Stock traders understand this price psychology pretty well.

In the case of the iPhone, the initial price of the device when it was released last year was $599. Then it dropped to $399…

“It establishes a reference price of $600, and now when it comes down — that’s very, very exciting,” said Dan Ariely, a Duke University behavioral economist and the author of “Predictably Irrational,” a book about how we make decisions. “We compare it to the higher price. I don’t know if Steve Jobs planned this or not, but if he manipulated based on anchoring, he did a very nice trick.”

If it weren’t for Android, I definitely would buy one of the new iPhones. I’m trying to hold out for an Android phone, even with the delays.
I am very excited about the future of mobile applications. With GPS there are so many possibilities. It is going to change the world.

The price of diamonds is going to drop like a rock - they can now “grow a more perfect diamond than we can find in nature.” All of you chumps who bought diamonds for your loved ones (myself included) basically threw your money out the window.
The great thing about this is not all of the new jewelry we can wear, or the fact that we are chumps, but all of the applications for technology:

At the heart of almost every electrical device is a semiconductor, which transmits electricity only under certain conditions. For the past 50 years, the devices have been made almost exclusively from silicon, a metal-like substance extracted from sand. It has two significant drawbacks, however: it is fragile and overheats. By contrast, diamond is rugged, doesn’t break down at high temperatures, and its electrons can be made to carry a current with minimal interference.

Apollo has used profits from its gemstones to underwrite its foray into the $250 billion semiconductor industry. The company has a partnership Bryant Linares declines to confirm to produce semiconductors specialized for purposes he declines to discuss. But he revealed to me that Apollo is beginning to sell one-inch diamond wafers. “We anticipate that these initial wafers will be used for research and development purposes in our clients’ product development efforts,” Linares says.

This is the beginning of the Diamond Age.

Congratulations California, for being one of the first to allow same-sex marriage. It is ridiculous that it isn’t allowed in so many places and that it has taken so long. For a lot of us, equal marriage is just common sense.

The Million Zimbabwe Dollar Homepage was recently mentioned in the nytimes Freakonomics blog. It was mentioned in another nytimes blog a couple months ago.

But Dombrow’s friend doesn’t have to be rich to pay one and a quarter billion Zimbabwe dollars (ZWD) for two beers, a mineral water, and one dinner.

Thanks to inflation, it comes out to just $2.70 in U.S. dollars (according to OANDA.com).

Zimbabwe’s severe inflation sparked a parody of the Million Dollar Homepage — The Million Zimbabwean Dollar Homepage (worth US $0.002159).

The new Roadrunner supercomputer is more than twice as fast as BlueGene/L, making it the first petaflop capable computer. It uses Red Hat Linux and has “almost 7,000 AMD Opteron dual core processors and almost 13,000 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs in special designed TriBlades connected by Infiniband.” You can read the complete system overview here [pdf].

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

IBM is doing a lot of very cool stuff. Anytime anyone asks me for a safe stock to invest in, I recommend IBM. They are also working on the Blue Brain project.
IBM is helping to drive us to the Singularity, and I think they will make a lot of money along the way.

This is so awesome. It is hard to be anti-technology when you read something like this: a man who has been paralyzed for 30 years can finally walk again - in Second Life.

The 41-year-old patient used his imagination to make his character take a walk and chat to another virtual person on the popular Second Life website.

The patient, who has suffered paralysis for more than 30 years, can barely bend his fingers due to a progressive muscle disease so cannot use a mouse or keyboard in the traditional way.

In the experiment, he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.

In the near future this man may be able to walk again in real life. With the exponential growth of information technology there is a lot of promise to treat problems that were once considered hopeless. Imagine a man in a similar situation 50 years ago - what hope would he have?
Today it is very different. It is only a matter of time (e.g. like maybe 10-20 years) before even the most serious conditions and illnesses will be completely cured and/or treated.

Studies show that at least part of your intelligence is not derived from genetics and can be improved.

“When it comes to improving intelligence, many researchers have thought it was not possible,” says Jaeggi. “Our findings clearly show this is not the case. Our brain is more plastic than we might think.”

…The results were surprising. While the control groups made gains, presumably because they had practice with the fluid intelligence tests, the trained groups improved considerably more than the control groups. Further, the longer the participants trained, the larger were their intelligence gains.

This is part of the reason why I think it is important for young people to play chess.

Henry is in trouble. Securities fraud, conspiracy charges, etc…
This made me laugh:

In 2001, according to one count on the indictment, Mr Nicholas smoked so much marijuana during a flight on a private jet between Orange County and Las Vegas that the pilot had to put on an oxygen mask.

I’ve made some changes to the all-time high list. Now, the sparklines in the posts on the main page of uglychart.com will display in bloglines and Internet Explorer correctly. They will look like, for example, this sparkline of UAUA (which just made a new all-time low):
You will notice that you can now also hover-over the sparkline and it will display the full company name.
This has been done in preparation for the wordpress stock sparkline plugin that I am creating.

Thiel put down $500,000 so The Seasteading can start to build city-states in the open ocean. Sweet.

“Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry,” he said. “You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That’s a ridiculous barrier to entry. And it’s got enormous customer lock-in. People complain about their cellphone plans that are like two years, but think of the effort that it takes to change your citizenship.”

It’s an interesting idea, anyway.

Even if their big idea doesn’t end up panning out, their story should live on in internet lore for confirming the dream that two guys with a blog and a love of Ayn Rand can land half a million dollars to pursue their dream, no matter how off-kilter or off-grid it might seem.