Vernor Vinge is well known as one of the originators of the concept of the technological singularity, which is well-known to inform his sci-fi writings.

One of the less well known concepts which informs his sci-fi writings is one possible fate of societies that do not or can not end in a "singularity", which is the eventual unavoidable collapse of the society in a cascading failure state brought on by excessive, uncontrollable complexity in the ever-more-sophisticated systems that drive the society. In this case, take "system" in the broad sense, including not just software, but business practices, government, and societal mores. A failure occurs somewhere, which brings down something else, which brings down two other something elses, and perhaps quite literally in the blink of an eye, you are faced with a growing complex of problems beyond the ability of any one human to understand or contain.

We've seen small-scale examples of this before; Part 1 of The Hacker Crackdown goes into some detail about the 1990 AT&T phone network collapse.

I've always been a bit dubious of this theory. It's not intrinsically bad, but the truth is all software and systems must have some fault tolerance in them, because in reality, faults happen all the time. As I write this, my office has just experienced 6 straight days of faulty internet connection, and yet, our world has failed to end. We've got problems, but every bit of software we use already knows it has to be able to deal with problems like that. Only a few things were confused by the exact nature of the network failure, and even those were non-fatal. Deliveries will be late, networks will be down, contracts will be violated, only the truly foolhardy fail to make plans for those eventualities... unless....

This article on the importance of bringing a topic focus to the news is very important. The thesis is that the article-by-article nature of modern news is incapable of covering issues on any but the most trivial of levels, since every (short) article needs to start from scratch.

If you've felt like the news media can't ever seem to get past the first couple of days of Econ 101 (or other equivalent topics), this is why. They are structurally incapable of it.

More bailout stuff, skip if that makes you unhappy.

How did we get here? The economy is fantastically complicated beyond human comprehension, so we are forced to use heuristics to comprehend it. No amount of education can overcome this fact, which is why every economy professor is proposing a different solution; the education doesn't mean you actually understand, it "just" changes the heuristics.

My favorite heuristic for understanding the economy (and also a lot of business in general) is that people will do what they believe is best for them, based on their local comprehension of the situation, and that what other people intended for their local situation counts for nothing. Like many of my heuristics, this may sound blindingly obvious when stated baldly, but people clearly do not make economic predictions based on this. (By "people", I mean people in general. I don't know what economic professors base their predictions on.)

A bailout that does not remove the mandates that banks issue bad loans is worse than no bailout at all. It just guarantees that when this happens again, next time it'll be even bigger.

How about repealing the Community Reinvestment Act, at the very least pending an investigation?

How about instead of banning corporate parachutes, we ban subprime mortgages entirely? How about phasing in requirements for a 10% down payment, minimum? (And make these clauses airtight; I don't care how ethnic you are, pony up the dough or GTFO.) Both of these are actually fairly bad ideas for various reasons, but I think both would be better than this bill's policy of transfusing blood into a bleeding patient and declaring victory!

Michelle Malkin has the story behind the Palin email hack. (Warning: Link to Michelle Malkin, if you're sensitive about that. But the email quoted by that post is as close to primary source as I can get.)

In summary, Palin's email account was hacked by exploiting the fact that Palin's answers to the security questions that allow a user to reset their password could be even-more-easily-than-usually guessed by accessing public information, which then permitted full access to her account.

I wanted to discuss this situation from a computer security point of view, because there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this example.

Swoopo, which I refuse to link to, is one amazingly evil site. It is an auction site (for some loose definition of the word "auction") that works as follows:

• A mark registers for the site and buys "bids" for $1 each.
• The site puts an item up for auction, starting the price at 15 cents.
• The marks take turns "bidding". Each bid makes them the auction's current winner, costs them one "bid", raises the price by 15 cents, and bumps the timer up if it's close to the end. Whoever has the winning "bid" by the time the auction expires gets the item.

The auction timer ends up being pretty pointless as it gets bumped up endlessly; an action really ends when the marks stop bidding.

Garret, I know you generally dislike pictures using HDR photography, but there is certainly a time and a place for it.

By popular demand ("this one guy asked for it once"), I've added a post index to iRi. (Also, Google has lost a lot of my pages, which sucks mostly because I keep trying to use it on my own site.)

I tried to implement something like Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases, which take characteristic phrases out of books and works pretty well, but my corpus is too small. There are many words I use only once, and the vast majority of two-word phrases are entirely unique. Consequently, I use only single words, and even that works poorly.

I didn't notice this reddit link go by last month, since I don't check my referrers as often as I used to (heh), linking to my post about teaching things other than trig.

All in all, I feel like I fared well for a site like Reddit, but there was one repeated theme in the comments I wanted to address: The idea that economics would be impossible to teach in high school. The argument was that economics is hard in the sense that true understanding requires advanced math, that economics is controversial in the sense that there is no one accepted theory of economics, and that having a partial understanding of economics could even be worse than no understanding at all in some cases.

Following up on my "failed predictions" point, I point at the now widely-distributed article about the low-fat vs. low-carb diets.

The standard dietary orthodoxy predicts that the results of this study would be exactly the opposite of what happened. The predictions are wrong. Therefore, the standard model is wrong. I don't need to be a nutritionist to make this determination.

I don't know what the right model is. I think that's pretty sad, considering that if nutritionists hadn't gotten bogged down by a premature orthodoxy, we would probably be now in the position of refining a solid idea, instead of where we really are now, which is quite nearly square one.