“The Barter Theater first opened its doors in June 10, 1933, providing relief and diversions for Depression-era audiences. It was founded by Robert Porterfield, a young actor who suggested that audiences barter homegrown produce for admission. Its motto was “With vegetables you cannot sell, you can buy a good laugh.” Crowds were receptive to the idea of ‘ham or Hamlet,” and an estimated 80 percent of the audiences paid with fruits, vegetables, and livestock, or dairy products.”

"Refining a new mechanical trading system and ran a series of backtests with and without a profit stop. As the post title states, this system uses four degrees of freedom. "

"When I give talks on this, a question usually comes up about how far we can go with this, and the questioners usually ask about scenarios that I really don’t think are possible. And I always tell them that I don’t think their scenarios are possible based on our current understanding and tools. But then I add that 10 years ago everybody thought that the stuff I’m showing was impossible, so who knows? Hell, a mere 5 years ago, before I started working in this field, I was teaching optics for photographers, and in the lecture on the resolution limit of a lens I would say that what I’m showing them in that lecture is one of the few timeless results that is unlikely to be supplanted by new technologies (as opposed to, say, the lecture on how a CCD detector works). And now I’m working on beating the diffraction limit. So who knows?"

"See chart below (thanks go to David Wheelock from Fed St.Louis), which shows monthly value of imports in 75 countries between 1929 and 1933. Trade implosions happen, you have been warned."

"The time-tested response is that you're not sure, that ads are risky, that you can't tell. And for some sorts of products and some sorts of ads, you'll get no argument from me.

Digital ads are different (or they should be). You should know cost per click and revenue per click and be able to make a smart guess about lifetime value of a click. And if that's positive, buy, buy, buy.

And if you don't know those things, why are you buying digital ads?"

"The essential problem is the tragedy of the commons. Global warming and concern about CO2 emissions is a global, social problem that has extraordinary long term impacts, but when you look at it on an individual level, the marginal returns that a selfish individual can gain by ignoring the greater good far exceeds the marginal cost to that individual in the short run. In the long run, though, everyone pays more."

"I just want to let the food Nazi moms in on what happens when your kids come to a house where junk food inhabits the pantry. They have no decision-making skills or sense of moderation when faced with the forbidden fruit roll-up. Like deprived animals, they are determined to consume the lifetime allotment of sugar they have been denied; all before pick up. I have seen such a child eat Swiss Miss Cocoa with a spoon directly out of the family sized container, only to move on to conquer a box of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts. When faced with not one, but three brands of chips, they become apoplectic and run from the kitchen clutching bags of Cool Ranch Doritos and French Onion flavored Sun Chips, only to be found in a corner curled up in the fetal position surrounded by wrappers, unable to state their name."

"In a much-discussed magazine article last year, Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, raised an important question: Why does the rest of the world view China’s rise as a threat but India’s as a wonderful success story? The answer is that India is a vast, unwieldy, open democracy ruled by a coalition of 20 parties. It is evolving through a daily flow of ideas among the conservative forces of caste and religion, the liberals who dominate intellectual life, and the new forces of global capitalism."

Consider replacing "oil" with "auto".

"But with any energy boom eventually comes the energy bust. Here are some photos I took showing what a community looks like if its economy is disproportionately based on oil and the oil companies leave. I’m not a particularly good photographer, so these aren’t artistically impressive, but they capture what the area looks like now."

"Kelvin did not believe that heavier-than-air flying machines were possible and he regarded X-rays as a hoax. Kelvin’s ingenuity was manifested even in cases where his overall predictions were wrong. He gave a lecture on the state of physics at the turn of the twentieth century, and – not unlike Hilbert’s famous lectures in mathematics – claimed that physics was nearly complete and all problems would soon be settled. He mentioned, however, “two clouds on the horizon,” the unexpected behavior of ether in the Michelson-Morley experiment and the problem of the spectrum of the black body radiation. His genius as a physicist was manifested by the fact that of all the scores of open problems in physics present at the time (as there always are), he pinpointed the two problems that subsequently led to revolutions: the ether problem led to relativity, and black body radiation to quantum theory."

"The health of our communities, our planet, and ourselves depend on how we plan, design, and construct the world between our buildings. Green Community explores the origins of our precarious ecological situation and introduces communities large and small where citizens, political leaders, planning and design professionals, developers, and government agencies are working together for a more sustainable future."