(no subject)

"[E]very person in this country of super-asinine propensities, everyone who hates social progress and loves deflation, feels that his hour has come and triumphantly announces how, by refraining from every form of economic activity, we can all become prosperous again.” --John Maynard Keynes, reacting to the British emergency budget of September 1931, quoted by his biographer Lord Skidelsky in the Financial Times.

via a post in Prof. Brad DeLong's blog

More fun with cesium (or, as they say over there, caesium).

From the University of Nottingham:

The video referenced in the above clip from 5:37:

From a series called "The Periodic Table of Videos". The outtakes are pretty funny.

(no subject)

Edward Harrison, in a recent post in his Credit Writedowns blog:

Obama had one shot to fix banking and to apply stimulus. And he did not get the job done. Despite the belief during the election of 2008 that Barack Obama actually understood economics better than John McCain, I am not so sure. Sometimes Barack Obama gets it. Sometimes he doesn’t.

I happen to believe that Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney would have done pretty much the same thing as Obama regarding stimulus and bailouts, frankly. The healthcare situation is where the Democrat-Republican divide lies. So, on stimulus and bailouts, it’s not as if Obama was doing something that other politicians would not have. He was a conventional politician, taking a conventional route.

But, that route is what has led us to where we are. If Barack Obama had wanted to be "change we can believe in" he would need to have taken a different path.

(no subject)

The roads around here are very quiet at 4AM. It's a great time to haul stuff around.