We're a 21st Century Couple...

...or something.

A few minutes ago, I'm in my home office, door closed, Christmas music playing loudly, and foot heater going full blast.  Debbie is about 10 feet away, in our bedroom, doing her physical therapy exercises and watching a movie on her iPad.  She spots one of our cats (Maka Lea, our little physiologically challenged fellow) stuck in the bedroom.  He wants to get into our livingroom, but he can't jump over our dog gate.  Debbie can't easily get him there in her current state.  She wants to get my attention.  How does she do it?

She emails me.

Our Moon?!?!

Did some kid run amok on the moon with a set of different colored paints?  What is this?

This particular image shows the thickness of the lunar crust around the entire surface of the moon.  The data to create this image came from NASA's GRAIL satellites, delightfully named Ebb and Flow, which measure the gravitational field of the moon with unprecedented resolution and precision.  The crustal thickness map is just one of many results from the mission.  More here and here...

Earth at Night...

NASA has posted some beautiful composite photos and movies made by the Earth Observatory satellite, showing the night sky of Earth.  It took me several tries to download the movie; I suspect the site is overloaded as this has gotten wide distribution.  As usual, you can use the brightness of any given area as a proxy for human wealth – check out North Korea, Yemen, and Mali to see what impoverished areas look like.

Corruption Perceptions...

Transparency International has released their Corruption Perceptions Index for 2012, complete with a lovely interactive infographic (snapshot below).  There really aren't any surprises for the bad guys: North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Venezuela, etc.  The good guys list is surprising mainly for which countries are not on the list: U.S., Britain, Germany, and Japan.

Is This What Obama Is Hiding?

The terrorists who killed our ambassador to Libya and three others were using weapons provided by the U.S.

I don't have the words...

Stock Market Manipulation...

One of the many things I learned while working in the electronic stock trading industry was just how common – and easy – stock market manipulation is.  Some forms of manipulation are illegal, and some are actually completely legal.  One of the illegal forms of manipulation is the practice of making trades solely for the purpose of raising a company's apparent market capitalization (“market cap”).

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent and detailed analysis of how this works, complete with real world examples.  This particular form of market manipulation leverages one of the odd customs of the fund management world: the determination of a fund's value by using the closing price of the stocks it holds.  The closing price is simply the price of the last trade of any given trading day.  For stocks that trade thinly (that is, not many trades during any given day), it's not hard to arrange for your trade to be the last trade of the day – all you need is the cooperation of someone who holds the stock and is willing to sell it to you for an above-market price – and for you to buy it at that price. This needn't even involve much money, as a trade of even a single share will still set the closing price.

This particular market manipulation could be eliminated quite simply, by changing the basis for fund valuation from closing price to a weighted average price.  I've seen this proposed on several occasions, but I have no idea why this hasn't happened...

Curiosity Is On the Move!

Curiosity is all finished at Rocknest, and is on the move on the floor of Gale Crater on Mars.  At right is a view of the way forward, from Curiosity's navigation camera...

How To Live With an Introvert...

A clever cartoon, and accurate according to my own experience as an introvert...

Driftwood Horses...

These look like something my brother Scott might make...though he's more attached to sea serpents!