The Apple Factory

This American(?) Life visits the Apple Factory in China: Read the transcript or listen to the audio of the show which has more emotional nuance.

Read Why Apple Makes iPhones In China and Why America’s Factories are Screwed for more discussion.

Apple Reports Earnings: [WSJ] Apple registered earnings of $13.1 billion, or $13.87 a share, up from $6 billion, or $6.43 a share. Revenue surged 73% to $46.33 billion. About 58% of revenue came from international sales.  [BetweenTheNumbers] reports that at the recent valuation of Apple shares ($455) the market capitalization of Apple was briefly higher than the GDP of Greece. (This is not really a fair apples-to-apples comparison, pun intended).

Lest you get too depressed by all this news, over at Google, an entirely different funny geek theme emerges, that of the Badass Engineer. However, much of this humor is directed at an audience of software engineers, so I give a fair warning to non-geeks.

Visualize the All the World's Gold

05-Jan-2012: This fact-filled graphic was just posted on ZeroHedge All The World's Gold
That is 165,000 metric tons = $8,487,797,102,400.00 at $1,600 per troy ounce.

25-Jan-2012: Of course you could laugh at all the news from the SLV fund and the January 25 Fed announcement RNN examines the Gold and Silver price action after the Fed's FOMCAnnouncement

Inspirations for 2012

Recharge your batteries with Sarah Peck's amazing Do Something SlideShare and then continue to her blog for more interesting readings.

If you are statistically inclinded, see Incredible Things that Happen Every 60 Seconds on the Internet

I don't think either of these things have much to do with the other.  In fact, the anti-couch-potato musings of Sarah Peck are probably the polar opposite and antidote to the "drown me in an ocean of meaningless facts, Facebook updates, Tweets, and other trivia" that the Internet dishes out every second of every day.