Traditional ice cream is a mixture of unmixable ingredients: water, egg, fat and air. While ice cream appears homogeneous, it’s really a finely dispersed mixture. We call a stabilized dispersion of immiscible ingredients, such as ice cream, an emulsion.

The character of the emulsion determines its quality. So called “super-premium” ice cream like Ben and Jerry’s is dense and creamy. That’s because the emulsion has a high ratio of fat molecules compared to ice crystals and air bubbles. This makes that ice cream taste better, but you pay for it in higher fat.

Ice cream makers have long used tricks to reduce the fat content of ice cream. However, messing with the mixture often has a corresponding effect on taste. Increased air or the addition of gums and stabilizers has been used to compensate for the lack of fat. This has its biggest impact on the texture. Low fat ice creams were either light and airy or lacked the creaminess of their super-premium counterparts.

Researchers however had hope. They discovered that decreasing the size of air bubbles in the ice cream greatly increased its perceived creaminess. If they could shrink the bubbles, they could lower the fat content and maintain the taste. They thought if they forced the emulsion through tiny pores (extruded it), they could shrink the size of the bubbles. It worked. However, there was an unintended consequence.

The pressure required to force ice cream through tiny pores created enough heat to melt the ice cream slightly. Anyone who has refrozen ice cream knows that melting causes water droplets to congregate and refreeze into larger ice shards. These shards kill the smooth creamy texture.

So all they had to do was keep the ice cream frozen while they forced it through the holes. “Why don’t we just cool it down?”, the researchers thought. And so they did, and low-temperature extrusion was born. By mixing the ice cream at 0-5 degrees F, rather than 24 degrees F, Slow Churn was born.

The results are astounding. Slow Churn combines super-premium taste with diet ice cream nutritional facts. It is quite possibly the greatest ice creamovation since the advent of the home freezer. There really is no trick to bite you in the ass (think slip-and-slide Olestra intestine.) You should seriously try it. And now, now you know how it’s made.

Too lazy to cite specifics, but here is where I got the information:

Abstract

Yahoo Answers

Looksmart

prevention.com

Names should be memorable not just because they are repeated over and over again.  Yahoo!, Target and craigslist come to mind. A name should says something about both the station and the listener.  The Prius is a memorable name which people can identify with.  Prius means hybrid; it says “I’m doing my part, how about you?”. How many people identify with KRLS?  What does listening to KDUK say about you?

Some people get it.  Jack FM is building a national brand name in radio that stands for no-DJ-nonsense music.  They even have a tag line “Playing what we want.”  Now that says something about the station and the listener.  Jack is one of the more popular radio franchises around the country.  They are making bundles by sticking to basic marketing principles.

Others kind of get it.  Stations like KROQ in Los Angeles matched their genre (Rock) to their call signal (ROQ.)  However, there is little room to differentiate with this approach.  On the west coast, all stations start with the letter K.  Would this fly in any other industry?  What if soft-drink companies did this?  You would have Coca Cola, Cuny Cola, Cobs Cola and so forth.  Something tells me that would get confusing fast. Yet, radio has been doing it for years.

This seems to me to be a case where a company is exposing the underlying technology of a product to the consumer unnecessarily.  Programmers fall into this trap a lot when they try to build a front end to their creation.  No one cares that the FCC identifies you as KISS, just like no one cares about how you architect your database.  It should be invisible to the consumer.  The same should true of radio stations.

I can’t wait to tell a friend I listen to a station called The Grind or Tantric.  Now that could catch my attention.  Wake up radio.

Jet Blue’s reputation and its stock have taken a major hit. Interestingly, this is the first black eye for the discount airliner, usually praised for its customer service. The question is, will people avoid flying JetBlue?

I, personally, doubt it. Up to this point, JetBlue has been one of the only airlines to garner any kind of customer loyalty. They routinely put the needs and wishes of the customer first with better snacks, more leg room and personal satellite television sets. Consumer reports surveys agree, routinely ranking JetBlue atop their list of best airlines. Management process to avoid this kind of catastrophe in the future should be reasonable task.

So would I recommend JetBlue as a long term holding? Absolutely not. Save Southwest, airline stocks have created little value for investors. They are interesting cyclical businesses though and I believe we are ready for an upturn. That sounds crazy right? Oil prices are high, and JetBlue is a long haul airline. They get hit especially hard when prices increase. So why is now a time to buy?

It is important to invest in cyclical industries when there is blood of the streets. When times are obviously bad, and few people are obviously paying attention, it is time to invest. When cyclical stocks fall out of favor, scoop them up. It’s time to scoop up JetBlue.

I met this man:

Whom I recognized from a blog post on Techcrunch and asked who asked me if my beat-up, came-free-with-the-plan, 2 year old Samsung mobile was this phone:

Maybe he had missed the two enlarged versions in front of the store.  After I assured him it wasn’t the iphone, he told me an interesting story.

Apparently someone had offered the man $300 to wait in line for him the night before the iphone launch.  He was quite willing to submit and unpacked his sleeping bag in front of the Apple store on University.  The overnight stay landed him the coveted 3rd stop in line.

