| George Magnus Talks Europe Posted: 29 Sep 2011 04:42 PM PDT The ever-interesting George Magnus of UBS talks Europe today on Tom Keene’s Bloomberg show. I’d embed it, but I can’t figure out to stop it from auto-starting. 
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| Michael Lewis on California: California and Bust Posted: 29 Sep 2011 04:21 PM PDT Michael Lewis continues his series on seriously screwed economies around the world with this visit to California (where he lives). It’s better than his Germany installment, if not as much as his fun as his entries on Greece and Iceland. [Arnold Schwarzenegger has] got to be one of the world's most recognizable people, but he doesn't appear to worry that anyone will recognize him, and no one does. It may be that people who get out of bed at dawn to jog and Rollerblade and racewalk are too interested in what they are doing to break their trance. Or it may be that he's taking them by surprise. He has no entourage, not even a bodyguard. His former economic adviser, David Crane, and his media adviser, Adam Mendelsohn, who came along for the ride just because it sounded fun, are now somewhere far behind him. Anyone paying attention would think, That guy might look like Arnold, but it can't possibly be Arnold, because Arnold would never be out alone on a bike at seven in the morning, trying to commit suicide. It isn't until he is forced to stop at a red light that he makes meaningful contact with the public. A woman pushing a baby stroller and talking on a cell phone crosses the street right in front of him and does a double take. "Oh . . . my . . . God," she gasps into her phone. "It's Bill Clinton!" She's not 10 feet away, but she keeps talking to the phone, as if the man were unreal. "I'm here with Bill Clinton." "It's one of those guys who has had a sex scandal," says Arnold, smiling. "Wait . . . wait," says the woman to her phone. "Maybe it's not Bill Clinton." Before she can make a positive identification, the light is green, and we're off.
via California and Bust | Business | Vanity Fair. 
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| The Ten Thousand Kims Posted: 29 Sep 2011 06:17 AM PDT Strange and magnificent stuff: The Ten Thousand Kims In the Korean culture the family members are recorded in special family books. This makes it possible to follow the distribution of Korean family names far back in history. It is here shown that these name distributions are well described by a simple null model, the random group formation (RGF) model. This model makes it possible to predict how the name distributions change and these predictions are shown to be borne out. In particular, the RGF model predicts that, for married women entering a collection of family books in a certain year, the occurrence of the most common family name “Kim” should be directly proportional the total number of married women with the same proportionality constant for all the years. This prediction is also borne out to high degree. We speculate that it reflects some inherent social stability in the Korean culture. In addition, we obtain an estimate of the total population of the Korean culture down to year 500 AD, based on the RGF model and find about ten thousand Kims.
via [1109.6221] The Ten Thousand Kims. 
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