Warm Water, Good Baking

Not to understand the market’s operations

No federal or state regulator has market oversight responsibilities or regulatory powers governing the over-the-counter derivatives market or indeed has even sufficient information to understand the market’s operations. The market is totally opaque and is now popularly referred to as “the dark market.” It is enormous -- the reported size of the market as of last June exceeded $680 trillion dollars of notional value, more than ten times the amount of the gross national product of all the countries in the world.

From what Brooksley Born had to say on her accepting the 2009 Profile in Courage Award, May 18, 2009.

Just think of the leverage!

Back then, at Bell Labs, a Cherry few know

Cherry: Yes, it is. Very high. And there was this flavor, other people probably talked about this, but it was group dynamics all going on up there. We were all up in the sixth floor. Although I think I worked mostly in my office and visited the sixth floor with questions, [inaudible] the sixth floor. But there was this attitude, there were all these little tools built, and it was the idea of pipes that just kinda, of stringing things together, that was all neat and wonderful. And there was this attitude that he who touched it last owned it. So if you needed PR (?) to do something PR didn’t do, and you went and added it, you now owned PR. And so if some other part of it broke, you owned it.

MSM: You were now PR’s support.

Cherry: You were PR’s support. Yeah, so a lot of the programs floated from person to person because somebody would add a feature to Sort, and they owned Sort. Somebody else would add a feature to Sort and then they owned Sort.

Now that is, how open source was done at Bell Labs in the 70ies. Inside the corp. though, half owned by Western Electric and half by AT&T. Dig the spirit.

... The graphics part of it, I think Tech is still better as far as what EQN does and what Tech does. From a mathematical standpoint I think you’ll find Tech better, but I don’t think Tech stuff is anywhere near as natural to work with. That may be very prejudiced, I don’t have a…

Oral History at Princeton with Lorinda Cherry.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt

Today we commemorate the 125th birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt who was the First Lady of the United States of America for 12 years from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of the administration her husband, Franklin Delano headed and during that time and after assumed a role as an advocate for the American Civil Rights Movement.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born to one of New Yorks's most distinguished families and seems to have sought a somewhat curious path in life. When, in 1902 at age 17, Roosevelt returned from the UK to the United States, her formal education ended. She was given a debutante party and went on to become a social worker in the East Side slums of New York. That same year Roosevelt met her father's fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in whose future lay a serious handicap and the presidency of the US in what in Austria somewhat euphemistically is called the difficult time before '45.

After her husband's sudden death in said year 1945, Roosevelt continued to be an internationally prominent author, speaker, politician, and activist. She engaged to enhance the status of working women and opposed the Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution saying she believed it would adversely affect women.

Roosevelt founded the UN Association of the United States in 1943 to advance support for the formation of the UN. She was a delegate to the UN General Assembly from 1945 and 1952. During her time at the United Nations she chaired the committee that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not perfect but not bad either, we say.

Active in politics for the rest of her life, Roosevelt chaired the Kennedy administration's ground-breaking committee which helped start second-wave feminism, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.

Curiously the "Wiener Zeitung", took the opportunity to have a certain Evelyn Steinthaler write a piece about Die First Lady der Welt in its Saturday edition. In that interesting story Mrs. Steinthaler who has recently translated Langston Hughes' "Simple Speaks His Mind" nicely quotes from Mr. Hughes' and her own work, giving a short introduction first.

Der afroamerikanische Autor Langston Hughes lässt in seinem Ende der 1940er Jahre erschienenen Buch "Simpel spricht sich aus" die Hauptfigur, Jesse B. Semple (einen Harlemer Simplicisismus, genannt Simpel) eines Abends, an einer Bar sitzend, um die baldige Wiederkehr Jesus Christus und um Rache für die erlittenen Qualen der schwarzen Bevölkerung bitten:

"Nein", sagte Simpel. "Ich hoff, er lässt Mrs. Roosevelt in Ruh."

More need not be said.

"... Opera is mainly for young people."

Nearly a month ago, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa announced the end of her opera career, saying "the work was "exhausting"". We only read about it just now in New Zealand's Herald on Sunday.

From the 70ies on Mrs. Te Kanawa has enjoyed the lovers of golden voice and thanks to recording will go on for our lifetime. In 1981 around 600 million people heard and saw her on TV singing at the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Spencer.

Let us assure you that this lady of mixed Irish and Maori descent was one of the finest Mozart singers ever. We always particularly liked her as the Contessa Rosina di Almaviva in Le nozze die Figaro.

Mrs. Te Kanawa will sing a penultimate opera performance playing La duchesse de Crakentorp at New York's Met and a last one at the Cologne Opera in Germany next April when she will do the "Marschallin" in Richard Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier". Now while we can certainly see and hear the talent and the qualities in that opus, but this is still not our kind of music and therefor it seems improbable that we will take the pains of getting the tickets and travelling to Cologne.

We need not be afraid though for Mrs. Te Kanawa will go on singing and touring on the much quieter concert scene. In August she insisted that though she has not sung opera since 2004 she had never retired.

"The press retired me," as she told the Telegraph in London. "I have not been singing opera very much but I still sing a lot of concerts."

Kiri Te Kanawa made more remarks on sustainable and shortsighted strategies in singing. Go read yourself.