opinion

This morning I was looking at the book Mechatronic Reliability by Wei Yang.  The forword I wrote for the book brought back memories of days he and I spent in Santa Barbara and Princeton.  The text of the forword follows.

Recent events about the financial crisis and generally spread turmoils on Economics and Financial Environments  lead me to these conclusions.

Critical Speed:  informations, a key issue on finance, reached a critical speed. Maybe this is the "first" critical speed of the system. Speed of informations has reached the same order of magnitude of people's judgement (executives and investors more than others) so there's a sort of over-reaction about actual events.

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Most of you have heard about the commissioning of the Large Hadron Colider (LHC) by CERN and then the explosion of Helium followed by a postponement of operation until spring next year.  One of the worries some people had was that a mini black hole would be created by the collsions.  Also, the anthropic principle in one of its forms suggests that every possible universe exists but we see only our universe because it's the one in which intelligent observers exist.

I've mostly had quite helpful responses from iMechanica participants whenever I've asked questions on this forum.  However, I've noticed that questions from several posters have gone unanswered.  I feel that there are two main reasons for that lack of response:

1) The questioner has not provided an adequate details by which they can be identified.  I generally don't like responding to a question posed by someone called xyz1983.