1. 1) at an options trading desk by a future Forbes billionaire and his blonde assistant;
2. 2) at a trading desk at Merrill Lynch when debugging the code of an options trader who was on his honeymoon cruise on the day his options were expiring;
3. 3) at CitiBank by a random trader who angrily demanded that I fix something to do with Word Perfect--I had nothing to do with it.

This doesn't include violent outbursts by traders on the floor. I left Wall Street. I developed tinnitus and could no longer hear the yelling.

Occasionally I receive calls for HFT jobs from recruiters
who represent elite hedge funds. Here is the typical exchange.

RECRUITER
You’ll be working with astronomically smart people. One
group uses crystalline cohomology to obtain the best
polynomial time approximation algorithms for
intractable problems in HFT. The engineer who did this
was an embryo prodigy who taught himself calculus
within ten to the negative sixty-seven seconds of conception.

ME
Is that the work you have in mind for me?

RECRUITER
No. You’ll be cleaning the group’s digital bed pans.

ME
Perhaps you should recruit a Nobel Laureate.
Thanks for calling.

Meanwhile admirers of the shoe attacker showered the anonymous young man with promises of everything from Nike trainers to replace his lost footwear, to iPads, sex and jobs.

I can understand an iPad, but what is he going to do with Steve Jobs?

The Japan Earthquake thread in the nuclear engineering forum at physicsforums.com has become a more reliable and timely source of information on the stricken reactors at Fukushima than mainstream news sources, according to commenters posting from Japan. The latest news:Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency says air may be leaking from theNo 2 and No 3 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.Another example, as of March 30, 11 AM JST: Radioactive iodine 3,355 times legal limit found in seawater near plant. Another from March 30: IAEA Confirms Very High Levels of Radiation Far From Reactors.

April 11, 2011. The Japanese government's nuclear safety agency has decided to raise the crisis level of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant accident from 5 to 7, the worst on the international scale. Also, see this post from the physics forum. In each case, the news was available on physicsforums.com before publication in the mainstream press.

Let's hope that the Japanese government does not suppress this essential source of information.

Chicken Little has been vindicated at last!

I wish there were a way to delete vague, hostile replies with no substantive content.

Consider the BeBook Neo or Club readers. These will read many of the popular ebook formats.

Some libertarian-minded commenters here seem to think that Amazon is operating strictly within a "self-regulating" free market and ought to have the rights of private individuals and especially conservatives, who demand the freedom to ignore externalities. In fact Amazon actively engages in monopolistic practices and resists free markets. (I'll avoid the larger issue that Amazon depends deeply on government to ensure that markets it operates in function under controlled conditions, but resists acknowledging this and tries to avoid paying for the services it takes for granted, such as trademark, copyright, trade secret and patent protection--like many companies.)

I used to have an Amazon Kindle. They advertise low prices for electronic books. But those purchases are tied to an Amazon Kindle account, not to you. You cannot transfer a book you have read to someone else, as if it were a real book. The analogy between physical property and intellectual property breaks down. Amazon controls downstream copies of the electronic books you purchase from them. You pay $9.99 to Amazon for an ebook in the mistaken belief that you are saving money on the purchase of merchandise that purportedly behaves like physical property. In fact, that $9.99 helps Amazon stifle markets. If I sold you my Amazon Kindle with the books I purchased, and you re-registered the Kindle in your name, my books would vanish. It would be as if I sold you my bookshelf with books I purchased from Amazon, and Amazon removed the books once you claimed the bookshelf.

You could say that I agreed to whatever terms Amazon devised. Fine: not acknowledging that Amazon's monopolistic practices have nothing to do with free markets is ideology. And that is one reason why I am recommending the BeBook reader.