[Image: Koala, a CC-licensed photo by Mshai]

The Australian Koala Foundation reported this week that koala populations are declining because we humans continue to invade their habitats. Wildfires and global warming aren't helping, either. They could become extinct within a few decades. More: BBC, Reuters.

Over at The Awl, there's a total bummer infographic showing circulation data for major American newspapers going back to 1990. Spoiler: the lines look like steep cliffs. You can almost see the shuddering clusters of journalists at the edge being pushed over to a most splattery demise by the invisible hand of the market.

A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades [The Awl]

The title really says it all. Follow this link to see a metric crap-ton of fruit bats (the largest such gathering in the world) converge on a remote swamp in Zambia--an area only about the size of two or three soccer fields.

To take the shots, BBC camera crew had to swoop in on a powered hot-air balloon. Because there were so many bats that a helicopter couldn't fly. Oh. My. God.

Photographer Chris Jordan has published a series of images identified as dead albatross on Midway Atoll whose bodies are filled with bits of plastic they ingested.

Midway Island is an anemic little line of sand and coral reefs, way out in the middle of the Pacific. Now, I don't know Mr. Jordan personally, and haven't fact-checked the story behind the photos -- but presuming it's all as presented, this really is a horrifying set of images. Birds that live as far away from civilization as you can imagine, their innards packed with petroleum flotsam? Wow.

The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Midway (chrisjordan.com, Thanks, Susannah Breslin and Sean Bonner!)

Oh, how I love fightorflight from Metafilter's checklist on why your plan to save journalism won't work. Top marks!

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) No one will be able to find the guy
(X) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
(X) It tries to prop up a fundamentally broken business model
(X) Users of the web will not put up with it
( ) Print readers will not put up with it
( ) Good journalists will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Readers' unwillingness to pay for just news
( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
(X) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives
( ) Sources' proven unwillingness to "go direct"
( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism
( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
(X) The high cost of investigative journalism
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting
( ) Legal liability of "citizen journalism"
( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist
(X) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football
( ) The necessity of the editing process
(X) Americans' huge distrust of professional journalism
( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog
( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything
( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income
( ) Rupert Murdoch
( ) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering
( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting
( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) The tragedy of the commons
( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing
(X) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites

Problem with your plan to save media: the checklist (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

"Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products," a new paper by Princeton computer scientists and economists Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Markus Brunnermeier, and Rong Ge suggests that complex financial derivatives are computationally intractable: that is, once you have mixed together a bunch of weird-ass securities and derivatives, you literally can't tell if the resulting security is being tampered with as it pays off (or doesn't). Freedom to Tinker's Andrew Appel likens it to cryptography: you can mix together a bunch of known quantities to get a new number that can't be turned back into the old numbers.

The paper shows the example of a high-volume seller who builds 1000 CDOs from 1000 assert-classes of home mortages. Suppose the seller knows that a few of those asset classes are "lemons" that won't pay off. The seller is supposed to randomly distribute the asset classes into the CDOs; this minimizes the risk for the buyer, because there's only a small chance that any one CDO has more than a few lemons. But the seller can "tamper" with the CDOs by putting most of the lemons in just a few of the CDOs. This has an enormous effect on the senior tranches of those tampered CDOs.

In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis.

Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs.

Intractability of Financial Derivatives

When your three-year checkbook calendar runs out, does that signal the end of the world? No? It's pretty much the same for the Mayan calendar and 2012.

In fact, the idea of a countdown to cataclysmic apocalypse is a Western, not Mayan idea, say some Mayans who are getting fed up with the hype. You can read more about their perspective in this AP article: "2012 Isn't the End of the World, Mayans Insist."

Another important thing to think about: The amount of money being raked in by woo-woo charlatans (and, now, big entertainment companies) who are all capitalizing off what amounts to willful misinterpretations of Mayan legends, traditions and science. My college anthropology professor (and expert in Central and South American archaeology) John Hoopes had some interesting thoughts on this...

I'd like to see more of the revenue from the hyping of 2012 mythology through books, movies, conferences, and websites go directly to the living descendants of the ancient Maya whose cultural heritage and intellectual property is being appropriated without their knowledge or consent for the financial benefit of non-Maya hucksters.

This raises a lot of questions about who owns traditional knowledge. I don't claim to have the answer, though. There are a lot of wrinkles and complications, including the good possibility that the living Maya probably have no legal standing when it comes to these issues. But I suspect it has much more to do with what's ethically responsible than with legal obligations.

