The God Plays Dice blog has an amusing post on how the date of Easter is calculated. Wikipedia has all the messy details of course, but the blog makes a good introduction to the topic. “Easter is the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21… [T]he cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves each 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat each nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend[s] only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other each 375 centuries, so the [p]air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn’t matter because that’s a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000 [years].”

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Researchers from the University of Maryland have recently discovered three asteroids that appear to be roughly 4.55 billion years old, dating back to the formation of the Solar System. The scientists say that the asteroids have survived relatively unchanged since that time, and make good candidates for future space missions. “‘The fall of the Allende meteorite in 1969 initiated a revolution in the study of the early Solar System,’ stated Tim McCoy, curator of the national meteorite collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. ‘I find it astonishing that it took us nearly 40 years to collect spectra of these [CAI-rich] objects and that those spectra would now initiate another revolution, pointing us to the asteroids that record this earliest stage in the history of our Solar System.’”

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wanderindiana brings us an update on the White Home missing emails mess, which we’ve discussed before. It seems the hard drives of many White Home computers are gone beyond the possibility of recovery. Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy? “Older White Home computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White Home revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.”

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Filed under: Management, Bear Stearns Cos (BSC), Housing

Even though they might have messed up Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC) far worse than anyone could have imagined such a venerable institution could be messed up, you’ll happy to know that current CEO Alan Schwartz and chairman and former CEO James Cayne are staying on top of their real estate holdings.

Back in February — while his company was in the midst of imploding — James Cayne spent $27.4 million on two adjacent apartments at New York City’s Plaza.

Something is badly wrong with corporate governance/executive compensation when a guy can sit by — or in Cayne’s case, play bridge and smoke doobies — while one of the financial world’s most revered institutions collapses under his watch — and still have enough left to spend $27 million on two condos.

Meanwhile, Mr. Schwartz had pulled his $4.5 million property off the market and is renting it out.

Thankfully, these guys aren’t out of the woods yet. They’ll likely spend years dealing with a slew of class-action lawsuits stemming from the collapse of the company they destroyed. As Gary Weiss recently reported, Bear Stearns is no stranger to lawsuits.

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Chroniton writes with news of a Silicon Valley company, Luxim, that has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, nearly ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours. There’s no mention of mercury or other heavy metals, which pose a problem for compact fluorescents.

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