Wale – 90210 (prod. by Mark Ronson)

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Wale’s debut album has leaked.

Excel and the Language of Love

FemaleExcelPowerUser: Oh how you tease me so with your .XLS whispers in my gchat window…
Cameron: ‘Tis a proven way to seduce the ladies, methinks
FemaleExcelPowerUser: Clearly, I’m fantasizing about embedded “IF” statements, and don’t even get me started on defined ranges
I can’t even type anymore
Cameron: Can we do it in Excel ’07, so we aren’t limited to 65,000 rows?
FemaleExcelPowerUser: Baby I love it when you round
But its 65536

I think I’m in love.

Basement Jaxx – My Turn (ft. Lightspeed Champion)

Headbanging bears! From now on, if your music video lacks headbanging electro bears, I’m not watching.

Perhaps the video is more impressive than the track itself, but I kind of dig the synth beat that occasionally gives way to guitar and mariachi trumpets. Solid vocal line too, but the track would’ve been better had there been some rapping placed between vocal interludes. Alas, no track is perfect…

Via Kanye West.

Porcelain Dolls

These PNB danseuses look like porcelain dolls that are about to fall over and break into pieces:

PNB dancers Margaret Mullin, Kaori Nakamura, and Laura Gilbreath rehearsing Jiri Kylian’s Petite Mort. Photo by Bill Mohn.

Director’s Choice runs from November 5th-15th at McCaw Hall.

Knowledge Pays

There is a very cliche expression that often makes the rounds of economists, which holds that “we live in a knowledge economy,”—having knowledge pays.

A man who died yesterday, Jeffry Picower, has made that abundantly clear.

You probably haven’t heard of Mr. Picower, but that’s just the way he would’ve liked it. A lawyer and an accountant, Picower was known as an expert in tax shelters. He was famous for making things invisible. For example, on January 2, 2003, Picower withdrew $1,378,852 from a curiously named account, “Jln Partnership”, which was managed by none other than Bernard Madoff. When withdrawals across all his accounts were totaled for that day, they amounted to exactly $250 million. Nothing he did was by accident.

Mr. Picower achieved something amazing. He discerned that Bernie Madoff was a fraud years before securities regulators did, and he was able to profit massively from that knowledge. Picower knew that he could go public about Madoff’s ponzi scheme at any time, and therefore held enormous negotiating leverage over Madoff, who would do anything to avoid the disclosure. What Mr. Picower asked for (in exchange for his silence) was substantial: enormous returns from his investment with Madoff, paid for in dollars that belonged to other investors. Picower could demand precise annual percentage gains for his account–much higher than the returns given to other Madoff investors. Picower would pick the number, and Madoff’s people would dutifully backdate trades to update the account balance to Picower’s satisfaction.

Although Madoff ostensibly produced eerily consistent 10-12 percent annual returns for his clients, the returns he provided Picower were other worldly:

In 14 instances between 1996 and 2007, a group of Picower trading accounts experienced annual returns of more than 100 percent. On 25 occasions, the annual return exceeded 50 percent. During this same period, the biggest annual gain in the S&P 500 was 31 percent (1997). The S&P’s annual average for that period was slightly under 9 percent. In 1999, one of Picower’s accounts earned 950 percent.

On April 18, 2006, Picower wired $125 million to Madoff to open a new account. Madoff’s office began “purchasing” securities in the account, but “it backdated the vast majority of these purported transactions to January 2006″ when the stock market was at its lowest for the period. Twelve days later, the net equity value of the account was $164 million, a gain of $39 million – or more than 30 percent – in less than two weeks.

From 1995 to 2008, Picower made 670 withdrawals totaling $6,746,066,548. Initially, he’d invested some $1.6 billion with the fraudster, so this amounted to quite a return on his initial investment.

Was much of his wealth stolen from others? That’s a question that the courts are trying to find out right now, but considering Picower’s prowess for financial sleight-of-hand, we may never know.

Clearly, Picower’s gain from his knowledge of Madoff’s fraud is not an something to look up to, but it surely illustrates the benefits of having more information than others. After all, Picower died a very rich man.

Madoff Client Jeffry Picower Netted $5 Billion—Likely More Than Madoff Himself – ProPublica
Jeffry Picower, Madoff Investor, Found Dead at Home – Bloomberg

The White Menace

“…national studies have found that next to having a large Division I sports program, the single most highly correlated factor with alcohol and substance abuse on college campuses is the percentage of students who are white: the whiter the school, the bigger the problem. Not because there’s something wrong with white people, per se, but because privilege encourages and makes more likely all kinds of self-destructive behaviors, and allows those who enjoy the privileges to remain cavalier about their activities all the time.”

-Tim Wise, White Like Me, page 40.

Chiddy Bang – Kids

MGMT’s Kids continues to be mixed and cut in a million different ways–perhaps that’s the new sign of an addictive cult hit. Here’s Chiddy Bang’s attempt, building a hiphop beat with Kids‘ synth:

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Evolution is a treadmill, not a ladder.

“Progress … is about to hit the buffers of overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, and the exhaustion of resources. However fast we run, we never seem to get anywhere. Has the industrial revolution made the average inhabitant of the world healthier, wealthier, and wiser? Yes, if he is German. No, if he is Bangladeshi. Uncannily, … evolutionary science is ready to suit the mood. The fashion in evolutionary science now is to scoff at progress; evolution is a treadmill, not a ladder.”

Aggression vs. Apprehension

“Men have evolved to live dangerously because success in competition or battle used to lead to more or better sexual conquests and [hence] more surviving children. Women who live dangerously merely put at risk those children they already have [or those they are yet to have].”

Women are incentivized to avoid risk if they want their genes to be passed on to the next generation, whereas men are incentivized to seek risk.

It’s interesting that, in humans’ pre-agrarian ancestral environment, human gender roles had completely opposite incentives with regard to risk, and yet they still were able to cooperate in order to create successive generations.

(Page 20)

Jay-Z vs. The Verve – Bittersweet Dirt Off Your Shoulder

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