I don't know that I know the best way to handle this, either. But, whether or not the living Maya should be paid for the use (or misuse) of their ancestors' ideas, I personally see a lot of racism at play in this story. Not the white hood sort of racism, sure. But I'm don't think I have a better word for what happens when the largely white and wealthy American New Age community co-opts and exoticises the traditions of a marginalized native people and then ignores those people when they say, "That's not what our traditions mean. Please stop misrepresenting us."

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user theilr, via CC

An oxygen-depleted "dead zone" the size of New Jersey (well, figures!) is starving sea life near the coast of Oregon and Washington. The phenomenon will probably recur annually, and is caused by climate change, according to Jack Barth, an oceanography professor at Oregon State University. The news coincides with the release of this National Science Foundation briefing about the increasing occurrences of these "dead zones" around the world.

Pacific Ocean 'dead zone' in Northwest may be irreversible (LA Times)

More bad news for the dollar. The head of the World Bank says the importance of American currency will continue to diminish in relation to the euro and the Chinese renminbi.

"The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency," the World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a speech at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. "Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar."

New York Times article here.

Theeviljeremy sez, "My friend Damien-- one of those bafflingly creative types-- created this hand carved chess set. I had a chance to see the figures in person the other day, and the level of detail is really incredible. I particularly like the queen of the village, with a chainsaw at her side and a shotgun hidden behind her back, but there are a lot of standouts on both sides of the board."

Zombies vs Villagers chess set (Thanks, Theeviljeremy!)

Mike Outmesguine -- wireless guru, author, and veteran -- is one of the most knowledgeable people out there with regard to post-disaster connectivity know-how. I am digging the instructional piece he has in the current issue of MAKE about "worst-case-internet" kits, with details on what to include, what each component costs, how to set it up, and why.

Law Enforcement Targets does a handsome line of shooting range zombie targets, including several in inexplicable Nazi uniforms. Good practice, I suppose, for the forthcoming Nazi zombie uprising.

Law Enforcement Targets: Zombie Targets (via Geekologie)

From the Free Range Kids blog, a remarkable story from a YA author who was invited to address a fourth grade class:

I was setting up a phone call with a 4th-grade teacher and her class -- they live a good thousand miles across the country from me. I let her know that I have Skype, so nobody needs incur any long-distance charges. Her response via e-mail just now: "Is there a way to Skype with us being able to see you, but you not being able to see us? Due to confidentiality and other school district guidelines, I am hoping this is a possibility."

Truly, I am speechless. I'm just glad this won't be an in-person school visit, because it would be really awkward wearing a blindfold all day, lest I actually lay eyes on these kids.

Can You Please Come Talk to My Class...But Not Look at Anyone?

Jennie sez, "Two Seattle suburbs (of the super affluent persuasion) are monitoring and recording every vehicle that enter their town limits. If you happen to have had a past criminal infraction, you will be followed by police. Creepy and overzealous! By the way, residents of these towns are so community oriented that they also refuse to pay property tax to support their local county library system. But don't worry, they're 'not elitist at all,' according to a local council member."

In Medina, a new sign bears this warning: "You Are Entering a 24 Hour Video Surveillance Area..."

Medina -- a city of 3,100 with an average household income of $222,000 -- had discussed the idea for years as a way to discourage crime, city officials said.

Last year, there were 11 burglaries, Chen said.

"Some people think [that number of burglaries] is tolerable," he said. "But even one crime is intolerable."

Medina City Councilmember Lucius Biglow said crime prevention "outweighs concern over privacy."

"Privacy is considerably less nowadays than it was, say, 50 years ago," he said. "I think most of us are pretty well-documented by the federal government ... simply because of the Internet and credit cards."

Cameras keep track of all cars entering Medina (Thanks, Jennie!)

(Image: MARK HARRISON / THE SEATTLE TIMES)

Video: "Angeles Crest Highway after the Station Fire," by Hal and Susan McAlister, who were joining staff at the Mount Wilson Observatory.

We were escorted by LA County Sheriff's deputies. We were stunned by what we saw, and inattentive to keeping the little Flip video camera stable and accurately pointed. The devastation speaks for itself.

(via YouTube user Lndacurtss)

Here's an unparalleled gluttony opportunity in the UK:

Mario's Cafe in Westhoughton do a big breakfast for £10! Eat it all in 20 mins without a drink to wash it down with and you get it free!

It's 10 eggs, 10 bacon, 10 sausage, 10 toast, 5 black puddings, tomatoes, beans and mushrooms.

