A Goring Concern →

Leverage has played a big part in the rally: margin financing for share purchases has increased five-fold over the past year to more than 2 trillion yuan.

One of the scariest sentences I think I've read this year.

See also:

Of seventeen hundred stocks on the Shenzhen Exchange, only four have fallen this year, and more than a hundred have seen their shares rise more than five hundred per cent. The Shenzhen Index as a whole has doubled since January, and is up more than two hundred per cent in the past year.

from the New Yorker.

The Untold Story of ILM, a Titan That Forever Changed Film →

The Exact Moment Big Cities Got Too Expensive for Millennials →

The median rent in Los Angeles has been out of the reach of young people since at least the Carter administration. Chicago, by contrast, was affordable for the typical young worker until 2012 [...]. Most millennials could responsibly budget for rent in Boston as recently as 2004 [...]. San Francisco dipped in and out of unaffordable territory for years, until — after roughly a decade of affordability — rents shot ahead of millennial incomes in 2003; they have continued to outpace salaries ever since.

Since this is the percentage of income young people pay in rent, it's impacted both by lower wages and rising rents.

The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle →

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west [...]. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. [...] One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA's Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, "Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast."

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.

So, not just Seattle, then...

Great article including science, history, and apocalyptic warnings.

The Single Most Important Question to Ask About the Iran Deal →

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, played an absolutely crucial role in motivating the world, and the Obama administration, to oppose Iran's nuclear ambitions. But he has become an impotent player in this drama in part because he seeks a perfect solution to the Iranian challenge. There is no perfect solution.

You can't continue to sanction them and get them to drop nuclear research. Iran will undoubtedly be more powerful that it was before, but without the specter of a nuclear device to support its ambitions in the future.

How SQLite Is Tested →

As of version 3.8.10, the SQLite library consists of approximately 94 thousand lines of C source code. By comparison, the project has 91,515 thousand lines of test code - 971 times as much test code!

The Making of Lemmings →

Lemmings simply offers something different. The sprites with flouncy hair soon become friends, their dedication and helplessness an irresistible pull. The size of the lemmings, that first impulse behind their creation, has the neat effect of making minor hills huge and half-screen gaps cavernous, thus ennobling their acts.

One of the best video games ever made. I still have it on all my computers just to explode some pixels while listening to MIDI classical music from time to time.