Juggling Dynamite

For the past 10 years, investment banks have enjoyed a veritable free-for-all, trading, churning and making manipulating markets however they wished to goose profits. Any time regulators did caution or confront them, banks were able to pay modest fines and carry on without admitting or denying any fault. Today the culture of regulatory tolerance and forbearance is turning and banks are finding themselves in a new world of higher scrutiny. A fresh vigor for criminal investigation and charges by the US Department of Justice of late is a game changer and investment banks are now scampering to divest themselves of trading arms that are no longer feasible in a world of increased legal oversight and accountability.

The Justice Department is investigating whether J.P. Morgan manipulated energy markets, marking the latest legal hurdle for a bank already facing a mountain of litigation and regulatory scrutiny. Here is a direct video link.

“Believe it or not, the electric storage battery — a technology that has been around since the eighteenth century — could change the economic course of the twenty-first century. Thanks to breakthroughs on the horizon, batteries qualify as one of 12 disruptive technologies that the McKinsey Global Institute has identified as part of a recent report on innovations that will change the way the world works. Each game-changing technology could affect hundreds of millions of people, create hundreds of billions of dollars a year in economic value, and reconfigure large sectors of the global economy. Advanced batteries, for their part, have the potential to shape global demand for fossil fuels, increase the use of renewables in the electric grid, bring reliable electric power to businesses in developing economies, and extend electricity — and therefore access to the modern world — to millions of the world’s poorest.”

Read the whole article about new developments in this exciting and obvious game changer technology: Better batteries, better world. Yes, this is happening.

Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed — Eratosthenes’ calculation of the Earth’s circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau’s measurement of the speed of light in 1849. Here is a direct video link.