Kite Surfer Vs House
I get the feeling that this may be a viral add but it’s funny none the less … possibly noteable for the long warning at the start of the video about not doing stupid things like trying to kite-surf over a house and culminating with the wonderful phrase “if you take chances, at least wear a good video cam!”
The Economic Fiction?
Having just read a post about the process of trying to turn the book into a film, I was searching on amazon.co.uk for ‘Software’ by Rudy Rucker, I guess you can tell from the link that I found it . . . however in the process I came across what I assume is a, somewhat ironically, miscategorised book.
Head over to amazon.co.uk and search for software in the books section. Unless something’s changed you to will end up with a list of 103,616 books, most of which are, fairly reasonably, of a technical nature. Scroll down a little and select the Fiction category (containing a far more reasonable 217 entries).
Sitting there proudly at the top of the list, with the default sorting of ‘by relevance’ is The Ultimate Technical Trading Software: In Search of the Holy Grail . . . erm, what? It does feel about right though. The economy is currently in a state of meltdown due in part to people using software to predict the movement of the markets in order to make more cash . . . then other people using different software to predict the behaviour of the first software and the people using it. Then still more people using software to predit the behavior of the software that’s predicting the behaviour of the software that’s predicting the behaviour of the markets (I think that was right).
At some point people started making money off the behaviour of the software rather than on the behaviour and all of a sudden our financial system is down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass and we are just creating money out of thin air. At some point of course someone took a trick from the The Emperors New Clothes and said “He’s naked!” . . . end result, global recession . . . ho hum 😉