The next day, mania ensue around the Apple store.  Rumor had it that they had 300 iphones inside and there were far more people waiting outside to buy one than that.  Bids of up to $1000 were herd for an early place in line.

The hero of our story had an interesting decision to make.  He could honor his previous arrangement and give his place to the man he originally promised it to and pocket $300.  Or he could sell out the stranger and offer up his spot to the highest bidder in hopes of a big score.

The man chose the former.  He valued a sure $300 over a more speculative ephemeral payment.  I would like to think that honoring ones promises also played a part.  The man was happy with his choice as he retold the story.  Apparently, the Apple store had closer to 4000 iphones.  If he had held out for more money, he may have left with nothing.  Maybe Gordon Gecko was wrong after all.

I do like new authors though, which creates a dilemma. In order to avoid feed accumulation and overload, I am constantly evaluating and paring down my feeds to the best of the best in each category. This has been a slow process and so I thought I would share my favorite writers in each of several categories.

Business:

Jeff Matthews Is Not Making This Up

Internet Outsider

Eight Fat Swine Blog

Herb Greenberg

Startups:

blog.pmarca.com

Found+READ

Ask the Wizard

TechCrunch

Guru/VC

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

Blog Maverick

A VC : Venture Capital and Technology

Seth’s Blog

These are the blogs I could not live without. I hope you find some you haven’t read before.

Technorati Profile

Carried interest is the percentage of the gains kept by managers of private equity funds to incent management to increase returns to shareholders. Usually this amounts to 20% of the gains after some benchmark level. Carried interest has been taxed at a favorable 15% rate, about as low as you can get in our tax code. This is because it’s treated as capital gains, a distinction I take issue with.

To understand why carried interest should not be taxed as capital gains, it’s important to understand why capital gains receive such favorable treatment. The government has long used to tax code to entice people toward positive acts. IRA’s and 401k’s encourage people to save for retirement. Tax deductions for interest payments help people purchase property. Low capital gains taxes encourage people to invest their money in the US for a long period of time (over one year.)

The government has a direct incentive to encourage capital investment because it clearly stimulates the economy. Decreases in taxes on capital gains and markets have been followed by a rally in equities, economic growth and increased tax revenue. Really, everybody wins.

Steve Brotman argues that the same incentives apply to VC capital gains. He argues that VC’s create the jobs that fuel economic growth, and I think he’s right. I, however, disagree with the notion that the lack of overly generous tax treatment will deter this benefit to our economy. However, capital gains is meant to encourage people to deploy capital, not manage it.

Here’s why that’s important:

I believe the limiting reagent in VC capital distribution is not the amount of VC’s around, it’s the amount of capital. The multi-trillion dollar mutual fund industry has none of the incentives of carried interest and yet, they are able to fill every fund manger position with qualified people (you don’t see job listings on Monster.com.)

Brotman makes the argument that many VC’s don’t actually make much money. This seems like a silly argument. First, they make more than my parents who pay taxes at the normal rate. Second, VC’s that don’t make a lot of money must not be receiving any carried interest (main source of profit for general partners) and so, they don’t get a say and aren’t stellar VC’s creating tons of economic value anyway.

The dot com boom was another example where the number of VC’s did not effect the level of investment. There were more venture capitalists around at the height of the boom than any point in history. Yet, venture investment fell and the economy sputtered. The of number of VC’s around does not effect the amount of investable dollars and thus, does not effect the economy.

The limiting factor then is the amount of capital looking to invest. So maybe we should incentivize that? And we do. Since invested dollars clearly fall under the guise of capital at risk, gains on invested dollars are taxed at 15%. With these incentives in place, the system will continue to work. Capital will find those willing to manage it regardless of how those who manage it are taxed. We should tax private equity mangers like the citizens they are.

Brad Feld and and the New York Times agree with me.

That all changed today after a little experiment with publicity and syndication. I have been a Yahoo Finance fan for as long as I have been an investor (almost 3 years now.) I scan the site daily and generally notice when they make a change. So when they started including blog posts from Seeking Alpha I gave the blog network a second look.

Seeking Alpha has come a long way since I first found the site a year or so ago. They have redesigned the homepage, have a lot more users and have landed a round of funding from Benchmark Capital. When I started a finance blog, I knew I wanted to see how effective Seeking Alpha could be at driving traffic to my site.

Seeking Alpha accepts contributions from anyone who’s article passes their cadre of editors. After reading through their contribution guidelines, none of my current posts met their “company specific” criterion. Acting impatiently and impulsively, I decided to submit an article I had posted on the Motley Fool message board over a year ago entitle “Is Google the Next AOL?.” A day passed, and I didn’t hear anything from Seeking Alpha and concluded that the article was too old and wouldn’t make it onto the site.

I woke up this morning and found that my assumption was wrong, my gmail informed me that my article had been accepted. (You can find it here, it was just an experiment so I didn’t post it on my blog) I went to the Seeking Alpha home page to find my article as the first post on the homepage, in large bold type. I felt a tinge of pride despite the fact I had no knowledge of how posts made it to that top spot. I just assumed it was because of how great my post must have been. I was late for work and I left feeling great. This blogging thing might be fun.

