Entrepreneur alert.  VInly records are selling again.  The LP, thought to be long gone, is making a comeback.

Some think that listeners enjoy the warm, organic sound of vinyl reocrdings.  Perhaps people like a physical possession in this digitalized world.

Last year, vinyl record sales amounted to $281 million in the US.  The market looks as though it will continue to grow this year.

Take a chance on vinyl?  Why not?  A good, small niche business.

An interesting deal between GlaxoSmithKline and Noartis involved a drug swap.  GSK got drugs related to vaccines and Novartis got cancer drugs. Both companies got drugs they were best at selling and promoting.

For a while, drug companies have been boltstering their roster of strengths by the acquistion of small companies that have successfully developed a drug in their field of specialty.  Merck is to buy Idenix, a biotehnology firm.  More than 70% of the productts of the best performing drug companies are not deeloped in house.

The drug business now models itself on the motion picture business.  You invest when the product appears ready to go.  Will drug companies now meet with startups and discuss their own needs and help the start up deliver them?  Marketing and distriution.  This is Hollywood’s sucessful model.

As the government issues new dietary guidelines in the US, should entrepreneurs in the food business look for new opportunities?

The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is also looking into a “sustainability” diet for the first time. The idea of a sustainable diet involves eating less meat and dairy products and shifting toward a plant-based diet in order to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and protect the environment.

The process of raising animals, transporting them, killing them, processing the meat, etc. requires high energy usage, thus increasing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. A study published in the journal Nature found that diets higher in refined sugars, refined fats, oils and meats increase such gases in the atmosphere, and also increase the incidence of diseases such as type II diabetes, heart disease and other chronic illnesses.  There would be no net increase in food production emissions if plant-based diets became the norm.   Former Preisdent Clinton and Vie Preisdent Al Gore are both on plant-based diets.

The House Appropriations Committee instructed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell to make sure the committee does not “pursue an environmental agenda.”

“Some critics argue thatt, while obesity is a significant concern with regard to people’s private health, such coercive, ideological modification of private behavior unrelated to public health is outside the Constitutional power of the federal government.

Elliott Morss writes:  The evidence from blind tastings of wines people like and their ability to tell differences between wines is growing rapidly.

Goldstein et al, based on data from 6,000 blind tastings, found: “Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. …we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less….”

More recently, Ashton has taken another look at Goldstein findings and provides data that reinforces them.   Lecocq and Visser analyzed data from three data sets totaling 1,387 observations on French Bordeaux’s and Burgundies. They report similar findings:  “When non-experts blind-taste cheap and expensive wines they typically tend to prefer the cheaper ones.”

The evidence suggests most people cannot tell one wine from another when only using sensory organs. So what really adds to wine’s value? Like doctors’ recommendations, there appear to be significant wine “placebo effects” from brand, label, price, country of origin, high ratings, and the recommendations of wine store staff.

If most wine is consumed with food and food changes the taste profile of wines, why are most tastings done “in isolation”? Sipping wines loaded with tannin (like Barolos) is not fun.  Such wines taste much better with food.

In tastings of the Lenox Wine Club, we tried to get tasters to consume wine with food before scoring the wines.  It did not work.  The tasters viewed the tastings as “work” and wanted to complete them before food and socializing at dinner.

1. When eyes, tongue, and nose are used to taste wines, price makes no difference: people like inexpensive wines just as much as expensive wines.
2. Limited evidence suggests further that when tasters are blindfolded (using only tongue and nose), 25% of tasters cannot tell the difference between red and white wines.
3. Like women’s perfume, pocket books and sun glasses, wines are a “fashion good.”[7] That is, external signals, such as price (higher better), brand name, shape and color of bottle, ratings, wine salesmen, and country of origin all add value. Rough calculations suggest that of the roughly $250 billion of wine sales annually, $100 billion is attributable external “fashion” signals. People are starting to realize they can find good wines for $10, but as long as people are ignorant, vain, and insecure, there will be a “fashion premium” for wine.

Ashley Dove-ay writes:  The aircraft industry is expecting a seven-fold increase in air traffic by 2050, and a four-fold increase in greenhouse gas emissions unless fundamental changes are made. But just how “fundamental” will those changes need to be and what will be their effect on the aircraft we use?

