Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

New Early-Stage Funding Nomenclature: The Color
Skier with Helmet Cam Films Avalanche From Inside
The Beer->Food->Civilization Connection
Skiing Cunningham Couloir (Aiguille Du Midi)
Viruses: Up and to the Right
Field Notes: Science, Libya, SEO, China, Electronics, etc.
North Shore Riding
I'm Number 86! I'm Number 86!
Field Notes: Sex, Saudis, Shiller, Solo, etc.
No Jets For You: Agency Problems in Public & Private Firms
San Francisco Jobs Approach Dot Com Peak -- in Less Space
Time to Swap Out My Nail Polish Car For A Gas Model
Today in Body Fat
Three Disaster Videos of the Day
Field Notes: Marrakech, Ice, News, GE, Y Combinator, etc.

New Early-Stage Funding Nomenclature: The Color

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 05:55 PM PDT

I propose a new early-stage funding nomenclature. Talking in terms of millions of dollars is both too specific and too fuzzy to be useful. Even when you know the amount, it's hard to put it in context without knowing everything else being funded right now. We need a new system normalized to the current world of seed and Series A venture financing.

Enter the "color". Based on the recent $41m financing of Color.com by Sequoia and Bain, I propose a system whereby "color" would be the base unit. We would then use metric prefixes to describe financings larger, smaller, etc than that amount.

For those of you unfamiliar with metric (read: Americans), it would work like this:

1000 microcolors = 1 millicolor ($41,000)
10 millicolors = 1 centicolor ($410k)
10 centicolors = 1 decicolor ($4.1m)
10 decicolors = 1 color ($41m)
10 colors = 1 dekacolor ($410m)
10 dekacolors = 1 hectocolor ($4.1b)
10 hectocolors = 1 kilocolor ($41b)

So, rather than saying company XYZ raised $20m, we would henceforth say it raised about 50 centicolors, or 0.5 colors, whatever you're comfortable with. I think it's easier to say 50 centicolors in cases like that, but the the Financing System Internationale (FSI) would provide that flexibility. Similarly a small seed financing of $50k would be 1.1 millicolors. You see? Much better. [-]

[Kudos to Eric Norlin who did some of the foundational research underlying this new system.]

Skier with Helmet Cam Films Avalanche From Inside

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 05:33 PM PDT

This is a little like tossing a camera into a washing machine during spin cycle, but a skier in British Columbia with a helmet cam got caught in an avalanche and accidentally filmed the whole thing. [-]

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

The Beer->Food->Civilization Connection

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 01:20 PM PDT

Revelatory stuff in a new SciAm piece about the historical origins of beer:

She cited colleagues who have advanced theories that humans first domesticated cereal crops to make beer, not just bread, and that humans evolved to associate ethanol, which is present in ripe fruit, with satiety. The various lines of evidence indicate that beer may well be as old as cooking itself, which began at least 250,000 years ago. "When people started harnessing fire and cooking, they probably started making beer"

More beer, I mean here.

Skiing Cunningham Couloir (Aiguille Du Midi)

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 12:59 PM PDT

Fantastic stuff:

Cunningham Couloir from kris thomas on Vimeo.

Viruses: Up and to the Right

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 12:52 PM PDT

From the current issue of Science, the remarkable growth in known viruses in recent years -- almost 8x since 2000. To be clear, the piece isn't implying the actually number of viruses is growing, more that our knowledge of existing viruses is exploding.

F1 medium

Field Notes: Science, Libya, SEO, China, Electronics, etc.

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 11:46 AM PDT

The High Water Mark of American Science (Source)
Rory Stewart · Here we go again (Source)
Is SEO killing the clever headline? - SEO & Social Media Marketing (Source)
Niall Ferguson and George Magnus on BBC talking China (Source)
Residential Energy Consumption Survey - (Source)

North Shore Riding

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 11:40 AM PDT

A whole series of super mountain biking videos from Vancouver's North Shore here. One follows -- flip it to HD and go full screen. Instant motion sickness.

Pipeline on Fromme, North Vancouver BC from Barry Duncan on Vimeo.

I'm Number 86! I'm Number 86!

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 06:56 AM PDT

Not entirely sure how this happened, but my admittedly eclectic and often meta Twitter feed is number 86 on TIME magazine's list of the best Twitter feeds. You can check the list here, and my entry here.

