The making of a good cup of espresso is part science and part art. See a master at work:

Espresso Intelligentsia

The latest trend on Wall Street is a practice called high-frequency trading. As this story out of MIT makes clear, it could be as big a risk as the mortgage market was.

The crash in 1987 has been blamed in part on the automated selling of stocks. As the market fell, more and more systems automatically sold. It turned what might have been a small correction into a collapse. In this case, we have computers making much more complex decisions automatically and very quickly. The interactions between the different systems are not well understood.

Currently, this kind of trading is accounting for 61% of all trading volume. Anything taking up that much volume deserves a close look. At the rate these systems are trading, orders are placed at 1,000 per second. If something were to go wrong, we could have a fullscale collapse due to something as simple as a coding error in under 10 minutes. It is not clear that the markets are able to handle that kind of volatility.

The traders argue that they are creating value by increasing liquidity. Unfortunately, that’s the exact same line used by the firms behind the complex derivatives that just finished tanking the economy.

Bibliodysyey has a great collection of high resolution posters of various nuclear power plants from around the world. Well worth a look if you’re into deep engineering nerdiness.

If you were to add up all the strange things I have seen on the internet, I believe it would not come anywhere close to this. Do not click this link if you ever want to go anywhere near plumbing again.

Kitchen Sink

The Kopp-Etchels effect is a fascinating phenomenon caused by helicopters landing in dusty conditions. The mechanism is not clearly understood but the visual evidence is striking.

The Wall Street Journal is running a wonderful interview with Cormac McCarthy about the upcoming film adaptation of his novel The Road. Best line in the interview:

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Check it out.

In an astonishing failure to understand social media or journalism in general, Kurt Greenbaum called the boss of a man who pusted a vulgar word in the comments of his site. Long story short, he got the man fired. This appears to be in violation of his employer’s terms of service. In a blog posting, Greenbaum seems positively delighted.

Unsurprisingly, the Internet Hate Machine™ was immediately alerted. A site creatively applying the same vulgarity to Kurt Greenbaum is already up. Look for an abject apology or resignation soon.

Update: It appears that Greenbaum is also a hypocritical douche nozzle. He posted this apalling video a couple of months ago. In addition to the inexplicable white guy badly rapping cliche, the video features several words which are far more offensive than the relatively mundane obscenity Greenbaum deemed offensive enough to get a guy fired over. Someone revoke this guy’s internet badge.

A pair of videos posted on the faculty blog of the University of Alberta vividly explain why it is pretty much never a good idea to talk to the cops even when you are innocent of whatever crime is being investigated. A good lesson even for the law-abiding among us.