Barry Ritholtz sez,

In doing the research for the “Bailout Nation” book, I needed a way to put the dollar amounts into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars.

People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

Alexey Titarenko’s “City of Shadows” is a series of haunting, gorgeous long-exposure shots of street-scenes in St Petersburg, Russia. The long exposure-times turn the people in the shots into ghosts and suggestions of motion.

Link

(Thanks, Marilyn!)

Flickr’s Pixelsurgeon has remixed a bunch of BBC news-footage in which the anchors, having signed off, just look at one another with relief and sit silently waiting for the fade-out, calling the result, “The Day There Was No News.” The effect is nothing short of wonderful.

Mr Jalopy adds, “Somehow, this silent newscast is more eerie than normal boombastic version of the days events.”
Link

(Thanks, Mr Jalopy!)

WillS sez, “The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band who could not afford a camera crew for their video, ‘performed’ in front of a load of CCTV cameras, requested the footage from the camera operators under the Freedom of Information Act Data Protection Act and then stitched the results together for their music video.”

Link

(Thanks, WillS!)

Here’s a nice little bauble: a tiny shim that sits between your phone’s SIM and the phone, which unlocks the handset. Note the admirable use of the grocer’s apo’strophe in the sell-copy — a sure sign of daffy ingenuity.

This SIM unlock is made of a very thin piece of FPC (0.10mm) with a Microcontroller mounted on, that goes between your Operator's SIM card & the phone's SIM socket.

Because of it's very thin & slim design it fits into almost all phone's on the market and can also be easily removed again. It's got Gold Immersion and makes perfect contact with the card and the socket at ALL times.

Link

(via Red Ferret)

Stephanie sez, “NotCot has a post up about Stephanie Posavec’s (not me) incredibly detailed graphic artwork in which she exhaustively analyzes the language and thematic structure of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, rendering the data into amazingly beautiful Tufteian info-graphics that are as elegant as they are data-rich. In 'Literary Organism' the entire beat classic is represented as an array of flowers, with petals and blossoms accurately reflecting the word and paragraph count of each chapter. Colors are assigned based on the subject of each section, like cyan for 'Dean Moriarty,' & tan for 'Parties, drinking, & drugs' It's breathtaking."

Link to Posavec at the Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust,
Link to Notcot

See also:
Jack Kerouac’s hand-drawn cover for On the Road
Joyce Johnson: Jack Kerouac and the 50th anniversary of On The Road
Unedited On The Road to be published
Coppola adapting On the Road
Steve Allen interviews Jack Kerouac
Kerouac curator invents copyright laws to keep photographers away

An unknown artist fashions animals out of plastic bags and fastens them to subway gratings, and the hot air inflates them and makes them puff up and wiggle.

The story we heard at dinner tonight is that there’s an artist who’s been making these animals out of discarded plastic bags. He (or she) ties the bags to the ventilation grates above the subway lines so that when the subway rushes through underneath, the animal jumps up and springs to life.

Link

(Thanks, Marilyn!)

“What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?” first published in the November, 1968 issue Mechanix Illustrated, contains many exciting predictions for that far-off, futuristic date.

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated. Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.

Link