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dsgood - July 28th, 2009
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02:45 pm
[Link] | Friday July 24, 2009 "In 1997, money manager David Leinweber wondered which statistics would have best predicted the performance of the U.S. stock market from 1981 through 1993. He sifted through thousands of publicly available numbers until he found one that had forecast U.S. stock returns with 75% accuracy: the total volume of butter produced each year in Bangladesh. Leinweber was able to improve the accuracy of his forecasting 'model' by adding a couple of other variables, including the number of sheep in the United States. Abracadabra! He could now predict past stock returns with 99% accuracy." p. 81, Jason Zeig, _Your Money & Your Brain_, 2007, Simon & Shuster.
***To Southwest Senior Center, to use the computer lab.
***To the St. Vincent de Paul store. They were giving away food, including bread.
The bread was mostly take and bake chiabatta loaves and chiabatta buns. There were also brat buns, English muffins, and bagels. I took cinnamon bagels and English muffins.
Supermarkets and bakeries don't donate standard white bread; it's always something fancier. There are American children growing up with the idea that upscale bread is poverty food.
Which much of it used to be. My mother's father sometimes called Russian pumpernickel
"soldier bread." He spent part of his childhood near a military base in the Ukraine. The Tsar's soldiers got that bread in their rations, and eagerly traded it for other food.
Conversely, in America macaroni was once an upscale Italian food. Its name was extended to other fashionable things:
Yankee Doodle came to town
Riding on a pony.
Stuck a feather in his cap,
And called it macaroni.
To East Lake Library, and then home.
***The UK's oldest working TV set was featured on As It Happens (CBC radio news program, carried in the US by NPR stations.) The set dates from 1936. It originally cost as much as a new car, at a time when there wasn't much to watch.
***Also on NPR: Repeat of a story on a woman in Georgia who's having trouble feeding her family of five. She and her husband both work.
She said the food shelf in Atlanta had a six month limit. Twin Cities food shelves don't have such limits. (They do limit the number of times each month you can get food.) I wonder if there's only one food shelf in Atlanta -- or, more likely, only one which serves people in her area.
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