Is a bubble coming? Well, is a valuation something passably sophisticated -- or is it a version of "Facebook has 500 million users... how much is a user worth?...oh, say, 100 bucks... presto, $50 billion!"

Maybe Google's IPO idea of "e * appropriate power of 10" lends a false air of accuracy -- all those digits! Not pulled out of thin air either.

PS. Ads? What ads? Facebook has ads?!?

...but even so, was it THAT difficult for a number of US Administrations to realize the strategic inportance of rare earths, instead of standing idle while US production dwindled into nothingness? So now, hello urban mining. Good thing I still have my old cell phones, they might fetch a price.

The theory about market makers and the premiums they enjoy is well and good... but if you check out recent Goldman Sachs Supplemental Liquidity Provider role you might conclude it is not exactly above board.

I don't buy the 7-digit part. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc didn't get to be what they are by paying 7-digit salaries to anyone who doesn't have some track record of making them 8-digit profits. Those guys don't throw money away. They offered to double or triple a professor's salary, that is all.

Front-running, sub-pennying and similar shady practices are indeed part of the landscape. However, almost all high-speed traders do it. The issue seems (to me at least) to be something else: how to out-do opponent momo (momentum trading) algorithms. There there is room for detecting others' strategies and adapting yours accordingly to gain an advantage.

It is not necessarily a joke. Ordinals do show up in the study of finitary objects. E.g. formal deductions in Peano Arithmetic are finite strings of symbols, but their proof-theoretic analysis leads to countable ordinals up to epsilon_0. Or, the analysis of Goodstein sequences or the Hydra game again proceeds most smoothly by assigning countable ordinals to numbers or tree nodes. Closer to CS, program-correctness work going back to Dijkstra involves ordinals (I still remember him staring at the blackboard working out the order type of a particular case). To be fair, their usage here in the analysis of trading strategies, which are finite AND BOUNDED objects may be a bit of overselling. Enjoy it until HFT gets banned!

Frankly, every time I watch Fox News I get the distinct impression I _am_ watching porn. Bad porn, at that.

Such an idea is part of the plot in Tom Stoppard's "Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon". A very amusing book!

I worked on the Magellan mission (called VRM, Venus Radar Mapper back then); Galileo had already been designed, and we did use quite a lot of it. (Thanks!) Work had started on CRAF-Cassini. It was the mid-80's. Launch seemed so far in the future...