Smivs writes “The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society have posted a navigable life-size pic of a blue whale! It will take a while to look at all of it, but it starts at the eye (which is a great idea). The picture is navigable — there is an insert of the whole picture and you can change the view by moving a cursor around — but if you just let it run, the whale will slowly ’swim’ past you. It’s a bit like being in a submarine with the whale going past a porthole. Definitely worth a look!”

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Smivs writes “The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society have posted a navigable life-size pic of a blue whale! It will take a while to look at all of it, but it starts at the eye (which is a great idea). The picture is navigable — there is an insert of the whole picture and you can change the view by moving a cursor around — but if you just let it run, the whale will slowly ’swim’ past you. It’s a bit like being in a submarine with the whale going past a porthole. Definitely worth a look!”

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nuke-alwin writes “Stephen Hawking has traveled to South Africa in search of Africa’s Einsteins. The project will create Africa’s first post-graduate center for math and physics. The British government has unfortunately decided not to back the project, which is hoping to fight poverty by identifying the kind of talent that can create wealth.” Neil Turok is deeply involved as well; he was recently named to head the Perimeter Institute in Canada, whose server we brought to its knees this morning.

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Filed under: Forecasts, Bad news, Housing, Recession

Median home prices fell in two-thirds of American cities in Q1 2008, the National Association of Realtors announced Tuesday.

The median price fell 7.7% to $196,300 in Q1 2008 down from $212,600 for the same period a year ago, the NAR said. It was the largest year-over-year decline since the NAR started keeping comprehensive records of median home prices in 1979.

Median prices declined 12.3% in the West, 7.9% in the Midwest, 7.5% in the South, and 3.32% in the Northeast.

Median prices fell in 100 of 149 U.S. metropolitan areas, rose in 48, and 1 market was unchanged. The largest declines occurred in California: Sacramento, down 29%; Riverside and San Bernardino, each down 28%, and San Diego, 23%. On the positive side was Binghamton, N.Y., which registered the largest increase, up 11.8%, followed by Peoria, Illinois, up 10.4%.

‘Housing market looks stalled’

Economist Peter Dawson did not mince words regarding the U.S. housing sector’s condition, circa spring 2008. “The median price declines are large and show a housing market with an enormous inventory build, a housing market that looks stalled,” Dawson stated. “With inventories this high, prices are prone to continue to decline for at least another 3-4 quarters, unless we see a sudden recovery by the U.S. economy, which isn’t likely. It remains a buyers market in most American cities, to say the least.”

Further, the above price decline occurred despite a drop in fixed mortgage rates. The NAR stated the national average rate for a 30-year, conventional, fixed-rate mortgage fell to 5.88% in Q1 2008 from 6.23% in Q4 2007; the rate was 6.22% in Q1 2007, the NAR stated. However, Dawson was quick to point out that although mortgage rates are lower, year-over-year, lenders’ mortgage stipulations are “much more rigorous, for most potential borrowers” compared to a year ago, which “has almost certainly reduced the total number of mortgages approved” — a factor in the current low home sales rate and large inventories.

The NAR said there were about 4.1 million U.S. homes for sale at the end of Q1 2008, about a 9.5- to 10-month supply at current sales rates. A typical/normal market has about a 3-4 month supply of homes for sale.

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esocid writes “WorldWide Telescope, developed by Microsoft’s research arm, knits together images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and others. Windows users (only) can browse through the galaxy on their own or take guided tours of different outer-space destinations developed by astronomers and academics. The application allows viewing from different wavelengths such as X-ray, visible light, and hydrogen-alpha radiation. Business Week has a review and some background on the project, which has been in development for years. Google Sky beat them to the punch but Business Week opines that WWT’s interface is better.”

