seriously?

facebook ipo valuation could top $100 billion

girl math: bsb harmonic range

yesterday i was taking a trip down memory lane and watching backstreet boys music videos on youtube.  one of my favorites:

in mathematics, a harmonic range is the distance between four harmonic conjugates. 

let's say our backstreet boys are forming collinear points by standing on a line:

brian and nick are harmonic conjugates with respect to a.j. and howie if: 

|brian * a.j.|	=	|brian * howie|
|a.j.* nick|		|howie * nick|

further, a.j. and howie are harmonic conjugates with respect to brian and nick. 

in short, our boys divide the line in the same ratio.  line brian-nick is divided harmonically at a.j. (internal ratio) and at howie (external ratio).  if | brian * howie | = 1, then:

|brian * a.j.|	=	a ( 1 - a )		|brian * nick|	=	2a
		1 + a				a + 1

all four boys form a harmonic range within our harmonic line segment! 

but what if kevin wants to rejoin the group?  no problem, he can stand as the midpoint between brian and nick:

then:

kevin * nick^2 = (kevin * a.j.) (kevin * howie) 

who doesn't love a good 1998 bsb harmony?

made in china or trade with china?

the economist recently featured a story on the economic relationships betwixt africa and china.  the chinese have been interested in the continent since the cold war and have been investing in africa since the mid-90s.  the chart below shows the exponential trade growth between the two over the past 15 years.

i normally take data sets and publications from the heritage foundation with a grain of salt and a stiff drink.  but this was a discussion in one of my grad school courses a couple years ago and i've heard relatively little about it since. 

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but one of the more interesting things in the second chart is that china's greatest outward investment is in the americas (ex-u.s.) at 19.5%.  isn't that supposedly our investment turf?  and keep in mind, these numbers don't include bond (debt) transactions. 

china's portfolio is pretty diverse on the surface, but the majority of their investments (66.9%) are in up-and-coming economies.  if current trends continue, i'm hypothesizing china will have significant underlying influence in shaping the global economy over the next century - more so than "just being" china.

my favorite 3 x 9 comic of the day

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spotlight: tontine

the tontine is the "wolf pack" system for raising capital.  individuals pool their money into a permanent common fund and receive dividend payments based on their investment and the fund's performance. 

until death. 

if a member of the wolf pack dies, his or her shares are divided among the rest of the pack.  whoever outlives the rest of the pack takes the whole pot. 

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lorenzo de tonti created this system in italy and france during the mid-17th century.  it was later used by french, british, and u.s. governments for public initiatives, such as funding buildings and promoting life insurance sales.  the state would recoup the capital pot once all the investors died.

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since tontines create a "live-er takes all" incentive, today, they are prohibited in most of the u.s. and britain; the french still use a limited tontine concept. 

girl math: topology at tiffany's

i recently accompanied a friend to tiffany & co. in search of these somerset knot earrings:

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mathematically, knots are a set of closed, non-intersecting curves which exist in three-dimensional space.  the earrings above are math knots.

this is also a math knot:

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this is not a math knot:

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topology ("rubber sheet" geometry) focuses on geometrical properties that are unchanged by an infinite amount of twisting, bending, pulling, shrinking, or stretching.  angles, length, width, etc. don't matter - everything is elastic.  a sphere is topologically equivalent to a cube (scube?); a donut is topologically equivalent to a coffee mug.  because the heart of "rubber sheet" geometry is the relationship between an object's points and these properties, topology is reliant upon set theory and the theories of limits and continuum.

