Sunday, November 4, 2012
The Most Indebted Man in the World
Got
a mortgage and credit card debt? Think you owe a lot of money? However
much money you owe, that's peanuts compared to what Jérôme
Kerviel owes.As Matthew O'Brien wrote in Quartz, Kerviel is the world's most indebted man, owing more than $6.3 billion to the French bank Société Générale:
He can earn million-dollar gains without anybody knowing. He can execute make-believe trades by sending fake emails from hacked computers. He doesn’t always lose money. But when he does, he loses more than $6 billion. He is … the most indebted man in the world.O'Brien explains the whole thing in this post: here.
Jérôme Kerviel is learning one of life’s harsher lessons: It stinks to be $6.3 billion in debt. That’s how much his fraudulent trades in 2007 and 2008 cost French bank Société Générale, and how much he has been ordered to pay in restitution—after he gets out of jail in three years. A judge recently upheld these terms on appeal.
Stay risky, my friends?
Burglars deterred by signs offering $10,000 reward to police officers who shoot them dead
After losing thousands of dollars in merchandise, a Texas store owner is
using a different tactic to deter thieves. Signs at Debra Trejo's San
Antonio clothing store offer a $10,000 reward to any law enforcement
officer who shoots and kills burglars.
Not so long ago she was worried about going out of business after a series of break-ins.
"We would have a lot of break-ins. They'd be like once a month or once every two or three months," Trejo said. No matter what she did, the crooks found a way in.
Then, she saw a sign on another business and decided to put similar ones on her store. There hasn't been a break-in since. "Once the signs came in, it was a big turnaround. I didn't think it would be this much of a success," she admits.
Not so long ago she was worried about going out of business after a series of break-ins.
"We would have a lot of break-ins. They'd be like once a month or once every two or three months," Trejo said. No matter what she did, the crooks found a way in.
Then, she saw a sign on another business and decided to put similar ones on her store. There hasn't been a break-in since. "Once the signs came in, it was a big turnaround. I didn't think it would be this much of a success," she admits.
Kidnapped radio engineers forced to build comms networks for the Zetas, never seen again
For at least six years, Mexico’s cartels have relied in part on a sophisticated radio network to handle their communications. The Zetas hide radio antennas and signal relay stations deep inside remote and hard-to-reach terrain, connect them to solar panels, and then link the facilities to radio-receiving cellphones and Nextel devices. While the kingpins stay off the network — they use the internet to send messages — the radio network acts as a shadow communication system for the cartels’ lower-level players and lookouts, and a tool to hijack military radios.Mexican Cartels Enslave Engineers to Build Radio Network
One network spread across northeastern Mexico and dismantled last year included 167 radio antennas alone. As recently as September, Mexican marines found a 295-foot-high transmission tower in Veracruz state. And while the founding leadership of the Zetas originated in the Mexican special forces — and who might have had the know-how to set up a radio system — relatively few of the ex-commando types are still active today.
One engineer, named Jose Antonio, was kidnapped in January 2009 while talking on the phone with his girlfriend outside a mechanics shop. He worked for ICA Fluor Daniel, a construction company jointly owned by U.S.-based Fluor Corporation and ICA, Mexico’s largest construction firm. Antonio’s family contacted the authorities, but were instead visited by a man claiming to be an ICA employee along with two Zetas. “They said they were going to help us, and that our contact would be ICA’s security chief,” said the kidnapped engineer’s mother. But the group’s message was implicit: Don’t pursue this, or else. The cartel members were later arrested, but Antonio never returned.
"Cultured Youth": China's Hipster
Hipsters are everywhere! Even in China, where they're called "cultured
youths" ... or "dumbass youths," depending on whom you
ask:
As the country’s middle class swells in number–and its people discover the pleasures and disappointments of a life spent pursuing material comfort–there comes the emergence of a distinct counter-culture. In Chinese, they are the wenyi qingnian, or wenqing for short, literally meaning “cultured youth.” It’s China’s closest equivalent to the alternatively beloved and reviled English word “hipster.”The photo above is of three cultured youths reading poetry aboard a Shanghai subway. Monica Tan of Tea Leaf Nation has the story: here.
