Check out this article from Benjamin Applebaum at the Washington Post, talking about how smaller banks are doing fine in the crisis and are not starved for capital. Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.

Consider any field that’s judged for its quality – artwork, music, beer taste, basketball playing ability, wine, etc. Which fields are going to be judged the same by everyone? Which fields are going to be judged differently by everyone (Wine for example, where judges gave different scores to a wine sampled twice). In which fields is price a good indicator of quality?

How long before rich college students start hiring secretaries, either here or overseas, to help them with their workload?

You will need all this for your brewing day:

Brew Pot (5 gal) and lid
Fermenter (6 gal) and lid
1.5 Liter Bottle of Water (for Measuring)
Yeast Starter Jar (Big enough for half of the water in the 1.5 liter bottle. It is cool if this has measuring units but not near essential).
Other Pot(s) and lids to hold sanitized water
Plastic Wrap to cover Yeast Starter Jar
Bathtub or Large Sink or Chilling Coil or Snowbank

2 stirring spoons
Ordinary table spoon
Thermometer
Airlock
Bag of Ice

Strainer
Iodophor (or other solution; I don’t know about the other ones)

Grain (if your recipe asks)
Yeast
Hops (bittering and finishing)
Malt Extract

Sanitize -
Put 5 gal of water in brew pot, put 1/2 fl. oz of Iodophor in the solution. Put the brew lid in the pot. Let it sit for ten minutes and rotate the brew lid at 5 minutes. If the Iodophor turns clear from brown, it’s not sanitizing anymore and you need to use more.

Pour all of the water into the fermenter. In the fermenter put anything that’s gonna touch the brew.
your airlock,
a small pot (about the size of a Pyrex measuring cup),
a stirring spoon (long enough to touch the bottom of the brew pot and more, not wooden),
another stirring spoon
ordinary house spoon
thermometer
the fermenter lid, rotate at 5 minutes
strainer

Hang up everything or put it in containers that have been sterilized. Cover the fermentor and yeast jar lid to keep out air.

Boil 3 gallons of water in the brew pot. 3 gallons is about 7.5 bottles of 1.5 liter water. Pour it into the fermenter or another sanitized container and let it cool. Hopefully it will cool or be chiller than room temperature by the time the wort is done.

Boil 3 gallons of water in the brew pot. 3 gallons is about 7.5 bottles of 1.5 liter water. Some of this water will evaporate during the boil.

Steeping Grain
Pour 3 quarts of water (about 2 bottles of 1.5 liter water) into a pot and boil it to 150-170. Pour in the grain. Keep the water at this temperature for 20-30 minutes. Pour this through a strainer into the brew pot. Or if you have a grainbag, steep the grain at 150-170 directly in the brew pot.

Fill a 1.5 liter water bottle a quarter of the way then pour this into a pot. Boil this water then let it cool to 95-105 degrees. Pour in a packet of yeast. Take a sanitized ordinary spoon and scoop it full of malt extract and pour this in the cup. Stir it. Cover this cup and wait 30 mins.

The brew pot should be warm, maybe not boiling yet. Turn off the heat. Add the grain if you didn’t have a grainbag. Add the malt extract. Make sure you stir it well enough that none sticks to the bottom, if you turn on the heat again and there’s stuff sticking to the bottom it’ll burn and taste awful.

Bring the water to full boil! You probably need to cover the pot with the lid to get to a full boil. THere should be foam on a smooth surface. There should be a Hot break within 5-20 minutes where there is a big risk of boiling over. After the Hot break you’re ready to add your first hops. Set a timer for 60 minutes when you add your first hops. Stir them into the wort.

Prepare a cool area to chuck the pot in. This could be a bathtub with a ton of ice.

Don’t cover your pot all the way – leave a little bit open so sulphur can escape the pot otherwise your beer will taste a like cabbage.

Stir your pot occasionally.

Add finishing hops according to your recipe.

Ok once the timer’s done you want to rapidly cool your wort. Be careful not to contaminate the wart with your hands or water dripping from your hands or fingerprints. Carry it over to the bathtub and put the lid on. If the water surrounding the pot gets warm replace it with colder water.

If your yeast is foaming its ready to go. Pour it into the fermenter.

Ok let your pot cool to 80 F. This should take about 30 minutes.

Hopefully the water you poured in the fermenter earlier has cooled. Or if you were keeping it in a different container. After it’s cooled pour your brew pot wort through the strainer into the fermenter. Try to do it violently. Hopefully the water level is around 5 gal. If lower add more water. If higher start with less water in the fermenter.

