My friend came to me about a great new idea he had. I shall paraphrase our discussion:

-”Yo. Why is reality so hard?”, he asked.
-”I’ve no idea. Why is reality so hard?”, I replied.
-”It’s because there’s too many things to keep track of. I have a solution: micro-feng shui.”
-”Micro-feng shui? But isn’t micro less?”
-”Everything micro is good. For example: microchips. Very good.”
-”OK, so how does it work?”
-”Step 1: reduce spatial complexity. From now on, view the world as a planar space and ignore all height differences. That’s 30% less complexity. Then, step 2: happiness.”

Considering what’s published nowadays in various self-help books, packaging this idea into a 400-page book would probably reach New York Times bestseller list very fast. Not to mention the creation of some sort of a pseudo-religious movement, enabling my friend to be showered in non-Zimbabwean paper currency.

The multinational insurance giant AIG reported massive losses for Q4/08: 61.7 billion US dollars.

If that looks like a big number, think again: AIG has already received 150 billion USD, plus is about to receive 30 billion USD extra as bail-out/rescue/emergency funding. All in all this is 180 billion USD, almost three times the losses.

That’s… massive. But how much money is it, really?
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My friend from the almighty APMID posse recently started on a path of trying to get $100 k (yes, one hundred thousand US dollars) with Flash games. He’ll be blogging along about his progress, so be sure to follow his journey. He’s currently into part 2 of his series, and so far has sold one game.

It’s a Christmas-themed Flash game called Reindeer Rattle, where you control Santa Claus’ flying reindeer squadron to capture Christmas gift packets. Each gift gets more points and over time your reindeer posse grows longer and longer. It’s quite addictive – have a look!

I could imagine if a parent were to stick their kids in front of this game they could enjoy some good Yuletide and Christmas glögg in peace & harmony.

The Vice Chairman of the insurance giant American Insurance Group, Mr. Jacob Frenkel, entertains us with this quote about their crisis:

“The left side of the balance sheet has nothing right and the right side of the balance sheet has nothing left. But they are equal to each other. So accounting-wise we are fine.”

AIG already got $85 billion from the Fed, and the total sum might even go up to $120 billion. With that amount of money, I might consider becoming a stand-up comedian as well!

BBC provides us with nice graphical illustrations of the mindbogglingly huge impact of the ongoing finance crisis.

Contrast e.g. the rescue plans of United Kingdom with the annual spending in health and education. With numbers that large, they will need snowploughs to move all that money. Yes, of course nowadays it’s all digital, but I like the mental image.

Tony Howlett gave a presentation in Defcon 16 about the “cashless society”; why, what it means and likely developments. It’s a very interesting read, especially the point made about card payments – what happens when there’s no electricity?
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Due to increased phishing attacks against banks with bad security procedures, banks have been forced to re-think their situation. To be fair, the Swedish branch of Nordea fixed their internet bank procedures somewhat after these problems.

Anyway, my bank (Nordea) recently sent me a Todos Argos Mini II USB smartcard reader, to be used with the Nordea internet bank. It’s actually quite simple to use.
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Recently I read the Freakonomics book. Do read it, unless you already haven’t – it’s very entertaining and thought-provoking.

Then, in a similar vein, I ran into this BBC article, which states: “Analysis of notes from a selection of Spain’s major cities showed that each one carried an average of 25.18 micrograms of cocaine.”

In other words, people snort so much of the illicit substance through rolled-up notes that the notes in circulation will have measurable amounts of cocaine in them. It’s unbelievable, but true.

Since people dig huge holes to the ground to get out minerals worth less, would this resource be somehow commercially exploitable?

Let’s do the math!
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A CAPTCHA is an automated test which is used to separate computers from humans. It is created in such a way that for humans it is easy, but for computers as difficult as possible. For example, given an image with distorted text, a human can easily read the presented word, but computers will have difficulties (the amount of difficulties depends on how the image is distorted).

One use for CAPTCHAs is to prevent spamming with the idea that anything automated (such as mass-spamming computers) won’t pass the puzzle, and therefore will not be able to inject their trash-messages into a service. However, CAPTCHAs don’t work so well in practice anymore.
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Yahoo! provides a web wallet service called “Yahoo! Wallet”, where one can store credit card information. Unfortunately, it can also be used by bad guys to test the validity of the credit card data they have obtained.
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