The £10 Breakfast!!! (via Making Light)

Engineers in Los Angeles are baffled by the recent epidemic of failing underground water pipes throughout Los Angeles. Every time you turn on the local TV news around here, over the last few months -- there's new footage of a "major blowout." After examining "dozens of ruptures, some of which flooded streets, damaged vehicles and buildings and created a sinkhole so big that it almost swallowed a firetruck," officials and city engineers have agreed that something odd is going on, but they don't know exactly what, or why so many points of failure in such a compact window of time. Snip from Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles' water system was put in place by William Mulholland, who figured out how to tap water from the Eastern Sierra and the Owens Valley and designed an aqueduct system that let it flow to Los Angeles on the force of gravity alone. The influx allowed semi-arid Los Angeles to boom -- and subdivisions marched outward in the 1920s and the years just after World War II.

The system remains a marvel to many engineers and still sends water over the Santa Monica Mountains from Sylmar to San Pedro using gravity. But parts of it are now almost 100 years old, and many of the pipes are wearing out.

One note on which most agree: a bankrupt state and a city crippled by slashed budgets are ill-equipped to solve the problem.

Here's one LA Times story, and here's another from this morning after two more pipes burst. (Image: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Tony sez, "These haunting images of the gigantic 'ghost fleet' of ships parked off the coast of Singapore are one more gripping visualization of the economic state of affairs the world over."

Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.

They are a powerful and tangible representation of the hurricanes that have been wrought by the global economic crisis; an iron curtain drawn along the coastline of the southern edge of Malaysia's rural Johor state, 50 miles east of Singapore harbour.

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession (Thanks, Tony!)

The Philadelphia Free Library system is broke, and they're shutting it down, including cancelling "all branch and regional library programs, programs for children and teens, after school programs, computer classes, and programs for adults" and "all children programs, programs to support small businesses and job seekers, computer classes and after school programs" and "all library visits to schools, day care centers, senior centers and other community centers" and "all community meetings" and "all GED, ABE and ESL program."

Just look at that list of all the things libraries do for our communities, all the ways they help the least among us, the vulnerable, the children, the elderly. Think of every wonderful thing that happened to you among the shelves of a library. Think of the millions of lifelong love-affairs with literacy sparked in the collections of those libraries. Think of every person whose life was forever changed for the better in those buildings.

Think of the nobility of libraries and librarianship, the great scar that the Burning of Alexandria gouged in human history. Think of the archivists who barricaded themselves in the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad, slowly starving and freezing to death but refusing to desert their posts for fear that the collections they guarded would become firewood.

Think of the librarians who took a stand during the darkest years of the PATRIOT Act and refused to turn over patron records. Think of the moral unimpeachability of those whose trade is universal access to all human knowledge.

Picture an entire city, a modern, wealthy place, in the richest country in the world, in which the vital services provided by libraries are withdrawn due to political brinksmanship and an unwillingness to spare one banker's bonus worth of tax-dollars to sustain an entire region's connection with human culture and knowledge and community.

Think of it and ask yourself what the hell has happened to us.

All Free Library of Philadelphia Branch, Regional and Central Libraries Closed Effective Close of Business October 2, 2009

Interactive Flood Maps show us how familiar land contours will change as the oceans rise. (via Tim O'Reilly)

NASA image of the Los Angeles fires, as viewed from high above our planet.

The image was acquired mid-morning on Sunday -- the fire has since more than doubled in size, mind you! -- by the "backward (northward)-viewing camera of the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra satellite."

To give you a sense of scale, the image you see here covers an area 152 miles wide. Them's some big blazes.

More about the image here, and larger sizes. And here's more, from scientists at NASA JPL. Robert Mackey at the NYT has a related item. I cringe at linking to the Daily Mail, but hold your nose and click on this image: an annotated version of this same NASA shot that shows you where various parts of LA are located. I am happy to report that I am safely near the edge of the blue stuff, and not downwind of those huge, nasty smoke plumes.

A ginormous amphibious air tanker called the Martin Mars just made a massive water drop over Mount Wilson, the hill northeast of Los Angeles where the century-old Mount Wilson Observatory and nearby TV, radio and cell phone towers are all located. The World War II-era flying boat literally water-bombed the peak today to douse flames from the Station Fire, which has burned 127,000 acres (the largest in LA County history).

Here's an LA Times pic of this bad boy in action over Mt. Wilson. Snip from the accompanying story:

Los Angeles County Fire Department Battalion Chief Steve Martin said, "We are going to burn, cut, foam and gel. And if that doesn't work, we're going to pray. This place is worth a lot, but it's not worth dying for. "

In a worst-case scenario, firefighters were expected to retreat to the safety of the observatory parking lot or seek refuge in the concrete and steel basement of the 105-year-old, 100-inch telescope observatory. A Martin Mars air tanker, also known as a Super Scooper, dropped 7,500 gallons of water on Mt. Wilson.

