It's amazing what a couple of days of bed rest and some intake of antibiotics can do for a sick man. By yesterday afternoon, my energy was really returning. I took it easy, but I was able to head to the stables and watch my daughter ride. It was a good day.

John Cook has published a nice article on The Code Project: Five Tips for Floating Point Programming. It's a good refresher article, with some deeper implications if you really want to get into numerical analysis. Here's the blog article and discussions. I have some circa 1970 references if you want to go further. Hopefully someone will take pity and add some modern references:

• First Principles Of Numerical Analysis, Burton Wendroff, 1969, Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 69-16406
• Numerical Analysis, A Second Course, James Ortega, 1972, ISBN 0-12-528560

It also pleases me no end to report that the Wall Street powers, Congress, the President and God knows who else have decided how to spend our tax dollars bailing out fat cats. Instead of viewing Wall Street as another industry with inefficiencies that need weeding out, it has attained a status even higher with our polticians than auto manufacturers and other union organizations. Instead of $25B on auto companies, we get to spend $700B on Wall Street bail outs. Even Buffett has joined the cacophony. You'd think the same guys forecasting the end of the earth with the Large Hadron Collider have morphed into business guys forecasting the end of the earth as we know it because they've discovered credit actually obeys the laws of gravity. We can't afford a $12B super collider, but we can afford $700B?

The flaw in this entire argument is that once things stabilize, through some as yet unnamed economic theory, consumers will start borrowing again, home prices will stabilize and we'll continue on our happy jaunt down inflation's yellow brick road. Except, maybe consumers are tapped out. The ones that will borrow maybe have borrowed too much, and the ones that have not borrowed, well maybe they won't borrow in the future either. So the only borrowers out there are the same subprime rats that triggered this whole comedy?

I know I sound like a broken record, but this is a bad, bad, bad idea. We do not have the money. It's borrowed, it's printed, it may as well be robbed at gun point from my grand children for all the good it is going to do them. I know I'm no brilliant Wall Street brainiac, but I do have an IQ above 150 with some minimal training in science, mathematics and business. Why in God's name are we doing this?