Wow. I’m kind of amazed that the NYSE has the balls to build a huge new datacenter (WSJ was nice enough to crack the story open). If you’re unfamiliar with how the stock exchange really works, you’d be surprised just how little human interaction occurs in what gets traded and what does not. How little human interaction, you ask? Well, 70% of all trading is done strictly by computers with complicated programs and algorithms that sift all the available public data about stocks, and then makes trades based on that information. Think about that for a second. 70% of our entire economy is controlled by a bank of computers. Now, the NYSE is building a brand new datacenter, they’re giving access to firms so the firms can locate their own servers within the datacenter. What does that mean? All of these same computers will be able to trade at a much higher frequency– orders of magnitude higher– and much more quickly; think in milliseconds. If this doesn’t concern you, then you’re probably not aware of the inherent fragility in computers, programs, and the good ol’ computer adage “garbage in, garbage out”. I could very easily see the entire exchange crashing

Continue readingAnd it seems no matter how hard I try, I’m always wrong

A paper, published at Science Express, looks at the non-obvious connections that exist between string theory in a hyperboloid spacetime and high temperature cuprate superconductors. The work, carried out by a trio of physicists from Leiden University in the Netherlands, looks at the possibility of using the mathematics of string theory to describe quantum phase transitions in fermionic liquids. In particle physics, the 16 basic building blocks of the universe are either bosons, the force-carrying particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics, or fermions, the constituents of matter that are described by Fermi-Dirac statistics. While quantum physics can easily deal with systems of bosons, there is no general mathematical theory that describes fermions at non-zero density. Methods known to work well for bosonic systems break down when applied to fermions due to what is known as the “fermion sign problem.” Computationally, describing a fluid system of fermions (such as the electron “sea” present in metals) bogs down because the problem scales with exponential complexity, making all but the most trivial systems intractable.  In order to understand these systems, educated guesswork or simplifications are often applied. Unfortunately, the simplifications typically cannot describe the symmetry breaking that occurs near a quantum critical state (a region believed

Continue readingLook in his eyes and see the disease, but in his mind he’s free and clean

Interestingly enough, my previous blog post was encouraging a person who is contemplating suicide to hold on for a little while longer. In the news today, I read that Chief Financial Officer of Freddie Mac committed suicide by hanging. I was dismayed at a lot of the comments that I saw attached to some of the news articles with people saying things like, “Well, he deserved to die for the mess he put the country in.” and the like. Regardless of how you feel about our current financial crisis, and who or what entity is at fault, does a person really deserve to die? Over money? Really? Are we, as a country, really going to start saying something like that? And at what point does a person deserve to die over money? Is there a dollar amount? What would it be? Who decides? Listen: this was a person. He had a family. He had a wife. He may have had kids (I don’t know, offhand). He probably had brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and probably a mother and father that are still alive (he was only 41). There’s now an entire family that is devastated that they didn’t see the warning

Continue readingYou took down your dose, cut your own rope, wanted to show yourself everything

One dark weather morning in 1982, February 11th, amidst the clouds and gray pitted skies, a child was born to a quiet man and a woman of grace. It was very near three o’clock in the morning, and the ordeal had lasted all of three hours or so. The baby screamed and carried on like the world was ending, and in many ways, has continued to do so through out his life. Tonight, at the stroke of midnight, I sit in quiet reflection of that moment. I’ve seen the miracle of child birth, I’ve been there, and witnessed a life yearn for its first lung full of air. But I’ve never seen the face of my own child come in to this world, as I’ve never had one, and I can only imagine how it must have felt to meet a person you’ve been getting to know for nine months. I’m told that as I was being weighed, there was a hanging ornament just about the scale. I have no idea if it’s true, but I’m told I stopped crying and watched it swing above me in fascination. I’ve been alive for over a quarter of a century now, and

Continue readingLately he can feel it, turning off inside his heart

I am sad tonight. Very sad. As a culture, we tend to sensationalize death, and it’s only when the numbers rise that we stop to pay attention to the the aftermath. It’s only then that we stop to take a good look at the victims and wonder why things had to happen this way. It also usually helps when the victims are white, but that’s a topic of another discussion and I won’t go in to the obvious racial discrimination that occurs in the media. As is common for me, I was reading through some news on Google and came across this news story. For those that are too lazy to read the story, I’ll just go ahead and quote a relavent portion of it: A man apparently despondent about losing his job killed his wife and five children before turning the gun on himself, officials said Tuesday. The bodies of five children and two adults — the children’s mother and father — were found Tuesday in a home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Wilmington. Among the dead, authorities said, were an 8-year-old girl and two sets of twins — 5-year-old girls and 2-year-old boys. In Lupoe’s suicide note,

Continue readingYou’re made of blood in a world that’s plastic, take my hand, cause only I can show you the way…