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Tuesday, February 09, 2010

The mounting troubles with Toyota

"About 223,000 of the cars recalled are in Japan. Some 155,000 are in the United States and another 53,000 in Europe.

In addition to the standard 2010 Priuses, Toyota is recalling 270 plug-in Priuses, 28,000 Lexus HS250hs, and 11,000 Sai hybrids. Older Priuses are unaffected by the problem, Toyota has said.

Separately, Toyota also recalled 7,300 of its latest-model Camrys in the United States to fix a power steering pressure hose in the engine compartment that may be the incorrect length. This could cause a hole in the brake tube and deplete the braking fluid, interfering with braking, Toyota said in a statement."NY Times

There's no hope for humanity. Even the Japanese cannot get the quality assurance perfect.

Credit Default Swaps

"Q: Just how do investors bet against these countries?

A: They do so through credit-default swaps, which are exotic insurance-like financial instruments that signal how investors view the risk of any particular country's debt. As part of prudent management of the risks they're assuming, big investors that buy a country's bonds also buy these swaps as protection against default. Investors with no underlying stake in the bonds, however, can also buy swaps and bet against a country.

If investors think a country is financially weak, the cost of insuring the purchase of its bonds goes up, and this also influences the return investors will demand in exchange for assuming the risk of buying a country's bonds.

Q: Why do these swaps sound familiar?

A: They're the same instruments that helped amplify the near-meltdown of the U.S. financial system in September 2008. Investors bet against the bonds of investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the insurer American International Group and others. In good times, swaps help manage risk. In bad times they seem to increase fear and panic.

Q: What's the big deal if swaps go bad?

A: Before swaps became so popular, a country defaulted on a bond, then negotiated with its creditors what's called a "haircut." They'd agree to repay say 70 cents on the dollar and issue new bonds with a higher interest rate for anyone willing to invest anew.

Swaps add a new wrinkle. The swaps market, worth trillions of dollars, isn't regulated, and there aren't clear settlement mechanisms or exchanges on which these instruments trade. Today's fear is the same as the worries in the turbulent fall of 2008 ? that a default could trigger disorderly settlement of these bets and financial chaos could ensue."

mcclatchydc

The beast is back! Remember that CDS was the primary factor that brought AIG down. It is pretty much a bet against bankruptcy of a company or a country. And guess what? Apparently there are literally gazillion of CDS being traded against European countries such as Greece or Spain.

If Greece default on their loans, it will trigger massive CDS repayment - I am not sure whether it is as big as AIG but the market of CDS are huge.

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Iranian Tale

Kylie has yet another interesting dispatch from Iran.

Guys, Time to go back to school

"
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women?s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.

These sorts of romantic complications are hardly confined to North Carolina, an academically rigorous school where most students spend more time studying than socializing. The gender imbalance is also pronounced at some private colleges, such as New York University and Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., and large public universities in states like California, Florida and Georgia. The College of Charleston, a public liberal arts college in South Carolina, is 66 percent female. Some women at the University of Vermont, with an undergraduate body that is 55 percent female, sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as ?Girlington.? " NY Times

Superbowl channel

This page has all channels in 223 countries and territories that will air the superbowl live today.

frank sinatra

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country?s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country?s many Sinatra lovers, like Mr. Gregorio here in this city in the southernmost Philippines, are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation. (NYTimes)

the slow moving train wreck

"?The risk of contagion is a real one,? said Scott Thiel, the head of European fixed income at the asset management firm BlackRock in London. ?Investor sentiment is now focused on countries like Spain and Portugal, where fundamentals are weakest.? He said that for now, he saw little risk for Italy, given the relative stability of its economy.

The euro, which has become one of the world?s strongest currencies since its introduction over a decade ago, is now down 5 percent against the dollar this year. The euro?s decline picked up speed when the European Commission?s statistical office revealed in mid-January that Greece had been submitting false data to calculate its budget deficit. (Late last year, Greece stunned investors by saying that its government deficit would be 12.7 percent of its gross domestic product, not the 3.7 percent the previous government had forecast earlier)." (NY Times)

The Asian countries are chilling out and with a bit of a smirk enjoying the crisis the Western countries collapsing economy. Now you now what we experienced in 1997.

AIG-Goldman

a fresh story by NYTimes journalists about Goldman Sachs' aggressive demands for insurance payouts from AIG in the two years leading up to its collapse: link

Transformer

"The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems. And Boeing?s new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems.

These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, ?it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code,? says Manfred Broy, a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, and a leading expert on software in cars. All that software executes on 70 to 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of your car." Discovery

This just blew my mind. The fact that a recent salon contains 5-10 times the amount of code required on the newest jumbo jet or the latest generation fighter jet is quite unbelievable.

