A Moral and Intellectual Emergency

From Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris:

Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

Hat tip to Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion is on my nightstand. (Sam's book was on my nightstand a few months ago, but I didn't notice this choice snippet then).

Interested in civic action for people whose worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements? Consider joining the Brights. I did.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 08:30 PM | TrackBack

Currency by the Yard

I was musing about this as I was reading about how naked Société Générale must be feeling after having stripped off 7.5 yards of capital in (so it seems, but the night is young...) trader fraud.

I used to think that, when Wall Street Foreign Exchange traders sold Yen "by the yard" (meaning 10⁹ yen, a U.S. "billion"), I presumed that the New Yorkers were making a humorous and self-deprecating comparison between their business and the rag trade, next door on the Lower-East Side.

In fact, it is Londoners who invented it. They were abbreviating the word "milliard", the old French/British word for a 10⁹, when the word "billion" used to mean 10¹² (for which we say "trillion") following the numerical system known as échelle longue. The word "billion" is still considered confusing semantically (did you mean 10⁹ or 10¹², old chap?), and phonologically is too close to million or trillion in a noisy trading environment, where people seem to be rather sensitive to silly mistakes.

I didn't know that.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:01 AM | TrackBack

Banking and Poverty

Sometimes I have to remind myself how poor people in the United States are:

In the middle of a Yahoo Finance article on Social Security, I notice:

As many as 40 million U.S. households either have no bank account or make little use of banking services, according to an estimate from the Chicago-based Center for Financial Services Innovation.

The current U.S. population is about 299,400,000 people (2006 est.), with about 2.59 persons per household. That means over 1 in 3 households don't use a bank. Wow.

But then, we note that over 1 in 8 people in the United States live in poverty (again, from the census), and over 1 in 5 children under age 5. Of course these stats are all over the place...

Posted by BradRubenstein at 01:05 PM | TrackBack