Fill the airlock up to the line with cheap vodka or whiskey. Replace it on top of the fermenter. Store the fermenter in a cool place.

Journalists are all gaga over reports of a 4 percent decline in driving and a 3.4 percent increase in transit ridership. But do the math: transit only carries about 1.5 percent of urban travel. Increase that by 3.4 percent and you can’t come close to making up for a 4 percent decline in the other 90-some percent.

From the Antiplanner.

I had a lot of trouble with this recently, so hope this helps. Google is pretty strict with the CSV files it imports.

First off open Excel. On the top line of your file, you want to have the following headers:

Subject, Start Date, Start Time, End Date, End Time, All Day Event, Reminder On/Off, Reminder Date, Reminder Time, Meeting Organizer, Description, Location, Private

Every event (every row in Excel) needs to have a Subject, Start Date, and Start Time. The other headers are optional and you can mix and match them as much as you please. Here is a complete sample I uploaded today.

Subject, Start Date, Start Time, End Date, End Time, Private, All Day Event, Location
Ramsay Shield, 7/26/2008, 7:00 PM,, 9:00 PM, FALSE,, TBC
Training, 7/27/2008, 12:00 PM,, TRUE, FALSE,

Highlight every time under Start Time, End Time, and Reminder Time, click “Format Cells,” then “Time,” then “1:30 PM.”
Highlight every date under Start Date, End Date, Reminder Date, click “Format Cells,” then “Date,” then “3/14/2001.”
You need to do both of those things for Google to recognize your file.

Private, All Day Event, Reminder On/Off – type True or False in the relevant space. If you leave them blank Google Calendar will use the default settings for these events (for privacy, it will make the event private or public depending on whether the calendar is private or public). If there isn’t any info after Start Date & Start Time, Google assumes the event is one hour long. Make sure also that the only data on the spreadsheet is events – otherwise Google will return an error.

Once you’re done click File –> Save As, then click down at the bottom where it says “Microsoft Office Excel Notebook” for file type, and change it to CSV (Comma Separated Value) format. Then you’re ready to upload to Google!

On a separate note, if you upload the same CSV file twice, Google will create duplicates of your events rather than replace the first set. There’s no “Remove duplicates” button either – you have to do it manually, or erase the whole calendar and start again.

11 of Pomeroy’s top 16 teams are still alive. Stanford knocked out Marquette, and Wisconsin knocked out Kansas State.

In the field are Arizona State, Nebraska, Virginia Tech, New Mexico, Ohio State, Florida, Syracuse, and Illinois. Out are St. Mary’s, BYU, Vanderbilt, Oklahoma, Villanova, Kentucky, South Alabama, and St. Joseph’s.

Mount St. Mary’s is way better than Mississippi Valley State – the only non-conference games Mississippi Valley State won were against Division II opponents. I know the committee doesn’t want to match up the two reps from historically black colleges, but in this case they were worse than the other 16 seeds.

Midwest
1 Kansas
16 Miss Valley St/Coppin St

8 Ohio St
9 New Mexico

5 Texas A&M
12 Georgia

4 Kansas St
13 Oral Roberts

6 UConn
11 Illinois

3 Dook
14 Boise St.

7 Indiana
10 Syracuse

2 Georgetown
15 Cornell

South
1 Memphis
16 Austin Peay

8 Davidson
9 Florida

5 Arizona
12 W. Kentucky

4 Mich St
13 CS Fullerton

6 USC
11 UNLV

3 Marquette
14 San Diego

7 Nebraska
10 Oregon

2 UNC
15 American

West
1 UCLA
16 Tx Arlington

8 Butler
9 Mississippi St

5 Xavier
12 Kent St

4 Clemson
13 George Mason

6 Purdue
11 Miami FL

3 Texas
14 Portland St

7 Notre Dame
10 Arkansas

2 Louisville
15 UMBC

East
1 Wisconsin
16 Mt. St. Mary’s

8 Gonzaga
9 Virginia Tech

5 West Virginia
12 Temple

4 Tennessee
13 Siena

6 Pittsburgh
11 Baylor

3 Stanford
14 Winthrop

7 Drake
10 Arizona St

2 Washington St
15 Belmont

The writing sucks, I can’t believe they got Dennis Quaid and Forest Whitaker to play the characters they do, and I would have left halfway through if I wasnt with someone.

“For the first time ever, banks/lender own more of the houses in America than the folks who live there do.”

From Barry Ritholtz at Big Picture

GrandCentral is in private beta, and users can’t invite other users, but you can sign up using this link.

Check it out.