From Alan Nevin, chief economist for the California Building Industry Association and San Diego-based MarketPointe Realty Advisors: “Now it’s just a matter of the pig going through the snake.”

“Any sufficiently complex bit of code is hard to make easily reusable without abstracting it to a level in which it is essentially useless.”

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who had a brain stroke on 10th Dec 1996. The stroke put pressure on the language centers on the left hemisphere of her brain. On the 27th Feb 2008, she gave a talk at TED about the experience. The talk is well worth watching!

I had work to do today, so obviously I had to procrastinate by reading xkcd archives.

Check out the following series:

1. Journal
2. Journal 2
3. Journal 3

There’s a new Banksy gone up on Newman Street (just around the corner from our flat).

Some interesting papers have come out on the “Credit Crunch”.

• Leveraged Losses: Lessons from the Mortgage Market Meltdown

  This paper provides a good overview of the financial market turmoil occurring since August 2007, and discusses how the crisis might impact other areas of the economy.

• A Black Swan in the Money Market
  

  This paper examines the sudden jump in spreads between the overnight and term inter-bank interest rates.

Here is a great talk by Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren on the upcoming collapse of the middle class. The first 5 minutes are spent on introducing Professor Warren, so I recommend skipping to roughly 5-6 minutes into the video. She gives a very, very interesting comparison of the changing socio-economic factors between 1970-2007. The talk was given on the 8th March, 2007 at Berkeley.

So, on Sunday I was lying on the couch reading when I heard this commotion from Oxford Street. I jumped up and went out onto the balcony - just in time to see the Olympic Flame go past! It was driven past on an open top bus, held upright by this girl in a track-suit.