Orange Orange (category:links)

The New Yorker has a recent writeup on the financial crisis titled “Melting Into Air” with the tagline “Before the financial system went bust, it went postmodern.”

The article draws a surprising (and possibly slightly facetious) parallel between “derivatives,” a type of financial product whose value is “derived” from another transaction of an actual product, and deconstructionism, a literary theory that denies any straightforward interpretation of the written language.

An example of the simplest derivative, the article points out, is a farmer selling the right to buy his harvest later on in the year. Since what he is selling isn’t the harvest itself, but the ability to participate in a transaction for something of tangible value, this “product” he is selling has no intrinsic value, but is instead “derived” from the presumed value of the future harvest.

The farmer example seems to be pretty harmless, since whoever buys the derivative has a pretty clear idea of the risks (maybe the harvest won’t be as big as expected) and of the value (at the very least the buyer will end up owning SOME amount of crop) of the transaction. But you can imagine more complicated derivatives being set up that DON’T have obvious connections to the original good upon which their value is based. It turns out that much of the difficulty of fixing the current mess (and why there is a mess in the first place) is because of how much of the world’s investment dollars is tied up in derivatives:

The trade in derivatives took off, to the extent that the total market in derivative products around the world is counted in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Nobody knows the exact figure, but the notional amount certainly exceeds the total value of all the world’s economic output, roughly sixty-six trillion dollars, by a huge factor—perhaps tenfold.

And all because

finance, like other forms of human behavior, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts—a break with common sense, a turn toward self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn’t be explained in workaday English. In poetry, this moment took place with the publication of “The Waste Land.” In classical music, it was, perhaps, the première of “The Rite of Spring.” Jazz, dance, architecture, painting—all had comparable moments. The moment in finance came in 1973, with the publication of a paper in the Journal of Political Economy titled “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities,” by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes.

This is why Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism theory is strangely appropriate for describing what is happening with derivatives today:

meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always “deferred,” moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an “aporia,” from a Greek term meaning “impasse.” There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.

Looks like reading all those incomprehensible papers in Junior Honors English paid off–now we can sit back in our chairs in the Ivory Tower and relish the literary beauty (literally!) of the chaos that surrounds us. What’s next? Imagist poetry embedded in Sarah Palin’s interviews?

A bit of shameless re-blogging to get me back into the swing of things:

Collins English Dictionary is adding an entry for meh (”an interjection to suggest indifference or boredom”) to next year’s 30th anniversary edition. It was the winner of a campaign launched by Collins seeking public nominations for new words, and it beat out such competition as jargonaut (a fan of jargon), frenemy (an enemy disguised as a friend) and huggles (a hybrid of hugs and snuggles). This follows on the heels of another Collins competition that we discussed last month, where the public was invited to vote for which old, infrequently used words should be saved from deletion.

[Ben Zimmer via Ideas]

Apparently this announcement has caused a certain amount of support and disapproval from the blogosphere, centered around whether onomatopoeias and interjections are worthy of inclusion in dictionaries.

Zimmer, the linguist who wrote the column I linked to above, also describes a bit of the surprising etymology behind “meh”:

An additional problem with meh is that it still feels like a bit of a novelty, since it owes much of its current popularity to online discourse. But meh has a fascinating story to tell. As I learned when I researched the word for a 2006 Language Log post, the onomatopoetic roots of meh, along with its slightly more disapproving sibling feh, go back to Yiddish.

The word was then popularized of the Simpsons and spread “as an all-purpose lukewarm reaction in online communication, particularly in fan forums, chatrooms, and the like.” Now it’s even made its way onto American Idol in noun form as “meh-ness.”

Thank goodness. Meh is probably one of my favorite words, and I fully support the idea of dictionaries tracking innovations in the use of language — even if it’s through transparent publicity stunts. Now I was going to write a little bit on the purpose of dictionaries, but meh, maybe I’ll save that for another day…

From the blog of the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross:

[via The Rest is Noise]

National Geographic has a feature article on light pollution, and the social, environmental, and biological effects that the loss of darkness has exacted on humans and non-humans alike. Among the many unforeseen consequences of light pollution: increased incidence of certain types of cancer, birds dying from disorientation in the urban light-jungle, frogs’ and toads’ circadian rhythms.

The highlight of the report, though, is an incredible photo slideshow, which almost tells the story just by itself. Familiar places are transformed into strange, luminous mazes and the wildest corners of the countryside are shown in the glowing penumbra of far off sodium lamps. Another reason I love night photography.

[via fcphoto]

The Economist does a feature on the emerging technologies of cloud computing. “Cloud computing” is a catch-phrase used to refer to a shift in the way computers are being used, one which is ushered in by services like Google Docs or online services that seem to do the same things that desktop applications once did. Technological shifts have enabled this shift, as “data centres are becoming factories for computing services on an industrial scale; software is increasingly being delivered as an online service; and wireless networks connect more and more devices to such offerings.”

The report is comprehensive and fascinating, with parts on the evolution of data centers, the novel idea of software as a service, the economics and business models emerging in the cloud, etc. There are more articles listed on the right sidebar when you follow any of those links.

Fittingly, the report ends in its last part on the deeper, ethical-political issues that the cloud will force us to face:

It is when computers become virtual machines that things get really tricky. These days IT systems are at the core of many companies—and just like data, these systems can now live in a variety of places. What happens if they start to migrate to another country where power is cheaper or regulation laxer? Similarly, if services are a combination of elements provided in different jurisdictions, who is liable if something goes wrong?

We’ve come a long way since the dawn of Web2.0 and all the gushing (mine included) about the new shape of the Internet. Here’s to hoping that new surprises continue to lie in store.