Rotundus.com

Baby Boomers Sicker Than Parents’ Generation, Study Finds

"Baby boomers have more chronic illness and disability than their parents, as their sedentary habits and expanding girth offset the modern medicine that enables them to live longer, a study said." Sounds like lots of expensive healthcare...

NYT, 1924: Hitler's tamed by prison, "no longer to be feared"

An article from the December 20, 1924 New York Times. A slight misstatement.

The paternity myth: the rarity of cuckoldry

"An urban myth, often asserted with a wink & a nod in some circles, is that a very high proportion of children in Western countries are not raised by their biological father, and in fact are not aware that their putative biological father is not their real biological father. The numbers I see and hear vary, but 10% is a low bound." What are the problems with such figures? They rely on a dataset "strongly sample biased toward those who have a reason to have suspicions." Estimated rate? "Zuck asserts that they’re more in the 1-5% range, with 3.7% being a high-bound figure for one study."

Suicide bomber blown up prematurely by spam text

The bomber in question still killed 35 people but it seems likely that the total would have been higher otherwise.

Sea urchin nickel 'trick' could be key to capturing carbon

Looks like you may be able to use nickel as a catalyst to convert CO2 to calcium carbonate (AKA chalk).

Lawns Into Gardens

"converting 10 percent of our nation’s lawns to vegetable gardens 'could meet about a third of our fresh vegetable needs at current consumption rates.' ... Ten percent is optimistic; even 1 percent would be a terrific start, because there is a lot of lawn in this country. In fact it’s our biggest crop, three times as big as corn" The nation here, of course, is the US but the principle still applies.

Leftists demand 100 percent tax on the rich

I'm not all particularly opposed to somewhat higher taxes on the wealthy but then there's this... "Germany's socialist Left party want a 100 percent tax on anyone earning over €500,000 and will be including the policy in their general election campaign platform."

Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets

Per, a criminologist cited in the article: "The United States today is the only country I know of that spends more on prisons than police ... In England and Wales, the spending on police is twice as high as on corrections. In Australia it’s more than three times higher. In Japan it’s seven times higher. Only in the United States is it lower, and only in our recent history." (The US is top of the list of countries by incarceration rate - Canada is #132 with an incarceration rate roughly 16% of the US's).

in reading a Mother Jones piece on high-frequency trading problems I came across the following:

in the Jersey City offices of a midsize financial firm called Knight Capital, panic was setting in. A program that was supposed to have been deactivated had instead gone rogue, blasting out trade orders that were costing Knight nearly $10 million per minute. And no one knew how to shut it down. At this rate, the firm would be insolvent within an hour. Knight's horrified employees spent an agonizing 45 minutes digging through eight sets of trading and routing software before they found the runaway code and neutralized it.

At $10 million / minute you'd think the thing to do is kill electrical power to everything right off the bat and worry about the resulting cleanup later rather than combing the source code. Companies in the cloud computing space might loose track of stuff that's running. That's why Netflix created Janitor Monkey - software who's purpose is to go around and try to clean up abandoned but still running servers. You'd think that the financial services world would be somewhat better contained though.

And of course there's still the crazy speed with which financial markets are obsessed:

Stock exchanges can now execute trades in less than a half a millionth of a second

There's really a lot of thinking that needs to be done about the sort of market-oversight involved there. e.g. there appears to possibly have been some insider trading with some seeming to get the results of a US government report about 400ms prior to it's official release. It might seem ridiculous to prosecute for releasing info 400ms ahead of time but if in that short timeframe you can execute hundreds of thousands of trades can you really decline to chase this down as the SEC appears to have done?

As the article notes most of the problems so far seem to have been accidental but there seems room for a maliciously-created algorithm to reap quite a bit of havoc. How do you prevent problems? There's talk of various types of "kill switches" to shutdown trading, but humans may be adverse to pulling such triggers manually as the article notes. Another interesting idea are things such as quote lifetimes - crazy to think about how short a lifetime might have stopped some previous problems:

Even a minimum quote life of just 50 milliseconds "would have eliminated the flash crash," says Eric Hunsader, the CEO of Nanex, a company that makes software for high-speed traders.

The per-trade tax also seems to make a fair bit of sense.