Making waves

Spectrum2, originally uploaded by Varjohaltia.

Having borrowed a spectrum analyzer, I checked to see what's in the air in my home. Good grief. The top of the graph is -30 dBm. -70 dBm is still a perfectly useful wireless signal. Needless to say, with all this ruckus, no wonder said signal won't make it through!

Irony

So I'm reading some scholarly works from around the change of the millennium on the Asian Financial Crisis (since it essentially triggered the migration from regional production networks to ethnic business networks and other more diffuse and "invisible" business networks in Asia.) They go over Greenspan's and other economists' Congressional testimony in 1998 on how the Western system of capitalism is so transparent and structured that over-leveraging, liquidity crises, and moral hazards from expecting government to bail out companies could not happen here. It was, after all, due to the cronyism and government meddling in markets that caused the melt-down in Asia. Most of the Asia experts in these books are complaining that those views are way over-simplified.

Sort of creepy to read this stuff, with 20-20 hindsight.

Music

PSA: If you like Nightwish and haven't already, check out Within Temptation. Pandora and Genius have introduced me to a bunch of other bands (Edguy, Edenbridge, Krypteria, Lunatica etc. that have gorgeous songs in the vein of Nightwish (and several of them predate the Finns) but typically I like one or two of their songs and don't much care to listen for the rest. So far, Within Temptation seems to have their act together a lot more consistently -- to the point where I'm going to refrain from buying more tracks from Amazon and will spring for the entire CD.