The Linkielist

Linking ideas with the world

UK building Tri-service defence acadamy

Posted on January 19, 2007 by Robin

The UK are going to consolidate in St. Athan, Wales, and consolidating a wide variety of trainings from 27 different locations in to 1. Not only will that be a whole lot cheaper in terms of manpower required to run the academy and property expenses, but it will also mean that inter-services jointness could become a core cultural value in a large part of defence, which means a whole load more efficiency due to less unhealthy interservice rivalry and more understanding of the other branches.

BASE Jumping Legal in US

Posted on January 19, 2007 by Robin

A NY state judge has ruled that since Jeb Corliss was very aware of the risks involved and attempted to mitigate them as much as possible, his attempt to jump off the Empire State Building was not reckless and endangering behaviour and thus legal.
Of course those namby pamby pussies who get adrenal rushes from watching their garage doors open with a remote control are all up in arms about it, but from me that gets a ‘Top Bloke’ award to that judge.

Stock Market Randomness

Posted on January 19, 2007 by Robin

There’s a test people did a few times where they put different stock names at the end different exits of a maze and let a hamster ‘pick’ his favorite stock. It turns out that the hamster is no worse (and sometimes better) than real life stock brokers, showing how the market is random.

The Sun-Times has a monkey who has been picking stocks from a larger portfolio every year for the past four years and has been doing significantly better than the major indexes:

In the four years since Mr. Monk has chaired and inspired this contest, his stocks have posted annual returns of 37 percent, 36 percent, 3 percent and, in 2006, 36 percent