October Madness
If you live in New England, you always have leaf peeping to look forward to as we round the seasons and enter October. However, as the leaves intensify with color, the office intensifies with workload. Call it the end of year rush, but my projects always seem to be squeezing in a string of deadlines before the Christmas holiday. Perhaps this year though, it’s more of my own doing. Taking on a new project at work with more responsibility, coupled with teaching a course that I am developing from scratch, has only been manageable at the expense of my posting frequency here at AOU.
So, as I find myself rescheduling doctor’s appointments and keeping up with the baseball playoff games via the refresh button, I just want to take this opportunity to let you all know this is an important outlet for me and I shall return. For now, I need to bear down these next 5 weeks and focus on my other responsibilities. Please forgive this short pause.
In the meantime, I hope you continue to enjoy this blog’s content. See you soon.
Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute
When great minds meet, you either see a comedy show of flying egos or genuine poetry. The latter should be used to describe such an occasion when Jonas Salk met Louis Kahn. At the time Salk asked Kahn to design a research laboratory “worthy of a visit by Picasso.”
What stands now is a place where art and science meet in an atmosphere of reflection, collaboration, and discovery. The Salk Institute serves as one of the greatest achievements in architecture, science, and the often fragile client/architect relationship.
Paris Changes the Future of Urban Form
Call me old-fashioned, but I was very disappointed to find out that Paris had lifted the ban on buildings over 37m. I discovered this change through the announcement of Herzog & de Meuron’s new 200m (650 ft) tower for Paris, as the first since the ban.
[Image: Paris roof-scape. Courtesy of PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE.]
Financial Crisis Timeline
I was tipped off by John to a Fast Money video on CNBC, which explains the following three pieces of legislation that set the stage for our current financial crisis.
[Image: Graph of DOW Index highlighting three years with influential economic legislation. Courtesy of Google.]
- 1999 - Congress passes law allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept weaker credit
- 2001 - 9/11 caused Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, to drop interest rates very low
- 2004 - SEC grants exemption to 5 firms allowing them to borrow against their reserves at a 40:1 ratio
It is important to consider these events before you hop on the hate-train, because two of them were passed with the best of intentions for our society and our economy.
How Big is 700 Billion?
The treasury’s financial bailout has been labeled Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Since they chose a name whose acronym sounds more like a government scandal or cover-up, I’m not sure they’ll fair much better with the details. To this end, I’m going to ignore all the information/misinformation, and focus on putting this number in perspective.
[Image: Money falling from sky. Courtesy of Seeing Red AZ.]
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