The Holiday Season's Hottest Gifts - Wall Street Journal

The Holiday Season's Hottest GiftsWall Street JournalTablet fever is fueling this season's toy sensation, the LeapPad learning device by Leapfrog Enterprises Inc., which has been selling online for up to twice its suggested retail price ....

Alternative Christmas Trees

10 Green Christmas Tree Alternatives to Make Your Holiday Shine ...

Tis the season to start decorating the house with holiday cheer. You can still get your family into a festive spirit, without chopping down any trees. Instead try a gorgeous alternative tree made from recycled cardboard, ...

Strictly Simple Style: Alternative Christmas Trees for Small Spaces

Alternative Christmas Trees for Small Spaces. FestiveTree.com. A house doesn't seem like a home until you've celebrated the holidays within its rooms and nothing says "holiday" quite like a Christmas tree. But if your living ...

So why hasn't Apple joined the club that includes JPMorgan Chase, Kraft (KFT), Caterpillar (CAT), and other household names? The answer lies in the peculiar way the Dow index is calculated. Most benchmarks, including the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, weight their components by market value, which is the share price times the number of shares outstanding. The Dow uses only one component of that equation: stock price. Thus IBM (IBM), at $164, holds the top weighting in the Dow, 10 percent, even though it is only third by market value. Meanwhile, because General Electric (GE), Alcoa (AA), and Bank of America trade in the teens, they represent a combined 3 percent of the Dow—less than a third of IBM's weight. Such distortions, says Jeffrey Yale Rubin, director of research for Birinyi Associates, are why "investors should realize that the Dow is just a subset of the entire market—not the entire market."

The chart below shows the size of US Federal Reserve holdings. All the treasury bonds, and mortgage bonds, and other miscellaneous they bought from primary dealer banks (GS, JPM, BNY, etc) and other financial institutions.

Chart from federalreserve.gov:

This is how we shall grow produce in the post-apocalyptic future
Finally -- a device that will guarantee we can still grow vegetables in the dark, after a nuclear holocaust has blocked out the sun or rampaging zombies have taken over our farmland. This Japanese lettuce-growing vending machine has been making the blog-rounds over the last few months, both because it doesn't require sunlight (it uses fluorescent bulbs) and because of the surprising yield it can churn out: 60 heads a day, or over 20,000 a year.

The machine, called the Chef's Farm, was developed by Dentsu and can produce 60 heads of lettuce per day (or 20,000 heads per year) grown under 40 watt fluorescent lighting housed in a chrome housing that can be stored conveniently in any restaurant.

The portable fluorescent garden goes is on sale for $90,000, with the target market ostensibly being restaurants that want locally manufactured, sun-free vegetables on site.
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