Think about it for a sec. Yes, this is wrong.
]]>Think about it for a sec. Yes, this is wrong.
]]>Ok, so we admit - air travel is not exactly a good line of business to be getting into these days - it's just that we all think planes are AWESOME!!!
Thanks to Alberto for the pic!
]]>The main trait that drives evolution is natural selection - a process causing heritable traits that are helpful for survival and reproduction to become more common in a population, and harmful traits to become more rare.
So please tell me how a species can 'evolve' when it is clearly incapable of eating. See diagram below:
For all you 'intelligent design' believers (quotes added for emphasis):
Intelligent design is the assertion that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a modern form of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, modified to avoid specifying the nature or identity of the designer.
Whilst I accept that pizza is a man-made foodstuff and it's clearly obvious that the pigeon wasn't designed to eat it, it's probably just common sense to assume that intelligent design, if there were such a thing, would not be so cruel as to make the simple task of eating so fucking difficult for the humble pigeon!... Tell me that doesn't disprove intelligent design - either that or it proves that God/the-designer actually has quite a sense of humour!
]]>30 minutes later ...
Spitfires FTW!
Is that last photo clever or what! A blogging paradox if you will!
Alberto and I were discussing how freaking awesome Spitfires were the other day and how absolutely sweet it would be to have one. Well, for a mere ~£250k you can have your own... albeit a replica, but almost as good as the real thing!
]]>Got me thinking about a little gorilla art project of my own.
Buy 50 Banksy prints. Best go down to Brick Lane or somewhere where they only cost a fiver each. Find a number of pictures of Banksy himself. Attach to said artworks (see above). Create a high quality book of the 50 prints claiming as your own artwork. Send 50 copies of sample book to various art critics/bloggers. Await slanderous reviews. Await letter from Banksy's attorney. Make video of opening of letter.
]]>Nom nom nom. All gone!
]]>Old Chinese proverb say: Always best add diversification to one's business model!
]]>What does bother me however is when they go out of their way to (attempt to) poke fun, albeit completely innaccurately at people who are actually leaders in their field. In this case, Peter Thiel.
Some background information:
Thiel was one of the original co-founders of Paypal. He took it public and eventually sold the company to eBay for $1.5 billion. He runs an uber-successful global macro hedge fund called Clarium Capital, a technology venture capital fund - The Founders Fund, and is an investor in Facebook and many more very successful web2.0 companies such as LinkedIn, Slide, Friendster etc etc. The list goes on. In short the guy is a fricking genius!
So Valleywag thought it would be fun to point out that a 13% loss last month in Thiel's $7 billion fund, Clarium, was more or less equivilent to the supposed $1 billion (5%) personal investment that he has in Facebook. They then go to question why Michael Arrington failed to mention anything about the loss when he interviewed Thiel at the recent TC50 conference in San Fransisco.
"The loss comes after a stunning track record of the firm's biggest monthly loss, beating an 11 percent drop in March 2004. Strangely, this topic went uncovered in TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's interview of Thiel on Monday."
Arrington is not an idiot. Even if he knew about the Clarium loss, I'm sure he would know that questioning Thiel over this would simply make him look stupid and ignorant.
I suppose what annoys me is the fact that Valleywag seem to think that they have the right to criticise successful people just because they're successful. It seems like jealousy to me. In this particular case I believe their criticisms actually made them look pretty stupid because they're entering a territory (global macro hedge funds) that they clearly don't have a clue about. They even went as far as to mention that this 13% loss is greater then the fund's previous biggest loss (11% in march-2004).
"The loss comes after a stunning track record of the firm's biggest monthly loss, beating an 11 percent drop in March 2004."
They fail to mention however that the fund's performance before and indeed since then has been absolutely phenomenal. They also fail to mention that this type of fund is inheritly high risk. It makes big returns but is also susceptible to making big losses. This is simply the nature of the game and investors are well aware of this when they invest.
Anyway I suppose the point is: Don't criticise people about things you don't understand! Jeez!
/RANT
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Do you like how the text is all backwards. I did that on purpose. Yeah, subversive I know.
]]>Apologies for the crap photo. More can be found here.
Any input would be appreciated.
]]>The grand move
And voila! The new office. It may not look much better than the old one, but it is about twice as big and much more airy and spacious. Horray!