The Purple Item Is George Clooney* January 22, 2014January 22, 2014 FLYING OBJECTS Here’s 24 hours of air planes flying around the troposphere, compressed into a minute. Double click to view “full screen” so the yellow dots — airplanes — don’t all blend into a big blob. Here’s stuff flying around the ionosphere and above, with 20,000 days compressed into 10 minutes. The red items are satellites (operational or defunct); yellow: rocket bodies; green: mission-related objects (bolts, lens caps, etc.); blue: solid rocket motor slag; white: fragments from explosion events. MIND-BLOWING JOKE “Why did the chicken cross the Mobius strip? To get to the same side.” — Favorite joke of Fred Bernstein and Chuck Upchurch’s twins, Jake and Aaron, aged 11 SIGA The SIGA saga continues, as Jim responds to Glenn’s response to his first posts. (Non-SIGA owners: Go back to watching debris fly around the Earth!) And when I asked why he still owned some, he explained: “I don’t think it’s a bad bet here, just not a ‘very smart’ one as before. Aside from FDA or revenue action (neither of which processes could possibly reach fruition in a timely manner for a company explicitly trying to sell itself), there still remains prospect of an upward blip upon acquisition and/or when lawsuit closes. Plus, as you know, the stock tends to endlessly cycle (due to low volume). I imagine that’ll continue, so there may be a more favorable exit moment. At $4 I’d sell more. One of my primary confidence boosters in this investment has been the conviction that even if it missed big success, there’s sufficient intrinsic value that stock price couldn’t imaginably fall below my original buy-in cost (high $2s). But I can see, for first time, potential of a grind-out to zero (if acquisition fails to materialize). That’s not assured or even particularly likely, but I can see a clear pathway to that frightful scenario (and there’d be no ‘triggers’ along that path, just a gradual greying-out), so I’m getting the lion’s share of my money out of the way. I’m not feeling the sense of buy-price assurance that spurred me to invest more than ‘I could truly afford to lose.’ Make sense?” It does. SIGA may not work out. Own it only with money you can truly afford to lose. *I assume you saw “Gravity”?