(via Neatorama.)

I really need to get to St.Petersburg. Can’t believe I never made it when I was Europe-side.

(via Neatorama.)

Sadly, my suggestions for a firepole (or water slide!) to replace the unreliable elevator at work have been roundly ignored…

(via Daniel Pink.)

You take a small pod ship round a base and design tools to add to your ship to complete puzzles (which the IPO then patent pends, sigh). Really creative and quite addictive actually.

nb: I couldn’t get this to run on Chrome on my Mac but it worked fine in Firefox.

(via Neatorama.)

This though, is very cool. Not only does Out of Print clothing make some pretty cool tees, but part of its mission is to donate a book for every shirt sold to a community in need through its partner Books for Africa.

Def want a Moby Dick shirt (for those of you who missed sending me Xmas gifts… ahem… Oh, and BTW go and read Melville’s classic now if you never have), but was just thinking about all the classics I’d love to have a shirt for like To Kill a Mockingbird as well as childhood faves like The Count of Monte Cristo (thinking about the book covers now on some of those childhood adventure novels I had).

OK, so classic novels question? Some of your favourite classics you don’t see on their shirts that simple must be on there?

(via Cool Hunting.)

If you don’t know anything about economics, the scary thing you should take away from this is how heavily opposed in advice these two approaches are and that supporting one or the other is fundamentally a question, when you strip everything down to fundamentals, of belief. Pretty spooky, huh ?

Anyhow, I wish this’d been around when I was suffering through 2nd year Econ.

(via David Olsen’s twitter feed – who I seem to be just wholesale snagging stuff form today.)

Oh, and if you’re interested in the full transcript.

Fear the Boom and Bust

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits

[Keynes Sings:]

John Maynard Keynes, wrote the book on modern macro
The man you need when the economy’s off track, [whoa]
Depression, recession now your question’s in session
Have a seat and I’ll school you in one simple lesson

BOOM, 1929 the big crash
We didn’t bounce back—economy’s in the trash
Persistent unemployment, the result of sticky wages
Waiting for recovery? Seriously? That’s outrageous!

I had a real plan any fool can understand
The advice, real simple—boost aggregate demand!
C, I, G, all together gets to Y
Make sure the total’s growing, watch the economy fly

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits

You see it’s all about spending, hear the register cha-ching
Circular flow, the dough is everything
So if that flow is getting low, doesn’t matter the reason
We need more government spending, now it’s stimulus season

So forget about saving, get it straight out of your head
Like I said, in the long run—we’re all dead
Savings is destruction, that’s the paradox of thrift
Don’t keep money in your pocket, or that growth will never lift…

because…

Business is driven by the animal spirits
The bull and the bear, and there’s reason to fear its
Effects on capital investment, income and growth
That’s why the state should fill the gap with stimulus both…

The monetary and the fiscal, they’re equally correct
Public works, digging ditches, war has the same effect
Even a broken window helps the glass man have some wealth
The multiplier driving higher the economy’s health

And if the Central Bank’s interest rate policy tanks
A liquidity trap, that new money’s stuck in the banks!
Deficits could be the cure, you been looking for
Let the spending soar, now that you know the score

My General Theory’s made quite an impression
[a revolution] I transformed the econ profession
You know me, modesty, still I’m taking a bow
Say it loud, say it proud, we’re all Keynesians now

We’ve been goin’ back n forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Keynes] I made my case, Freddie H
Listen up , Can you hear it?

Hayek sings:

I’ll begin in broad strokes, just like my friend Keynes
His theory conceals the mechanics of change,
That simple equation, too much aggregation
Ignores human action and motivation

And yet it continues as a justification
For bailouts and payoffs by pols with machinations
You provide them with cover to sell us a free lunch
Then all that we’re left with is debt, and a bunch

If you’re living high on that cheap credit hog
Don’t look for cure from the hair of the dog
Real savings come first if you want to invest
The market coordinates time with interest

Your focus on spending is pushing on thread
In the long run, my friend, it’s your theory that’s dead
So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective
Prepared to get schooled in my Austrian perspective

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits

The place you should study isn’t the bust
It’s the boom that should make you feel leery, that’s the thrust
Of my theory, the capital structure is key.
Malinvestments wreck the economy

The boom gets started with an expansion of credit
The Fed sets rates low, are you starting to get it?
That new money is confused for real loanable funds
But it’s just inflation that’s driving the ones

Who invest in new projects like housing construction
The boom plants the seeds for its future destruction
The savings aren’t real, consumption’s up too
And the grasping for resources reveals there’s too few

So the boom turns to bust as the interest rates rise
With the costs of production, price signals were lies
The boom was a binge that’s a matter of fact
Now its devalued capital that makes up the slack.

Whether it’s the late twenties or two thousand and five
Booming bad investments, seems like they’d thrive
You must save to invest, don’t use the printing press
Or a bust will surely follow, an economy depressed

Your so-called “stimulus” will make things even worse
It’s just more of the same, more incentives perversed
And that credit crunch ain’t a liquidity trap
Just a broke banking system, I’m done, that’s a wrap.

We’ve been goin’ back n forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No it’s the animal spirits

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers,
both when they are right and when they are wrong,
are more powerful than is commonly understood.
Indeed the world is ruled by little else.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt
from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves
of some defunct economist.”

John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men
how little they really know about what they imagine
they can design.”

F A Hayek
The Fatal Conceit

via GetUp‘s own Tom S.

Read Keane’s guide on letter writing your polies – love the stuff about throwing in random extra issues or questions on unrelated matters so they have to expend resources and can’t use canned responses, cut and paste mail merges or have to pull on resources from other departments.

Yeah, baby…

SketchNation is on Twitter at the moment and sure to announce the app availability there.

Other tips of the ol propellor beanie this week to the voice recognition searching of the new Google Mobile iPhone app (love it. Though it failed to recognize my mellifluous, Juilliard-school tones asking about Vitaminosis A) and the pretty kick ass funky ShopSavvy which uses the camera as a bar code scanner (and very handy and topical for Xmas shopping).

(via ReadWriteWeb.)

The Independent Games Festival competition has been heating up some entries and a pointer sent me to Rocketbirds: Revolution. Gotta love the production values on this one. Cut scenes, retro paltformer gameplay and, well… chickens versus penguins… And you have to love a chicken hero called Hardboiled… =] Demo playable on the jump link.

(via BoingBoing.)

The optimal number for this given a finite population of, say 100 life partners, would be 37… you should see 37 people and then choose the next partner if no better option has presented itself in the first 37. Math says so. Really. In fact, you can apply this to any number of potential life partners (as hard an estimate as that may be unless you live on a very small island or in the event of global holocaust) by dividing the potential number by e, the base of natural logarithms (approximately 2.72).

Unfortunately, it’s fairly mum on what to do if one of the first 37 was your optimal choice and you blew it.

So, how many more you got to go if you’re still out there ?…

(via Neatorama.)

(via GetUp Office list.)

Kinda loving this right now though guess I’m working those choices anyhow (for better of worse).

Also, check out Five Big Questions and the aforementioned Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun.

(via Box of Crayons.)

Diary Of A Swine Flu Victim

(via SS on the GetUp office list.)

Great little ad from Australia’s GetUp ! on the plans of the Rudd government for internet filtering throughout the whole country (yes, shockingly for a democracy like Australia, the same sort of thing you’d expect from China, Iran and some other sadly misguided repressive regimes).

Cute and effective. Love the idea of censordyne as a toothpaste like product.

(Disclosure : I’ve just accepted an employment offer with GetUp and will be moving to Australia, but would have posted this up anyway. )

(via BoingBoing.)