In previous BB posts about the LA fires, I mentioned these giant 747s that have also been spurting water from the sky, to extinguish the blaze. Wired has a nice photo gallery of those guys in action here. And Popular Science has some interior shots of the 747s. Spoiler: they are friggin huge inside.

The managers of the observatory are now very optimistic that the historic site will make it okay.

Below: Astronomer Mike Brown has been tweeting while the area around the Mt. Wilson Observatory burns, and he spotted the WWII flying boat in action.

Erin sez, "As part of a back-and-forth regarding the harassment of photographers at U.S. Department of Transportation headquarters in Washington, I've gotten my hands on the Homeland Security Department's official guidelines for photography of federal buildings. They're lame, to say the least, but I'm pretty sure they haven't been widely shared before now."

DOT response to the ACLU regarding photo harassment (Thanks, Erin!)

(Photo: Dave Bullock, more here, click image to enlarge). Yes, they come every year, but the 2009 fires are now being reported as the largest ever in LA County's history. 122,000 acres and counting (the land mass of San Francisco and Las Vegas combined, with room to spare). Watching the blaze from a seaside rooftop last night was like gazing out at a distant, roiling Mordor.

Two firefighters died. Today, a quick Twitter scan reveals ambient "air-fear," worries over E.T's house, gay porn stars vowing to soldier on while studios scorch; confusion between snow and ash; citizens afraid their cars have developed dandruff overnight, and cigarette smoking as training. The web yields many a moody video of "pyrocumulus" and slow-moving doomclouds, and abundant photosets.

The hundred-year-old Mt. Wilson observatory is a site of huge importance in astronomy history. It's seen its share of blazes. And last night, it was as if the observatory webcam had suddenly plopped down on the surface of the Sun. Communications towers nearby carry signals for every major TV channel in LA, as well as a number of radio frequencies. The site is still at risk.

Some of what I'm following: On Twitter, hashtag #stationfires. @LATimesfires is doing a nice job. And Load this KML in Google Earth for a comprehensive data set. Please share other resources of note in the comments.

Todd "Telstar Logistics" Lappin is wowed by the giant planes we're using to fight the fires. Snip:

Aviation history was made today as a Boeing 747 Supertanker made its debut drop on a live wildfire.

Tanker 979 is a specially modified Evergreen 747 configured to carry 20,500 gallons of retardant, enabling it to lay down a fire line as much as three miles long from an altitude of 300 to 600 feet.

Things are slowing down today, as temps ease and humidity rises. The fire chief just downgraded the Station Fire status from "angry" to "cranky." But containment is still only at 5%, and officials say the fires won't be fully controlled for two more weeks. For now, my advice for fellow LA residents? Don't inhale.

Well, this little viral number didn't take long to become the stuff of screaming Drudge sirens. So, over at CNET, Declan McCullagh wrote about an update to a cybersecurity bill that first circulated this spring. In his interpretation of the bill (which I haven't read in entirety, full disclosure), Declan says the bill gives the White House new power to unplug private-sector computers from the Internet in the case of national emergency. Snip:

[Critics of the earlier bill are] not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet (CNET).

Commenting on this article, ZDNET's Sam Diaz argues that the White House is not equipped to hold the keys (where are these magical keys, btw?). "The argument that the government is ill-equipped and shouldn't be trusted with the such far-reaching power is no joke."

At the Atlantic, Mark Armbinder counters that Skepticism [is] Warranted -- But Nuance Needed.

A few things to keep in mind. One: the president already has the authority to shut down parts of the Internet in emergencies.

Sam sez, "This is a Google map that tracks all the events from issue 1 to 64 of the Walking Dead comic. The comic actually takes place in the real world and this map has markers for everything that has happened and where it happened, complete with references to the comic and images. "

Map (Thanks, Sam!)

"No fish can escape mercury pollution" is the bottom line in a federal study of mercury contamination that tested fish from nearly 300 streams across the United States. Link to AP article.

Over at Dangerous Minds, Richard Metzger says, "I like how the AP writer tries valiantly to put a positive spin on this. It may well be that 100% of all fish in America has some level of mercury contamination, but only one fish in four has dangerously high levels. Dude, we are so screwed..."

Image: "Don't eat an entire fish at once," from mrjoro's CC-licensed Flickr stream.

Aaron sez, "At a chemistry conference, nuclear scientists gave away some hilarious swag, including kitchen table place mats with facts about radiation exposure and playing cards with nuclear weapons trivia."

All is not Sturm und Drang among the WMD crowd. During the talk, with the help of other symposium participants, everyone in attendance received a set of RADACAD playing cards. The back of each card sports a picture of what appears to be a nuclear-explosion-triggered fireball that will grow into a mushroom. The face of each card provides a teaching moment. The four of diamonds, for example, lists eight radioactive isotopes used in industry that are of the greatest concern when it comes to dirty bombs. The joker cards show a cartoon character clad in a hazmat suit as he holds out what appears to be a tray bearing a picture of a nuclear explosion bomb, sort of like an offering of an hors d'oeuvres.

