Word: graham
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...first vegetarian society was formed in 1847 in England. Three years later, Rev. Sylvester Graham, the inventor of Graham crackers, co-founded the American Vegetarian Society. Graham was a Presbyterian minister and his followers, called Grahamites, obeyed his instructions for a virtuous life: vegetarianism, temperance, abstinence, and frequent bathing. In November 1944, a British woodworker named Donald Watson announced that because vegetarians ate dairy and eggs, he was going to create a new term called "vegan," to describe people who did not. Tuberculosis had been found in 40% of Britain's dairy cows the year before, and Watson used this...
...frustrating, frightening settlement of an airplane but as a comic-book hero might, as a machine of one-is an essential aspect of human consciousness," he writes. That may not ring true with everyone, but he sells the sentiment on the strength of his enthusiasm. He describes Harold Graham's 112-foot practice flight with a 140-pound Rocket Belt in 1961 as a "pilot kicking gravity's ass like it had never been kicked before." Defying God's wishes, it turns out, isn't an easy task. The world's best jetpack pilot, Bill Suitor, likened flying the contraption...
...Benjamin Graham was well prepared for the Crash of 1929. The now legendary investor had hedged his bets: he would buy preferred stock in a company and sell short common stock in the same company. When stocks crashed in October 1929, common shares fell much faster than preferreds, and Graham made a lot of money off short sales...
...after the crash, most of those preferred shares seemed so cheap that Graham couldn't bear to part with them, he wrote in his memoirs. They kept falling, and his profit soon turned to a loss. His fund (equivalent to a modern hedge fund) ended the year down 20%. In 1930 it dropped 50.5%; in 1931 16%; in 1932 3%. "The stock market," as Graham resignedly put it in the first edition of his book with David Dodd, Security Analysis (1934), "is a voting machine rather than weighing machine...
...actually begun voting along with Graham by then - his fund gained 50% in 1933, and he did spectacularly well for himself in the next two decades. "In the short run, the market is a voting machine," he later took to saying, "but in the long run, it is a weighing machine." Over time, Graham's strategy of buying stocks that seemed inexpensive relative to a company's underlying assets and earnings really was (and presumably still is) a profitable strategy. But for months and even years on end, cheap stocks are perfectly capable of getting cheaper...