The crucial next step towards ensuring the aircraft industry becomes greener is the full electrification of commercial aircraft. That’s zero CO2 and NOx emissions, with energy sourced from power stations that are themselves sustainably fuelled. The main technological barrier that must be overcome is the energy density of batteries, a measure of how much power can be generated from a battery of a certain weight.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that once batteries are capable of producing 400 Watt-hours per kilogram, with a ratio of power cell to overall mass of between 0.7-0.8, an electrical transcontinental aircraft becomes “compelling”.

Another aspect is an exponential fall in the cost of solar panels, which have already become the cheapest form of power in most US states. The expected 70% fall in cost of lithium-ion batteries by 2025, and the rapid rise seen in the cost of kerosene-based jet fuel means that there will be a large and growing disparity in the costs of running aircraft that will greatly favour electrification.

Once electric aircraft are established, the next step will be to integrate a gimballed propulsion system, one that can provide thrust in any direction. This will remove the need for the elevators, rudders, and tailplane control surfaces that current designs require, but which add significant mass and drag.

Leonid Bershidsky writes:  In a record month for New York art auctions, one standout was an all-white work that sold for $15 million. Even if one lacks Tom Wolfe’s courage to doubt the value of contemporary art, the multi-million-dollar price tag for some white paint on canvas cannot but raise existential questions.

White paintings are something of a philosophical tradition. Kazimir Malevich started it in 1918 with “Suprematist Composition: White on White”:

Here’s what he had to say about it in the catalog for the Moscow exhibition where the cool white square on a warmer white background was first shown:

I have overcome the lining of the colored sky, torn it down and into the bag thus formed, put colour, tying it up with a knot. Swim in the white free abyss, infinity is before you.

American artist Robert Rauschenberg created five “White Paintings” in 1951. He went further than Malevich in his rejection of substance, simply rolling white house paint onto smooth surfaces.

If one were sensitive enough that you could read it, that you would know how many people were in the room, what time it was, and what the weather was like outside.

Weisberg’s work was too strange for the Soviet Union’s tame official art scene, and his first big exhibition took place three years after he died, in 1988. One white-on-white painting, with just a hint of shyly glimmering shapes, sold for $139,280 at Sotheby’s in London in 2006. A stitched-together white canvas by Australian-born Lawrence Carroll was valued at between $23,200 and $32,200 at a Sotheby’s auction in Milan. It failed to sell.

So what is so special about the 1961 work by American conceptualist Robert Ryman that fetched $15 million in New York? Or the nearly identical one below, also by Ryman, which sold for $5.2 million?

White has a tendency to make things visible. With white, you can see more of a nuance; you can see more. I’ve said before that, if you spill coffee on a white shirt, you can see the coffee very clearly. If you spill it on a dark shirt, you don’t see it as well.

The most probable reason for the price lies outside the realm of art, even defined broadly as a symbiosis of painting and explanation. Alexander Rotter, co-head of the contemporary art department at auction house Sotheby’s, simply decided that Ryman needed a push. “I thought there was really something to be done with the market, that’s why it’s been priced so high.”

If one wanted to be poetic about this piece of marketing wisdom, one could say Rotter is talking of the same sky whose lining Malevich claimed to have overcome.  In the end, the value of art is in the emotions it conveys, its power of holding one’s eye and occupying one’s thoughts. A white canvas may have had the requisite powers in 1918 or even in 1951, because it made a radical statement. In 2014, it’s meaningless. The business decision behind the insane price is the only true piece of art in the case of Ryman’s works.

Even in the highly unlikely event that certain art lovers are moved by the spectacle of unadulterated whiteness, there’s no need to pay millions of dollars for the pleasure. They can simply follow Rauschenberg’s advice: “Want one? Paint one.”

Yossi Beinart, CEO of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, wants to have more Isrraeli tech IPOs come to the eexchange.  At a recent meeting of Israeli biotech, IT and medical device developers he wore a suit to distinguish himself. He told the crowrd if they ever wanted an IPO to remember the guy in the suit.

Trading volumbe on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has declined 40 per cent in the past four years and IPOs went from 17 in 2010 to 4 this year.

While Israel has more startups per capita than any other country except the US, Entrepreneurs can make more money on a US IPO, but there are many small Israei companies that are too small and get gobbled up by Google  and Intel instead of going public.  Beinart wants to change this.  In the next few months he expects the Knesset to pass legislation that will make it easier for companies to list on the Israeli Exchange.