WMD Goodie Bag (Thanks, Aaron!)

Louis Armstrong meets zombies in this machinima clip that sets the brilliant zombie game Left 4 Dead to the "What a Wonderful World."

What a Wonderful L4D (via Wonderland)

"What We Become," Volume 10 of the fantastic and wrenching zombie comic The Walking Dead keeps right on shambling relentlessly toward the total annihilation of the human race. I read it in about 30 minutes, shivered for 10, then read it again. Then shivered some more.

Kirkman, Adlard and Rathburn are masters of pacing, and as the survivors push on towards Washington and the possibility of some explanation, or even salvation, the story never lets up once. This volume focuses on the horrors of war and disaster, and what people become through necessity or weakness, and I can't wait for volume 10 11.

The Walking Dead, Vol. 10: What We Become

Link to Volume 9, Link to Volume 8, Link to Volume 7, Link to Volume 6, Link to Volume 5, Link to Volume 4, Link to Volume 3, Link to Volume 2, Link to Volume 1

Mathematicians at the University of Ottawa, Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad and Robert J. Smith, have published "When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of a Zombie Outbreak!" It's a serious look at the mathematical epidemiology of zombiism, published in "Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress."

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

PDF: When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of a Zombie Outbreak! (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

(Image: Zombies Swarm Apple Store, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Jayel Aheram's photostream)

We covered Doug Fine's radical off-the-grid lifestyle experiment last year on Boing Boing TV -- embed above. He is the author of Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living, and he's still going strong out there on the Funky Butte Ranch. When he's not out in the fields turning the compost heap or feeding chickens, he's working on his next book, which I'm looking forward to reading. Doug has a thought-provoking piece out in this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section, here's a preview:

I have a fiancee and a son to provide for, so I decided to take a hard look at our prospects for survival if our consumer safety nets went away. For now, my green lifestyle choices at my remote 41-acre outpost in the American Southwest are optional. You know, growing lettuce instead of buying Chilean. Using organic cotton diapers instead of buying Pampers. But what if one morning in, say, 2049, I wake up to milk my goats and find out that supplies are no longer streaming in from China and California? What would I do if both box stores and crunchy food co-ops suddenly were no more? In other words, I'm examining my place in a hypothetical post-oil, post-consumer society 40 years in the future.

Now, I'm not rooting for such a thing. Slave labor, forest depletion, climate change and global resource wars aside, globalization has a lot going for it. I love that I can email a musician in Mauritania and ask to download his latest album. And anyway, lots of people still see globalization as the economic model for the foreseeable future. But when I was covering the former Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, every single person I met told me that they'd thought pigs would fly before the Politburo crumbled.

On My Ranch, Ready for the Great American Meltdown (Washington Post)

Designer and BB pal Ehrich Blackhound points us to a GOP infographic about the Democratic health care plan (PDF). Source: Joint Economic Committee, Republican Staff Congressman Kevin Brady, Ranking House Republican Member, via foxnews.com.

"I love how dense and jarring the design is," Ehrich notes, "As if to say "Your donor liver will be lost somewhere under this red arrow!"

But wait! There's always two sides to every pie chart.

"The Democrats have a response!" Ehrich says. "Soothingly designed, as if to say, 'Your new healthcare plan is like a day spa and as fun to play with as your iPhone. Also, it comes in several flavors of sherbet.'" Organizational chart of the House Democrat's health plan: Do not fck with graphic designers (Flickr, Robert Palmer)

Jon Taplin reproduces this jaw-dropping chart: Floyd Norris's scary graph of Durable Goods Production, adding, "We have so hollowed out our industrial plant that the only thing we are now producing is weapons of war." He goes on to quote Toynbee on Rome: "The economy of the Empire was basically a Raubwirtschaft or plunder economy based on looting existing resources rather than producing anything new. The Empire relied on booty from conquered territories... With the cessation of tribute from conquered territories, the full cost of their military machine had to be borne by the citizenry."

Update: The total numbers are better than the percentage changes: The US "remains primarily a civilian economy. Military now takes 8% of all durable goods, up from 3% in 2000."

