Cool Magic Tricks

Stage Magic Tricks

Stage Magic Tricks Biogoraphy

Investing in the financial markets necessarily involves one’s ability to change perspectives over time. Often the job of assessing what is important at any particular point becomes increasingly difficult in a period of heightened short-term volatility. Not difficult in terms of staying focused on the factual reality of the economy, corporate earnings, etc., but difficult in that the financial media feels compelled to come up with rationales for daily movements in asset prices. Possibly the single greatest task of any investor today is filtering out white noise. And there’s more of the white noise than ever before.

So said the Contrary Investor; and I could not agree more given my sense that the media remains “long” volatility. Indeed, every time volatility increases, so do my phone calls from the financial media as they feel "compelled to come up with rationales for daily movements in asset prices"; last week was no exception. Verily, the week seemed to build on the previous week’s smackdown with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker, who I actually like very much, but challenged me on the point that it was the media that first termed the “fiscal cliff” Armageddon. I had averred that it would certainly not be Armageddon, holding fast to the belief that when something absolutely had to happen inside the DC Beltway it has typically happened. My comments were:

Stage Magic Tricks

Beginner Magic Tricks

Beginner Magic Tricks Biogoraphy

The first movement began stunningly with a muted harp sounding like an twanging Asian instrument. Grubinger's entrance was made by quietly tapping stones (nature's tears?) as he walked from the front of the stage, where he had an elaborate percussion setup, to the orchestra's percussion section in the rear. There, the soloist had access to a bank of timpani on which he pounded with mad abandon before quietly (and with a slight smile that I think he was trying to suppress) tapping his stones once more as he returned to the front of the stage.

Tan's orchestral writing is color drenched. One minute, we could be reminded that he's an avant-gardist communing with sound as sound (he recently conducted a concert in China where he introduced new pieces meant to be in dialogue with John Cage). The next minute, he can be a happy Hollywood composer blockbuster-bound (he won an Oscar for his "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" score).

Still, attention focused on Grubinger, who is not just an athletic percussionist (he eschews concert tails for a fitted black T-shirt) but also an acrobatic one. The concerto's cadenzas appeared designed for an octopus, what with Grubinger ever grasping for bowls, blocks, bells, gongs, drums, marimba, vibraphone and rainstick.

In some of Tan's recent orchestral music, he takes a simple melodic motive and doesn't let go of it, drumming it in, so to speak, in every which way and with every kind of instrumental combination imaginable. That describes the final cadenza. But what might have been a cheap trick turned into such an exuberantly elaborate one that I fell for it, and so did the rest of the audience, if the huge applause was anything to go by.

Beginner Magic Tricks

Math Magic Tricks

Math Magic Tricks Biogoraphy

With just a few words, Pflugerville School Superintendent Charles Dupre made the best case we’ve heard in a while for whether public schools can continue educating Texas’ nearly 5 million students on budgets that have been slashed by the state in recent years.
“We can get by if just getting by is acceptable,” Dupre told a judge last month during the state’s ongoing school finance trial. “In our district, that is not enough. We want to help students master the curriculum — not just get by.”
Those words are at the heart of what public education funding is all about – just getting by or providing a quality education that prepares students for the workforce or college. Given the demands of a global economy and a future that relies on preparing today’s students to be tomorrow’s economic engines, the Legislature should roundly reject a “just get by” approach to public education.
Whether Texas public schools will just get by or excel, however, is in the hands of Texas legislators who convene on Tuesday. Their decisions will be heavily influenced by what happens Monday, when state Comptroller Susan Combs releases the official estimate of how much the Legislature will have to spend in the next two-year budget. Early estimates project a budget with a surplus of $8 billion, a stark and welcome difference from 2011, when lawmakers started the session in red ink, falling $27 billion short of what was needed to pay the bills. Then the unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. Those figures contrast with current positive economic indicators: Unemployment is at a four-year low at 6.2 percent, and sales tax receipts are shooting up along with a roaring economy, fueled largely, Combs has said, by a West Texas energy boom mostly from hydraulic fracturing.

Math Magic Tricks

Monday, 7 January 2013

Stage Magic Tricks

Beginner Magic Tricks

Math Magic Tricks