Not Sure What This Says About IPhone Users

According to the MacRumours site, the most popular app for the Iphone at the moment is the Ifart, which as you may have guessed makes fart noises and on the 22nd December, sold 13,274 copies.

Shopping Versus Worship on Christmas Day

On Christmas Day, I accompanied my extended family to our local church and was surprised to find that for the main service, it was only half full.

Despite being a fully paid up agnostic, I found this rather sad and wondered where everyone else was.

According to the BBC web site, it appears that they were waiting for the sales to start online.

To quote the article More shoppers online at Christmas

More than five million people are expected to use the Internet to carry on shopping on Christmas Day, the online retail group IMRG says.

IMRG estimates more than £100m will be spent online, compared with the £84m spent last year.

The shopping figure compares with the four and a half million people who attend a Christmas church service.

While I don't believe in God, I do like to think that Christmas day is the one day when people relax and spend time with their families, rather than crouched over a computer.

It seems to rather kill the spirit of Christmas or perhaps I'm just getting old....

Louis Theroux and a Lesson in Extremism

If anyone out there is foolish to think that the only faith that has extremists are Muslims should sit down and watch the the excellent Louis Theroux documentary called the Most Hated Family in America.

He spends time with the Westoboro Baptist Church who picket the funerals of dead soldiers killed in Iraq as a protest against an America that tolerates homosexuality

Whats scary (as with all extremists) is that they are absolutely convinced that they are right. 

While they are currently only picketing churchs, synagouges and even hardware stores that sell Swedish goods (you'll understand when you see it), you can see how they could easily progress down the road to direct action or violence if they felt that Americca was slipping further away from them. 

Watch it on BBC IPlayer (short time only) or on Google Video

What Planet is the Pope From

Good to see that Pope Benedict XVI has got his priorities clear.

According to the BBC news web site today - Gay groups angry at Pope remarks

Speaking on Monday, Pope Benedict said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was as important as protecting the environment.

So lets get this straight - two men or women in a same sex relationship are just as much danger to the world as climate change, melting ice caps and all the other major changes that are starting to happen.

And they say that modern organised religion is not relevant any more....

Bernard Madoff and the Emperor's New Clothes

Cast your mind back nearly ten years to the dot com boom and recall the times when the financial geniuses in Wall Street, the City and VC funds were busy investing in 2nd or 3rd rate schemes that clearly had no chance of actually making in money.  Half of them will admit that they knew there was no chance of making any money, but no-one wanted to appear to missing out in a golden opportunity, with even Warren Buffet being criticised for not investing.

Compare those times to the classic childrens story, the Emperor's New Clothes where no-one wants to tell the king he is being swindled. Everyone could see he had no new clothes, but didn't appear to want to be foolish.

Contrast this with the Bernard Madoff affair and you realise that in this case, the whole financial community didn't even see he had no clothes on, they genuinely believed that his were made of gold.

While people such as Nicola Horlick bleat that its not their fault and its the fault that of the regulators for not being tough enough, consider the following

1. Returns Were Far Too Consistent

Year on year, the firm returned consistent returns of 12% whatever what was happening on the market. As Henry Porter described in his article in this Sundays Observer

Daniel diBartolomeo, a physicist and number cruncher from Boston was asked to look at Madoff's figures and compare them with those of a firm that was pursuing exactly the same strategy. 

No matter how much regression analysis he applied to Madoff's numbers, he could not reconcile the two performances. The analysis was passed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which ignored, then forgot it, a measure of how lax things became under the Bush administration

At what point did alarm bells not start going off with fund managers that this seemed a little strange. I pay a 1% management fee on my unit trusts and pensions and I'd like to think that whoever is looking after my funds was doing some basic due diligence into things like this

2. You Only Got Paper Returns

RBS had over £400 millions invested, Nicola Horlicks fund had £33 million invested (10% of its fund) and apparently the fund didn't provide electronic statements, preferring paper.

This seems rather odd when virtually any high street bank lets you download electronic statements to analyse in Excel

Didn't the analysts at these funds think this was rather strange considering the amounts they had invested, or perhaps no-one wanted to say anything for fear of being called a fool

3. The Company Was Audited By A Three Man Team

Having worked with companies who have been bought out, I know stressful the due diligence process can be with people looking into every nook and cranny of a company.

Strangely this process appears to have been overlooked here with no-one thinking it strange that that a $5o billion fund or to lay it out in full, $50,000,000,000 fund was audited by a company whose three employees appeared to consist of , a secretary, another being a retired senior partner, and the third, a shadowy figure who dropped in a few evenings a week.

One hopes that this messy affair will give fund manager a good kickup their backsides and get them actively thinking about the pros and cons of the companies that they invest in rather than just following the crowd.

Classic Album Covers - Lego Style

While you'd be tempted to think that some people have got better things to do with their time, this Flickr slideshow should bring a smile to your face, although it does have a rather literal interpretation of the word classic