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.”

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!

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.

Garth Sundem of Geek Logik fame has a blog in which he comes up with formulas for wrapping every-day decisions in a mathematical framework. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while - especially with regards to procrastination. The trick is to quantify all the factors that you think are important in the issue you are considering, and then describe the relationship between the variables mathematically.

I read the following quote at “The price of everything” blog:

“You couldn’t get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.” – Edward Flaherty.

I can’t wait to find someone to insult.

While reading this article in The Economist, the section on rising inequality leapt out at me. The newspaper suggested that technology may be to blame. This is certainly a situation that I’ve been expecting for a while.

In contrast to the Singularity proposed by Vernor Vinge, I believe that as people become more educated, have better tools, and live longer, it will be harder and harder for young, less well educated, and poorer people to compete. This will stratify society.

There’s a great interview in Reason Magazine with economist Lant Pritchett about how stopping immigration is effectively holding countries’ citizens hostage. He argues that constraining people within artificial borders bounding countries which are economically unviable is one of the biggest sources of global inequity. Very interesting read.

I just read a very scary post about the dangers of using credit cards online. The author describes are disreputable companies are using sales through legitimate companies to steal your credit card information and get you to “opt-in” to payments. Although some of the technical details aren’t quite right, the overall post is well worth reading.

I just saw this video of Dan Osman speed free-climbing Lover’s Leap in California… AMAZING!