A man who works with the complexities of equity trading systems, loves music and wine, and writes short pieces of fiction when nobody's looking.
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Mirrors and glass: the role of design in a time of change

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As the introspection of the last thirty years gives way to technology-led interconnection and transparency, what is the new role of design?
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Capricorn Suit

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mmmark
3811 days ago
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Nearly there
Sussex, England

Bonuses & arms races

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There's an important economic principle behind the debate about bankers' bonuses. It's that individual self-interest sometimes conflicts with the collective interest.
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Why – and how – I wrote Bad Pharma

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This is my piece for Waterstones Book Club, where I was asked to write about why – and how – I wrote Bad Pharma. The full book club caboodle is here, and you can buy the book here. Here it is… ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I wrote this book because we need to fix a set of problems […]
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mmmark
3997 days ago
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Always nice to get some insight into how other people research.
Sussex, England

     April 17, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge triumphantly marched...

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     April 17, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge triumphantly marched into Phnom Penh, marks the moment the absolute contingency of the world was revealed to the city's residents.
     Before, these residents had unconsciously assumed that urban life would carry on as normal, regardless of which faction won the civil war. Indeed, they cheered the victory of the Khmer Rouge, innocently thinking the new peace would be an unproblematic continuation of the old. This quickly proved to be a false assumption when they were forcibly evacuated from the city, with the seemingly eternal fixities of society, money and markets suddenly eliminated in the new anticapitalist utopia of Democratic Kampuchea....In this the victims of the genocide occupied the same epistemic position of Russell's tragic chicken who was misled by its "crude expectations of uniformity" to expect the farmer to continue to feed it indefinitely into the future:

          The man who has fed the chicken everyday throughout its life at last wrings
          its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature
          would have been useful to the chicken.

The existential question this raises for us is thus: are we the contemporary equivalents of those urban residents of Phnom Penh on the morning of April 17, 1975, blithely expecting our ways of life to persist indefinitely into the future, all the time unknowing of the Chaos lurking underneath the seemingly stable foundations of our existence?

-Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim


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Undocumented Feature

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And it doesn't pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there's no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are.
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10 public comments
Skotte
4000 days ago
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telnet brigandine.org 9390

A chat like system thing that still runs, after like 15 years. Still no fFucking banner ads.
Rochester, Earth
PaulPritchard
4004 days ago
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Beautiful
Belgium
skorgu
4005 days ago
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IRC still exists.
2bithacker
4005 days ago
There's even an official #xkcd IRC channel http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/XKCD
taddevries
4005 days ago
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Yes! I want this feature, so bad.
adamgurri
4005 days ago
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hahaha wow the last panel makes it.
New York, NY
reconbot
4005 days ago
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I made a chat system just like this
New York City
JayM
4005 days ago
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O
Atlanta, GA
guruprasad
4005 days ago
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Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
trparky
4005 days ago
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"And it doesn't pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there's no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are."
huckncatch
4005 days ago
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so good
4005 days ago
I wonder if this is even a real thing...
SselemanLuos
4005 days ago
The Starship Titanic forum is pretty close: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/02/emergent_systems