I met Mr. Giang in the park across from my hotel. He was a very amiable old guy and we spent a half hour chatting. He had to leave, but wondered if I’d meet him back here the next day so he could introduce me to his niece and we could all have a “nice conversation.” I warily agreed. It would turn out to be one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had.

That night I met up with with fellow travel bloggers, Dave and Colin, and we spent the night drinking cheap beer and Vietnamese whiskey. Dave and I were comparing events of the day and he mentioned how he’d been befriended by a local who took him home for dinner to meet his sister who was a nurse and was about to move to New Zealand.

After a friendly dinner and chit chat, he’d been told a story about their sick grandmother and had give them $10 US to help with medical costs. He suspected that it was a scam, but had got a good meal and a taxi ride out of the deal so he wasn’t too worried about the money. I told him about my appointment to meet Mr. Giang tomorrow at 3:00. Dave laughed and said “I wonder if his grandmother is sick, too?”

Mr. Giang met me at the park as agreed and brought his cousin (whose name I forget) along. She was in her late thirties and was very interested in learning more about the US. As we crossed the park, I saw Dave sitting on a bench reading. He laughed and waved — his bus left at 7:00 and he was killing time.

I thought we were just going to meet for coffee, but they flagged down a taxi, explaining that they wanted to treat me to a real meal and introduce me to their family. I didn’t really want to go, but hated to be rude, so I went along. Traffic was heavy and the taxi took a good fifteen minutes to reach their house. I was, of course, completely lost.

Read More Here: http://johnnyvagabond.com/featured/poker-scam-saigon/

The rally in the “cloud” and in the online space isn’t just good for Wall Street investment bankers, it’s also getting more and more businesses and individuals to give up their right to privacy. Is this the result of random chaos theory or is this centrally planned to take away our rights?

Long story short, new media has brought the voice of protest to the national stage. Freedom of speech has kept the internet free and open. Could this change in the future? The spying controversy shows why moving all of the U.S. economy online has consequences, like corporate espionage.

How can we trust these contractors with our data when our businesses may be in competition? These are all issues that small businesses must face when deciding to “go digital.”

“When training beats education, civilization dies” — C.S. Lewis

Against all probability, a device that purports to use cold fusion to generate vast amounts of power has been verified by a panel of independent scientists. The research paper, which hasn’t yet undergone peer review, seems to confirm both the existence of cold fusion, and its potency: The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline. Even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they tested is 10 times more powerful than gasoline — which is currently the best fuel readily available to mankind.

The device being tested, which is called the Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat for short), was created by Andrea Rossi. Rossi has been claiming for the past two years that he had finally cracked cold fusion, but much to the chagrin of the scientific community he hasn’t allowed anyone to independently analyze the device — until now. While it sounds like the scientists had a fairly free rein while testing the E-Cat, we should stress that they still don’t know exactly what’s going on inside the sealed steel cylinder reactor. Still, the seven scientists, all from good European universities, obviously felt confident enough with their findings to publish the research paper.

As for what’s happening inside the cold fusion reactor, Andrea Rossi and his colleague Sergio Focardi have previously said their device works by infusing hydrogen into nickel, transmuting the nickel into copper and releasing a large amount of heat. While Rossi hasn’t provided much in the way of details — he’s a very secretive man, it seems — we can infer some knowledge from NASA’s own research into cold fusion. Basically, hydrogen ions (single protons) are sucked into a nickel lattice (pictured right); the nickel’s electrons are forced into the hydrogen to produce neutrons; the nickel nuclei absorb these neutrons; the neutrons are stripped of their electrons to become protons; and thus the nickel goes up in atomic number from 28 to 29, becoming copper.

This process, like the “conventional” fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium, produces a lot of heat. (See: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up.) The main difference, though, is that the cold fusion process (also known as LENR, or low energy nuclear reaction) produces very slow moving neutrons which don’t create ionizing radiation or radioactive waste. Real fusion, on the other hand, produces fast neutrons that decimate everything in their path. In short, LENR is fairly safe — safe enough that NASA dreams of one day putting a cold fusion reactor in every home, car, and plane. Nickel and hydrogen, incidentally, are much cheaper and cleaner fuels than gasoline.

