This is what AAA rated assets looked like before the collapse

Easy to understand why the crash happened when the owner of this shack was able to mortgage it for $108,000 which was double of the (already inflated) value of the “house”. This was considered a high risk debt, it was sliced and packaged with a lot of other high risk debts and sold as securities with AAA rating.

ms –> $

Free market is not so fair after all. A NY times article discusses how big traders get access to information earlier (by some milli-seconds) than others and use automated algorithms to buy and sell shares to unsuspecting small investors who are still seeing the older information on their screens. [Link]

Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency trading is one answer.

And when a former Goldman Sachs programmer was accused this month of stealing secret computer codes — software that a federal prosecutor said could “manipulate markets in unfair ways” — it only added to the mystery. Goldman acknowledges that it profits from high-frequency trading, but disputes that it has an unfair advantage.

Yet high-frequency specialists clearly have an edge over typical traders, let alone ordinary investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission says it is examining certain aspects of the strategy.

“This is where all the money is getting made,” said William H. Donaldson, former chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange and today an adviser to a big hedge fund. “If an individual investor doesn’t have the means to keep up, they’re at a huge disadvantage.”

Human body emits visible light

along with all other living creatures, when viewed with ultra-sensitive detectors capable of detecting single photons … [Link]

To learn more about this faint visible light, scientists in Japan employed extraordinarily sensitive cameras capable of detecting single photons. Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.

The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.

Faces glowed more than the rest of the body. This might be because faces are more tanned than the rest of the body, since they get more exposure to sunlight — the pigment behind skin color, melanin, has fluorescent components that could enhance the body's miniscule light production.

Since this faint light is linked with the body's metabolism, this finding suggests cameras that can spot the weak emissions could help spot medical conditions, said researcher Hitoshi Okamura, a circadian biologist at Kyoto University in Japan.

Soap Bubble Nebula

 

From New Scientist: [Link]

IT LOOKS like a soap bubble or perhaps even a camera fault, but the image at right is a newly discovered planetary nebula.

Planetary nebulae, which got their name after being misidentified by early astronomers, are formed when an ageing star weighing up to eight times the mass of the sun ejects its outer layers as clouds of luminous gas (see Why stars go out in a blaze of glory). Most are elliptical, double-lobed or cigar-shaped, evolving after stars eject gas from each pole (see a gallery of the nebulae).

Dave Jurasevich of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California spotted the "Cygnus Bubble" while recording images of the region on 6 July 2008. A few days later, amateur astronomers Mel Helm and Keith Quattrocchi also found it.

The bubble, which was officially named PN G75.5+1.7 last week, has been there a while. A closer look at images from the second Palomar Sky Survey revealed it had the same size and brightness 16 years ago. Jurasevich thinks it was overlooked because it is very faint.

"It's a beautiful example," says Adam Frank of the University of Rochester, New York. "Spherical ones are very rare." One explanation is that the image is looking down the throat of a typical cylindrical nebula. However, it is still remarkably symmetrical, Frank says.

Apple is serious about secrecy

Apple contractor Foxconn’s employee commits suicide during interrogation after losing a fourth generation iPhone prototype. [Link]

Foxconn worker Sun Danyong was handling a shipment of 16 iPhone prototypes, and one of them went missing, according to ND Daily [Google translation]. Then, Foxconn unleashed its central security division to investigate Sun. Unable to take the “unbearable interrogation techniques,” Sun jumped from a 12-story building on July 16, according to the report.

Foxconn has issued a statement [Google translation] apologizing for the incident. The letter admits that the chief of Foxconn’s central security division, surnamed Gu, may have used “inappropriate interrogation methods,” including possible beatings, searching Sun’s house and holding Sun in solitary confinement. Gu is on suspension and under internal investigation, according to Foxconn.

Electric Plane

 

The first flight of the e-Spyder took Peghiny to an alitude of 400 feet and speeds reaching 55 mph. It followed Friday’s taxi tests and a “short hop” — less than 10 feet off the ground — down the runway at the Woodstock Airport. With child-like excitement, Peghiny told Wired.com the flights went flawlessly.

