Full Frontal Friday

No worries or sorry to disappoint, the title was just to grab cheapo page views, HA!

Banking Sector Breaking Down, All Alone it Seems
Readers know I am pretty anti-bank. As such the bottom falling out on the banking composite, ticker XLF, almost brings a tear of happiness to my eye. Could not happen to a better sector.

Banks have been showing perfect trading quarters where not even one day did they lose money trading. We should all be so smart and skillful. Even so, banks are only making their earnings numbers because they have all lowered loan loss reserves to puny levels in the face of increasing mortgage losses. Well, that paper not stored at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, and the FED.

The markets in general seem to keep rising, at least the indices as a whole are. Under the hood stocks are breaking down all over the place. While rotation into stocks of other sorts may be going on, where else can it go?

At this point commodities (inflation expectations, speculation) are rolling over hard and the banks have been moving down for 3 months solid. The FED has a pair of epic fails to show for all their efforts. Stocks continue to roll and the divergence from the banking sector is getting very large. Yahoo graph comparison (click for larger view):

This gap will have to close by either the markets going lower or the banks going higher. I think it is time to look for the lighted exit path but I am known to be an alarmist.

Friday Night Entertainment
Setting you up for a good weekend one Friday Night at a time.

I Just Have NO IDEA
Japan makes some weird stuff. Here is a new product description for a face lift face trainer:

From the makers of our sleeper hit, the Beauty Lift High Nose, comes the latest beauty gadget to draw attention not only for its very unusual design, but also its simple yet effective functionality. Just slip the Facial Lift At Once into your mouth once a day for three minutes and you will feel the electric buzzing work on your cheeks, chin, lips, mouth and even nose. The pulsing will come in four different levels of strength and in a complete 360-degree spread, pushing and working on your facial muscles little by little every time.
Not only will this give your face a boost "at once", exercise and training couldn't be easier than with this gadget. All you do is put on the mouth cover, pop it in your mouth and it does the hard work for you! If only running a marathon could be as easy!

You have to see this but you are warned, maybe NSFW!:


WOW.

Deep Sequencing
A little science, yes?

Way back in the day DNA sequencing was limited to using radioactive labelled phosphorus and then doing a sort of PCR reaction to make progressive DNA fragments of longer length. When run out on a gel and then captured on a film, you could read the bases of DNA. This sucked for various reasons; it was RADIOACTIVE, short run length, GC compression, etc. Along came Sanger Dye Terminator sequencing and that was much better. Technology improved and the automated ABI machines were great. I still use an older model at work for basic stuff.

The Human Genome was sequenced using a variety of methods, and usually done as moving forward in a line type of way. This took years. Craig Venter, then at Celera Genomics, used shotgun sequencing (breaking a genome into small fragments, then sequencing all the fragments many times over, and assembling the sequence by overlapping regions. While hardly novel, it was super fast at the time.

Today a new era has been coming online and I wanted to mention it. It is called Deep Sequencing and this takes the shotgun approach to the next level. The science behind this is not too hard to get (look over the Wiki entry) and this is a huge thing going forward.

For about $48,000 in reagent costs (excluding the machines that do it, those are big bucks) and a weeks time, a whole genome can now be covered. This has so many applications it is amazing. Cancer marker testing is at the front of the line aiming at personalized medicine. For a molecular biologist this is exciting stuff. Every big company is getting three of these, and even smaller firms want one.

There is much more and I cannot go over it all tonight but I did want you to think about it. The speed at which the technology is moving, the film "GATTACA" is not out of the question. What kind of issues might that present in terms of insurance, etc are hard to know. Food for thought. While not investment advice, some names if interested are (some are private I believe):
-Knome
-Applied Biosystems
-Pacific Biosciences
-Illumina

More science goodies? How about a system that transfers test liquid using sound!!! It is called the Echo system and using sound waves volumes as small as 2.5 nanoliters can be transferred into an assay plate. Amazing stuff.

Funnies
OK, enough heavy stuff.

Twitter Reveals Robots are Evil
Like I said, the robots are gearing up to mess with us:

see more funny videos, and check out our Yo Dawg lols!

Film Clips
Movie time!

Seems everyone knew the villain "Christine" so let's see her in action. "Ok. Show Me.":

I am fond of that film. From the comments on the YouTube clip and I agree 100%:

@Hubs88 It still looks better than any of the special effects I've seen in movies in the last 20 or so years.

Better than CGI crap. This movie always makes me think of this tune.

From the original "Karate Kid", Daniel finds out the path to learning may not be so direct:

Classic.

Rock Blogging
Here come the tunes.

Reader C-T used to be a Gin Blossoms roadie (I think?) so let's open with "Allison Road":

I like that one.

Reader Gawains (who owes us a real estate report! Kidding!) would like to hear Nazareth with "Hair of the Dog":

Whole album is great.

I know, I tend to repeat (I try to stick to the 1 year rule!) but I so wanted L.A. Guns and "Over the Edge":

Yes, it is from the "Point Break" film. Epic tune.

I got an email from Recession Sessions who wrote the "Gold Price Song". I like people that work at getting their stuff out there so take a look at this nice song:

Nice work!

One of Economic Disconnect's all time favorite tunes is "Karma Police" by Radiohead:

So nice.

Two songs left, what will be heard?

Now that my man David Batista has seen "Streets of Fire" let's celebrate with "Nowhere Fast":

That song gets me rocking! A Must see.

Last call! Grab a drink and a significant other.

Get amped up with Ozzy's "Bark at the Moon", an under rated song if there ever was one:

Great ending!

Have a good night.