What does a typical “cultured youth” look like? Baidu Baike, China’s version of Wikipedia, contains an entry on the term that quotes writer and musician Guo Xiaohan: “I’m a very typical wenyi qingnian. I like poetry, novels, indie music, European cinema, taking pictures, writing blogs, cats, gardening, quilting, making dessert and designing environmentally friendly bags.”
Improve Your Luck by Changing Your Name
Psst!
Got bad luck? Forget buying good luck charms ... change your name instead.Don't laugh. It seems to have worked for a lot of Thais:
Baramee Thammabandan, 46 years old, had a run of misfortune a decade ago when he was still known as Teerapol Lilitjirawat. His business trading garments in Bangkok's mazelike markets slumped, his eyesight began to fail and he could no longer properly manage his affairs. Worse, he says his former wife left him.James Hookway of The Wall Street Journal's The A-Head reports: here.
So, Mr. Baramee did what many Thais do when faced with a patch of bad luck: He changed his name. "I wanted to become a new person," says the slim, clean-shaven Mr. Baramee, whose new name means "Charisma" and which he chose to bring him wealth and fame.
It seems to have worked.
Though almost entirely blind, Mr. Baramee now is at the forefront of a booming new industry advising other Thais how to choose new names for themselves. A long list of Thai celebrities and business tycoons parade into his office in one of Bangkok's busiest shopping malls, asking for advice on new monikers, while his team fields more than 250 calls from anxious others wanting a consultation. In just five years, he says, his business has doubled ...
Confederate Army Officer Wearing Jaguar Skin Pants
The stylin' Captain Samuel J. Richardson of the Second Texas Cavalry wore a standard issue hat and shirt. But his pants and his holsters were made of jaguar skin!
More
The Slide in the Imperial Palace
Alexander Palace was a residence of the Tsars outside of St. Petersburg. One room known as the Mountain Hall became a playroom for children during the reign of Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855). Amidst the precious and fragile works of art, the Tsar built an enormous slide.
Five weight loss tricks that actually work
There's a lot more to a smile than meets the eye.
Here are 10 little-known facts that will have you beaming.
Here are 10 little-known facts that will have you beaming.
Meningitis Outbreak: 404 Cases, 29 Deaths
Eighteen more people have been diagnosed with fungal meningitis in an
outbreak linked to tainted steroid injections, health officials
reported Friday.More
Terrifying Psychotherapy Treatments Of Yesteryear
What Is The Zodiac?
In principle, dates in a horoscope should correspond to when the sun passes through each constellation. But they don't, much of the time. And a closer examination of the motion of the Earth, the sun, and the stars shows the Zodiac to be more complex than you might imagine.
Brown Mountain lights still enchanting mystery
Swamp gas? Ball lightning? Optical illusion?
Brown Mountain Lights puzzle
By Mark Washburn
-
This newly released photo depicts an appearance of the Brown Mountain Lights, seen east of Linville Gorge in Burke County. It was shot by photographer Charles Braswell Jr. of Taylorsville on Oct. 15, 2001, at 6:26 p.m. Braswell also captured the phenomenon's movement on a video camera at the same time. For more than a century, the strange lights on the mountain have baffled viewers and researchers. COPYRIGHT CHARLES BRASWELL JR.
No one knows the answer to the mountain’s mystery,
including C.W. Smith, who has probably spent as much time around fabled
Brown Mountain as anyone alive.
Smith, 67, spent 33 years with the U.S. Forest Service, patrolling the Pisgah National Forest as a federal law enforcement agent beginning in 1966.
He knows every fold of the ridge and is familiar with its marquee mystery, the so-called Brown Mountain Lights.
He grew up in nearby McDowell County in western North Carolina and never much believed the stories about nocturnal flickerings. Then while working one night, he caught sight of what looked like a bonfire on the mountain, but in a place where there were no trails.
“It started going up the mountain, too fast for someone to be using mountain-climbing equipment. It went up to the ridge line and disappeared.”
With that, Smith became a believer, he told a symposium on the phenomenon held Saturday at Morganton Municipal Auditorium.
“If you ever see them, you’ll never forget it because you’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Lights long-lived
Brown Mountain, a rugged lump in the wrinkles of the Blue Ridge, has attracted attention since antiquity because of the lights.
Folklore holds that Cherokee Indians thought they were torches held by ghosts of grieving maidens. An early European explorer, a German surveyor named G.W. de Brahm, studied the mountain in 1771 and concluded it vented “nitrous vapors which are borne by the wind.”