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knot theory, a branch within topology, centers on the shape of our tiffany's earrings: links and knots.  an ambient isotopy (stretching, shrinking, pulling, bending, twisting, or magic tricking the knot) cannot reduce the curve to an unknot (something that isn't a knot). 

oh, and cutting the knot is forbidden.  but why would you want to?  the earrings are so pretty as is.

spotlight: shadow stock markets

shadow stock markets are private, unregulated markets in which investors can purchase shares in non-publicly traded companies prior to an ipo launch.  to participate in a shadow market, the securities and exchange commission requires investors to have a net worth greater than $1 million.  these "accredited" investors have an early bird investment opportunity before average investor demand increases the share price; however, the accredited investor is exposed to greater risk and uncertainty, as well as lack of liquidity and disclosure requirements from the company.

a very recent and relevant example was when goldman sachs teamed up with russian investor yuri milner and pumped $500 million into facebook. 

ah, the russians. of course.

bubble, bubble, toil and trouble?

linkedin. zynga, groupon, facebook. 

linkedin had an explosive first day of trading.  the company's offer price of $45 p/s catapulted to $122 p/s and is currently trading around $95 p/s.  the firm's market value nearly reached $9 billion.

there are other heavy hitters in the pipeline.  zynga is rumored to launch its ipo in the next couple weeks.  groupon's will be by the end of the year.  and the almighty king facebook will launch its ipo in 2012.

are these social media firms really worth it?  they have no organic product or service to sell - their economic value is generated from marketing other products and services.  are firms that coordinate information worth billions?  if so, why don't administrative assistants have higher salaries?

bring on the shorts.

too big to hbo

hbo premiered "too big to fail" last night.  the film was based on andrew ross sorkin's novel of the same title. 

when it was over, i was somehow disappointed and exhilarated. 

back story:  i rented the audio book from the library and listened whilst running (for some odd reason i can't just "read" nonfiction anymore); however, i accidentally heard the first two hours under my ipod's shuffle setting.  william hughes, the narrator, was so compelling that i thought sorkin just had an interesting writing style.  needless to say, i only made it to about chapter five before i had to return the audio book to the library.

i was disappointed that the time i invested in the novel was over in the first six minutes of the film.  i enjoyed dick fuld's background and i found erin callan's story particularly intriguing.  i obviously did not get very far in the book, but there was a lot of detail, emotion, and juicy gossip that just didn't have time for portrayal in the movie. 

i did enjoy the humor, timeline, and questions poised throughout the film.  i also forgot about how john mccain suspended his campaign to return to washington during the crisis - so thanks for reminding me.  overall, the cast was great.  evan handler as lloyld blankfein was my favorite, but ayad akhtar's version of neel kashkari was lukewarm.

the purpose of the novel was to humanize the 2008 financial crisis.  the film did so, but failed to meet its potential, seemingly more focused on the logistical lessons learned from the immediate events which led to and the ultimate passage of the troubled assets relief program.  i believe, on content, sorkin's work would have thrived as a miniseries - but i don't think it would've generated a great enough audience to merit that length.

the film didn't have the personal emotional gravitas that i was expecting - but it did make those historic events accessible to outsiders who would not have necessarily read the book.  for more insight, i would highly recommend watching this 20-minute video:

and at the end of the day, the film did make me want to re-checkout the audio book from the library.

nigerian sweep

the action congress of nigeria (acn), a classical liberal political party, uses the broom to symbolize they will sweep out all the bad things in nigeria.  since nigeria is in the midst of an election cycle, the price of brooms is increasing dramatically and housewives are not happy.  according to the wsj:

"the price of brooms has more than tripled in some places.  in parts of lagos, it's difficult to find any brooms at all, illustrating the unwelcome intrusion of nigerian politics on the home front... irked housewives say they have been forced to let dust pile up, or opt for their worn-out brooms... some say broom sizes are also shrinking, another means for merchants to inflate profit margins."

source: nationalmirror

apparently the acn purchases the brooms in bulk and resells them to members of the party, driving up prices.  during the last election in 2007, the price of brooms didn't decline until two months after the election, leaving housewives in piles of dust.

i wonder if the acn could set up a service to purchase the brooms in bulk, rent them to party members, then resell them to the housewives' market.  the renting portion of implementing that idea seems difficult, so maybe the acn could assist in establishing an actual "broom market day" where housewives and party members could buy and sell these brooms?  hmmm...