wallpaper How Much is a Planet Worth?

Gliese 581 c: $160
Mars: $14,000
Earth: $Lotsa!

From BoingBoing:

Our planet's value emerged as nearly 5 quadrillion dollars. That's about 100 times Earth's yearly GDP, and perhaps, Laughlin thought, not a bad ballpark estimate for the total economic value of our world and the technological civilization it supports.

I find this kind of amazing, that one can simply plug in numbers regarding physical characteristics of a planet- quantities that don't, on the face of it, seem to have much to do with economic value- and get something that seems like a plausible estimation of the "worth" of the planet. $14,000 seems like a low value for Mars, to me, but I suspect that's at least in part because I think about its potential future value, not its value in terms of today's ability to utilize it.

The interview portion of the article goes into some detail of how the equation was pieced together, and helps clarify how this works. Still wondering about magnets and tides, though.

wallpaper This is Cool

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.

Though as the source notes, "Needs more Saturn." This embedding code looks like the style I was fighting with yesterday, so if the clip doesn't show up for you, follow the link to the source or to Scale, and you should be able to see it. It's only about a minute long, and quite impressive.

Followup: Yep. And as it turns out, Vimeo also offers "the old code," which is code for "the code that actually works." Hopefully, this is fixed now.

wallpaper Moral: Extort From Goldman Sachs

In Krugman's Blog today, he points out that in the James Bond film Thunderball, Spectre demands 100 million pounds for a pair of nuclear weapons...

Even the big one — demanding a ransom for two stolen nuclear warheads — is 100 million pounds, $280 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $2 billion — or one-eighth of the Goldman Sachs bonus pool.

Why rob banks? That's where the money is. And it's more true today than ever before.