Other theories have been floated through the years.
In February 1913, the Observer ran through a few, including dust vented from a mica mine, then added: “Quite a few suspect that some moonshiner, who likes not the limelight, is sending up the light on a kite to frighten his neighbors and others out of that immediate vicinity.”
A U.S. Geologic Survey later that year concluded people were observing refracted lamps from locomotives on the Southern Railway. Then came the Great Flood of 1916, which washed away tracks and the theory. Trains didn’t run for a spell, but the lights stayed on the job.
A 1916 study concluded the glow was the result of “sulfurated hydrogen vapors” – better known as swamp gas.
In 1922, another geologist spent a week in the mountains and declared the lights were nothing more than auto headlights, train lamps and optical illusions. Fred May, editor of the Lenoir News-Topic, called it shoddy science.
“Weather conditions were such that he had only two cloudless and fogless nights during the week he was here making observations,” May reported.
Ball lightning theory
Dan Caton, a physics and astronomy professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, is one of the foremost academic researchers of the lights.
He believes most sightings are bogus – people are seeing campfires, headlights, aircraft, even the lights of distant Lenoir. Caton, who spoke at another symposium on the lights in February, estimates that maybe 5 percent of reports are legitimate.
He favors a theory that the lights are ball lighting, a little-understood but long-observed phenomenon. He has interviewed people who describe misty or fireworks-like miasma about as big as a beach ball floating up the mountainside, a good account of ball lightning. Why it occurs with regularity in the Linville Gorge, he said, needs to be further explored.
Caton and a team from the university are setting up a camera pointed toward Brown Mountain that will feed to the website brownmountainlights.org and should be in operation by month’s end.
Photographic evidence
One of the best pictures taken of the lights was displayed at the symposium by Charles Braswell Jr., a Taylorsville professional photographer whose work is familiar to readers of the Our State magazine.
In 2001, he shot a video of lights rising above the north ridge mountain, then opened the shutter of his camera for a 90-second time-lapse exposure. On the video, the light flared and ebbed, then crept to left, paused and drifted to the right.
On his film, it left a streak painting its path, which Braswell estimated was 3 miles long.
He said Brown Mountain is full of deception. People think they’re spying the mystery, but really only looking at campfires, mountain bikes or off-road vehicles.
“They’re unmistakable if you know what you’re looking for,” Braswell said. “There’s only one way to see the lights, and that is to spend a lot of time looking.”
A close encounter
On one still autumn night, Les Burril had a close encounter.
“Something just illuminated a few feet away,” said Burril, a career Forest Service officer who worked six years in the Pisgah.
“It looked like a candle. ... It continued to brighten for a few seconds and just sat there. Another one lit up a little farther away. I probably stood there eight or 10 minutes and watched. It moved down, smaller and smaller, then blinked out.”
Burril, assigned to hunt poachers and vandals, said he never thought much about the silent apparitions on his beat.
“We weren’t paid to look for the Brown Mountain Lights. I always looked at it as some kind of physical phenomenon. I wasn’t worried about them. Now, a guy who might rise up out of a bush under the light, yes.”
Burril, 56, retired and living in Georgia, said he has no idea what they are.
“There are guys a lot brighter than me who have tried to figure it out, and I didn’t even try.”
He’s not alone. No one knows the answer to the mountain’s mystery.
Smith, 67, spent 33 years with the U.S. Forest Service, patrolling the Pisgah National Forest as a federal law enforcement agent beginning in 1966.
He knows every fold of the ridge and is familiar with its marquee mystery, the so-called Brown Mountain Lights.
He grew up in nearby McDowell County in western North Carolina and never much believed the stories about nocturnal flickerings. Then while working one night, he caught sight of what looked like a bonfire on the mountain, but in a place where there were no trails.
“It started going up the mountain, too fast for someone to be using mountain-climbing equipment. It went up to the ridge line and disappeared.”
With that, Smith became a believer, he told a symposium on the phenomenon held Saturday at Morganton Municipal Auditorium.
“If you ever see them, you’ll never forget it because you’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Lights long-lived
Brown Mountain, a rugged lump in the wrinkles of the Blue Ridge, has attracted attention since antiquity because of the lights.
Folklore holds that Cherokee Indians thought they were torches held by ghosts of grieving maidens. An early European explorer, a German surveyor named G.W. de Brahm, studied the mountain in 1771 and concluded it vented “nitrous vapors which are borne by the wind.”