National Security State

Ars Technica gives us a look into the world of "High Frequency Trading" (HFT), a lightspeed quick automated style of stock-market trading that uses semiautonomous systems to buy and sell assets in a fraction of a second, for a fraction of a cent more than they paid, a billion times, and make real money:

Some categories of "predatory algos" closely monitor the markets in order to sniff out exactly these types of hidden large orders, so that the algo can trade against them. For instance, if a predatory algo detects that someone is trying to hide a large sell order for INTC by trickling it out into the market in small blocks, it might work to bid down the price of INTC just a bit so that it can pick up those blocks at a discount and then sell them for a profit when the share price floats back up to the market's earlier, non-manipulated valuation...

The final animal in the HFT menagerie that I'll point out on this brief tour is the automated market maker (AMM), which is a subtype of what is often called "dark pools," or "dark liquidity." AMMs like Citadel always stand ready to buy and sell large quantities of assets, and they don't publish price quotes to other market participants via exchanges.

To find out what assets a dark pool will either sell or buy and at what price, you first have to ping it. Once you ping the pool with a request to, say, buy a specific asset, the pool will reply with the price that it's willing to sell you that asset for. You can either accept the price and complete the transaction, or turn it down and ping again later to see if the price has moved in your direction.

The Matrix, but with money: the world of high-speed trading (via Futurismic)

A handsome, welcoming new border crossing has had its 21-foot-high yellow "United States" letters scrapped because crazy border people are afraid that the words "United States" will serve as an irresistible temptation for terrorists.

Four years ago, when the federal General Services Administration unveiled its plans for a new border-crossing station here in northeastern New York State, the design was presented as part of the agency's campaign to raise the dismal standards of government architecture. Even many in the famously fractious architectural community celebrated the complex -- particularly its main building, emblazoned with glossy yellow, 21-foot-high letters spelling "United States" -- as a rare project the government could point to with pride...

Yet three weeks ago, less than a month after the station opened, workers began prying the big yellow letters off the building's facade on orders from Customs and Border Protection. The plan is to dismantle the rest of the sign this week...

"There were security concerns," said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. "The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid."

At a Border Crossing, Security Trumps Openness (via Schneier)

Barry sez, "One of the most difficult things you encounter when discussing the bailouts is getting people to understand concepts of enormity that are literally beyond comprehension. 'Trillion' is one of those concepts. This visualization (by Jess Bachman, who does the fabulous Death and Taxes poster), goes along way to making the number more understandable. "

Visualizing One Trillion Dollars (Thanks, Barry!)

Clearly the machine knows something we Californians do not. Boing Boing reader Adam Heitzman sends in this iPhone snapshot and says,

Here's a comical sign of the Econopocalypse. It's a picture of a Chase ATM in Sacramento telling me "Registered warrants issued by the state of California are not accepted."

Registered warrants are IOUs. California is/was something like the 6th largest economy in the world and the bank is saying "cash only, thanks, NEXT!"

And in the state capital, no less. [shakes head with sense of foreboding doom].

Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street is a book that chases down a provocative debate that the author discovered while working for Fortune magazine: the idea that the market is driven by fear, psychological quirks, fads, and other "irrational" factors, and as such, it does not represent a set of prices derived from the decisions of millions of actors, but rather a set of nearly impossible to predict fluctuations that are about as useful as a series of coin-tosses.

This hypothesis is a timely one, given the recent econopocalypse, but readers who (like me, I admit) turn to the book to find a snarky excoriation of the idiocy of the rational market ideologues who got rich while annihilating the economy will not find it here. Instead, what Fox has put together is a thoughtful, often fascinating, always illuminating history of the idea of market rationality, and the fortunes of the economists, bankers, regulators, philosophers and psychologists who've sought to explain the stormy seas of the market (and to get rich while doing it, of course).

If you've followed the behavioral economists and the exciting, weird and difficult-to-generalize conclusions they've reached since the crash (or the last one), Myth is a good grounding in the ideas that behavioral economics reacts against: the notion that a small group of fast-moving, informed investors can keep the market rational by exploiting the idiots and the suckers and the weirdos, taking all their chips and sending them away from the table.

Myth considers "rational" explanations for bubbles and crashes -- the fact that CEO and fund-manager compensation is structured such that a "rational actor" will do things that make the market go blooie -- and also the most pervasive "irrational" economic factor: overconfidence, which seems to be at the root of many, if not all, of the market's oddities.

By the end of the book, I was left with a much clearer understanding of how little I understood: how much of the technical jargon and specialized jargon of finance serves as window-dressing on a bunch of unproven and half-proven ideological assertions, and how little there is in the new "science" of behavioral economics to explain all of it (yet).

The overwhelming conclusion I came to when it was all done was this: if I was starting out at university right now, I'd go into behavioral economics and see what there is to be seen. It's a new territory, rich and barely mapped, and there's plenty to discover there.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street

Wells Fargo is suing itself to clear title on a property in order to foreclose on it; as the first mortgage holder, it must sue all subsequent mortgage holders, including the second mortgage holder...Wells Fargo!

