of “Dr. Penglosss” (butchering of Candide’s Pangloss maybe?) has blogged about why they don’t think High Tech High should keep Bayshore.
Technorati Tags: hightechhigh
“Capote” and “Infamous” are two movies that came out within a year of each other that covered the exact same events, Truman Capote’s writing of the non-fiction novel “In Cold Blood“. I recently finished In Cold Blood for an assignment in humanities class and was extremely curious about how Mr. Capote learned so much about the killings. The two movies gave a (sometimes conflicting) glimpse into this process.
“Infamous” starts a little earlier than Capote and focuses more on Capote’s eccentricities. Throughout the movie, there are faux interviews with those who knew Capote at the time of the book, his high class friends. While it relies more heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of the plot of the book and fills in the surrounding characters, the timeline is considerably off. For example, the killers never move prison cells, even after they are sentenced to death.
“Capote” sort of looms over Infamous as a symbolic 800 pound gorilla. With much more publicity, I was expecting it to be better and the truth was that it lived up to my expectations. It was clear that Capote had a higher budget than Infamous and felt more like how I imagined the story to go (albeit much darker than Infamous).
Infamous focused more on how Capote gained access to the small town of Holcomb and eventually fell in love with Perry Smith while Capote was more about Capote’s obsession with the book and how it affected him psychologically. Both movies are quite well done and I would recommend both of them to anybody curious about the man behind In Cold Blood but if you only watch one, Capote should definitely be it.
Technorati Tags: capote, infamous, movies
Down in San Diego, we learned this week that the popular charter school High Tech High was closing one of its schools in the bay area, High Tech High Bayshore. The school said that they were unable to meet enrollment goals and were going to sell the building they had. I didn’t realize how big this would be, now Scoble is posting about it because one of his friends has a student enrolled.
He brings up some interesting points about giving notice to the parents. Surely the parents could’ve done something to keep the school open. I have also heard though the HTH Bayshore is in a bad neighborhood and this may have contributed to the decision.
Technorati Tags: hightechhigh, scoble
The New York Times today has a review of a book called ‘Remainder‘ by Tom McCarthy. It is about a man who pretends to be normal after an unknown accident. The book sounds very much like something Philip K. Dick would write and the style also looks pretty similar. I’m always looking for a new book to read and I think I’ll pick this one up soon.
This is McCarthy’s first novel but he is not new to writing in general. The review mentioned his being a part of a “semifictitious avant-garde network” that call themselves the International Necronautical Society. He is actually the General Secretary of the INS and writes reports and manifestos for them. ReadySteadyBook has an interview with McCarthy that gives some insight into the writing and publishing of Remainder.
Technorati Tags: books
There are some cool new features over at the music/social networking site last.fm including a flash based quilt of your top albums or artists. I have been using last.fm for a couple years and it has really grown into an amazing system. Back when I first started there were actually two sites, Last.fm and Audioscrobbler and I still use iScrobble to update tracks via iTunes. Now that they pretty much have the basics to tracking people’s music down, they are really branching out with the social networking. Via Chaotic intransient prose bursts
Technorati Tags: last.fm
On Baghdad’s dusty streets, Iraqi children are playing make-believe war games inspired by the Shiite-Sunni conflict, a development that shows the depth of the city’s rapid and violent break-up along sectarian line
The Associated Press is reporting that small children in Iraq are pretending to be militia men fighting against each other. A scary thought indeed but what can be done about it? They just act out what they see around them. The United States (allegedly) has a similar type of problem with kids acting out the violence that they see on television. A few of the solutions proposed for that are for better education and less exposure to violence on TV.
It is a little bit harder in Iraq however. The threat of violence is real and unavoidable. The only way to solve it would be to take away the violence and the fear incited by it. If we pull out soon then at least we will not be a catalyst in the situation. These children will probably be scarred forever by it but it will be for the sake of future generations.
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One of the ministers that counseled Ted Haggard, the outspoken critic of gay marriage and former evangelical preacher who hired a male prostitute for his own use, announced that Haggard is “completely heterosexual“. Wait, so just having sex with one guy isn’t enough to make you only partially homosexual? This is absurd logic. One might wonder then, when Mr. Haggard was not completely heterosexual.
Since he hired a male prostitute, there was probably a moment in his life that he was at least partially bisexual. Maybe they ‘healed’ him of his homosexuality. More likely though is he was so scared and ashamed of the political fallout of this news becoming public that he lost any and all desire.
Technorati Tags: evangelical, tedhaggard
Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs put the ball in the music industry’s court today by admitting, in a press release, that Digital Rights Management doesn’t work to stop piracy. This is a good move for Apple–they hold so much of the digital music and portable media player market. It’s hard to see however, what the immediate repercussions will be, if any. Record companies seem to hold a hard line on DRM. If Apple did open up the iTunes Music store, I would definitely be all over it.
Technorati Tags: apple, drm
On sunday, the Times ran an article about a prize winning Iranian nuclear scientist who was allegedly assassinated by the Israeli Mossad. Rather than using this to take a low blow at the Israelis, the Iranian government has taken a unique approach and claimed that the Mossad did not kill him because they couldn’t possibly get through the Iranian’s security.
For the people who want to take it at face value, it says that Iranians don’t simply blame everything on Israel because they are Israel but that’s not the point of this. Iran is downplaying the Mossad as a force and calling them weak while at the same time refusing to admit their own weakness.
We may never know if this did happen or not though. Oppressive regimes have a tendency to make their lies into imaginary events. Anybody involved will deny their affiliation and no documents will ever be kept about an operation. I don’t think the Mossad is going to go out and admit that they did kill him, they aren’t really known for that.
If Israel did in fact kill him it was definitely a bad choice though. Messing with a country full of propaganda against your country is not a very good idea politically. If anything, it’s just going to make them hate you more. Either way, Iran is still years away from a nuclear weapon.
Technorati Tags: iran
