Category Archives: Uncategorized

Drink ALL the coffee!, originally uploaded by Shiny Things. Someone at Toby’s Estate has been spending too much time on the internets.

I forget who originally came up with the idea of searching for “[Laughter]” in the transcripts of Fed meetings (though this piece from the Atlantic collects all the best ones from bubblicious 2006, and is pretty much canonical as far as … Continue reading →

“Why”, asked Brenda the sea lion, “do I work with these idiots?”, originally uploaded by Shiny Things. The sea lions are indisputably the stars of the show at Sentosa’s Underwater World. It can’t be long before they realise this and … Continue reading →

…but Starhub, Singapore’s biggest cable provider, thinks everyone should be able to join in the ripping-off-its-customers game. This flyer was stuffed in with my cable bill last month. I’m not sure which genius in the marketing department decided to run … Continue reading →

Are these the world’s richest people? Sure, why the hell not. But I can’t just let the launch of Bloomberg News’s Bloomberg Billionaires Index (“a daily ranking of the world’s 20 richest individuals!”) go by with just a gag lifted … Continue reading →

Economic Hypochondria Down Under is one of an armful of great pieces from the just-launched Global Mail – per their website, “a philanthropically funded, not-for-profit news and features website. Our mission is to deliver original, fearless, independent journalism”, and they … Continue reading →

The Iranian rial’s plunge seems to have stalled at the 18,000 mark, but Iran is still determined to take some… erm… serious measures against currency speculators: In addition, the hard-line chief of Iran’s judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Amoli Larijani, threatened Wednesday to … Continue reading →

From CME trader Ryan Carlson’s excellent Trading Pit History blog, here is a photo of possibly the greatest open-outcry exchange ever: the American Liquor Exchange. Sadly defunct now, it thrived in the mid-1930s, with this Pittsburgh Press article from 1933 reporting heavy buying … Continue reading →

So if you were the PM of Samoa, which is moving this week from the US side of the international date line to the Australian side, wouldn’t you rather drop a Monday instead of a Friday? Anyway, Samoa is skipping Friday December … Continue reading →

Berkeley in HDR: tone mapping, originally uploaded by Shiny Things. So here’s some photos I shot from a SEKRIT location in the hills above Berkeley, right on sunset on a clear November day, and then processed through Photomatix Pro to … Continue reading →