The condo owner's attorney, Dan McKillop, suggested that the reason had to do with paperwork. While a lender could avoid suing itself as a lienholder by just releasing the lien after the foreclosure, that apparently involves an extra step or steps, which end up making it easier and faster for the bank to sue itself. That may be -- I don't pretend to understand this area of law -- but generally it is against the rules to file a complaint that you know cannot succeed (for example, because you can't recover against yourself), even if it may come in handy for some reason. Maybe this is in fact a clever strategy, or maybe, as a professor quoted by FOX Business suggested, "[t]his is just folks cranking out paperwork without conscious thought."

Financial Crisis Comes Full Circle As Bank Sues Itself

The chairman of the virtual bank in EVE Online, a space-trading/piracy game, absconded with billions of virtual credits, swapping them for $5,000 in cash to make a house payment. The embezzlement caused a run on the bank and has rocked the economy of EVE.

The run on the bank has come to about 600 billion ISK, which has been withdrawn. However, we have a very big group of excellent supporters, who have deposited about 105 billion ISK sitting in Sweep to keep us liquid. We are extremely grateful for this. Currently the run seems to be mostly over with only a slightly higher withdrawal rate still, than deposit rate. That's to be expected, and in-line with EBANK's strategy to shrink to a more managable level.

EBANK has always been extremely sound, due to our massive reserves. Our checks and balances have proven themselves to work as a mitigation device and by having the reserves spread out over several directors, the embezzlement was kept to a minimum. However, the run on the bank had the potential to do great damage to EBANK as people frantically made withdrawals to ensure they would not be caught if the bank ran short.

We have also had several offers from very large entities, regarding big loans, should we need to cover any insolvency. Frankly, this has yet to be needed. But we are grateful for the support.

Billions stolen in online robbery

New perspective on EVE Online's latest bank embezzlement (via /.)

Robbo sez, "Talented Toronto writers & filmmakers, Jim Taylor & Cory Laffin, have announced the first Zombie Short Film Festival and are calling for submissions. The festival will be held in Toronto, at the glorious Revue Cinema (in my friendly neighbourhood Parkdale) on October 30th. The criteria for submissions is pretty straight forward: 1) It must be a short film with a maximum running time of 20 minutes; and 2) It must involve zombies. Further details can be found on their web site."

Zombie Short Film Festival: Call For Submissions (Thanks, Robbo!)

(Image: Toothless Zombie, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Ateo Fiel's Flickr stream

The new report from the Deloitte Center for the Edge says that, "return on assets for U.S. companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of 1965 levels,at the same time that we have seen continued, albeit much more modest, improvements in labor productivity." Jon Taplin explains, "any productivity gains from the digital revolution have been more than wiped out by our corporate (as well as personal) addiction to debt. To understand this, it's important to grasp the difference between return on equity (the classic Wall Street measurement) and return on assets...By masking their absolutely dismal performance in the last 40 years in ROA, by taking on more and more debt to juice ROE, both Wall Street and America's corporate elite are engaged in a massive shell game, in which the average investor is the mark."

America's Corporate Shell Game (Jon Taplin)

The Shift Index (Deloitte Center for the Edge)

Britain recently released its "War Book," detailing the national plan for life after a nuclear attack. By all accounts, it's a hair raising document, but I'm damned if I can find a copy on the web, or on the National Archives' site. Can you? Post links in the comments section, please!

The country would have been divided into 12 regions, each governed by cabinet ministers with wide powers, aided by senior military officers, chief constables and judges and based in bunkers. Other senior figures would have retreated to a central government shelter under the Cotswolds.

The plans all assumed that the confrontation would be with the Soviet Union. Among the possible scenarios spelled out in the autumn of 1968 was escalating tension following a Soviet moon landing and troop movements in eastern Europe...

The book apparently formed the basis for regular exercises every two years by senior civil servants, with daily internal briefings, the organisation of national preparedness schemes including the stockpiling of food and building materials for shelters and, as the threat grew more imminent, the removal of art treasures from London to Scotland and the emptying of hospitals of all but the most acutely ill.

David Young, a former Ministry of Defence civil servant who took part in the mock exercises, told the programme: "R-hour would be the final release of nuclear weapons. There may have been an earlier tactical use ... but R-hour was [when] everything that's left goes. That's not an easy decision to participate in. Even though you know it is just an exercise, it makes you think."

Young said ministers were not encouraged to take part in the exercises: "They would be disinclined to play by the rules. Some of them quite liked talking, so you'd get behind time and there would be a fear that if they showed a reluctance to do what the military believed was necessary, that this would weaken deterrence..."

