A few miscellaneous videos to entertain you.
View from a rocket booster on Discovery
Real-time footage from a camera mounted on Discovery’s rocket booster. The booster is jettisoned after about 90 seconds (by which time the rocket is maybe 30km high), and it floats back down to the ocean.
Sir Patrick Stewart talks about Twitter
I don’t tweet. I’ve never Twittered. And, it’s not that I’m resisting it, but, I see no reason to have it in my life. To reduce life to — how many? — 140… just seems to me to be a little bit simplistic.
But he has a laptop and an iPhone (which he notes is “an extension of whom I am”). And he loves emails. What a legend.
Stop motion flipbook-style video
Another one of those videos where you say, “That’s really cool, but how long did that take to make?!” There were over 6500 frames.
Kulula Airlines has cool livery on one of its 737s (img) 
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Kulula, South Africa's budget airline, has annotated one of their 737s with lime green livery which annotates the plane's features. Annotations include: "loo (or mile-high club initiation chamber", "black box (which is actually orange)", "landing gear (comes standard with supa-fly mags)", "a.p.u (extra power when you need it most)". (The apu is the auxiliary power unit which provides electricity to the plane when the main engines are off.) Link goes to pictures of the plane.
(Quicklink) • • 8:50pm
Hasbro has redesigned the redesigned the Monopoly board. The board is now circular. It looks cool, but the deal breaker for me is that they’ve also gotten rid of cash. That’s right, Monopoly money is no more. Players get cards which they insert into an electronic bank account in the middle of the board (it looks like a calculator to me). Blah.
Where’s the fun in that? Gone is the tactic to cut backroom deals by waving fistfuls of notes in front of other people’s faces. Gone is the ability to chip in some cash so your ally can buy that fourth hotel. Gone is the psychological advantage of stacking your massive pile of cash up against your arch-rival’s dwindling reserves. And of course, gone is the ability to engage in daylight robbery of your opponents’ cash when their head is turned. Or even the bank’s.
In 2004, when I was writing about Google’s then-upcoming IPO, I made the point that the absolute price of a stock has an effect on the liquidity of a stock – mainly due to psychological factors. I brought up the example of Berkshire Hathaway, which at that time was trading at almost $90,000 for its A shares and about $3,000 for its B shares. At those prices, I noted that Berkshire was less liquid than some of its comparably sized peers (ie, Berkshire shares were changing hands relatively infrequently). A reader disputed this proposition, so it’s interesting to now revisit it, given what has happened at Berkshire over the last couple of weeks.
Aside from the fact that it’s Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire is an interesting company. Berkshire itself is a holding company, with many, many wholly- or majority-owned subsidiaries (a large insurance and reinsurance arm, utilities, apparel, retail, etc). It also holds significant stakes in numerous major corporations (Moody’s, Washington Post, Wells Fargo, Gillette, Coke, Goldman Sachs, GE, etc). Consequently, investing in Berkshire is akin to investing in a diversified mutual/managed fund – Buffett himself has 99% of his personal wealth in the form of Berkshire stock. Berkshire’s business lines produce a lot of cash (somewhere in the region of $8-10bn), and it’s Buffett’s job to figure out how to invest that money.
Berkshire’s common stock (“BRK”) is split up into two classes. Its Class A shares have been the highest priced shares on the NYSE for some time now, so Buffett decided to create Class B shares, to allow “the masses” to be able to invest in BRK. A B share has 1/30th the rights of an A share, with two other differences: B shares have proportionately less voting rights, and cannot be converted into A shares (whereas conversion in the opposite direction is true). Consequently, a B share is theoretically worth slightly less than 1/30th the price of an A share.
B shares, however, are now priced at about $75. The reason for the repricing is that they underwent a 50-for-1 stock split a couple weeks ago. Berkshire is notable for having never distributed a dividend, nor splitting its stock (both of which are factors which helped to drive those stocks’ prices to lofty heights). The reason for the recent split was only to support the mechanics of a proposed acquisition deal.
The immediate consequence of the split was to drive up the liquidity of the stock. Small-time investors could suddenly afford to buy a handful of BRK shares, and the trading volume of BRK.B spiked that week. The other consequence was that BRK could now be added to the S&P 500 index. Despite its market cap of about $200b, BRK was absent from the index due to its low liquidity. Because there are many funds out there which attempt to track the S&P, any change to the stocks comprising that index would necessitate at least some of those funds needing to add BRK to their portfolio. This in turn would drive up liquidity (and price) of the stock.
Granted, five days of trading history with the new Berkshire B shares doesn’t provide much of a window onto long-term return potential. Average daily trading volume in the Berkshire Hathaway B shares has soared though, from 41,000 shares traded to as high as 6.6 million shares traded — and that was just on Monday. In the past five days, approximately 50 million Berkshire Hathaway shares have been traded.
Consider this: the 50 million Berkshire Hathaway shares traded over the past five days represent what would have previously amounted to almost three-and-a-half years’ worth of trading volume for the Berkshire Hathaway B shares. (src)
Interestingly, many still regard that BRK is still undervalued post-split (Buffett thought they were undervalued pre-split).
Finally, another side effect of the split is that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will probably benefit nicely. Several years ago, Buffett pledged to donate about $30b to the Gates Foundation in the form of BRK stock, delivered over time. The Foundation currently holds about 78 million BRK.B shares, and because it is obligated to spend a certain amount of money by Buffett, the Foundation regularly sells its BRK shares on the market. The increased demand for BRK.B shares in the short-term should held the Foundation to unload stock at better prices. In the long-term, the increased liquidity of the stock should also enable the Foundation to more smoothly unload shares without jarring the market price as much.
12:26am 