Friday, February 05, 2010

Awesome video of the day

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Nomadlife China Problem

Most of you have received the notification email from the Google about the end of ftp publishing support.

It means that all of us, including this main blog, will revert to publishing on Google blogspot. You will be able to keep your existing domain (xxx.nomadlife.org). That is not an issue, capice? Publishing on Google also brings a lot of benefits of much faster publishing and new gadgets/toys to play with on your blog.

The downside is that China does not like Google very much and vice versa.

With this switch, all nomadlife hosted on Google will go offline from China if the great leaders decide to block access to Blogger sites (which is the case right now). You have to go through all sort of jujitsu to bypass the great firewall of China.

This is the biggest problem that I intend to solve.

Milky Way Tubemap

Armageddon postponed

|The world?s highest energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will run at half its maximum energy through 2011 and likely not at all in 2012. Officials at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, had previously planned to run the gargantuan accelerator at 70% of maximum energy this year.

The change raises hopes at the LHC?s lower-energy rival, the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, of being extended through 2012 instead of being shut down next year. Fermilab researchers are hoping that their machine might collect enough data to beat the LHC to the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson, a particle key to how physicists explain the origin of mass.

The $5.5 billion LHC is designed to blast protons into other protons at an energy of 14 trillion electron-volts (TeV), seven times the Tevatron?s maximum. But it cannot run at full energy because of a few faulty electrical connections, or ?interconnects,? between the thousands of superconducting magnets that guide particles around the 27-kilometer subterranean ring. In September 2008, just 9 days after it first circulated particles, the LHC suffered a catastrophic breakdown when an interconnect between two magnets melted. That problem took 14 months to correct. The previous plan was to run the LHC briefly at 7 TeV, stop for a few months to rework the weakest interconnects, then ramp up 10 TeV later this year. CERN officials have now scaled back the energy to 7 TeV for this year and next, says Steve Myers, director of accelerators and technology at CERN.| (Science Mag)

They doing yet another "upgrade" to the LHC because of faulty design. Remember that it just underwent 14 months of repaired after breakdown in the early days of its initial operation. I know it is an amazingly complex and great system but this is turning into a job guarantee scheme.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Exercises keeps your cell young

"When the researchers measured telomeres in the middle-aged subjects, however, the situation was quite different. The sedentary older subjects had telomeres that were on average 40 percent shorter than in the sedentary young subjects, suggesting that the older subjects? cells were, like them, aging. The runners, on the other hand, had remarkably youthful telomeres, a bit shorter than those in the young runners, but only by about 10 percent. In general, telomere loss was reduced by approximately 75 percent in the aging runners. Or, to put it more succinctly, exercise, Dr. Werner says, ??at the molecular level has an anti-aging effect.??

There are plenty of reasons to exercise ? in this column, I?ve pointed out more than a few ? but the effect that regular activity may have on cellular aging could turn out to be the most profound. ??It?s pretty exciting stuff,?? says Thomas LaRocca, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who has just completed a new study echoing Werner?s findings. In Mr. LaRocca?s work, people were tested both for their V02max ? or maximum aerobic capacity, a widely accepted measure of physical fitness ? and their white blood cells? telomere length. In subjects 55 to 72, a higher V02max correlated closely with longer telomeres. The fitter a person was in middle age or onward, the younger their cells. " (NY Times)

When assassination works

"Something rare has happened in a region often given to brutal autocracy: power has been peacefully transferred to a civilian, just four months after an army massacre that recalled the worst of Africa?s past.

It was, bitterly for Guineans, the massacre that might have finally unchained this long-repressed country. An unusual set of events followed: the grave wounding in December of the country?s military dictator, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, in an assassination attempt; then what appeared to be acquiescence by his second-in-command, Gen. S�kouba Konat�, to a switch to civilian leadership; and finally the scene of hope last week when Mr. Dor� took power and promised the nation its first truly free elections within the year." NY Times

When reason silenced, bullets speak.

Change coming up

Google is discontinuing blogger.com ftp support that nomadlife relies on. HOLY CRAP!

"
|Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.
Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP ? yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger."

The good thing is that I can finally dispose nomadlife old rickety server and rely on the motherload instead. Another good news is that you will be able to keep your nomadlife address while publishing with Google and the blogging updates tracking can work - I got a plan that I think will make the transition work. Better still I think this news force me to get off my butt and do something new.

I'll present the plan in a week's time and then you guys can take a go at it.

Tehran Time - AS - HP - NIAC - TZ

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:26:08 GMT

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