Did anyone else see the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie "The Master" and
think scientology? It's a great movie, and seems to parallel the post WWII
development of scientology. Fascinating stuff.

Yeah, I'm reading this now.. I'm not really a fan of comics, they generally overload my brain or something. But this book seems much more powerful with the graphical element. I'm so impressed. Hedges always complains that contemporary society has gone too far "visual" so i guess this is his response to that.

If you see humanity as a collection of separate automata then this is not going to work. But is this true? Are we really all a bunch of self-optimizing machines?

My teacher Adi Da points to what he calls "prior unity", and indicates that some global internet based approach to decision making could arise virtually overnight if we got our shit together.

From the book "Not-Two Is Peace":

... no global organization presently
is equipped to deal with the complexity of the world situation,
in a way that accounts for the whole, because of the
prevailing paradigm--which is that of separate interests
negotiating toward settlements that are most advantageous
for themselves. The global good (both human and non-
human) is thereby subordinated to the aims of the separate
interests.
In the current world, human beings are simply suffering
this situation, or exploiting it, or both. Therefore, a shift of
consciousness is essential, from the mind of "tribalism" to
taking responsibility for the whole. A new global institution
needs to emerge--one which genuinely represents humakind
altogether, or "everybody-all-at-once", and, thus, empowers
the human population as a totality.
Such a forum would allow humankind to become conscious
of itself as one great coherent force--the only force
capable of requiring and implementing systemic change
that takes all factors into account. The purpose of the
Global Cooperative Forum is to create the context for a new
cooperatively-based global civilization to emerge, rather
than the current "non-civilization" that is being imposed
worldwide by exploitative, consumer-driven economics and
related military agendas.

Yeah, cool. I have often wondered about this, when quantum effects are "amplified" by a chaotic hamiltonian. But whenever I read about quantum chaos, they start going on about random matrices and billiard balls. Very strange, i don't get it at all. Thanks for the name, do you have a link to his work?

The exchange will also need to shuffle the incoming messages (order place/cancel etc.)
Otherwise it is still a speed game: who can respond the fastest to the update (even if it happens only once a second).
This is actually really easy to do, or legislate. They could even do it on the millisecond scale and it would kill this insane quest for "zero" latency.
Suddenly a whole lot of businesses would go kaput (the HFT scene probably is worth billions btw.)

I'm not sure what you are saying here. Are you suggesting that I invest in my own portfolio, or that I invest in a fund ?

Awesome! Someone here with a sense of humour.

Does anyone actually have anything to say about TFA ?

It seems to be more "game theoretic", (looking at the graph of possible moves and inferring value back to the root) which makes me think about the connection between ordinal numbers and game theory that John Conway wrote about in his 1970 book "on numbers and games".

Amen to that. I see this every day, it's also referred to as "picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer". Although I think that quote was originally referring to the act of selling cheap options.

I tried accessing hulu through a squid proxy in the US. It get's to the "loading video", but then "we are unable to stream this video. please check your internet connection and try again". I wonder if it's a bandwidth issue, or perhaps squid is doing something weird.

also by Marcus du Sautoy, is the best "easy read" mathematics book i have ever found. I was truly surprised at how literate a mathematician could be. This book also introduces group theory and goes into the story of the classification of finite groups (fascinating!!) and some bio of John Conway, and other funny stories.