After Knight Capital, New Code for Trades – NYTimes.com

9 Aug

Software is buggy. Some of my buddies in the industry tell me that it IS possible to write reliable code, but very expensive. So expensive and time-consuming that it is almost never done. Think about that for a minute. We live in a too-big-too-fail world that’s held together by software that’s almost guaranteed to fail. Sometime.

AS a former software engineer, I laughed when I read what the Securities and Exchange Commission might be considering in response to the debacle of Knight Capital’s runaway computerized stock trades: forcing companies to fully test their computer systems before deploying coding changes.

That policy may sound sensible, but if you know anything about computers, it is funny on several accounts.

via After Knight Capital, New Code for Trades – NYTimes.com.

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Incentive to Slow Climate Change Drives Output of Harmful Gases – NYTimes.com

8 Aug

Gamin’ the system.

So since 2005 the 19 plants receiving the waste gas payments have profited handsomely from an unlikely business: churning out more harmful coolant gas so they can be paid to destroy its waste byproduct. The high output keeps the prices of the coolant gas irresistibly low, discouraging air-conditioning companies from switching to less-damaging alternative gases. That means, critics say, that United Nations subsidies intended to improve the environment are instead creating their own damage.

via Incentive to Slow Climate Change Drives Output of Harmful Gases – NYTimes.com.

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Liberty in Hiding

8 Aug

IMGP7411rd

But the flowers are pretty.

Romney’s Incredible Extremes | The Nation

8 Aug

Mitt Romney’s tax and spending plans are so irresponsible, so cruel, so extreme that they are literally incredible. Voters may find it hard to believe anyone would support such things, so they are likely to discount even factual descriptions as partisan distortion.

The pro-Obama New Priorities PAC stumbled across this phenomena early in 2012 in its focus group testing. When they informed a focus group that Romney supported the budget plan by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and thus championed ending Medicare as we know it while also championing tax cuts for the wealthy, focus group participants simply didn’t believe it. No politician could be so clueless.

via Romney’s Incredible Extremes | The Nation.

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Take a Nap Already (Science Said So!) – Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg – The Atlantic

7 Aug

ASAP Science explains how “power naps” boost productivity, memory, and creativity. The trick, they say, is timing: waking up at the right phase of the sleep cycle will leave you feeling rested, but not groggy.

via Take a Nap Already (Science Said So!) – Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg – The Atlantic.

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In the Financial World, a Less Scrupulous Class of Lawbreaker – NYTimes.com

7 Aug

The financial industry in 2012 New York City offers itself as almost a Medellín cartel of shady and unscrupulous dealings.

Northeast of HSBC’s headquarters sits that of Barclays, a venerable bank that of late admitted to fixing Libor, an obscure interest rate that underpins trillions of dollars in investments. A wee nudge here and there, and a clever bank insider could make tens of millions of dollars.

via In the Financial World, a Less Scrupulous Class of Lawbreaker – NYTimes.com.

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What Was Revealed When the Lights Went Out in India : The New Yorker

6 Aug

But power cuts are hardly uncommon in India, which is why offices and factories have diesel generators and the homes of the better-off come equipped with battery backup systems. (Basharat Peer has written about how strategies for shortages are woven into daily life.) Many people caught in the middle of the world’s biggest power outage experienced it as a brief flicker of the lights.

That is to say, not having become so addicted to a centralized power grid as the advanced Western nations, India is not so vulnerable to failures in the grid. It’s more resilient.

via What Was Revealed When the Lights Went Out in India : The New Yorker.

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No-Vacation Nation: Why Don’t Americans Know How to Take a Break? – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic

6 Aug

The science of productivity is pretty clear that anything from a coffee break to a two-week vacation can make us better workers by replenishing our energy and attention and allowing our brains to make new connections that are obscured in the daily grind. Even at companies that offer vacation time (the vast majority of them), Americans often don’t take advantage. We like working, or at least we’re so afraid of not working that we deny ourselves breaks that might, paradoxically, make us more productive in the long term. Are we crazy?

Yes, we’re crazy. And it’s killing us and making us kill the world. We have to learn to chill the eff out.

via No-Vacation Nation: Why Don’t Americans Know How to Take a Break? – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic.

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Let’s bomb Syria – Salon.com

6 Aug

If McCain, Graham and Lieberman want to bomb Syria, let them do it personally. Let them ride in the bombers and, when it comes time to deliver the payload, each one can straddle a bomb and ride it down.  Yippie!!!

Maybe you think in the wake of the failure of Kofi Annan’s mission, there’s a better case to be made for acting forcefully to remove Assad. Maybe your opinion has changed as the conditions have changed, like a responsible thinking person.

But with McCain, Graham and Lieberman, the actual facts on the ground, the details of this fight, don’t actually matter at all, because McCain, Graham and Lieberman were calling for bombs and arms five months ago — before Kofi Annan’s assignment even commenced — and they’re calling for bombs and arms now and they’ll keep calling for bombs and arms everywhere as long as there are still newspaper editorial sections and Sunday morning political chat shows.

via Let’s bomb Syria – Salon.com.

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Tim Morton: Chants and the World

6 Aug

From Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP 2010, p. 104:

What’s wrong with the “re-enchantment of the world”? There’s nothing wrong with enchantment. It’s the prefix “re-“ that the source of the problem. This prefix assumes that the world was once enchanted, that we have done something to disenchant it, and that we can, and should, get back to where we once belonged. We simply can’t unthink modernity. If there is any enchantment, it lies in the future. The ecological “enchants the world,” if enchantment means exploring the profound and wonderful openness and intimacy of the mesh. What can we make of the new constellation? What art, literature, music, science, and philosophy are suitable to it? Art can contain utopian energy. As Percey Shelley put it, art is a kind of shadow from the future that looms into our present world.

The fact is, enchantment is as more about us than it is about the world. It is WE who are or are not enchanted by the world. But what good does our enchantment do the world?

Not much.

What need does the world have of our enchantment?

Not much.

If there’s disenchantment, that too has more to do with us than the world. If we want to we can get over it. If we can’t, well, no sense it looking to the world. Its got its own problems. It could care less about our disenchantment.

The world, like Old Man River, just keeps rollin’ along. And we can learn to chant anytime we so wish.

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