Nano Seconds

With an ever increasing rate of acceleration, man's ability to measure and engineer is outpacing man's ability to perceive. We can contemplate and design and execute machinery which makes decisions and processes information far faster than we are able to perceive with our senses of sight, touch, hearing and even taste.

Recently it was disclosed in an article in the Financial Times that financial programmers were contemplating how to profit from an increase in the processing speed of the computers which perform automatic trades in securities. That increase is measured as 400 nanoseconds. I think that means 400/1000000th of a second. There is a variable in all financial trading related to the ever decreasing value of the dollar due to the time value of money. It is called the Theta factor and is an important element of options trading. Every second that passes imposes inflation, risk and interest costs (and I suppose all kinds of other costs about which I am unaware) on the value of a dollar. If you can trade fast enough, before everyone else catches the change, then that intermediation will make you a gain over what other traders can achieve. Hence the new programming gives the 400 nanosecond advantage to those those control it. Wow~!

If our dollar loses value in microscopic time increments which we cannot perceive, how much greater is the loss if we can perceive it? Last week there was an auction by the U.S. Treasury of $30 bln of 3 Year Treasuries. A significant portion of that auction's sale was purchased not by the usual brokers who then make a living distributing those securities to individuals and companies who want them, but by some individual unknown source which gobbled up about $ 7 bln of the $30 bln auctioned. Now I can't count that high (my grandson can if you give him enough time) but that seems like an awfully large amount to be privately bid. That kept the interest rates low, held some of the dwindling strength of the dollar and no one can find out who spent the money that way. I fear that it was the Federal Reserve Bank or China.

On a more interesting note but still in the nano world, Kodak, remember them they used to be America's pride - the leading photographic company in the world, filed suit against RIMM and Apple for alleged infringement of Kodak's patents in digital image processing. Amazing that there is anyone left at that decimated company who actually understands the patents they own. Also remarkable is that there are enough different ways to accomplish the same end product - video and images on your phone - that these companies can each manufacture and sell rival products that work.

When will our phone just be built into a chip that is implanted at birth? In the scheme of things, it will probably seem like it happened in nanoseconds. Sphere: Related Content