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Bargain-priced stocks (and markets) can still disappoint. In the periods when the S&P 500 was trading in the cheapest quintile of market P/Es, ten-year compound real returns were as high as 19.4 percent, but also as low as 0.3…
Big Money Thinks Small
Joel Tillinghast
In 1902, Wilhelm Normann discovered that you could bubble hydrogen into vegetable oil to saturate it, turning polyunsaturated fat into saturated fat. Food labels often called this partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Trans fat is less likely to go rancid. Trans fats are semisolid at room temperature, so they spread easily and have an improved mouth feel. Trans fats were ideal for deep-frying. You can use this stuff over and over without changing it. Best of all, this stuff was cheap. Using leftover soybeans from animal feed, manufacturers could process the heck out of it and still get vegetable oil. A little hydrogen, a little chemistry, and boom—trans fats, baby. So what if it killed millions of people from heart disease? That knowledge was years in the future.
The Obesity Code
Jason Fung and Timothy Noakes
the Blackbird, which was actually the world’s first operational stealth aircraft. It was 140,000 pounds and 108 feet long, about the size of a tactical bomber called the B-58 Hustler, but with the incredibly small radar cross section of a single-engine Piper Cub. In other words, that is what a radar operator would think he was tracking. Its peculiar cobra shape was only part of the stealthy characteristics of this amazing airplane that flew faster than Mach 3 and higher than 80,000 feet. No one knew that its wings, tail, and fuselage were loaded with special composite materials, mostly iron ferrites, that absorbed radar energy rather than returning it to the sender. Basically 65 percent of low radar cross section comes from shaping an airplane; 35 percent from radar-absorbent coatings. The SR-71 was about one hundred times stealthier than the Navy’s F-14 Tomcat fighter, built ten years later. But if I knew the CIA, they wouldn’t admit that the Blackbird even existed.
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos
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