E-mails one key Democratic staffer: “K Street has the bill, or chunks of it, already, and the congressional offices don’t. So, the Hill is getting calls from the press (because it’s leaking out) asking us to confirm or talk about what we know — but we can’t do that because we haven’t seen the bill. Anyway, peeps up here are sort of a combo of confused and like, ‘Is this really happening?’” Reporters pressing for details, meanwhile, are getting different numbers from different offices, especially when seeking the details of specific programs.
Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman discuss the current financial crisis: how we came to it and what to do next. As usual, Taleb is on target with respect to banks: they’re utilities and shouldn’t be taking extreme risks.
(Side question: Is there a video of the talk Taleb gave at Davos 2009? I’m in the mood to hear him utterly destroy the reputations of some bankers and economists.)
These stamps appear to depict the crew of the 1964 Voskhod 1 space flight: Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov. This was the first multi-person space flight.
Notice the strong left-to-right diagonal composition in both of these stamps. In cultures which parse lines of text from left to right, a line angled such that the left is lower than the right is interpreted as rising and emotionally uplifting.
This compositional approach is useful when an artist or designer wishes to intimate a positive future.
When reversed — such that the left is higher than the right — this is useful to intimate a positive past.
