This kind of phone will be like the Encyclopedia Galactica of phones. Much better than the standard phone (i.e. the Hitchhiker's Guide), but slightly more expensive, a bit boring, and nobody will buy it.

In the book "Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone", the author mentions that Chris Dodd visited his station there, and he devotes a couple of paragraphs to the fact that he thought Dodd was a total dick. Basically his recollection was that Dodd was asking him questions, but they weren't really questions, he had some kind of stupid agenda, and all in all, he was left with a bad taste in his mouth from the encounter.

I don't know on what planet a PhD in math can automatically give you this salary.

I used to work for IBM and I recall that they used to disallow Skype. They had the particularly lame reason that "because Skype is not open-source, it is against our business strategy" or some such nonsense. [Yet they had no problem with Windows!].

Yes, when I saw the picture of their device I was concerned about winds. They make a big deal about the fact that it's made of out lightweight alloys. But the forces due to wind would be much greater than the gravitational forces, and the structure doens't look as if it is built in a way that you could collapse it somehow if a storm is expected.

>> Correct, because plants are more efficient than solar cells due to cholrophyll, so less sun power is wasted.

Er, I think you're wrong about this. The numbers I recall are about a 2% max efficiency from plants, and 10%-15% from solar cells. So solar cells are actually much more efficient. [The downside is that they do not automatically replicate themselves the way plants do.]

Yes, I agree. I got a lot out of "The Road To Reality".

For a similar thing for maths, try "The Princeton Companion to Mathematics".

Mod parent up.

It was obvious even from the Slashdot summary that the writer had an agenda.

That may well be true from a formal point of view, but I doubt it helps. You need a strategy that also works if no-one else is trying a similar strategy (if these strategies as a group are only profiting from each other, there's no reason to get in the game). Dan

To follow up on my own post-- from looking at the rest of his blog, it looks like Christian Marks is a real mathematician, probably with an interest in finance (e.g. he solves a math problem from the journal Advanced Mathematical Economics). So that part is for real, but I still suspect that the only ones who know for sure that this is bogus are not telling because they are earning seven figure salaries.

I am wondering whether this story is some kind of practical joke.

As someone who understands math to at least a certain degree (I publish in what is effectively applied mathematics), I know enough to say that this is bogus. The Wikipedia page on ordinal collapsing functions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_collapsing_function) shows that they relate to transfinite numbers (various orders of infinity). It is, to me, beyond plausibility that this could have any practical application in trading-- unless it's some kind of weird fad that only the mathematicians understand is a joke. I think someone needs to dig down further into this source.