Bookraft

As one can well imagine throughout the Financial Fiasco, letting the Financial community handle your investments has become both financially risky and intellectually a cop out. So I am doing a little do-it- yourself investing. So now I am primarily responsible for tuning and diversifying the portfolio with returns and risks managed to my longer term goals. And being a Web developer with strong roots in the Open Source community - I have decided to use as many good free financial investment tools as I could find. Let me tell you I was surpised at the diversity and quality of the free tools available. And despite this richness, there has been a clear winner - the base tool for all my financial valuations and research - Google Finance:

There is an article up at the NYTimes about the recent discoveries on Dark Energy. Yes this is Cosmological Theory that is right at the limits of AstroPhysics and importantly, testability. But what makes the story exponentially more interesting is the degree of abstract theorizing that is going on:

"Modern quantum mechanics predicts that empty space should indeed be imbued with this strange energy, but the possibility that the dark energy might actually be Einstein’s cosmological constant has thrown physics into philosophical turmoil. “The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said recently.

According to the calculations, the cosmological constant should be 1060 times bigger than what astronomers have measured; in such a universe, stars, planets and of course ourselves could not exist. The only way out, some physicists and cosmologists have argued, is to presume that our own universe is only one of as many as 10500 parallel universes, in which the laws of physics happen to be conducive to our existence. But many others bitterly disagree."

Welcome to Pix of Toronto on WordPress 2.7.

Macleans Magazine has hit right on the mark- a neurally perfect but logically blind spot in its article Dumbed Down. The premise of the article is that the new digitally immersive experiences that current youth - called Digital Natives - have changed the way youth think and work profoundly. The problem is that the BRAIN IS VERY PLASTIC AND IT DELAYS REACHING COMPLETE MATURATION UNTIL AFTER PUBERTY. So this makes the brain up to and through adolescence subject to wide-ranging changes.

Barack Obama is given tops marks for his ability to write and deliver a stirring speech. It is no small part of his political prowess. He has been compared to another Illinois native son - Abraham Lincoln for being a superb communicator. But Barack Obama may be taking this ability to listen, define and communicate to a new level. That is the argument of diverse observers from the Technology Review, NYTimes, and eWeek.

Blood Diamond is the second of three straight movies in which the so called Titanic pretty boy proves that he has moved into th

The reason that stock prices continue to gyrate so much as they head down and the credit markets still are frozen - even after unprecedented action by the Fed and worldwide central banks - all is captured in a single phrase - the derivative mess.

The headline on Fortune Magazine is :
Google: Is this company worth $165 a share ?

The Media appear to be working overtime to earn the hated "liberal" or "recklessly biased" epithets. In the latter case, Fox News Hannity and Colmes program is lately acting as a RNC-Republican National Committee cable channel conduit for strictly RNC viewpoints despite trumpeting that "the fair and balanced debate is only on 'Hannity and Colmes' ". Rigggghhhhtttttttttt.

There is a story in today's New York Times that is ...well like music to the heart. It is about the revival of puella puellae puellam ... err ... Latin in schools in the US. The growth rates are impressive ( measured by those taking the National Latin Exam from 100,000 in 1998 to 134,000 in 2007).

The revival is attributed to Harry Potter, SAT's , a touch of elitism among other factors. Harry Potter's influence because many of the spells and written secrets are in Latin, SAT's because there is definite truth to the notion that knowledge of Latin helps immensely in building English vocabulary but also make learning French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portugese and any other Romance language much easier.