Other theories have been floated through the years.
In February 1913, the Observer ran through a few, including dust vented from a mica mine, then added: “Quite a few suspect that some moonshiner, who likes not the limelight, is sending up the light on a kite to frighten his neighbors and others out of that immediate vicinity.”
A U.S. Geologic Survey later that year concluded people were observing refracted lamps from locomotives on the Southern Railway. Then came the Great Flood of 1916, which washed away tracks and the theory. Trains didn’t run for a spell, but the lights stayed on the job.
A 1916 study concluded the glow was the result of “sulfurated hydrogen vapors” – better known as swamp gas.
In 1922, another geologist spent a week in the mountains and declared the lights were nothing more than auto headlights, train lamps and optical illusions. Fred May, editor of the Lenoir News-Topic, called it shoddy science.
“Weather conditions were such that he had only two cloudless and fogless nights during the week he was here making observations,” May reported.
Ball lightning theory
Dan Caton, a physics and astronomy professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, is one of the foremost academic researchers of the lights.
He believes most sightings are bogus – people are seeing campfires, headlights, aircraft, even the lights of distant Lenoir. Caton, who spoke at another symposium on the lights in February, estimates that maybe 5 percent of reports are legitimate.
He favors a theory that the lights are ball lighting, a little-understood but long-observed phenomenon. He has interviewed people who describe misty or fireworks-like miasma about as big as a beach ball floating up the mountainside, a good account of ball lightning. Why it occurs with regularity in the Linville Gorge, he said, needs to be further explored.
Caton and a team from the university are setting up a camera pointed toward Brown Mountain that will feed to the website brownmountainlights.org and should be in operation by month’s end.
Photographic evidence
One of the best pictures taken of the lights was displayed at the symposium by Charles Braswell Jr., a Taylorsville professional photographer whose work is familiar to readers of the Our State magazine.
In 2001, he shot a video of lights rising above the north ridge mountain, then opened the shutter of his camera for a 90-second time-lapse exposure. On the video, the light flared and ebbed, then crept to left, paused and drifted to the right.
On his film, it left a streak painting its path, which Braswell estimated was 3 miles long.
He said Brown Mountain is full of deception. People think they’re spying the mystery, but really only looking at campfires, mountain bikes or off-road vehicles.
“They’re unmistakable if you know what you’re looking for,” Braswell said. “There’s only one way to see the lights, and that is to spend a lot of time looking.”
A close encounter
On one still autumn night, Les Burril had a close encounter.
“Something just illuminated a few feet away,” said Burril, a career Forest Service officer who worked six years in the Pisgah.
“It looked like a candle. ... It continued to brighten for a few seconds and just sat there. Another one lit up a little farther away. I probably stood there eight or 10 minutes and watched. It moved down, smaller and smaller, then blinked out.”
Burril, assigned to hunt poachers and vandals, said he never thought much about the silent apparitions on his beat.
“We weren’t paid to look for the Brown Mountain Lights. I always looked at it as some kind of physical phenomenon. I wasn’t worried about them. Now, a guy who might rise up out of a bush under the light, yes.”
Burril, 56, retired and living in Georgia, said he has no idea what they are.
“There are guys a lot brighter than me who have tried to figure it out, and I didn’t even try.”
He’s not alone. No one knows the answer to the mountain’s mystery.
Mars Curiosity
Where's Mars' Methane? Curiosity Draws a Blank
Curiosity comes up empty-handed in its first attempt to find the gas, which on Earth is tied to biological processes. Read more
Curiosity Snaps 'Arm's Length' Self Portrait
Using a camera attached to the end of its robotic arm, Curiosity has snapped a photo of itself in its Mars sandbox. Read more
Curiosity Finds Some Aloha Spirit in Mars Soil
The Mars rover has made yet another fascinating discovery -- the soil inside Mars' Gale Crater contains minerals you'd likely find in the volcanic soil of Hawaii. Read more
The Fossils of Galactic Cannibalism
A neat spiral hidden inside the guts of an elliptical galaxy is the latest interesting evidence of galactic cannibalism. Read more
New Three-Fingered Frog Discovered
The researcher attributes the missing fourth finger to an evolutionary process rather than to an environmental effect. Read more
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