“If you ask people to imagine winning the lottery,” Dr. Gilbert says, “they typically talk about the things they would do — ‘I’d go to Italy, I’d buy a boat, I’d lay on the beach’ — and they rarely mention the things they would think. But our data suggest that the location of the body is much less important than the location of the mind, and that the former has surprisingly little influence on the latter. The heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much about the whereabouts of the feet.”

Tao Te Ching v. 80:

Appreciate your life and be content with your home;
Sail boats and ride horses, but don't go too far;

http://www.taoteching.org/chapters/80.htm

And even knowing this doesn't change the effect.

Another reason not to eat them.

So I am starting to think that stocks are only so expensive because they are perceived as an inflation hedge...

Very nice.

Negative real rates of return

Inflation-protected securities sold at negative yields for the first time ever on Monday as traders anticipate that the Federal Reserve will start a new round of asset purchases.

Question: When the measured expected real return is below zero, how well can any recovery program work?  

Something unimaginable just happened. People would rather buy inflation protected bonds that are guaranteed to pay a negative .55% in real terms than start a business or invest in one or buy something they could enjoy today. This just baffles me. These bonds will be worth much, much less if the market decides that even a one percent real yield is the appropriate cost of safety. What a pessimistic tiding.

Windows 7 is a fantastic OS, so we might just stay with that. If Windows 8 doesn’t have a “killer feature and killer apps” then there won’t be the leverage on us to upgrade. We all upgraded to Windows 7 to get rid of the buggy Vista, or get the new stuff that made XP seem old-in-the-tooth. But will Windows 8 come up with something to make Win 7 seem long in the tooth? That’s a far tougher challenge.

Really interesting point. MS is fighting the big trends of the world moving to the web and to mobile and doesn't have a proven way to make money on the client side in either space. Meanwhile, it's commodity OS is going to have to compete with itself. This was bad for MS with Vista vs XP but by the time that 8 vs 7 comes around, the need for OS itself will be greatly lessened. The pressure really is on.

The iPhone artists are executing a nearly identical operation to the pictorialists'. To make people understand something as art, you make it look like the art they already know, right? Everyone knows the pictorialists made art photos, so now you make your iPhone shots look like their gum bichromate prints. You say over and over, iPhone photos can be art. And you push your work into the cultural institutions that define the edges of the art world.

I will need to chew on this one for a few days.  I have always distrusted iPhoneography becoming Art even if it is art.

Charlotta Kratz picked up on another interesting point in the article.  The iPhone apps that are fully automatic miss the mark of being art on at least one count: anyone can do it.  I have never liked Hipstamatic that much even though I often like its effects.  Even for tools that don't allow twiddling, like ShakeItPhoto, there is a skill to knowing which tool to use.  Hipstamatic forces the decision before the picture is even taken.  

Make sure to click over to the interactive version. I failed to post this properly last year. Happy to have another chance.

I would love to know what Christine O'Donnell thinks of this. Good school lunches is a subject near and dear to my heart.