A fascinating tale of a true hacker ... the mechanical engineering equivalent of a cryptanalyst.

I first came across John Coster-Mullen’s name in January of 2004, after I attended an exhibit by the artist Jim Sanborn (*, *, *, *, *, *, *, *), at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC.

Coster-Mullen’s research project can be construed as a danger to mankind or as a useless antiquarian endeavor. As maddening as his personality can be, it is hard to imagine what America would look like without the small and shrinking number of people who engage in painstaking, firsthand research in order to separate the truth from the body of supposed facts, and who keep the rest of us honest. A corollary of this insight, of course, is that much of what we think we know is wrong.

Atomic John

Dow 4,000. Food shortages. A bubble in Treasury notes.

Fortune spoke to eight of the market's sharpest thinkers and what they had to say about the future is frightening.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Meredith Whitney:

I think the overall economy will be worse than people expect.

Robert Schiller:

Some people who are so inclined might go more into the market here because there's a real chance it will go up a lot. But that's very risky. It could easily fall by half again.

Jim Rogers:

I cannot imagine why anybody would give money to the U.S. government for 30 years for less than a 4% yield. I certainly wouldn't. There are going to be gigantic amounts of bonds coming to the market, and inflation will be coming back.

Bill Gross:

Twelve months of the Obama Nation will not be sufficient to heal the damage of a half-century's excessive leverage.

Sheila Bair:

We need to return to the culture of thrift that my mother and her generation learned the hard way through years of hardship and deprivation.

8 Really, Really Scary Economic Predictions

For the eighth year in a row, we have compiled an alphabetical digest of ideas, from A to Z (almost), that helped make the previous 12 months, for better or worse, what they were.

We've previously covered a few of these ideas here at MemeStreams:

BMW GINA Light Visionary Model revealed

Amid Pan-Canadian outrage, the NHL issued a decree, informally known as the Sean Avery Rule, or the Nitwit Rule: no more doing that, whatever it was.

There are now a growing number of reports of cases of infections caused by gram-negative organisms for which no adequate therapeutic options exist. This return to the preantibiotic era has become a reality in many parts of the world.

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.

The action bias, or the desire to do something rather than nothing when you have just been through a terrible experience, plays a powerful role in our lives.

Some excerpts from the digest:

When presented with men and women to lead a company that's going down the tubes, people pick the woman.

Do these air bags make me look parachute-y?

"Personal techno-garter": When it detects, via a special power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns into the flesh of your leg.

The temptation to appear decisive -- particularly when you're being heavily scrutinized -- can be overwhelming.

It's a silly fad, like leg warmers and parachute pants.

Laziness almost always works.

"We can make a catwalk on Mars! Or on Venus! Or on top of two buildings, like Spider-Man. Whatever!"

Al Gore called on young people to engage in "civil disobedience."

Subjects ignored had a larger appetite for hot coffee and hot soup than did players who'd seen more action.

It was the first-ever forensic dog-poop DNA unit. Naturally, the project faced several hurdles.

The survey showed that Predator crews were suffering through "impaired domestic relationships" -- a problem which might possibly have something to do with the proximity of the Vegas strip.

If the measure sounds desperate, that's because it is.

The jump from 10 to 20 m.p.g. saves more gas than the one from 20 to 40 m.p.g. The move from 10 to 11 m.p.g. can save nearly as much as the leap from 33 to 50 m.p.g. Consumers don't get this.

Virtual kidnappings have become alarmingly commonplace in Mexico.

In many circumstances, privacy advocates get the link between discrimination and the availability of personal information precisely backward.

Duffy's look: street urchin with a stylist ...

"It's something we can engineer," Schiller says.

Rather than just killing off a species, why not see if they can do something useful for us?

The real engineering challenges may not be physics but politics.

Hmm, maybe I should just walk.

The Year In Ideas 2008

Apropos of Ito En:

Recently:

The recent popularity of green tea has resulted in a number of strange iced green tea beverages hitting the market here.

You got anything that doesn’t have green tea in it?