"My favourite measure, the one which always aroused a lot of debate ... was the introduction of censorship for private correspondence. You can imagine that was something that ministers would only agree to right at the very end when it was clear that war was inevitable."

War Book reveals how Britain planned to cope with nuclear attack (via Futurismic)

Barry Ritholz sez,

It is exceedingly difficult to convey exactly how much we are spending o bailouts. Start talking trillions (versus mere billions) and you get puzzled looks from people. Humans have a hard time conceptualizing any number that large. I wanted a graphic way to clearly show how astonishingly ginormous the amounts involved were.

This Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed. It is nothing short of astonishing. In one short year the bailouts managed to spend far in excess of nearly every major one-time expenditure of the USA, including WW2, the moon shot, the New Deal, Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars -- COMBINED. 206 years versus 12 months.

Bailout Costs vs Big Historical Events (Thanks, Barry!)

Two Japanese smugglers were busted on the Italian-Swiss border with a suitcase whose false bottom was stuffed with $134.5 billion in US treasury bonds, including two one billion dollar Kennedy bonds (a denomination used for national currency reserves). Either these guys are the world's dumbest, most ambitious counterfeiters, or they're the biggest currency smugglers ever caught.

It gets better: Italian law says that the penalty for currency smuggling is 40% of the seized cash, and that 40% (US$28 billion) will take a huge bite out of Italy's public debt.

If the certificates were real, for Italy it would be like hitting the jackpot. The fine alone would amount to US$ 38 billion, five times the estimated cost of rebuilding quake-devastated Abruzzi region. It would help Italy's eliminate its public deficit.

If the certificates are fakes the two Japanese nationals could get a very lengthy jail sentence for fraud.

As soon as the seizure was made the US Embassy in Rome was informed. Italian and US secret services were called in to assist the Italian financial police.

Some important international financial newspapers had already reported on the existence of 'funny money' circulating on parallel, i.e. unofficial, financial markets.

US government securities seized from Japanese nationals, not clear whether real or fake (via @stacyhebert)

Why I am I always the last to hear about these things? (thanks, Richard Metzger).

Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz contrasts the American response to its economic crisis with the measures it shoved down the throats of poor countries during their crises, and discusses why rich-world double-standards ("Buy American/European" provisions in bailouts that only discriminate against poor countries) contribute to a global disillusionment in the values that the rich world nominally espouses: democracy, transparency, and so on.

Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures--even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks--and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.

The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?

Many in the developing world still smart from the hectoring they received for so many years: they should adopt American institutions, follow our policies, engage in deregulation, open up their markets to American banks so they could learn "good" banking practices, and (not coincidentally) sell their firms and banks to Americans, especially at fire-sale prices during crises. Yes, Washington said, it will be painful, but in the end you will be better for it. America sent its Treasury secretaries (from both parties) around the planet to spread the word. In the eyes of many throughout the developing world, the revolving door, which allows American financial leaders to move seamlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, gave them even more credibility; these men seemed to combine the power of money and the power of politics. American financial leaders were correct in believing that what was good for America or the world was good for financial markets, but they were incorrect in thinking the converse, that what was good for Wall Street was good for America and the world.

Wall Street's Toxic Message (via Memex 1.1)

Rodney Salomon-Prudo (above), a fisherman from Madeira Beach, Florida, netted a rusty old supersonic AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missile while fishing in the Gulf of Mexico late last month.

The missile was about 8 feet long. Such a catch is a rare occurrence, despite the fact that Air Force fighter jets test fire some 300 missiles each year in the area.

In fact, Florida's share of the Gulf of Mexico is a military test range. And Captain Salomon said he pulled two missiles off the sea floor during his two-week trip.

But he left the other missile behind -- "brand new and still beeping," the captain said -- which perhaps was for the best.

After all, Tampa Bay barely handled the excitement of one missile turning up on its shores Monday, hauled in by a fisherman who had strapped it to his boat for 10 days in rolling seas, prompting a 500-foot evacuation around the Tom Stuart Causeway, a media circus and a military bomb squad's visit.

But it was all for naught. At first authorities on Monday described the air-to-air missile as "live." But Tuesday the Air Force said it was actually "inert," the explosive warhead removed before it was test-fired.

Fisherman laments losing Sidewinder 'souvenir'; Air Force says missile found Monday wasn't armed (Tampabay.com)

Wondering if your government's investment in GM will ever pay off?

It won't.

So $83,000,000,000 is what New GM would have to be worth in order for us to break even on our investment.

But $56,000,000,000 is what GM was worth at its all time peak in 2000.

And it's only worth about $7,300,000,000 now.

0.000000435% (via Kottke)