How many similes and metaphors can this guy pack into 10 words? Let's count...

• 1. Capacity of people
• 2. people congeal
• 3. people like lasers
• 4. social lasers
• 5. lasers of cruelty

Simile and metaphor constructs are supposed to help us understand ideas, not make them more obtuse. I think he is trying to make an analogy to the resonance of lasing, but good grief! How many people understand laser physics better than the social dynamics of internet forums?

I was halfway to making that same joke.

Thank you for posting this. I teach as an adjunct faculty member (Illinois Institute of Technology) and have also once tried one of MIT's online courses. It was quite bad, but that's a sample size of just one and I lack the time to do a more thorough investigation. I'm grateful that you have expended the time and effort to do much more.

It has always seemed to me that good online teaching may be possible but that I hadn't heard of good techniques for making it so. Your opinion that it is still in beta makes sense.

A couple decades ago, you could often get a /24 just by buying beer for the right people at an ISP.

Assuming the ball travels about 150 feet per second (~100mph), and traveled 5 feet during the top clip, the animated GIF in the article covers about a 1/30 of a second. The GIF contains 37 frames, which puts a lower bound of about 1000fps on the source video. This is at the upper limit of the 600-1000fps range you cite.

Of course, if they downsampled to make the GIF then they could have been well above 1000 fps. I'm curious what you think of their claims to be going over 10000fps for the world series.

You can buy Code Monkey (and other Coulton songs) on Rock Band. Hearing myself murder it, and then watching this version, reminds me how far I am from being a professional musician.

This AC knows what he/she is saying

Right here, sir. This group bought the crystal reactors (and presumably also hired personnel) from the previous corporation that went bankrupt trying to make and sell synthesized diamonds. You can even buy stock in the company.

http://www.sciodiamond.com/

The reason people can express all these capacities and power draws using Amps is that the phones are made to operate with near-constant voltage. This is very confusing to those who understand (correctly) that watt-hours and not amp-hours are energy units. Since

Watts = (Amps) x (Volts)

and volts are constant in this application, any given rate of amperage corresponds to a known wattage. Drawing 100mAh from a battery with 1200mAh of "amperage capacity" is the equivalent of the more-sensible energy representation at 4V: i.e. drawing 0.4 watt-hours from a battery with 4.8 watt-hours of capacity.

I don't quite understand why anyone started using amps instead of energy units to express battery capacities.

I am a mathematician, and I agree most of what you say.

One quibble -- the "dick-measuring contest" claim smacks of conspiracy theory -- the more prosaic and correct reason is that it is far easier for a mathematician to write the true mathematics into a Wiki article than it is for him or her to create a translation suitable for more general audiences.

(May I suggest you could improve the impact of your writing by spelling the word "mathematician" correctly?)

Whether your broker told you that or not, I guarantee nobody has any idea whether it was HF traders or a trend-following human on the other side of that trade. That's kind of a main point of the exchange -- anonymous trading.

This is not to take away from the fact that your trade got reversed, which definitely does suck.

It makes no sense for everyone to be so concerned about the survival of companies like Knight -- especially people opposed to algorithmic trading in the first place. Just let firms like Knight blow up! Their loss is others' gain, after all.

There was half an hour of wacky behavior in certain stock prices during Knight's whole blowup process, but that affected essentially zero long-term investors. Long-term investors don't need protection from this sort of incident.

Now, a flash crash is a bigger deal since it is more of a market-wide disruption. I still believe that long-term investors have little to worry about in one since the essential characteristic of such an incident is that it is over quickly (certainly none of my personal investments were ultimately affected by the flash crash). But, to the extent it is worth regulating to prevent another flash crash, I think software verification would be an overcomplicated and ineffective means of achieving that goal.

I'll also state that long-term investors have little to worry about from high-frequency traders. The whole point of HF firms is that they make a few pennies per trade. That's far less than the brokerage fees paid by long-term investors, so why complain about the profits made by HF firms rather than by the grasping brokers?

It's amazing how many people in this thread have made up their own version of facts and baldly stated them as true.

In reality, the exchanges are careful to make sure all cable runs are the same length (within the building). Once in a while, they will offer a new, faster "tier" of service such as 10GB links which of course is quickly adopted by many firms.

(Now, of course, you have to wonder whether or not I just made that up.)