When I got home, I checked the Seeking Alpha site again to relive the rush of seeing my name in print on someone else’s site. I surprised to see that my article was the most commented post on the network. I was again filled with pride… until I read the comments. While I thought my article was a tad controvertial, many people found it to be ourtright blasphemy.

Many commenters ignored the majority of my arguement, focused on a few lines with disagreeable adjetives and resulted to personal attacks. Now, I expected people to disagree with me. I hadn’t counted on people I had never met, passing judgment on my qualifications as a writer, employee and person after a single post. I had obviously struck a nerve and I closed my browser dejected. Maybe blogging wasn’t for me after all.

After an hour or so, the pain slowly faded and I decided to check to see if anyone had at least visited my blog. Seeking Alpha articles allow you to enter a URL which makes your name at the top of the post into a link. Google analytics informed me that this one link had lead to my most successful blogging day ever. My lifetime traffic had increased 10 fold from 4 (two of which were me logging in from different computers) to a whopping 48 visits!

Well, at least the publicity had payed off. Feedburner even assured me that not everyone hated my post, I had 5 new subscribers to the feed. Plus, I have learned a lot. First, people are mean. I already new that, but they can be even meaner through the anonymous web. Second, distribution is key. I can leverage social websites to drive traffic to my site. I have officially descended into the blogosphere and lost my comment virginity. Overall, a pretty productive day.

I believe the turn of the century has brought the age of indexing. Conventional wisdom says we can’t be the market no matter how hard we try, and so we don’t.

We’ve stopped trying to beat the market and we have placed our money in indexes. Oh, sure, the S&P 500 index has been around for awhile, but that’s just the start.

We are dicing the market into pieces to juice our returns with all manner of index and ETF. The Q’s let us play the Nasdaq, QID’s let us play short. We can carve out a slice of BRIC or ride the energy wave.

As with every trend on Wall Street, there is an opportunity to buck it. Billions of dollars are being invested into indexes and ETF’s. It would be easy to join the crowd, concede and hope for market matching returns.

I, on the other hand, won’t stand for it. The more money that is sucked from individual stocks, the more opportunity there is for those who are willing to pick them. As money is sucked from every 401(k) into the Spider-filled black whole, the more inefficient the rest of the market becomes.

The real opportunities aren’t on the beaten path of an index. The Spiders, Q’s and Diamonds only account for 630 stocks. There are over 10,000 public companies to buy! This blog and my portfolio will consist of investing discussions of small, under-followed and inefficient markets. The wild, where the real profit is.

If you expected to read about the benefits of passive investing and the record of the efficient markets theory, I’m sorry. I think it’s a bunch of crap. The only way to make above average money in the markets is to do something other than what the average person is doing. It takes a little more work, but, God dam, it can be worth it.

(He had forgotten to remove the cap from his vial before running the HPLC auto-sampler. I found the needle attempting to insert itself into the plastic cap to no avail. Ok, it was funny to me, but that’s because I have spent the last four years working as a synthetic organic chemist.)

I was faced with a choice.

A. I could tell my gregarious professor who would proceed to mock my colleague’s mistake publicly.

B. I could fix the problem, but tell him to be more careful next time.

C. I could fix the problem, rerun his sample and say nothing.

The choice was made even more perplexing because of the relationship I share with this coworker. He is a meticulous and dedicated chemist, who’s been excepted to all of the top PhD programs in synthetic organic chemistry around the country. I am, on the other hand, am a more cavalier “Cowboy” chemist bound for investment banking and consequentially am not nearly as dedicated as I used to be. Our styles and temperaments are polar opposite, which causes tension.

The issue is further complicated because despite my cowboy approach to chemistry, I have had more success in lab than he. I am finishing writing up my project for publication, while he is still trying to make his synthesis work. He takes every opportunity he can to poke fun at my style. I have no doubt he would have chosen option A or B, if not both.

My thought process:

A. I could tell my gregarious professor who would proceed to mock my colleague’s mistake publicly.

My first instinct. I have been the butt of countless jokes in lab and have a reputation as a practical jokester. This seemed a perfect opportunity for fun. However, it was definitely counter productive. It would take time to devise a clever sign to hang upon the machine, and I would forgo precious instrumentation time for the joke. It also would clearly impact a relationship that was already rocky. I knew he was a tad jealous of my recent success and there was no need to rub it in his face.

B. I could fix the problem, but tell him to be more careful next time.

This would have allowed me to continue my work, but would have smacked of passive aggressiveness. There was no need to tell him what he did was wrong because he already knew. It was clearly a careless mistake. Any mention would just be rubbing it in.

C. I could fix the problem, rerun his sample and say nothing. \

This is what I did. I didn’t get any laughs, but you know, I felt good all day. I was able to run his sample and mine resulting in increased productivity. Usually I would err on the side of comedy, but today, I erred on the side of productivity. Maybe I’ll be able to cut it as a professional after all.