Penta Cites # 3

For last few days media news and blogs have been overloaded with Lehman Brother stories and the Big Bang experiment. I can't resist myself for featuring them in my this week's penta-cites.

Economy/Wall Street Meltdown

Here was the world's richest country with 5 per cent of world's population, accounting for 25 per cent of world's output and here they were borrowing huge amounts from the rest of the world. The rest of the world was saving for Americans to splurge. This bubble has burst!

Economic analyst Paranjoy Guha Thakurta expressing his views in CNN-IBN:Face the Nation and even comparing the crisis with 1929 Great Depression

Economy/Lehman Brothers

Scientists in Switzerland tested their $3.8 billion supercollider this week and there was relief that the theoretical fear that smashing protons would create a black hole didn’t materialize. If the science guys want to find actual black holes, they should visit the atom smasher that is Wall Street and see how the collision of buyers and sellers has created a variety of black holes at Lehman.

Wall Street Journal: while doing valuation of Lehman Brothers

Technology/Google

You believe you can solve any problem and take on any challenge. That is a wonderful thing. But if you end up trying to do everything, you can end up forgetting who you are.

John Battelle speculating that 10 year old Google may soon face an identity crisis.

Technology/Google Earth

It seems that cattle and deer tend to graze while standing in a north-south direction. No one had ever noticed this until some researchers used Google Earth to study the question.

Steven D. Levitt in Freakonomics blog - The Last Thing in the World I Would Ever Think Google Earth Would Be Used For

India/Wildlife

The issue here was not the leopard but as usual the crowd management. If the crowd had not gathered around the leopard, it would have been any other day in the city.

Kalyan Varma is his blog after recent Leopard attack in Mysore.