As far as we can tell, the main barrier to cold fusion — as with normal fusion — is producing more energy than you put in. In NASA’s tests, it takes a lot more energy to fuse the nickel and hydrogen than is produced by the reaction. Rossi, it would seem, has discovered a secret sauce that significantly reduces the amount of energy required to start the reaction. As for what the secret sauce is, no one knows — in the research paper, the independent scientists simply refer to it as “unknown additives.” All told, the E-Cat seems to have a power density of 4.4×105 W/kg, and an energy density of 5.1×107 Wh/kg.

If Rossi and Focardi’s cold fusion technology turns out to be real — if the E-Cat really has 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline — then the world will change, very, very quickly. Stay tuned; we’ll let you know when — or if — the E-Cat passes peer review.

Read More Here: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/156393-cold-fusion-reactor-independently-verified-has-10000-times-the-energy-density-of-gas

Futures are up around a half percent thanks to the $4.75-$5.75 Billion of stock market pumping (stock juice) hitting the tape Monday courtesy of QE infinity… Pomo for the rest of the week is much lighter. Expect them to sell the rip, though most traders will not be buying any dips from their Hampton getaways. All in all, QE works until it doesn’t — trade accordingly…

Because my pops did a great imitation of this, and because the NSA don’t need no stinking badges …

View the full RUT chart at Wikinvest

April 18, 2011

More comments this morning on valuation issues, something we spoke of last week. Again, just as in 1999 – when a central banker goes bonkers in flooding the system with liquidity, historic valuation tends to be thrown out the window as so many more dollars chased a relatively fixed amount of stock. That said, small caps (as represented by the Russell 2000) are now at record forward P/E ratios, and at their largest premium over large caps in a generation. For those newer to the market, small(er) caps have been the horse to ride since the bubble burst in 2000; each year a bevy of fund manager show up on CNBC saying “this is the year of the large cap” – and wrong yet again.

Via WSJ:

The market’s smallest stocks are commanding the largest premiums—and some of their biggest fans are becoming alarmed. The Russell 2000 Index (NYSE:IWM), which comprises about 2,000 stocks with small market capitalizations, is within about 2% of a record closing high. It is a milestone that it looks destined to reach well before larger peers such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard & Poor’s (NYSE:SPY) 500-stock index, which are off their record highs by 13% and 16%, respectively.

Small companies now command the widest premium over large-cap stocks in at least a generation, based on the ratio of price to earnings. Small caps, which typically have a market value of about $2 billion or less, often do better than large-cap stocks in the first stages of a recovery. With valuations so high, some are girding for a period of underperformance by the Russell 2000.

The Russell 2000 is trading at almost 18 times one-year forward forecast earnings, a record high, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

That P/E ratio is about 1.3 times the P/E of the market’s largest 200 companies as measured by Russell Indexes, according to Lori Calvasina, director of small-cap equity strategy at Credit Suisse (NYSE:CS), the highest since at least 1979, when her data begin.

The valuation gap has approached this level only twice before, in 1983 and 2007. After both instances, small-cap stocks vastly underperformed their larger brethren, Ms. Calvasina says.

Wait for it…..

“We’re on borrowed time,” she says. “We are transitioning into a new phase of leadership in which large will outperform small.“

The rally from the March 2009 bottom has seen the Russell 2000 (NYSE:IWM) rise 143%, topping the Dow’s 89% gain and the S&P’s 95% rise.

Small caps largely outpaced bigger companies in revenue growth in the past few quarters, Mr. DeSanctis says. They also slashed costs by 10.7% during the downturn of 2008 and 2009, according to Mr. Singh, which compares with 3.2% among S&P 500 companies.

Smaller companies have also benefited disproportionately from the Federal Reserve’s moves to pump liquidity into the financial system. The added cash has helped buoy all risky assets—and small caps are considered among the most risky in the stock market.

The Russell 2000 is more heavily weighted toward consumer discretionary stocks than the S&P 500 (NYSE:SPY) and less exposed to energy stocks. If oil continues to rise, that may mean the Russell 2000 lags behind.
No position

This is a guest post written by Trader Mark who runs the blog Fund My Mutual Fund.