links

It strikes me that much of today's blog could be summarised as "gut truth, simple message, shout, get cracking".

Anyway, I found this ironic:

Our financial markets have become a largely automated adaptive dynamical system, with feedback. Furthermore, a dynamical adaptive system with feedback is challenging ordinarily, but this one is also strategic. A flight controller is dynamical, but not strategic. Add an adversarial environment, and there’s no science I’m aware of that’s up to the task of understanding the potential implications of that system.

Hmm, someone could do with a copy of Red Plenty?

Also, this.

“Far more people are investigated, examined and spoken with than actually end up being hospitalized,” says Robert T.M. Phillips, a Maryland-based forensic psychiatrist who worked with the Secret Service for 15 years to assess people who threatened the president.

Sometimes the Person of Concern is referred for mental health services. Other times the Secret Service agents themselves continue to engage the person with frequent visits and calls.

Fein tells of one letter he read, written by a Person of Concern to the Secret Service agent charged with preventing him from harming a government figure. The letter was addressed: “To Agent Smith, my only friend in the whole world.”