"The point of these two examples is to say that, at this moment in time (subject to change with a portfolio-crushing lack of notice) short-term mean-reversion is the stock market play du jour. Not respecting this shift in the markets and following the CNBC’esque view of the world (the market rallied today, the bottom is here!) is quite possibly the easiest way to underperform even the sad saps on Wall Street."

"As it happens, the fledgling United States was completely ripped off by the manufacturer of the first official penny. At the time, the United States didn’t yet have a national Mint, so they outsourced currency production to James Jarvis of Connecticut, who had bribed the head of the Treasury board with $10,000 for the contract. Jarvis was supposed to produce 300 tons of pennies, but ultimately only produced four tons of slightly underweight coins. Furthermore, a congressional report stated that “Jarvis had received a large quantity of federal copper but had only paid for a small portion.” (Louis Jordan, University of Notre Dame)"

"Paperclip is a plugin for Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord that lets files work as simply as any other attributes do. There are no extra database tables, only one library to install for image processing, and the ease of being able to refer to your files as easily as you refer to your other attributes."

"In fact, their dismissal of history is a direct consequence of their version of Darwinism, which is focused on demonstrating how the actions of literary characters provide illustrative examples of human biological nature. While they give no end of homage to the idea that actual human behavior is subject to environmental influence – as far as I can tell, no one seriously doubts this – they seem to have no interest in investigating how behaviors and environments amplify into history. Literary Darwinism is paradoxically static, the examination of flies caught in amber, and Darwin himself has become a Platonic fetish to ward off the evils of change, of history."

"So if my guess is true, we either start to see less globalization, or we will gradually start seeing borders coming down over the coming decades. The twenty first century could well go down in history as the era of decline of the nation-state."