Capitalogix

Once In a Blue Moon ... or every couple of years

I was in New York for a quick visit last week.  

Seems I get there often recently.

A little more rare, I got a chance to see a concert (U2 at Madison Square Garden) and eat Junior's Cheesecake.

Meanwhile, Friday marked the second full moon of July, a phenomenon referred to as a “Blue Moon.”

  

  

Though the phrase “once in a blue moon” is used to describe a rare event ... a blue moon is not really that rare; nor does imply that the moon appears blue.

Technically, the term “blue moon” describes the second full moon in a single calendar month.

Most years only have 12 moons, but this year has 13 (which happens every two to three years).

Weekend Links

Hillary Clinton may have to deal with more fall-out from her deleted e-mail fiasco.

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• The Economist Explains: The End of Moore's Law. (Economist)

• Big Data Explained in Less Than 2 Minutes - To Absolutely Anyone. (DSC)

• A Preliminary Taxonomy of the Voices Inside Your Head. (Digest)

• Disney’s Research Lab Figures Out How To Put Words In Your Mouth. (TechCrunch)

• 'What I Would Tell My 20-Year-Old Self'.  (Fortune)

 

Trading Links:

• Tech Boom 2015: What's Driving Investor Insanity? (Forbes)

• This Is Your Brain on Money: How Investors Trip Themselves Up. (WSJ)

• These 2 Simple Slides Show Just How Hot FinTech Is Right Now. (BizInsider)

• Soros Says China Is Major Risk For World War 3. (ValueWatch)

• China’s Yuan Has ‘Long March’ To Reserve-Currency Status. (MarketWatch)

China Tries to Prevent a Market Crash

It has been a tough several weeks for Chinese markets.

As such, the Chinese government has taken some extreme measures to intervene and minimize the selloff.

Some of these measures include more than half the companies on the exchange "voluntarily" suspending trading.

But, it has not worked yet.

    

via WSJ.

 

Stratfor posits:  Beijing has an underlying interest in ensuring that China's stock markets do not collapse, even though any intervention risks exacerbating whatever financial and political fallout may come from an eventual market decline or crash. Therefore, the government will likely continue to intervene to the best of its ability, propping up markets and market sentiment whenever the risk of a major sell-off becomes too great.

This does not mean that stock prices won't slide further, or that the market will stabilize — indeed, it could well become even more volatile over the coming months. Until Beijing invents more avenues for investment, or unless it embraces interest rate hikes and any post-crisis restructuring, it will have to rely on the few tools available to ensure that citizens can generate the wealth and financial security they need to consume.  

 

What Languages are the Most Spoken - The Results Might Surprise You

There are over 7,100 known languages actively spoken in the world today. Of those, just twenty-three of them act as a mother tongue for more than 50 million people.  Collectively, those 23 languages make up the native tongue of more than half the world (4.1 billion people).

This infographic represent each language within black borders and then provide the numbers of native speakers (in millions) by country. The coloring shows how the languages have taken root in many different regions.

 

 via Alberto Lucas López .

 

As you can see, Chinese is by far the most dominant language on the planet right now, with almost 1.2 billion people speaking dialects. Comparatively, pretty much every other language on Earth is an also-ran: Spanish (399 million speakers), English (335 million), Hindi (260 million), and Arabic (242 million) take up the next four positions. Only when you add them up do they come close to the reach Chinese has.

Although Chinese is the most popular language on Earth, it's worth noting that its influence wanes greatly outside of Asia.

If you take the geographic diversity of where a language is spoken into account, English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese are the most influential languages on Earth, because of colonialism.

For more, here is a link to the Washington Post's article: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts.

How Big Is America? So Big!

Sometimes it helps to employ unconventional perspectives when thinking about the size of things.

Here's a map that shows how massive and productive America's $16.7 trillion economy is on a global scale.

The map compares the gross domestic product of each US states with the national GDPs of other nations.

America's largest state economy is California. For 2013, the Golden State's GDP was about $2.05 trillion, roughly the same as Brazil's GDP ($2.25 trillion). But Brazil's population is about 200.4 million, while California's is just 38.8 million — meaning California produces about the same as Brazil with about 80% fewer people.

