Quote of the Day (it's all our fault)

Today's quote comes from Representative Maxine Waters [D-CA], who uttered the following comment about the financial crisis on the February 20th edition of Real Time with Bill Maher:

"But we're not going to change that until we put some people in jail. [Applause. Cheers.] We have got to take the schemers who have conspired by hiring these mathematicians and others to come up with these exotic products that rip people off and put them in homes that they could not afford ..."

Yeah, hiring mathematicians is a conspiracy. For thoughts on similar topics, see a blog entry by Arcane Gazebo.

Tip of the hat to the AMS Math in the Media webpage.

Now I better get back to working on my paper on community detection in currency exchange networks (with a focus on data from the current credit crisis)...

New Game: Finding Constellations in Economic Graphs

In these days of financial crises and universal brouhahas, I think we should adapt our old practice of finding patterns in stars to discovering similar constellations in economic graphs.

For example, here you can see something like The Big Dipper.

Maybe this can be a new meme?

(Or perhaps we should just use the iTunes Oracle to determine economic policy?)