Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

I’ve been reading some old science fiction short stories recently, and I was reminded of just how good Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore were writing together after they got married. Writing separately they were notable. Moore in particular wrote the Northwest Smith series of stories in the 1930s, which were pulp stories but nevertheless vivid and memorable. Writing together they were excellent. Besides writing under their own names, they also used many pseudonyms, notably Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell. Their story Mimsy Were the Borogroves was recently made into a movie, The Last Mimzy, although I didn’t go see it. Their stories range all over science fiction; they never fell into a rut.

Unfortunately, novels are where you get recognition, and their best work was in short stories. They are not well known today.

My current understanding of the typical hedge fund is that there are certain dates when you are permitted to request a redemption. The hedge fund must then give you your money back within six to eight weeks. Some hedge funds have gates, which are limits on the amount of money you are permitted to withdraw.

September 30 was a hedge fund redemption request date. It seems likely that a lot of investors asked for at least some of their money back. That means that the hedge funds need to unroll their positions in order to get the money to give them.

I suspect that has something to do with the market collapse we are seeing. I don’t know how strong the effect is; nobody does, since hedge funds have essentially no reporting requirements.

At the Chabot Space and Science Museum this weekend, I saw the first tangible result I’ve seen of the demotion of Pluto: a ruler in the gift shop had the eight planets plus the asteroid belt, but no mention of Pluto.

The Tour of the Planets does still mention Pluto, though.

I watched the vice-presidential debate last night. It was reasonably interesting, but not all that exciting. I was hoping that Sarah Palin would address the obvious impossibility of the U.S. becoming self-sufficient in energy by drilling for more oil, but no such luck; when Joe Biden pointed out the numbers (4% of world oil reserves, 25% of world oil consumption), she simply didn’t respond.

One thing that was clear from the debate was Biden and Palin have very different positions on a number of issues. So I was honestly quite surprised to see on CNN (I was watching at the gym, I don’t actually have cable) that several “young people” watching the debate felt that there was no real difference between the candidates (link). Only some people felt that way, and of course reporters can find somebody to say anything. Still I was very surprised.

Either these people are not paying attention, or the candidates are somehow not communicating to them. I wonder what sorts of candidates these people would really like?

One of the general trends in financial systems these days is the removal of friction.

It wasn’t all that long ago that stocks were traded by waving pieces of papers in the faces of market makers (does anybody else remember the game Pit?). In fact, some futures markets still work that way. The action could be very fast, too fast to follow for the uninitiated, but it couldn’t run faster than human speed. Now stocks are traded electronically, and the pace can be much much faster than any human can follow. Computer programs trade stock against each other. This removes a lot of friction.

Without friction, you can slide a long way. So rather than interfere at the level of the trade, markets interfere at a higher level: if a stock price changes too far too fast, the market automatically imposes a brief moratorium on trades in that stock, for, say two hours. This gives humans a chance to get back into the loop to make sure that what is happening is what they intend.

I think this is an interesting example of using a high level control to permit the removal of low level controls. It would be nice if it were possible to apply this technique to, say, e-mail rumors: “this message has been sent to thousands of people in the last five minutes; let’s automatically attach a link to Snopes.”

Frank Herbert is justly famous for Dune, but I’ve always been very fond of his book Whipping Star. In that book the protagonist works for the Bureau of Sabotage, an official government agency whose job is to slow down other government agencies, to throw sand into the wheels of justice, to make sure that human considerations are taken into account. I’ve always thought that was a very perceptive idea. The sequel to Whipping Star, The Dosadi Experiment, I consider to be just as good as Dune.