Forbes has its list of rich folks out again.

It estimates Mr. Gates as being worth US$40.7 billion.

This is interesting in a bunch of ways. First off, rooting around in MSFT’s SEC filings, one sees that Bill had 651,749,668 shares, prior to the new 2-1 split. Multiply that by today’s share price, US$23.58, and adjust for the split, and one gets approx. $30.7 billion. So Forbes thinks Bill is worth $10 billion without his MSFT stock.

Another SEC filing says Bill is the holder of the single largest chunk of MSFT stock, at 11% of the total company. That’s interesting, because about 10 years ago I was able to back-calculate (given the share price and Bill’s stated worth in Forbes at the time) that Bill used to have about 33% of the stock.

The 22% difference went to the Foundation, mostly.

But you’ll notice 22% is bigger than 11%. So… Why isn’t the Foundation the biggest holder of MSFT?

The answer, I learned recently in Fortune (in a wholly unrelated article about how the Packards and the Hewletts have had very different strategies in their foundataions), is that the Foundation pretty much sold off the stock as it came in, immediately buying mostly bonds. This led to a pretty graph in the article, showing how the 10 biggest foundations have mostly tanked in the past few years, as they’ve been heavily invested in their donors’ stocks — except for the Gates Foundation, whose worth has continued to rise, to about $24 billion.

Sounds like a mostly good deal, except…

Well, except that 22% of MSFT would be worth about $60 billion today, if they’d hung on to the stock over the long haul.

Oops.

Also, it means that if Bill hadn’t gotten worried about his image serious about philanthropy, he’d currently be worth about $100 billion (90 in stock, 10 in other investments)… Even at MSFT’s present relatively low prices.

Here’s something that I haven’t seen much in US papers: The fragility of Tony Blair’s government.

The Financial Times reports today that yesterday, 122 Labour Members of Parliament voted in support of a resolution declaring that the case for war against Iraq is “unproven”.

According to Parliament’s own figures, that means Blair’s majority has shrunk from 165 to 43 — a loss of about 3/4.

Given that the most recent talk is that any vote on a 2nd Resolution from the UN explicitly authorizing force is not to be held until 1-2 weeks from now, the big question is, can Blair hold out that long?

More than that… Counting noses on the Security Council, how will it look if a majority of all members, and 4 out of 5 veto-capable Permanent Members, vote down said Resolution?

When one combines this with some of the reports I’ve seen that our various Embassies have been picking up feelers that sympathy throughout the world is turning against us… That many have come to see Bush as far more dangerous than either Iraq or North Korea… And, for that matter, the vast credibility gap Bush has abroad (such as reported in this article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times, which points out not only Turkey’s insistence on cash on the barrelhead because they have no faith in Bush to give them a dime post-war, but also Mexico’s — Mexico’s — almost certain vote against us because Vicente Fox feels betrayed by his former pal Jorge.)…

Well, I know he ran as “a uniter, not a divider,” but do we really want the rest of the world to start muttering “America delenda est”?

All of the following are real quotes… well, except for Minsky, which is a foggy quasi-quote from my memory. But still.

“I’ll tell you this much, whoever you are, personal advice to strangers is to going to get a drink in your face…”
– Dave Winer, software publisher, blogger, 4 May 2000

“Maggy is a very beautiful person and since you dig her you must be one too.”
– Dave Winer, 15 Jul 1997

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
– Larry Niven, SF writer, Loscon 1987, as I made a left turn without a signal in front of traffic on Colorado Blvd., the main drag in Pasadena. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d had my driver’s license only 48 hours at the time.

“You’ve seen the Libretto? What’s it like?”
– Marvin Minsky, professor at MIT, circa Summer 1997, at Larry Niven’s house

“…I cared for (his co-authored article) least…”
– Ted White, editor, writer, SF fan, Sept 2002

“…(his) letter is so stupid I don’t want to dignify it with a response… this jerk…”
- Manohla Dargis, film reviewer, OC Weekly, 2 Nov 2000

“Thanks for your note, just received, and for handsome words about poems new and old… I appreciate your cheer and your letter.”
– Richard Kenney, MacArthur winner, poet, professor at UW, 15 Oct 2002

“It was an absolute delight and a privilege to work with him. His attention to details, his professionalism, and his product knowledge was truly a cut above anyone I came in contact with in your field.”
– Raymond Hussein, a customer, in a kudos letter, 10 Jan 2003

“Hal, thank you for setting the standard by which we should measure all calls.”
– Ed Benack, Group Manager at Microsoft, 12 Jan 2003

More to come, as I {find them}/{cause them to happen}.

Today, from the Reuters feed on Yahoo, an orthodox metabolist tells us, “(T)he body will do its best to compensate and sabotage even… modest effort (to lose weight).

And he said, it should be within most people’s reach to lose 10 pounds (5 kg). But it will not be easy.”

Dr. Friedman’s biography may be read here.

Hm. 10 lbs, eh? Lessee. I started using the Atkins diet in July, 2002. At the time, I weighed 279 lbs.

This morning, I weighed 243 lbs — a loss of 36 lbs, or 13% of my body weight.

So, which do I believe? The 36 lbs, or Dr. Friedman?

Hm.

I first started looking into Atkins after reading an article in the New York Times. (NB: That’s a reprint, hosted at Atkins’ web site.) One of the strong points in that article was how the nutrition researchers all thought a calorie is a calorie is a calorie forever more, and the endocrine researchers — the ones who study how the body processes food — thought that Atkins’ approach of starving the body of carbohydrates to induce the body to burn fat should work.

Now, in the Science article written up by Reuters, the orthodox are continuing to complain that the US diet just has too many raw calories — rather than noticing that the bulk of the calories provided, both in sheer number and in cheap cost, are carbs, and that protein and fat have been slowly declining in the US diet for decades. Even while obesity and diabetes increase in the country.

Hm.

Well, I guess I know what I and my 36 lbs believe.