Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Immigrants leave Ireland
The Wall Street Journal highlights the downturn here with a story on immigrants leaving. The statistics are pretty stark, and I like how the WSJ uses these and most Irish media don’t: Citigroup economist Piotr Kalisz in Warsaw estimates that up to half of Polish émigrés to Western Europe since 2004 will return home in…
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Jeff Jarvis at the Guardian and the future of journalism
Jeff links to two videos of him talking with staff at the Guardian about the future direction of the news organisation. As ever he is refreshing to watch, equally so as his writing, which I have been reading now for seven years. Unfortunately many of my colleagues in the industry (in various firms) are slow…
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Exchange Traded Notes – tax treatment in Ireland
For the past several weeks I have been in correspondence with the Revenue in relation to their treatment of various investment instruments. I was particularly interested in more exotic ones like Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs) Futures Contracts, Options Contracts, CFDs and Spreadbetting. Perhaps the most surprising result of my questions was that Revenue don’t know…
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Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
I went to see these guys in the recently renovated Pavilion bar in Cork last night. Some really enjoyable music, and it is good to listen to some ‘real’ music, with real instruments. This one got the crowd going:
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Ella Fitzgerald: Summertime
Magic.
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How to store 6.5 billion images
Jason Sobel the manager of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, gave a presentation at Stanford recently. He explains how Facebook efficiently stores ~6.5 billion images, in 4 or 5 sizes each, totalling 30 billion files, and a total of 540TB and serving 475,000 images per second at peak. You can look at the presentation here. If…
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Mars impact
New Scientist details a pretty awesome collision in space: At roughly 8500 by 10,600 kilometres across, it is nearly 15 times the area of the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin which, at 2500 kilometres in diameter, is the largest undisputed impact scar in the solar system. The Mars crater was probably created by an object as…
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The Big Picture
Eamonn points to the rather excellent Big Picture blog over at the Boston Globe. However, as a long time reader of Barry Ritholtz’s blog, also called the Big Picture, I have to say my loyalties stay with Barry. Incidentally, he isn’t too happy with other blogs ‘stealing’ the name of his finance oriented blog. The…
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Bezos and Twitter?
Apparently. Jeff Bezo’s fund Bezos Expeditions has invested in Twitter, the micro-blogging platform. Maybe this will help with all that downtime.
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Is Google Making Us Stupid?
The Atlantic’s cover story by Nicholas Carr this month is really very good. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store…
Got any book recommendations?