Field Notes: Sex, Saudis, Shiller, Solo, etc.

Posted: 27 Mar 2011 11:16 AM PDT

Why Would a Shrink Fall Asleep During a Patient's Session? (Source)
Michael Palin on Diary Writing (Source)
Back to Saudi's fault lines (Source)
Shiller Singles Out Farmland as Bubble Candidate: Chart of the Day (Source)
The unsolved anthrax murder mystery (Source)
Effect of Ambient Temperature on Marathon Pacing Is Dependendent on skill (Source)
Episodic Physical and Sexual Activity & Triggering of Acute Cardiac Events (Source)
Peak Oil Production May Already Be Here (Source)
Career regrets versus education level (Source)
The power of being alone (Source)

No Jets For You: Agency Problems in Public & Private Firms

Posted: 27 Mar 2011 09:58 AM PDT

From a new paper:

Agency Problems in Public Firms: Evidence from Corporate Jets in Leveraged Buyouts

Abstract: This paper uses rich, new data to examine the fleets of corporate jets operated by both publicly traded and privately held firms. In the cross-section, firms owned by private equity funds average jet fleets at least 40 percent smaller than observably similar publicly-traded firms. Similar fleet reductions are observed within firms that go private in leveraged buyouts. I discuss assumptions under which comparisons across and within firms provide estimates of lower and upper bounds on the average treatment effect of taking a firm from public to private in a leveraged buyout. Both censored and standard quantile regressions suggest that results at the mean are driven by firms in the upper 30 percent of the conditional jet distribution. Results thus suggest that executives in a substantial minority of public firms enjoy more generous perquisites than they would if subject to the pressures of private equity ownership.

San Francisco Jobs Approach Dot Com Peak -- in Less Space

Posted: 27 Mar 2011 09:56 AM PDT

Lots of stories this weekend about the improvement in the California jobs picture, especially in the technology community. The number of tech jobs in San Francisco is finally regaining the dot-com peak, albeit in less office space, which is an interesting augury for the future of commercial real estate.

Jobs

Related news:

High tech industry on hiring binge (Source)
Hiring perks in Silicon Valley's engineer fervor (Source)

Time to Swap Out My Nail Polish Car For A Gas Model

Posted: 25 Mar 2011 07:48 PM PDT

Fluids by the gallon

[via Autoblog]

Today in Body Fat

Posted: 25 Mar 2011 02:30 PM PDT

Riveting reading on macable differences in body composition among fighters in Afghanistan, by an ER doctor working there:

RECENTLY I WORKED as an internist-intensivist at the Canadian Combat Surgical Hospital in Kandahar. Most of our casualties were Afghans: National Army soldiers, National Police and civilians caught in crossfire. They were diminutive men, almost always less than a hundred and forty pounds. I cannot comment on the body masses of the Taliban—they were never brought to us. But they are not likely larger than those of the soldiers and the police. And because, in war, soldiers are fed first—prospering right up to the moment they are pierced—the civilians were even thinner.

For someone used to the life and the pathologies of the rich and settled, much about practicing medicine in Afghanistan felt unfamiliar. One of the striking differences was the way gunshot victims' abdomens looked in CT scans. Back home, I was used to seeing organs stand out with some prominence from the abdominal fat. In fact, in Canadians, the state of the kidneys can be partly assessed by the degree of inflammation in the perinephric fat that envelops them. It's the same with the pancreas, and the liver often looks like it belonged to a French goose fattened for foie gras. Indeed, the idea of "normal" in a Canadian body proceeds from the assumption that it might be normal to spend one's days tied to a grain spout, beak pried open, being filled with cracked corn.

Not the Afghans. The surgeons, in fact, often commented on how the abdominal contents spilled out once the abdominal wall was opened; every loop of bowel immediately visible, unobscured by mesenteric fat, which, in Canadians, would cling to every organ like yellow oily cake. Excessive fattiness is precisely why, when caring for the critically ill in North America, glucose levels are tightly controlled with insulin—a procedure necessary even for those not thought to be diabetic. Stressed by the infection, or the operation that has brought us to the intensive care unit, our sugar levels rise, paralyzing our white blood cells and nourishing the bacteria chewing upon them. But it was never necessary to give the Afghans insulin, no matter how shattered they were.

More here.