Archive of October 2009
If you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence…
That sentence, paraphrased: smart people started working on Wall Street. For most of its existence, Wall Street was mundane, run by Ivy League jocks with old money. It wasn’t run by idiots, but it also wasn’t run by geniuses. Then, with the rise in college costs and Wall Street income, truly smart people started showing up — the kind of people who would otherwise be doing precedent-setting legal work or breakthrough physics research. These geniuses weren’t content with the easy wealth old Wall Street afforded — they wanted to experiment, they wanted to use their tremendous brainpower. And if they made boatloads of money in the process, that was just an added bonus.
The problem came when all that complicated math started collapsing under the weight of excessive greed and ignorant bosses.1 An already complex global financial system become a tangled web of math which eventually unraveled. Some things, particularly economic and physical infrastructures, are best run by conservatively intelligent people who won’t experiment. I don’t want a genius doing my plumbing and I don’t want one doing my taxes.
This excellent Op-Ed from the New York Times was recommended by John Gruber.
What follows is a poorly written exposition of my recent activity. If you’re not in the mood for self-congratulatory bullshit, here’s the gist: I made morgante.net. It’s cool. It’s me.
I made myself last month. Rather, I made the online version of myself: morgante.net. I’d been meaning to do this for months, but #sitesprint finally gave me the motivation to do so.
Before doing so, I created numerous designs, from the gaudy to the overly-subdued. One was entirely primary colors, another was pure black-and-white. With respect to the design, I feel I’ve reached the ideal equilibrium with respect to the Goldilocks Principle: interesting, but not garish.
As my online home on the web, it of course links to all my profiles on various sites (I have too many). Most notably, I’ve added a link to Lemnos, my lab. Its name comes from the island upon which the great engineer-god Hephaestus wrought his creations. Within the lab are all my various technical projects. Its powered by Habari and a plugin of my own devising. The project pages are almost entirely automated: metadata is extracted from the plugin source, downloads are built from the subversion repository, and support is powered by the Habari Forums. Overall, I’m quite satisfied with the result.
Back on my hub, I did my best to keep things jovial. Building a website entirely devoted to myself is inherently rather pompous, so I was sure to have a healthy dose of self-mockery. The about page is a tongue-in-cheek tale of my life, while the Twitter widget in the sidebar features my occasionally whimsical wordplay. Meanwhile, the contact page is fully AJAXified, using my AlienContact plugin.
In the future, I plan to have a fully integrated lifesteam, à la Sweetcron. It will have all my activity from various places around the web, in addition to random life achievement bits: school awards, projects I start, etc. — the idea is that I will be able to programmatically generate a resume from the data. Though I currently have something similar here, I would like to eliminate a lot of the superfluous material from Newy Ancient and move it to my hub. The next iteration of my blog will put my best content up front, while also integrating newer (short) link posts.
Stay tuned for more exciting things as I finally get some priorities straightened out. My goal is to write at least one article a week, when the hellish load of AP English allows it.