Link Dump

I’m on vacation this week, so here we’ve got some links I slapped together on Sunday. Actually some good stuff here though.

  • Trading Places: How Winthorpe and Valentine Pulled It Off – Trading Places is one of my favorite movies of all time, but I never quite understood what the heck was going on at the end of the movie. Of course, it works well enough, but my nerdy mind is constantly trying to figure out the exact mechanisms that were driving the price of FCOJ up or down. I never quite understood how Winthorpe and Valentine were selling at the beginning of the session, but buying later on. It’s sorta the opposite of the buy low, sell high paradigm we’re all familiar with. As the linked post explains, it turns out that they’re selling short – selling contracts they don’t yet hold. This would be risky, as they have to buy contracts later on to fulfill their short sell obligations… but since they knew the crop report, they knew the price would be significantly lower, so they made out like bandits. It’s estimated that they made $250 million. Interesting stuff, and of course, there’s a bit of Hollywood exaggeration going on here, but it’s still nice to know what’s going on at the end of the movie.
  • If The Movie “Inception” Happened In Actual Dreams – One of the big complaints about Inception is that the dreams don’t really feel like real dreams. I never really cared about that – real dreams get kinda boring pretty quickly – but this comic is a pretty great parody of the concept.
  • Manos: The Hands of Fate Video Game – The worst movie of all time made into a 8-bit video game? Sure, why not. This is apparently real, and will be coming to the iOS and presumably other devices soon. It actually looks about a billion times better than the movie.
  • Amazon Yesterday Shipping – A hilarious parody of Amazon’s recent drive towards same day delivery (which will be a game changing development if Amazon can pull it off… retailers are quaking in their boots about this).

That’s all for now!