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Which is an easier place to visit, Irkutsk or Angarsk?

My partner Seth Levine has a good post up titled 1980’s all over again with a link to a very interesting Merrill Lynch report titled 1980’s Redux. I was in high school in Dallas, Texas for the first third of the 1980’s and then college in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the rest of it. I started my first company in 1987 – on the heals of the Massachusetts Miracle and the beginning of the late 1980’s recession which was painful for Massachusetts, but I was too young and naive to notice. ...

Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books of all time (right up there with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values .) While I’m not a hard core mega-Objectivist, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead both spoke loudly to me at critical points in my life and have had a hand in shaping the way I think about the world. Atlas Shrugged just turned 50 and I expect there will be plenty of chatter about it. There’s an update on the continued effort to make a movie about it and an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Brian Doherty titled Rand and the Right*.* It’s short, pointed, and ends strong: ...

My long time friend and first business partner Dave Jilk sent me an email with the quote of the week in it – “The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data.” Perfect – brilliant. After responding that it would find the light of day in a future blog post, he respondedf that he tracked the attribution down to a guy named Frank Kotsonis (a pharmacologist), apparently in The Clinical Evaluation of a Food Additive: Assessment of Aspartame of which Kotsonis was an editor. ...

Tom Evslin has an outstanding post up today titled Causes of Global Warming – Are We Fooled By Hubris? Amy and I just finished watching Rome Season 2 and our conclusion is “the more things change the more they stay the same.” Anyone feel like buying some indulgences ?

Phil Weiser , my good friend, professor of law at University of Colorado Law School, executive director of the Silicon Flatirons Program , and co-conspirator on several things told me about two job openings at the University of Colorado’s Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program (ITP). In my ongoing quest to help any reader of this blog find new cool job opportunities, I humbly serve them up here. The two openings in the University of Colorado’s Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program are for a Faculty Director and a Senior Instructor. ITP is the nation’s first program of its kind, has a 30-year track record of success, and possesses an active research faculty with a dynamic and international student body. Plus – you get to live and work in Boulder. ...

I used to be good at tennis. Really good. When I was 11. I treasured my Jack Kramer Autograph (until I got a Futabaya), never really wanted a T-2000 even though I loved Connors, and thought Ille Nastase was fabulous. I grew up in the golden age of Connors, Borg, and McEnroe (and Guillermo Vilas, and Vitas Gerulaitis, and Eddie Dibbs, and the ever present Ion Tiriac.) I could beat most 12 year old boys and almost all the 13 year old girls except for Heather Harrison who regularly kicked my ass. I thought Prince oversized racquets were for old ladies. ...

When I read David Halberstam’s Summer of ‘49 recently, I thought of my dad many times. We talked about it one day and he told me about his brilliant Summer of ‘47 . I told him to blog about it and he did. Life in America was different then. For a total of $3, he had an amazing summer based around the New York Yankees and the New York Giants. His day started at Geller’s Candy Store every morning at 8am and ended on his local baseball field in the Bronx each evening when it got dark. He tells the story well and it’s a great compliment to his story Jake the Pickle Man . ...

On the heals of their recent financing, Lijit is looking for an experienced software engineer (4+ years) and a database wizard (5+ years). In addition to a clothing optional work environment, Lijit offers a fully paid health plan and all the M&Ms you can eat. Interested people should send a resume to infolijitcom. This job opportunity brought to you by the Feld job board (free listings for companies I have an investment in.) ...

On the heals of G.E. Unveil[ing] Credit Card Aimed at Relieving Carbon Footprints I’m looking for someone that is willing to sell me some fat credits. I’m running the San Francisco Marathon on Sunday on a whim to hang out with my running buddy Katherine McIntyre as well as to give her someone’s ass to thoroughly kick. I wasn’t planning on running marathon #9 until October when I have one planning in Bar Harbor, Maine, but I’ve had a good stretch of long runs the past two months and feel like it’ll be relatively easy to crank out a marathon at sea level (where “relatively easy” means “only a moderate amount of ridiculous pain – emotional and physical – during the last six miles.”) ...