"Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well."
The main-street Republican values of ... Burning Man?
Topic: Current Events
3:45 pm EDT, May 13, 2012
Go to Burning Man, and you’ll find everything from a thunderdome battle between a couple in tiger-striped bodypaint to a man dressed as a gigantic blueberry muffin on wheels. But underneath it all, says the festival’s co-founder, Larry Harvey, is “old-fashioned capitalism.”
President Obama has been touting patents as a way to create jobs and increase U.S. competitiveness. “These are jobs and businesses of the future just waiting to be created,” he said of patent applications last September, “somewhere in that stack of applications could be the next technological breakthrough, the next miracle drug, the next idea that will launch the next Fortune 500 company.”
The President is mistaken—at least when it comes to the patent system as it relates to software patents.
The once-popular game is suffering from boring grandmasters and controversial leadership.
Today, Anand, the current world champion, plays Boris Gelfand, an Israeli grandmaster, in the first game of the World Chess Federation (commonly known as FIDE for its French acronym) championship match in Moscow. While in India Anand is a national figure and in parts of Europe both players are relatively well-recognized, in the United States they are virtually unknown outside chess clubs or circles of enthusiasts. In part because of this, no one in America seems to be paying much attention to the title that once represented one of the Cold War's many battlefields. Chess has seemingly lost its cultural significance, abdicating its once revered spot to games like poker.
At JPMorgan Chase, a Complex Strategy That Backfired
Topic: Economics
10:50 am EDT, May 13, 2012
JPMorgan announced that it incurred a $2 billion loss in a complicated trading strategy that involved derivatives, financial instruments that derive their value from the prices of securities and other assets. The bank most likely structured the trade in a way that magnified losses.
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Check out the diagram and see how JP Morgan bet against itself twice over.
Ahmadinejad Kind Of Getting Back Into Old R.E.M. Again
Topic: Music
4:20 pm EDT, May 12, 2012
TEHRAN—Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told reporters Thursday he was kind of getting back into old R.E.M. again, rediscovering his once-great passion for the alternative rock group's first six albums.
People don't give Lifes Rich Pageant enough credit, but it's really good—really good," said the Iranian ruler who has been widely condemned for his human rights record. "It's a great album to put on when you're traveling. When I went to the U.N. in 2005 to speak about Iran's right to develop nuclear power, I was listening to it all the time."
Recently, aides confirmed Ahmadinejad's relationship with Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who agreed with the president's remarks that Israel should be wiped off the map, had been strained after the ayatollah issued a fatwa declaring R.E.M. had "totally sold out" with the release of Green.
60 Minutes - Steve Kroft talks to the bank examiner whose investigation reveals the how and why of the spectacular financial collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bankruptcy that triggered the world financial crisis.
Scientists at the University of Illinois in Chicago discover that men solve brain teasers better after a couple of beers. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was known to give interviews while drinking beer. Coincidence?
