Strip Joe Biden of His Motorcade? |
Since the Obama administration announced a series of measures in October last year to put an end to distracted driving, including an executive order directed at federal employees, Vice-President Joe Biden’s motorcade has been involved in at least five crashes. That’s an unusually high number for such a motorcade. |
In August, after Mr. Biden met New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion, two New York City police motorcycles escorting the Vice-President were involved in an accident. That followed a high profile crash in February, in which figure skating Olympic gold medalist Peggy Fleming and former bobsled champion Vonetta Flowers were injured. The two athletes were riding in the Vice-President’s motorcade at the Vancouver Olympics when the rear vehicle of the motorcade hit the back of a second vehicle, knocking it into a third car. Read more at blogs.forbes.com |
My friend Milt Lee has the coolest job in the world. Check it out here. Wall Street Trader Takes Quant Strategy to N.B.A. |
Think of Milton Lee as a technical investor. Except instead of analyzing stocks or commodities, he is analyzing basketball players. |
A former Wall Street equities trader who has done stints at ING and S.A.C Capital, Lee has joined the refurbished New Jersey Nets as the team’s director of basketball operations. His job is to crunch the statistics of Nets players, looking not just at their scoring percentages but also at their defensive efforts and where on the court they are most successful at hitting the net. |
Can a stream of numbers adequately predict the ebb and flow in play on the hard court? Well, more and more teams are trying to find out. The Nets, which recently came under new ownership, are the latest NBA team to hire a technical analyst like Lee to evaluate players. |
Read this obituary. Great story. Apparently he was famous, but I didn't know about him.
LONDON — Bill Millin, a Scottish bagpiper who played highland tunes as his fellow commandos landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day and lived to see his bravado immortalized in the 1962 film “The Longest Day,” died on Wednesday in a hospital in the western England county of Devon. He was 88.
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Mr. Millin was a 21-year-old private in Britain’s First Special Service Brigade when his unit landed on the strip of coast the Allies code-named Sword Beach, near the French city of Caen at the eastern end of the invasion front chosen by the Allies for the landings on June 6, 1944. |
The young piper was approached shortly before the landings by the brigade’s commanding officer, Brig. Simon Fraser, who as the 15th Lord Lovat was the hereditary chief of the Clan Fraser and one of Scotland’s most celebrated aristocrats. Against orders from World War I that forbade playing bagpipes on the battlefield because of the high risk of attracting enemy fire, Lord Lovat, then 32, asked Private Millin to play on the beachhead to raise morale. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
The World Cup may cost the UK economy more than $7B in lost productivity. In the States, it's not one-tenth of that. We have a long way to go before we catch up to the rest of the world in soccer-related slacking. I'm doing my part, though. URL: www.insideview.com
How can you not love the Dalai Lama? I'm no Buddhist, but he seems like the coolest guy on the planet.
WHEN I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best — and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.
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Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
Shut Out at Age 10, Federer Never Lost That Way Again |
There may be only one tennis player in the world who wishes he had taken it a bit easier on Roger Federer. Reto Schmidli, 31, a police officer and part-time psychology student in Arlesheim, Switzerland, is the only person who has “double-bageled” Federer, that is, beat him, 6-0, 6-0.
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The fact that the drubbing occurred in Federer’s first tournament match, when he was just 10 years old, is not lost on Schmidli. |
“I was just thinking about winning the match,” remembered Schmidli, who is now a recreational player ranked No. 715 in Switzerland. “I wasn’t thinking about being nice to him, but if I had to do it over again, I should have given Roger a game.” Read more at www.nytimes.com |
In one of the most dizzying half-hours in stock market history, the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points before paring those losses in what possibly could have been a trader error.  | Getty Images
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According to multiple sources, a trader entered a "b" for billion instead of an "m" for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble [PG
60.75
-1.41
(-2.27%)
 ], a component in the Dow. (CNBC's Jim Cramer noted suspicious price movement in P&G stock on air during the height of the market selloff. Watch.) |
Think the massive financial regulation bill is only about Wall Street? Think again. The NYT shows how lots of industries will be hurt by it.
Far afield from Wall Street, the intense debate over the overhaul of financial regulations by Congress is attracting some unlikely but powerful players. More than 130 companies from the manufacturing, retail and service sectors have retained high-powered lobbyists to weigh in on, and often oppose, the regulatory system being debated this week in Washington, according to an analysis of lobbying records by The New York Times. |
The companies bear little resemblance to Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street financial giants that have become the main targets of the legislation. The lobbying push by these other industries shows just how broadly the legislation could affect businesses. |
It also illustrates what some critics say is legislation so loosely drawn that it may inadvertently cover a variety of companies that are involved in lending or moving money, even if they operate far from Wall Street and had little to do with the financial crisis. Some industries, like payday lenders, fear that the financial overhaul may be a backdoor way for Congress to regulate them, something they have successfully fought for years. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
Interesting contrarian position on social media. Discuss amongst yourselves.... I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships. |
| During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn't be made good on. Today, "social" media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships. Read more at blogs.hbr.org |
A moon probe has found millions of tons of water on the moon’s north pole, NASA reported Monday. The vast source of water could one day be used to generate oxygen or sustain a moon base. |
A NASA radar aboard India’s Chandrayaan-I lunar orbiter found 40 craters, ranging in size from 1 to 9 miles across, with pockets of ice. Scientists estimate at least 600 million tons of ice could be entombed in these craters. Read more at www.wired.com |
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