Via Jeffrey Goldberg, this is quite odd, but very entertaining:
Ridiculous Indian “Talent Show”
Expanding Manhattan & Boston’s Landfill History
There was an interesting piece in yesterday’s NYT outlining a proposed expansion of lower Manhattan: LoLo, which stands for Lower Lower Manhattan, is one of the first proposals from the Center for Urban Real Estate, a new research group at Columbia University. The neighborhood would be created by connecting Lower Manhattan and Governors Island with millions of cubic yards of landfill, similar to how Battery Park City was born in the 1970s. Over 20 to 30 years, the center estimates, LoLo would create 88 million square feet of development and generate $16.7 billion in revenue for the city. Here’s what the proposed project would look like: On a somewhat related note, this reminded me that a while back I picked up
XKCD Money
This xkcd “cartoon” is just absurd:
Turtles Eating Strawberries
Via Ezra Klein, why not:
Horseshoe Bend
I suppose this lookout doesn’t lend itself to the most original photography composition. Over the summer, I shot this: Then the other day, I saw this on Terry White’s blog:
Missions to Mars
This is just a nice infographic: And this was just a weird movie.
Eric-Schmidt Backed “Slice”
Via Techcrunch, Eric Schmidt is backing a new start-up, Slice, that aims to organize and track your online purchases by querying purchase data from your inbox. I gave it a shot earlier this week, and found it to be surprisingly accurate and useful. I generally don’t use online life organization tools (e.g., Mint), but I found this to be a bit different. Instead of simply helping you to analyze your own purchasing behavior, it helps you anticipate and track outstanding items that are either en route or have been held up for some reason. So rather than log onto various sites to track your orders, you can just log into Slice, which has already identified the tracking numbers for shipped
Creepy Things From Japan
The Japanese have designed a robotic polar bear to “gently smack snorers in the face.” I’m not sure how this is supposed to work in practice, but the video makes it look even creepier than it sounds:
Maps
Via xkcd:
How to Value an Early-Stage Start-Up Company
I’m taking a class on early stage capital. It’s primarily focused on finding angel and venture funding for a start-up company, and structuring subsequent investment agreements. When a start-up receives funding, it’s pretty important to “know” what the start-up was worth before the funding was received. Otherwise there’s no way to determine what portion of the company is owned by the founders, and what portion now belongs to the new investors. Since most start-ups fail, and the one’s that are successful often blow through their financial projections, traditional discounted cash flow approaches are pretty meaningless. So how do you value an idea? I’ve always wondered about this. It’s a subjective process, but start-ups are valued often, so I knew there must be some