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Filed under: Deals, Bad news, Industry, Toll Brothers (TOL), Options, Technical Analysis, Housing

Toll Brothers (NYSE: TOL) shares are falling today after the company announced Q2 preliminary earnings this morning down 30% from a year ago and that it anticipates more “challenging times” ahead. However, the stock might be getting some support from another part of the statement that indicated TOL is looking to use some of its available capital to make acquisitions at cheap prices. If you think this stock won’t be rising too far in the coming months, then it could be a good time to look at a bearish hedged play on TOL.

After hitting a one-year high of $31.15 nearly a year ago, the stock fell much of 2007 to hit a one-year low of $15.49 in January. This morning, TOL opened at $23.25. So far today the stock has hit a low of $22.66 and a high of $23.67. As of 12:45, TOL is trading at $23.00, down $0.37 (-1.6%). The chart for TOL looks bullish and steady, while S&P gives the stock a positive 4 STARS (out of 5) purchase rating.

For a bearish hedged play on this stock, I would think about a June bear-call credit spread above the $27.50 range. A bear-call credit spread is an options position that combines the purchase and sale of call options to hedge risk in case the stock doesn’t do what you think but still leverage nice returns. For this particular trade, we will make a 4.2% return in six weeks as long as TOL is below $27.50 at June expiration. Toll would have to rise by more than 20% before we would start to lose money. Learn more about this type of trade here.

TOL hasn’t been above $27.50 since June and has shown resistance around $25 recently. This trade could be risky if the company’s earnings (due out on 6/3) are a positive surprise, but even if that happens, this position could be protected by resistance TOL might find around $25, where it topped out twice over the past two months.

Brent Archer is an options analyst and writer at Investors Observer.

DISCLOSURE: Mr. Archer owns and/or controls diversified portfolios of long and short stock and option positions that might include holdings in companies he writes about. At publication time, Brent neither owns nor controls positions in TOL.

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roice writes “The crazy hypercubists who created the 4D and 5D Rubik’s cubes (here are previous Slashdot posts on the 4-D one and the 5-D one) have now developed a free working 4-dimensional software analogue of the Megaminx puzzle. Composed of 120 dodecahedral cells, the underlying structure is arguably the most beautiful of 4D geometrical shapes, with amazing symmetries and no analogue in dimensions higher than 4. Though some have already begun working on solutions for this ‘Hyperminx,’ it has yet to be solved by anyone. Also, when it comes to number of positions, it dwarfs the previous puzzles by many thousands of orders of magnitude!”

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modernphysics writes “The Outreach Department at Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics offers a wide array of on the web lecture playbacks analyzing hot topics in modern physics and beyond. Presentations include Neil Turok’s ‘What Banged?,’ John Ellis with ‘The Huge Hadron Collider,’ Nima Arkani-Hamed with ‘Fundamental Physics in 2010,’ Paul Steinhardt with ‘Impossible Crystals,’ Edward Witten with ‘The Quest for Supersymmetry,’ Seth Lloyd with ‘Programming the Universe,’ Anton Zeilinger with ‘From Einstein to Quantum Information,’ Raymond Laflamme with ‘Harnessing the Quantum World,’ and many other speaks. The presentations feature a split-screen presentation with the guest speaker in one frame and their full-frame graphics in the other.”

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StonyandCher writes in about a collaboration between NASA and a leading Australian exploration and mining scientist, Dr. Brent McInnes, to search for signs of ancient life on Mars. The plan is to develop and miniaturize the “Alphachron” — an exploration technology currently employed by the Australian minerals industry to determine the age of minerals. If the Alphachron can be miniaturized, it could fly with the next rover mission set for launch in 2010. “The highest priority is to understand when liquid water was present on Mars. ‘The same minerals that can be found in [Western Australia]… can also be found on Mars,’ McInnes stated. Accordingly, by using the Alphachron to date minerals on Mars and thus tell when liquid water may have been present, it can be inferred when life might have been sustainable near the surface of the planet.”

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Filed under: International markets, Earnings reports, Bad news, Citigroup Inc. (C), Economic data, Housing

Large French bank Cr

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