His airplane is based on a Flightstar ultralight airframe he designed in the early 1980s and it is powered by a 20 kilowatt brushless motor developed by Yuneec International of China. The e-Spyder can fly for 40 minutes on the two lithium polymer batteries and it made several flights Sunday on a single charge. Peghiny said the motor, batteries and controller are “plug and play” technology similar to that found in remote control aircraft. [Link]

Microsoft’s Nuclear Option?

An NYtimes columnist presents a doomsday scenario in the ongoing struggle between Google and Microsoft . [Link]

The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success. Chrome products are given away, so they bring in no revenue for Google, and they don’t even provide a better search or advertising experience for their users, the company admits. So why does Google even bother?

To keep Microsoft on its toes.

What Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has to fear more than anything else is that he’ll awake one day to learn that the Google search engine suddenly doesn’t work on any Windows computers: something happened overnight and what worked yesterday doesn’t work today. It would have to be an act of deliberate sabotage on Microsoft’s part and blatantly illegal, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Microsoft would claim ignorance and innocence and take days, weeks or months to reverse the effect, during which time Google would have lost billions.

FPS disease

This one is for anyone that who has ever been addicted to a first person shooter. Personally speaking Duke Nukem did it for me …

Top Gear: Project Sipster

If we can be sure of one thing, it is that Top Gear guys will not die wondering. They decided to see if making a fuel-efficient car, that was fast as well, was really as big a deal as car companies make it out to be. So they took an old car (1981) and put a very efficient new diesel engine (2003) into it. Then they did some modifications to coax “this brick”, as they called it , into some sort of aerodynamic shape and tried to fulfill the following three criteria:

1. 70 mpg

2. 0 to 60 mph in 7 seconds

3. Cost less than $7000

Here is the final project report  [Link] and some videos for Project Sipster [Link]

On Feb. 20, TopGear.com declared war on oil, poverty and slow cars, all at the same time. We naively proposed that we could build the car that no car company could manage to build themselves. Specifically, we proposed to marry timeless Italian style with thoroughly adequate performance (0-60 in 7 seconds), shocking fuel economy (70 mpg) and humble frugality (you can duplicate it for $7,000). And we decided to build it in 55 days. In retrospect, both symmetry and our own sanity would have been better served if we gave ourselves 77 days to pull this off, but no matter.

In a perfect world, we would have started with a 1974 Volkswagen Scirocco. This paragon of low-rent sex appeal could easily swallow the turbodiesel Volkswagen engine we planned to use, and it's far more aerodynamic than the brick we finally settled on. We rejected that plan because we feared the bureaucratic hurdles involved in registering a car that had been converted from gas to diesel. We have since been informed by countless readers who have easily registered diesel-converted cars that we're complete idiots. That would explain a lot of other things as well…

Having settled on a Volkswagen Rabbit, we really should have shopped for one that was cheaper (we paid $1,700, but should have paid closer to $0), that hadn't been crashed and didn't have a fuel tank full of rust and french-fry bits from its former life as a grease-powered hippy car. See idiot comment, above.

Maybe you have to own wrenches to grasp just how ridiculous is the idea of putting a modern (2002) engine in an old (1981) car. Putting a Jetta TDI engine in a Rabbit is an egregious abuse of the word "put." You can put your hat on a rack, and you can put a head of lettuce in your grocery bag, but try putting an elephant in your trunk. Easy to say, far more complicated to do, and odds are good something will go wrong when you try.

Cosmic ray exploit

A 2003 paper from two Princeton researchers describes a way to hack Java based systems by exploiting the random bit flips caused in the memory by cosmic rays. [Link - PDF]

We measured the attack on two commercial Java Virtual Machines: Sun’s and IBM’s. We show that a single-bit error in the Java program’s data space can be exploited to execute arbitrary code with a probability of about 70%, and multiple-bit errors with a lower probability.

and later …

Java can be compiled to efficient machine code, and supports data abstraction well, because it uses link-time type-checking instead of run-time checking. However, this leaves Java vulnerable to a time-of-check-to-time-of- use attack. All the proofs of soundness are premised on the axiom that the computer faithfully executes its specified instruction set. In the presence of hardware faults, this premise is false. If a cosmic ray comes through the memory and flips a bit, then the program will read back a different word than the one it wrote.