The Digital Underground Lives On....and The Universe Just Got Bigger

As another week ends, our editors have chosen another selection of stories that have caught their imagination. With a variety of different interests at heart and recommended reading topics that range from the peculiar to the thought-provoking, each editor takes his turn to enlighten us.

Sylvester Majewski kicks off with a tongue-in-cheek article article about how the US elections were 'rigged'...

It Was Rigged!

I do not usually comment on politics. This time, however, I have chosen to do so, just to show how much trading relies on psychology. It is fascinating how the same mechanisms, both psychological and social, work in all areas of our life.

One of the articles I recently found brought me to this realization – we are all prone to be subjective in our verdicts and it is very difficult to sustain clear judgment.

We often feel that when we are losing the whole world is against us. It is especially visible in trading, where all our mistakes and losing trades are very easy to explain and where we cannot accept failure. Failure is always 'unfair'.

Before revealing the subject of the article, let me remind you of Donald Trump’s rhetoric from the election campaign. Since the polls did not favor him, he came up with an explanation as to why he was going to lose elections – because whole thing was "rigged" to favor Hilary Clinton. Easy, right?

While maybe even he believed it, his opponents were laughing. A few weeks later, after Donald Trump won the election, the situation repeated itself, although this time in the opposite direction. I found a series of articles claiming that Trump’s win was rigged and one in particular was from the Rolling Stone online edition. That’s right – "it was rigged… because we did not win".

I do not have to mention that such claims came from Clinton’s supporters. Even funnier is that Trump’s supporters no longer claim that the whole thing was rigged like they used to. Since they won, it has since become fair.

What a surprise. Do you recall your last trade when you were blaiming the unfair market for your loss and not being able to accept it? I do, plenty of them!

The Digital Underground is Still Alive

This week I suggest you read “The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems” by Benj Edwards at The Atlantic.

Like the author, I used to be a part of the once thriving BBS community, before the internet came along, and even operated my own BBS. For anyone with a similar background reading it will be a nostalgia-rich trip down memory lane, like rediscovering an old friend you haven’t met in 20 years.

For anyone that was too young to know the pleasures of the BBS experience, this can serve as a valuable education on the online world before the popular adoption of the world-wide web.

A time when it required programming skills, time and dedication to create a personal digital experience, a sharp contrast to today’s impersonal and unchangeable services of facebook or twitter where the user is just the product.

The Universe Just Got Bigger

People this year have been used to life on a completely different scale: big news, big market moves, big hands – however the biggest development of all could be how truly vast the universe is, or rather how small we are in relation to it.

While the known size or nature of the universe itself is to many either a vast unimaginable construct, or just a meaningless void, a recent article on Astronomy.com touches on how wrong previous estimates really were on the subject.

Recent data and mathematical modeling from the Hubble and other telescopes show the universe is larger by upwards of ten times its previous estimates.

For many, this news fails to move the needle – after all what is infinity multiplied by 10 on one’s calculator? (Spoiler alert: the number is still infinite). What this does suggest however is how large our known, and unknown universe is, which was previously pegged at around 200 billion galaxies.

Unfortunately, this recent revelation does not imply a groundswell of galaxies that can be immediately observed as it depends on our technology being able to effectively view an ocean of stars. Rather, observing the vastness of space is a look back in time, with even our most advanced telescopes unable to register every galaxy.

In more technical terms, galaxies appear to clump together as time goes by, accreting into larger structures whilst also reducing the total number of galaxies present.

By running this rate backward and calculating beyond what scientists can currently observe, researchers have concluded that around 90 percent of the galaxies in the cosmos are too faint and too far away to view with current telescopes.

As such, this is what allowed them to drastically increase the current estimation of the number of observable galaxies.

We conclude another week of stories that our editors are reading. Feel free to share your views in the comment section and any recommendations of your own. We look forward to hearing your opinions!

Check out our previous posts here:

Assange’s Confession…a Sign of Our Times

Brexit Revisited, Tom Hanks and The Decline of NFL

Climate Change, Cyber Attacks and the Return of Communism

Reputation Management…It’s All Rigged

Too Big to Jail and Where the Brexit Bankers Will Go

Death and Taxes…and a $10 Billion Scandal

Multiplanetary Species and Climate Change

The Mass-Text Manhunt and Fixing the Blue Screen of Death

The Red Pill and the Encyclopedia Reader

A Less-Cash Society and a $10 Billion Scandal

Coffee, Genes and All The Rest

Taking a Little Trip and Trading’s Resemblence to Poker

The Perils of Low Interest Rates and Subprime Auto Loans

No Gold Medals for Waste, Corruption….or Smog

No Doubt The Most Brutal Fight Yet

Robots, Cyber Motives and a Trader’s Addiction

An Attractive Commodity and the Pyschology Behind the Far Right

Banking on Pokemon and a Philosophical Victory

A New Breed of Plutocrats and China’s New Weapon

Gold Standard After Brexit and a matter of National Identity

Genetically Edited Humans And Electronic Persons

Computerised Storytelling And Quantitative Easing Doldrums

Eyeing Up This Year’s Biggest Tech IPO And The Search For Quantum Questions

Financial Efficiencies And Inefficiencies

The Bank Robber And The Psychologist

Fly Me To The Moon….And Bremain In The EU

Brexit: Ice-Cream Magic Or An Artistic Defeat

Virtual Reality and the Dark Side of Shaming

Insider Trading and the Dude Driving Istanbul Mad

On Valley Life and Opening Up AI