2007 — 17 August: silly season Friday
I know all generalisations are wrong (including this one) and I know many1 North Americans are like the best of our Cornish cream2 or our Royal Family, but why would anyone pay $2.1m to own what was once Steve McQueen's Ferrari? And why would some Dell employees lie to their senior executives and external auditors to overstate financial results by what may be as much as $150m in the last four years?
Still, after a five hour meeting, NASA officials said "they felt certain that the small hole posed no threat to the Shuttle's re-entry" so they won't be sending any of the flight crew out to repair the gash. I host an unrelated but somehow similarly-flavoured quotation here about Dounreay's nuclear safety containment assessment by committee.
Relaxed start to the day
It's jolly nearly noon, and the day is slowly kicking into gear! Not too bad so far. Now it's nearer 2 pm and I've even been and gone and got my watch back. Which is probably how I know what the time is, come to think of it. And now it's time to try a little toddle around the block. Followed by some shut-eye. Bliss.
Deeper into the Black Swan
As I grapple (nightly) with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's tome, so comments such as the following seem to ring ever more true:
It is deeply troubling that Britain has all its eggs in one basket. Government ministers talk airily about the creation of a knowledge economy, but what that means in practice is that the country's best mathematicians are employed by City firms to construct elaborate and, as it turns out, useless models to price risky financial instruments. These models have never been stress-tested because the people who created them assured us that the sort of problems we are now experiencing would happen only once in 10,000 years.
It is an exaggeration, but perhaps not much of one, to say that Britain is now dependent on speculation. The Germans are feeling the heat from the market turmoil but they use their bright people to create products people want to buy to enrich their lives. That's a knowledge economy. Britain uses its brains to develop products that have no intrinsic value and have helped take the global financial system to the edge of the precipice. That's a stupid economy.
Turns out Dr Taleb was at one time a "Quant"3... Go on, look it up; you know you want to!
A Good Day?
Well, it's 22:55 or so, She's 99% asleep — I don't think She caught much of the Stephen Fry "celebration" and I've just removed Her reading glasses and switched off Her bedside light — but smiled slightly when She got Her good night kiss. Yes: a pretty Good Day on the whole. Good Night!