Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Tuesday Stuff You Might Have Missed

Yes, it is still raining. How those Seattle folks get through this I have no idea.

Tuesday Stuff You Might Have Missed
A bit short on time so I will take a trip around the web and see what you may have missed.

China Loving Vancouver Real Estate
Trader Mark covers this trend:
Vancouver Housing Prices Pass New York and London as Chinese 'Move' In
"Fun random fact:
Starting about 18 months ago, so many homeowners applied to change the last two digits of their addresses to remove or shift the number 4, which in Chinese sounds like the word for death, or add the numeral 8, which is considered lucky, that Vancouver began turning down some requests, said Bonnie Lee, addressing coordinator for the city. "
Wow!

It's Not a Greek Bailout, it's Reprofiling
Ilargi of The Automatic Earth covers the new hot idea for Greek problem, Reprofiling!
This all stopped being absurd a long time ago.

No Way, No How
Alarmist headline over at Zero Hedge from CLSA's Russell Napier:
Russell Napier: The Bear Market Bottom Will Be S&P 400
Never going to happen. What planet is this guy on? And I am a bearish sort, lol.

LinkedIn Goes Public
The popular career resume site LinkedIn goes public and reprices higher to boot. My man Josh Brown is not that interested:
LinkedOut
"$4.2 billion valuation? Really?
I'm so not feeling the LinkedIn IPO (proposed ticker is LNKD). I'm sure they'll orchestrate a nice opening pop for it, but I'm only watching it as a gauge of risk appetite as well as what the future may hold for other social media-ish IPOs."


Antikythera Mechanism
From Little Bits of History, in 1902 on this date an ancient shipwreck (100 BC?) was found and among the many items taken out was the first "computer" which charted celestial movements using fine gears and other work not seen again until the 19th century:
Computational Device
As found:

A radiograph showing the fine gears:

Cool!

Cipher Twitter is Ahead of it's Time
I was loving this article today:
The Age Of Social Sharing Has Reached Its End
Jason Schwartz, founder of the iPhone app Matchbook, has this to say:
"The age of social sharing [and broadcasting everything] has pretty much reached its end," Schwartz says. "I think moving forward we will see a new era of more classy social sharing that's more indicative of people's real social interactions in the real world. Social interactions online aren't like the real world at all."
Indeud. Going further:
"Having all of your friends see everything is the old way of doing social," Schwartz says. "The new way is, 'Who do you REALLY want to share information with?' There are only a couple of people whose opinions you really trust, and you don't want the noise of everyone else drowning them out."
So how best to target your audience and keep it between the people you want to know what you are up to? CIPHER TWITTER! As I said in this post:
Maybe you want to get your name out there and be 100% open, but maybe you want to leverage the broad media of Twitter to communicate quickly with your friends, readers, etc. If Titter offered a service that would encrypt your text (for a small fee), then you could submit "keys" to those you want to see your posts (again, incremental fee here per reader?) so they could read the decoded message. Just think, you could instantly write up:

"BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE"

hit ENCRYPT, and this goes out instead to your reader list:

"ML$(*&^NBGFJOI^$(^%$#@()MMKLLGR%%^"

if you have supplied the key, they can read your message.
Nice.

Pay Per View Event
Now who would not shell out $50 to see our favorite bad ass, the honey badger:

Take on the Coconut Crab:

WOWZA! It would be a clash of the titans!

Have a good night.

6 comments:

watchtower said...

Let's see now, $50 to see a Honey Badger dine on Crab...count me in!

EconomicDisconnect said...

Yeah I think Honey Badger flips that thing and eats him up!

Patti said...

Thanks for the comment and link back. The x-ray picture was something I hadn't seen before. What ingenious people those Greeks were.

David Batista said...

Cool little bits of info you got there.

I speak Chinese and, yes, it's a pretty big deal to have the number 4 anywhere near or around your person. In Chinese the word for both 4 and death is: "si". They have different written characters, but speaking them aloud sounds virtually the same.

And, you know, on Facebook you can regulate which updates you see and who sees your updates. All you have to do is fiddle around with the settings. So I don't see what the big deal is. It's possible to have a thousand so-called "friends" on FB, but only have a core set of real friends that you regularly interact with on the site.

Jennifer Hillier said...

My money's on the honey badger! That would be an awesome fight.

Sorry to hear you're getting so much rain! Even after 4 years here, I'm still not used to it. It's just depressing.

EconomicDisconnect said...

Patti,
glad you liked it!

David,
Thanks for the chinese info, that is wild. You are all missing my point re social media: For me to be a millionaire CIPHER TWITTER must be born, lol.

JH,
A stellar review for your book by the Library Journal brightened up the day!