Here’s a nice one, via Pundette, via Stacy:
Of course, I prefer Phranc’s version, but YouTube doesn’t have it. So instead, we’ll give you her lovely “Toys R Us”:
Of course, while I was watching the Flower Drum Chick, I couldn’t help but notice 1) a paucity of reading material in her hotel room, which indicates that although being a girl may be enjoyable, it might be somewhat dull.
And then, 2) Ms. Flower Drum spends a lot of time looking in the mirror. Almost as much as our President. Furthermore, 3) I don’t see even one firearm in the room. That’s just wrong.
Finally, 4) it is not altogether clear how Ms. Drum makes a living. Apparently, she’s a trust-fund baby. Or something. Like maybe she invented something and has been living off that for a few years, because she doesn’t look like a parasite. She looks nice.
Pundette doesn’t dare embed this next clip, but she does link it, and thereby offer us a potential clue:
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It takes guts to embed that MM clip.
You’re right, Ms. Drum appears to be an empty vessel. It’s the male hierarchy that has kept her from developing her mind. I think she’s a show girl in the movie.
I prefer the traditional femininity, the kind that includes books and ‘accomplishments,’ of Elizabeth Bennett. But it’s hard to offend feminists with that, though I’m sure it can be done. Coincidentally, FDS (which I don’t think I’ve ever seen all the way through) ends with a double wedding, a la P&P.
No. No. No.
Ms Drum organized her life in separate rooms. We just never got to see her impressive arsenal or her work study where she conceived–and dismissed–collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), synthetic CDOs, and other credit-default swaps and derivatives.
Ms Drum’s inspiration came from a concept in actuarial science known as
the “broken heart”: People tend to die faster after the death of a
beloved spouse. Some of her colleagues from academia were working on a
way to predict this death correlation, something quite useful to
companies that sell life insurance and joint annuities. Suddenly she thought that the problem she was trying to solve was exactly
like the problem these guys were trying to solve. Default
is like the death of a company, after all, so she thought why not model this the same way we model human life. Her colleagues’ work gave him the idea of using copulas: mathematical functions the colleagues had begun applying to actuarial science. Copulas help predict the likelihood of various events occurring when
those events depend to some extent on one another. Among the best
copulas for bond pools turned out to be one named after Carl Friedrich
Gauss, a 19th-century German statistician. Her model, known now
as the Gaussian copula, was the result of this work. It runs the data through the copula function and spits out a default correlation for the pool — the likelihood of all of its companies defaulting on their debt at once. The correlation would be
high if all the credit curves looked the same, lower if they didn’t. By
knowing the pool’s default correlation, banks and traders can agree with
one another on how much more the riskiest slice of the bond pool ought
to yield than the most conservative slice.
After looking at her work for fifteen minutes, she promptly took all of it and burned it in the fireplace she had designed for her luxury apartment: She was just that smart! Sadly, subsequent generations weren’t.
The best diamonds have many facets. It’s a shame to focus on one.