To put it in a global perspective, if California were its own country in 2013, it would have been the 10th-biggest economy in the world, close behind Russia, whose GDP was $2.096 trillion that year.

Check out the rest of the states in the map below:

 

 via Business Insider.

Based on population, the US is the third-largest country in the world.

To put that in perspective, below is a a map that renames each state with the country that has the closest population to it.

 

via Business Insider.

 

The map, below, is interesting in a different way.  I'm sure you've heard that "a picture is worth a thousand words."  Here, a couple dozen words capture the world.

 

by Michael Tompsett via Fine Art America.

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekend Reading

Are we evolving ... or getting dumber?

 

via Scott Adams.

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• The Ultimate List of 20 Motivational Tools for Every Entrepreneur. (Read)
• Gartner Predicts Three Big Data Trends for Business Intelligence. (Forbes)
• 6 Google Flights Tricks That Are Better Than Any Travel Agent. (Huffington Post)
• How Terrible In-Flight Wi-Fi Will Finally Become A Thing Of The Past. (FastCompany)
• The Speech President Nixon Would Have Given If Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin Had Died on the Moon. (Vox)

 

Trading Links:

• How Many Mutual Funds Routinely Rout the Market?  Zero. (NYTimes)
• These Will Be the World's 20 Largest Economies in 2030. (Bloomberg)
• A Sign of the Times? Austria to No Longer Guarantee Bank Deposits. (Goldcore)
• A Look Back at Dallas Fed Fisher’s Flashiest Quotes. (WSJ)
• Santelli Stunned as Janet Yellen Admits "Cash Is Not A Store Of Value". (ZeroHedge)

Mana Lisa's Smile (Nope, It's not a typo)

Mana Lisa had a strange smile ... and eyes that seemed to follow you around the room.

The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. Sometimes you don't recognize when the journey starts ... other times you do.

 

 — with Ming Alihan at MAD Museum of Art & Design, Singapore.

 

And sometimes you have to go half way around the world, just to get to the starting line.

Best wishes on all your journeys.

MAP: Living Costs Around the World

This map shows the difference in living costs around the world using figures from the world's largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide.

The Consumer Price Index, used to determine the difference in the living costs between countries, takes into account the prices of groceries, transportation, restaurants and utilities.

 

 

There are many more charts with specific data by region.  The chart below shows the places with the highest and lowest costs of living.

 

via MoveHub.

 

The CPI in the infographic is a relative indicator of a country's living costs compared to New York. So, for instance, if a country has a CPI of 70, on average it enjoys 30% cheaper living costs compared to New York.

What’s Going On - Playing For Change [Music Video]

Here is a different take on Marvin Gaye’s classic “What’s Going On”.

It is a "Song Around The World" recording by Playing For Change.

It starts with an acoustic guitar in Africa, adds a drummer in Los Angeles. Next comes the electric guitar and bass on the streets of Chicago and strings in Serbia.  You get the picture ...

Now listen to the music.

 

 

 

Years in the making, minutes to watch. Very cool.

This Song Around The World is featured on PFC3. The album features 185 musicians from 31 countries.

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Here Are Some Links For Your Weekend Reading

Déjà vu?

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• 5 Tips for Finding Flow: A High Performance User's Guide for the New Year. (Forbes)
• Science Says This Personality Trait Predicts Job Performance. What's your guess? (BI)
• Why Airlines Want to Make You Suffer. (NewYorker)
• CIA Predictions for 2015 from the Year 2000. (Business Insider)
• Coming Data Deluge Means You’ll Know Anything You Want, Anytime, Anywhere. (SingularityHub)

 

Trading Links:

• 10 Legendary Investment Rules from Legendary Investors. (Zero Hedge)
• Big Banks Manipulate Physical Market Prices | The Big Picture. (Ritholtz)
• Information in Financial Markets: Who Gets It First? (Papers)
• High-Frequency Trading Payoff Tied to News. (MarketWatch)
• Oil Companies’ Predicament: Who Should Cut Production? (Wall Street Journal)