The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One

This PBS interview with William K Black provides a great overview of the current banking crisis. How did we get here, where were the regulators, why is nobody getting prosecuted for fraud? Because, as Blake lays out quite convincingly, banking fraud is what created this crisis. A giant Ponzi Scheme, officially sanctioned and never investigated by the government. A tiny snippet from the 30-minute interview:

BILL MOYERS: And we have to know that, in order to know what?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: To know everything. To know who committed the frauds. Whose bonuses we should recover. How much the assets are worth. How much they should be sold for. Is the bank insolvent, such that we should resolve it in this way? It’s the predicate, right? You need to know the facts to make intelligent decisions. And they’re deliberately leaving in place the people that caused the problem, because they don’t want the facts. And this is not new. The Reagan Administration’s central priority, at all times, during the Savings and Loan crisis, was covering up the losses.

BILL MOYERS: So, you’re saying that people in power, political power, and financial power, act in concert when their own behinds are in the ringer, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: That’s right. And it’s particularly a crisis that brings this out, because then the class of the banker says, “You’ve got to keep the information away from the public or everything will collapse. If they understand how bad it is, they’ll run for the exits.”

Normal Map Information

This paper on real-time normal map compression, written by J.M.P. van Waveren and Ignacio Castaño, is a great read for everybody who wants to deepen their fundamental understanding of normal maps. The paper fully explains a whole bunch of issues with normal maps that I only touched on in my 2007 GDC talk, and contains a lot of details that I didn’t know about yet. Highly recommended reading for all technical artists and grpahics programmers.

Darth Vader Feels Blue

The extended version of this touching moment includes scenes that you didn’t see in theaters.