Malcom Gladwell:

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing -- what one researcher calls "withitness." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.

From the archive:

It is ironic: people don't notice that noticing is important!

I was thinking earlier about the idea of "through-lines" in films as a great illustration of how patterns and themes emerge. In fact, in Repo Man, Harry Dean Stanton's character makes a comment about this very phenomenon -- something like, "You're thinking about a plate o' shrimp, and then suddenly someone'll say 'plate o' shrimp' out of the blue ..." And of course, through the whole movie, signs for "plate o' shrimp" are everywhere.

Decius wrote:

What do you think of [Gladwell's] new book? I've considered getting it but I have a horrible track record of not finding time to read books ...

I think it is a lot like his previous books. I bought and read The Tipping Point and Blink, but I haven't bought Outliers. Between his talk at the New Yorker festival and his articles, I feel like I know the gist of the message without bothering to read the whole book. He's been building on these ideas for years now. Still, I might pick up a copy later on; Amazon is offering it for 45% off these days.

For me, not buying the book has almost nothing to do with the prospect of not reading it any time soon. Or, said another way, I can buy a book without feeling the least bit compelled to read it promptly.

Most Likely to Succeed

Peter Schiff:

Tens of millions of people unemployed, inflation spiraling out of control, the government instituting price controls that result in shortages and blackouts and long lines for things.

I think things are going to get very bad.

Recently, Peter Schiff:

We need a serious recession in this country, and the government needs to get out of the way, and let it happen.

Take note:

If today we are shocked by shenanigans like the Enron debacle, insider trading, mutual fund abuses and the prevalence of special interests in politics, we need to get some perspective on our history.

Here's Thoreau:

“Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ‘All aboard!’ when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Many hedge fund managers ... are just picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And sometimes the steamroller accelerates.

Jules Dupuit, via Ross Anderson:

It hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Financial doomsayer Schiff still grim on future

Matt Mathis:

The current Internet fairness paradigm mandates that all protocols have equivalent response to packet loss, such that relatively simple network devices can attain a weak form of fairness by sending uniform signals to all flows. This "TCP-friendly" paradigm has been the policy of the IETF for nearly two decades. Although it was only an informal policy in the beginning, it progressively became more formal beginning with RFC 2001.

However we observe two trends that differ from this policy: an increasing number of environments where applications and other circumstances create situations that are "unfair", and ISPs that are responding to these situation by imposing traffic control in the network itself.

This note explores the question of whether TCP-friendly paradigm is still appropriate for the huge breadth of technology and scale encompassed by today's global Internet. It considers the merits and difficulties of changing IETF policy to embrace these changes by progressively moving the responsibility for capacity allocation from the end-system to the network. Ultimately this policy change might eliminate or redefine the requirement that all protocols be "TCP-Friendly".

This note is intended foster discussion in the community and eventually become input to the IESG and IAB, where it might evolve into a future architecture statement.

Recently:

There’s a profound flaw in the protocol that governs how people share the Internet’s capacity.

Rethinking TCP Friendly

Hendrik Hertzberg:

It wasn’t enough this time. But the time is coming.

From the last century:

You hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.

Freeman Dyson, from the archive (and also the last century):

That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.

It's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale.

Ethics are the art of doing that.

You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

More recently:

"You Westerners have your watches. But we Taliban have time."

Eight Is Enough

He said he wanted to be remembered "as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process."

Officials seem to think urgency to act absolves them from considering the longer-term implications.

I enjoy people most when I'm away from them.

From the archive:

In the 21st century, we "shy away from death," and we tend to think of a good death as a sudden one.

Not so in the 19th century. Dying well meant having time to assess your spiritual state and say goodbye -- which is difficult to do if you're killed in battle.

The people want to know. But at the same time, we don't.

This may be easier for some than others.

For those interested in high political theater, it will be a fascinating time.

It will not be easy.

It should be exciting.

This won't be easy.

"You have to laugh to keep from crying these days," she said as she wiped away tears.

In the long run we are all dead.