Sell Short

Interesting piece from WBUR on some novels about the financial crisis by Michael Lewis like the Big Short.

Burry figured that he could bet against pools of these subprime mortgage loans using an instrument called a "credit default swap," essentially insurance on a corporate loan. Burry persuaded the investment banks to create credit default swaps for the subprime mortgage market.

"As the pools of loans that are underneath these bonds start to default," Lewis says, the investment banks that gambled on the subprime mortgage loans were forced to send Burry money daily as the bonds went bad. "Wall Street firms, they were on the other side of the bets."

And in the clip, they talk about how AIG was where the Wall Street firms got their money.

Time Banking Community

I heard a really interesting story about time banking today. It is like bartering, but instead of directly exchanging goods, you provide services and you log how much time you spend, and then you can redeem them for other people's services.

The system in Boston is Time Trade Circle

anti beta blocker

found another good program on wmbr. not sure if it will still be around in the fall, though.

Radiolab

When I was an undergrad I used to mock my neighbor who listened to npr all day while sitting at his computer. Now that I have a job, I pretty much spend all day at my computer and about the best thing I can find for free that requires very little channel surfing on my part is NPR. In particular there is a show Radiolab that I have become quite fond of. If you are the impatient kind you can find their webcasts at www.radiolab.org, start listening, and skip the rest of what I have to say.

I was about 5 years late to the NPR party, and figured I wasn't really breaking into any scenes when I started listening to radio lab. Its two guys talking about science in an interesting way. Nothing super fancy about it, maybe some special effects and a lot of introspective background music but overall well produced. Each episode is about a common theme, and in reality each 1 hour episode is really 3 or 4 smaller episodes that get strung together.

What makes the show good, and really what I am saying is what makes this show worth sitting down to every day and listening to for 4 or 5 hours until you have listened to them all is that it doesn't exhaust your attention. The show is not a textbook, nor a one hour lecture it simply is a collection of stories about science about people.