Have you heard the Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya? He's really very very very very good. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite on Dec 7, 2009 - 27 comments

Van Shipley was the first electric guitarist in India. The name Van Shipley is Methodist, he [was] from Lucknow [Uttar Pradesh, India]. He designed his own electric eight string steel guitar in the 1940's. The reason he did this was that he'd studied Indian classical music under Ustad Alaudin Khan, the leading classical musician in India, who was also a contemporary of Ravi Shankar. He also studied the violin with a German teacher... so he made an eight string guitar, instead of a five string. His guitar was a solid guitar, designed to his style at the time, it was futuristic. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Jun 14, 2009 - 10 comments

"As no rational agent would be willing to take part in the last round in a finite economy, it is difficult to design Ponzi schemes that are certain to explode. This paper argues that if agents correctly believe in the possibility of a partial bailout when a gigantic Ponzi scheme collapses, and they recognize that a bailout is tantamount to a redistribution of wealth from non-participants to participants, it may be rational for agents to participate, even if they know that it is the last round. We model a political economy where an unscrupulous profit-maximizing promoter can design gigantic Ponzi schemes to cynically exploit this "too big to fail" doctrine." [more inside]
posted by Rafaelloello on Sep 23, 2008 - 57 comments