Category: Vanities

Stop Making Fun Of 50 Cent’s Bankruptcy

Rappers, like kings, like to brag about their money because it shows influence and status. Versailles, the vomitously elaborate gilded palace outside Paris, was nothing if not Louis XIV’s attempt to overcome doubters about his throne with an intimidating show of power and wealth. Meanwhile, he was driving himself and his aristocrats to near-bankruptcy — not to mention France itself, which suffered lost wars and financial hardship. This is why there are so many parallels between Renaissance bling and the rappers of today: Gold always speaks loudly, and frequently moreso than the truth.

From Fitty himself :

Could you love me in a Bentley?
Could you love me on a bus?
I’ll ask 21 questions and they all about us

→ Mashable

The Bloomberg Terminal : Inside The Esoteric Ecosystem That Keeps Finance Hooked

Even high culture has acknowledged its status. Last week the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History started displaying the old Bloomberg keyboard of bond market legend Bill Gross as part of its “American Enterprise” exhibition.

For bankers, traders and money managers, these examples of the terminal’s ubiquity are entirely unsurprising, with many admitting a near-addiction. “I genuinely don’t know how I’d manage without the terminal,” says Matt Russell, a fund manager at M&G Investments in London. “It’s quite sad, really.”

→ Financial Times

Bill Gross Gets Personal: ‘I Just Wanted to Run Money and Be Famous’

But make no mistake: This Bill Gross, the one eying the French crullers, isn’t that Bill Gross, the one who bent markets to his will at Pacific Investment Management Co., who built one of the most enduring track records in bond management history, who moved markets with his pronouncements. That old Gross wanted fame more than power and riches, and he wanted it with a hot eagerness that made enemies. By the time Pimco cast him out, he was considered by colleagues—there’s no way to sugarcoat this—to be a world-class jerk who’d lost his touch.

→ Bloomberg

The $80 Million Fake Bomb-Detector Scam

How could nearly 4,000 pounds of explosives have passed, undetected, into one of the city’s most tightly controlled areas ?

The first impulse was to look for infiltrators and collaborators. Some 60 suspects who had worked at checkpoints and local police posts near the bombings were rounded up. But the real problem, it turned out, was with the handheld bomb detectors being used at just about every Iraqi-run checkpoint in the country. They were toys. They had never worked. It had all been an expensive charade—costing the Iraqi government tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of lives—engineered by a portly middle-aged salesman in Britain.

→ Vanity Fair

More Ties Than We Thought 

There is 177,147 different tie knots according to this paper.

The pair used an existing tool from logic – known as formal language theory – to express the basic rules of tying a neck tie as a series of symbols. This included things like the placement of the tie, the direction of the fold and the need to end in a final tuck. They used their tie language to show that only 85 knots were possible.

Now mathematician Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, has vastly broadened the tie landscape.

→ New Scientist