Nathan Lustig

My Top 5 Ted Talks

Category : Personal Thoughts
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TED, or Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a group started in 1984 to bring together the smartest and most interesting people from the year to talk about what they’ve been doing in an 18 minute speech.  In 2003, TED put all of the talks online, free for anyone to watch.

It’s one of my favorite sites and I try to watch a few per week.  Here are my top 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVvn8dpSAt0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaSF1gPBKrA

Why Watch Blowouts?

Category : Sports
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If you are like me and DVR sports from time to time, you know how tempting it can be to fast forward to the good parts.

Evan Schumacher’s ShouldIWatch.com is a website that will help people decide if they want to watch their DVR’ed games, without knowing the final score or who won.  It only lets you see if one team got blown out, the other team got blown out or if the game overall was a blowout.
I would love to see a site like this for English Premier League and other soccer games that includes other readily accessible data like total goals, shots, yellow cards, red cards and fouls.  This would tell me if a game was worth watching.  I could create an “excitement formula” to give a score to tell me whether a game was worth watching.
I am sure this would be easy to do and people could change the weight of the data to fit their preferences for exciting matches.  This way, I could decide if I wanted to spend 90 valuable minutes of my free time watching a boring 0-0 draw without knowing the outcome beforehand.

Apple, iPhone and WalMart

Category : Business & Advertising
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The Freakonomics blog wonders about Apple’s decision to sell its iPhone at WalMart for only $99.

Will the iPhone loose its “cool” factor by being sold at WalMart?  Will other iPhone users be mad that they paid $300+ earlier and now can get them at WalMart for $99?
It’s a big gamble, but I think it will pay off.  Apple is clearly trying to make the iPhone as ubiqitious as the iPod.  It will be interesting to see if it works out.

The New York Yankees Just Bought A New MLB Franchise

Category : Sports
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According to this story from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the NY Yankees just spent a little over $240 million dollars in guaranteed money to sign pitchers C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett. 

When Mark Attanasio purchased the Brewers, he paid $223 million, or $17 million less than the Yankees are going to pay their #1 and #2 starters.

So much for the economic downturn affecting baseball…