Via efinancialnews.com But in recent weeks trading geeks have started to talk about picoseconds in what is a truly mind-boggling concept: a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. Put another way, a picosecond is to one second what one second is to 31,700 years. Why on Earth (which spins at a rate of 460 meters a second) is it necessary to trade so fast? The answer is simple. Firms that trade super fast effectively put themselves at the front of the trading queue and have priority over other orders.

“Always produce” is a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, towards things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof. - Paul Graham

It is worth emphasizing that quantitative measures of risk, until further notice, should not be viewed as a strictly cardinal (absolute) expression of risk, but rather as an ordinal measure; my VaR is more than it was a week ago, less than it was three weeks ago, but what “it” is, is not truly knowable. - Andrew B. Weisman

Via Paul Erdos: We have all these powerful computers but they are not good enough to answer this question, “Find the minimum number of guests that must be invited so that at least 5 will know each other OR at least 5 will not know each other ? ”

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary - Taleb