Thane Plambeck

Spirit Lander

Owen used my laptop and his McDonald's "Spy Kids" 3D glasses to look at this 3D image of the Mars Spirit Rover landing site.

American Sucker

I just finished this book by David Denby, a film critic at the New Yorker magazine, about his decision to invest heavily in tech stocks in 1999, a few months before the crash began. I pre-ordered it at Amazon and gulped it down in about 5 hours over the last few days.

Here he is in 1999, going through a divorce. He wants to buy out his wife's portion of their apartment (pg 12):

I conceived a simple plan. The market was booming. We had some serious resources, and I would throw those assets into the right things and make money quickly. I would try to make $1 million in the market in the year of 2000—yes, $1 million—and then I would buy her out...

Things go well at first (pg 95):

Quarterly Report, April 1, 2000
Cumulative Net Gain: $237,000

Yet clouds are on the horizon (still on pg 95):

...the day of the Nasdaq high, March 10, 2000, when index closed at 5048...the Journal ran an article that asked with a straight face which stocks would be the ones to "carry the baton" up to Nasdaq 6000.

But there was trouble after March 10—not just a dropped baton but, in middle March, skittishness, minicollapses, sessions in which the Nasdaq index would fall by 200 points on rumors and misunderstandings, only to recover over the next couple of days. Just as I feared, my hero Greenspan appeared to be ruining me.

Just two months later, the pain is only beginning (pg 102):

Back in the city, hope drained away, and I felt my brain slipping through my fingers. The Nasdaq index dropped all through May, reaching a low of 3164 on May 23, a fall of 1900 in two and a half months. As the index fell, I was beginning to get seriously hurt. From day to day, I struggled for clarity. The million...I kicked it loose as savagely as I could. I was in the office in mid-May when I let it go for good, staring out of the room with the great view east and the strong light. It was a joke the million, and I had to rein in my fury, because I could do nothing with it but destroy myself.

But things weren't so bad even after that (p 135):

Quarterly Report, July 1, 2000
Cumulative Net Gain $110,000

He's going to be a big loser though (pg 139):

An unwilling passivity before my fate, an overall languor...

I neither bought nor sold; I held, merely hoping for fresh gains. I needed a shot of energy, but, in July 2000, entering a three-day venture capital conference at the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Seventh Avenue, I got exactly the opposite. The glamour, the excitement had gone. What a dreary lot! What sloth and despondency! There were lots of young men, serious-looking Indians and Pakistanis; a few African-Americans; Asians in pairs talking to one another in Chinese or Korean....The movable chairs with their aluminum frames scraped the spotted and ash-stained carpets. Why are American business hotels so ugly?

Needless to say, it's downhill from there:

Quarterly Report, October 1, 2000
Cumulative Net Gain $85,000

Quarterly Report, January 1, 2001
Cumulative Net Loss $155,000

Quarterly Report, April 1, 2001
Cumulative Net Loss $395,000

Quarterly Report, January 1, 2002
Cumulative Net Loss $800,000

Quarterly Report, October 1, 2002
Cumulative Net Loss $900,000

Ouch.

Highly recommended.

William Empson

Seven types of ambiguity.

Or, Adam Phillips, writing in the Winter 2004 Threepenny Review:

If the fact that we are going to die has been taken by the great religions and their secular counterparts as the most salient fact about us, perhaps we should note the more improbable fact that we were conceived at all (that, in Empson's words, we came out of the nowhere into the somewhere). We are probably over-impressed by anticipation and inevitability—have, in a sense, organized our lives around them—because we have grossly overrated the significance of our own deaths.