Brett Hutley's Blog

I just popped down to the Lehman building here at Canary Wharf to see what was going on. There were a few people standing outside, and news crews filming - but overall it seemed pretty quiet.

A rap about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Absolutely awesome!

Just arrived back from France and we are pretty psyched about buying some land over there and building a small weekend nest. It's amazing how close Calais is to London. One hour on the train and you're there. Another hour and you're at the area we are looking at. Very doable for a weekend away.

From Alan Nevin, chief economist for the California Building Industry Association and San Diego-based MarketPointe Realty Advisors: "Now it's just a matter of the pig going through the snake."

"Any sufficiently complex bit of code is hard to make easily reusable without abstracting it to a level in which it is essentially useless."

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who had a brain stroke on 10th Dec 1996. The stroke put pressure on the language centers on the left hemisphere of her brain. On the 27th Feb 2008, she gave a talk at TED about the experience. The talk is well worth watching!

I had work to do today, so obviously I had to procrastinate by reading xkcd archives. Check out the following series:

1. Journal
2. Journal 2
3. Journal 3

There's a new Banksy gone up on Newman Street (just around the corner from our flat).

Some interesting papers have come out on the "Credit Crunch".

• Leveraged Losses: Lessons from the Mortgage Market MeltdownThis paper provides a good overview of the financial market turmoil occurring since August 2007, and discusses how the crisis might impact other areas of the economy.
• A Black Swan in the Money Market This paper examines the sudden jump in spreads between the overnight and term inter-bank interest rates.

Here is a great talk by Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren on the upcoming collapse of the middle class. The first 5 minutes are spent on introducing Professor Warren, so I recommend skipping to roughly 5-6 minutes into the video. She gives a very, very interesting comparison of the changing socio-economic factors between 1970-2007. The talk was given on the 8th March, 2007 at Berkeley.