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I came across this review of Foundation in my blogroll and remembered that I did one of these a while ago.

Digging it up I found what I wrote to be pretty awful. So I rewrote it.

“This is my kind of deal and my kind of partner,” Mr. Buffett told CNBC on Thursday. “Heinz is our kind of company with fantastic brands.”

In many ways, Heinz fits Mr. Buffett’s deal criteria almost to a T. It has broad brand recognition – besides ketchup, it owns Ore-Ida and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce – and has performed well. Over the last 12 months, its stock has risen nearly 17 percent.

That’s the NYT. I don’t know, this seems to be an odd deal to me. Sure the brands are great but quickly flick through Heinz’ financials and you see a company with a terrible balance sheet: 4.5bn of intangible assets and only 2.8bn of equity. 4bn of debt, about equal to the treasury stock deficit.  This is a company that has borrowed heavily to buy back its own stock for some reason. Why add the risk?

Well it’s about to get another pile of financing (3bn more by my math):

Berkshire and 3G will each contribute about $4 billion in cash to pay for the deal, with Berkshire also paying $8 billion for preferred shares. The rest of the cost will be covered by debt financing raised by JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

Everyone’s getting pumped up for deals deals deals but I’m scratching my head.

She asked me why I was so calm. I told her, We do this every night. We go to a house, we fuck with some people, and we leave. This is just a longer flight.

About 7000 more words here. Recommended.

-=-=-

Here’s another good quote:

“One of the tests is they make you dive to the bottom of a pool and tie five knots,” the Shooter says. “One guy got to the fifth knot and blacked out underwater. We pulled him up and he was, like, dead. They made the class face the fence while they tried to resuscitate him. The first words as he spit out water were ‘Did I pass? Did I tie the fifth knot?’ The instructor told him, ‘We didn’t want to find out if you could tie the knots, you asshole, we wanted to know how hard you’d push yourself. You killed yourself. You passed.'”

The blue whale—190 tonnes in weight and beautifully adapted for swimming—is a placental mammal. The mammal bit means that mothers nourish their babies with milk after they’re born. The placental bit means that mothers nourish their babies via a placenta before they’re born—an organ that allows them to exchange oxygen and nutrients without also swapping blood.

The bumblebee bat—1.5 grams in weight and beautifully adapted for flying—is also a placental mammal. So are you. So is a bear, an anteater, a giraffe and a squirrel. Also: armadillos, rhinos, rabbits, manatees, and pangolins.

All of these creatures, in their wondrous array of shapes and sizes, evolved from a small, unassuming, scurrying insect-eater that lived a few hundred thousand years after the apocalypse that finished off most of the dinosaurs.

That’d Ed Yong. And more from this piece:

After an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs — save for those that evolved into today’s birds — a small, furry animal scurried through the forest in search of insects. Its unassuming looks gave little hint that its descendants would one day rule the planet.

A team of scientists in the United States and Canada has now reconstructed the appearance and anatomy of this creature — the forebear of all ‘placental’ mammals, which give birth to live young at an advanced stage of development — in unprecedented detail, using a record-breaking data set of anatomical traits and genetic sequences.

The critter turned out to be a tree-climbing, furry-tailed insect eater that weighed between 6 and 245 grams. It gave birth to blind, hairless young, one at a time. Its brain was highly folded, and it had three pairs of molars on each jaw.

For the kind of coverage geeks can find nowhere else:

The default configurations in a country where legal settlements can be substantial tend towards the conservative side. We don’t know if that was a factor in this event but we do know that no fault was found and the power was stable for the remainder of the game. This was almost certainly a false trigger.

Because the cause has not yet been reported and, quite often, the underlying root cause is never found. But, it’s worth asking, is it possible to avoid long game outages and what would it cost? As when looking at any system faults, the tools we have to mitigate the impact are: 1) avoid the fault entirely, 2) protect against the fault with redundancy, 3) minimize the impact of the fault through small fault zones, and 4) minimize the impact through fast recovery.

And, oh yes, much, much more at this link, including discussion of $1m backup generators and how many TV commercials it would take to guarantee the safety of Superbowl lighting.

If you assume that driverless cars will work, this is a neat perspective:

If you live in a big city, go outside and look up and down the street. You can see hundreds of autos just sitting there doing nothing. Some of these cars move less often than once per week. I don’t live in a big city and my car moves 2 hours a day on a day of heavy use.

Now envision 5-10 years from now…you go out on the street and there are no cars…because there’s an Enterprise rent-a-car parking garage with hundreds of self driving cars two miles from where you live. They have a smartphone app that you press a button for what kind of vehicle you need and it shows up out front in five minutes.

There’s more here on the efficiency gains when humans don’t need to operate cars (we’ll need less of them). And trucks, too.

Remember CD jewel cases? I still remember the day I learned that I’d been opening them wrong: with two hands when I should have only used one (this is such a dead technology that I can’t find a video…).

Ok, so that’s hardly relevant now, but it looks like I’ve been using Ketchup cups wrong.

And Chinese food boxes!

Some detail on the top three jury verdicts in 2012 (#1 is 716m, a big increase from last year):

The year’s massive top verdict [$716,500,000] was awarded against a convenience store for selling alcohol to a teenager who plowed into another vehicle, killing its occupant. The #2 verdict went to three workers burned in an explosion at a grain silo who were awarded more than $179 million against ConAgra Foods for failing to clean up stored wheat that became combustible.

More here.

By the way, this sort of thing is why insurance costs go up each year. By the link’s measure, the top verdicts are 10% higher than last year, which were 10% higher than the year before.

But even so, that 716m one is a bit ridiculous (from a convenience store?!). Here is a bit more detail:

How much the Garcia family actually will receive from the millions the jury awarded is uncertain, Gilbert said. But it’s important that the jury sent a message, he said.

“The amount of justice that this family got out of this verdict you can’t put a number on it,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert, I have little doubt, does not mean to “send a message” to the consumers of America to spend more on chocolate bars and bottled water because convenience stores raise prices to cover the increased cost of insurance.

Here is a post debunking the “standard placebo narrative”: that there is a magical mind-over-matter process going on that heals of of our ills. In other words, the placebo effect is real.

What is measured in the placebo response includes things like reporting bias, or the desire of subjects to feel better, to please their doctor or the researcher, and to justify their prior decisions (to trust the doctor, take the treatment, enter the study, etc.). Begley fails to distinguish, in other words, between the pain that patients feel and the pain that they report. In studies we never know and cannot measure how much pain patients feel, only how much pain they report. Anything that would affect that reporting will also be lumped into “the placebo response” that is measured in the placebo arm of the study.

This is not quibbling. There is good reason to believe that reporting bias may be the major component of measured placebo effects.

And also very interesting is this study that finds no objective placebo effect. The benefits aren’t real.

In fact Begley did not mention the now famous (or infamous, I guess, depending on your perspective) study by Kaptchuk in which he studied both objective and subjective outcomes in asthma in response to active and placebo interventions. The results – there was a measured placebo response to subjective outcomes, but none for objective outcomes. Asthma is a condition susceptible to things like anxiety and expectation – so it provided a good opportunity to demonstrate objective improvement from placebo interventions, but showed none. This study, while very telling, does not fit the placebo narrative that journalists like to tell, and so is often absent from such articles or misinterpreted when present.

 

The NJ Police union just gave Eli Manning, a resident of my town of Hoboken, a lifetime card of some sort. Here is the description from the article:

It is a highly coveted membership, and card-holders are treated with the utmost courtesy and respect by all in the law enforcement community.

So how it works is that you put in your car window to make sure you get treated with respect.

That’s nice.