It’s a little old by now, but this is an interesting story about how automated news crawling wiped $300m off United Airlines’ market cap. Basically this is what happened:

• Back in 2002 United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy - that obviously made the news
• For some reason an old story became popular on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper website - it got put back onto the front page but without a date
• Because there was no date the Google News crawler picked up the story and put it onto today’s news
• Several other news aggregators picked up the story and it “eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg”
• That triggered automated trading programs to sell-sell-sell
• The selling spree wiped 1.14 billions dollars off of United’s market cap
• During the day stock recovered but ended $300 million down

Crazy stuff.

It’s a little old by now, but this is an interesting story about how automated news crawling wiped $300m off United Airlines’ market cap. Basically this is what happened:

• Back in 2002 United Airlines was on the brink of bunkruptcy - that obviously made the news
• For some reason an old story became popular on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper website - it got put back onto the front page but without a date
• Because there was no date the Google News crawler picked up the story and put it onto today’s news
• Several other news aggregators picked up the story and it “eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg”
• That triggered automated trading programs to sell-sell-sell
• The selling spree wiped 1.14 billions dollars off of United’s market cap
• During the day stock recovered but ended $300 million down

Crazy stuff.

XKCD is a superb webcomic (although pretty geeky) that I follow religiously. I recently came across this one which I found funny.

I thought it was pretty random so I Googled the incident and it turns out that Jimmy Carter was indeed ‘attacked’ by a swimming swamp rabbit in 1979! Read about it in the Wikipedia article: Jimmy Carter Rabbit Incident. There are also links to more detail.

Jimmy Carter stares at the crazed swamp rabbit that he had just fought off. Carter was out fishing alone when the swamp rabbit swam towards him and tried desperately to enter the boat. Mr President was forced to fend it off with an oar. Not sure that I believe this - but it does seem to be legit…

This site shows how common your surname is around the world (actually a quick look at the FAQ reveals that only 22 countries are covered). Anyway, I pumped Pott in and found out that:

• Pott is most common in Germany with 62 people per million (pretty rare)
• In Manitoba, Canada 88 people per million have the surname Pott
• The most common first name for Potts is Lothar!

Pott is most common in Germany although there appear to be quite a few Potts in Canada too

The highest density that I could find was Murphy in Ireland with 17,080 people per million!

Those who thought that only God could create life are in for a nasty surprise. Wired has this article about a team of scientists who are close to creating life from scratch. The scientists are able to build protocells using fatty molecules (for the cell membrane) and inserting bits of nucleic acids containing ’source code’ for replication.

These guys aren’t able to get the cells to replicate properly on their own yet - only certain DNA sequences get replicated. But they are close to creating a new form of life.

Wired has this interesting article showing word clouds of the different speeches at the recent Democratic and Republican conventions. Basically words used most often are largest in word clouds - they make an interesting way of seeing what was spoken about. For instance this is a word cloud for Michelle Obama’s speech about her husband. Predictably the word ‘Barack’ is most common but the words ‘work’, ‘people’ and ‘like’ are common too.

Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention

Check out the article for the other word clouds, below I have listed the speakers and their most common words. Pretty interesting.

• Hillary Clinton: America, going, Obama
• Joe Biden: Barack, Obama, change, John
• Barack Obama: promise, America, McCain
• John McCain: country, Americans, fight
• George W. Bush: John
• Sarah Palin: America, country, McCain