“It’s hard to believe the market for tech gadgets and accessories and replacement parts is not great enough to sustain local stores. People like me cannot be that rare. That makes little sense to me. I know the other techs I work with are having the same frustrations, and we’re always making do with duct tape and a wad of gum while we wait for replacement parts to arrive. There was a time when we could hop in the car and drive a half-mile to the nearest tech store and pick up whatever we needed.

Those days are gone. And I will miss having those resources handy.”

Circuit City RIP, 03-08-09 (Geek News Central)

I think that I’ve been to Circuit City twice; however, I think that this misses the point. These places were good if you were going to buy a cable, but they were never going to be able to maintain the massive infrastructure on the back of cable sales.

The thing that they were missing was knowledgable advice; and they were never going to be able offer that on the salaries they were offering. With little or no added value, they died.

Can we now just rename all the divisions of all the banks? 

“AIG gambling division in London”

David Galbraith’s Blog » Blog Archive » Nicholas Ashooh of AIG, the world’s worst PR guy?

The RBS Money burning division, the Nothern Rock lost at sea department etc.

Mashup is a great name but does it really describe something this complex and this good?

Newseum – Map View

The only mathematically consistent explanation known for this result is therefore Hardy’s. The weird things he predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking. Dr Yokota and his colleagues went so far as to call their results “preposterous”.

Quantum physics and reality | I’m not looking, honest! | The Economist

 

Wordle – richard.wilkinson.fr

“I have the right to own an MLS franchise, which I will action immediately after I have stopped playing,” Beckham said.

BBC SPORT | Football | Europe | Beckham planning to buy MLS team

Martin often talks more sense than most papers…

“I am convinced that the Germans, French, Italians, Spaniards, the Dutch may not agree on things as to using its own taxpayer´s money to help the new members of the EU, but they all agree that without the euro they are all worse off.”

Trash talking the euro

Of course he’s right. 

However, there is something that most commentators don’t get. 

“I just came back from New York City and all my friends in finance over there seem to be convinced that the euro will not survive this crisis. The New York Times and other top media all had articles about this. They think that euro nations will not agree on monetary policy and the French Franc, the DM, the Lira, the Peseta will be reborn.”

And exactly how will all these currencies be reborn? There’s the practical side of printing the money and distributing it etc. but there is also the rate at which they’re going to be reborn. 

If you’re sitting in government in Italy, do you really think that the answer to your problems is the Lira?

These people haven’t really thought it through have they?

How clever is this? 

“We do our best to predict what the sea floor looks like based on what we can measure much more easily: the water surface. Above large underwater mountains (seamounts), the surface of the ocean is actually higher than in surrounding areas. These seamounts actually increase gravity in the area, which attracts more water and causes sea level to be slightly higher. The changes in water height are measurable using radar on satellites. This allows us to make a best guess as to what the rest of the sea floor looks like, but still at relatively low resolutions (the model predicts the ocean depth about once every 4000 meters).”

Google LatLong: Atlantis? No, it Atlant-isn’t.

“Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.”

Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly – A hand picked TV channel