Your tax dollars at work

We learned from the Florida Keys tourism council that tar found on beaches in the Florida Keys beaches "do not match the type of oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill."

To determine where the tar in question came from, the council tells us, "tar balls discovered on beaches at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park, Smathers Beach in Key West, Big Pine Key, Fla., and Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas National Park, Fla. were flown by a Coast Guard HU-25 Falcon jet based in Miami to New London, Conn., Tuesday for testing and analysis."

Using a military jet to deliver tar to a lab? Have they never heard of FedEx? Did they absolutely, positively, need those results at the speed of sound?

It seems that ships passing through the busy shipping lanes near the Keys often shed oil. Still not a pleasant thought. But where the tar came from is secondary. Clean the beach first, then figure out who gets the bill.

About the Photo: U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Kelley. The mobile offshore drilling unit Q4000 (near) holds position directly over the damaged Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer, May 18, 2010, as the drillship Discoverer Enterprise burns gas from a tube in the ruptured drill pipe.

Putting on the brakes

The guys at Planet Money interviewed a college professor who goes into detail about how automated market orders led to a self-feeding frenzy. Part of the problem is that when the New York Stock Exchange paused to see what was happening, trades moved to other exchanges where bids were lower.

After meeting with the exchange executives today, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary L. Schapiro is scheduled to testify at a House subcommittee hearing tomorrow about what the industry will do to stop this happening in the future.

SkyNet storms Wall Street

Yesterday's wild market ride -- in which stock prices fell into a "black hole" for a few heart-stopping minutes -- appears to have been caused by "black boxes."

Unlike an aviator's black box, which records what has happened, an investor's black box decides what's going to happen. Algos, or trading algorithms, allow investors to program computers to buy and sell when certain conditions are met. For more on algos, see here and here.

For example, if your box was programmed to sell Proctor & Gamble at $58, that would have been triggered yesterday at about 2:45 p.m. Off go however many shares of P&G you held.

Now imagine that happening across whole mutual funds, many of which are index funds that track the whole Dow Jones or S&P 500 indexes. That's how the whole market moved so fast in the same direction.

Thursday's dive seems to have been triggered by an error, but that error led to a series of computer-generated trades that fed into each other until they reached critical mass. The New York Stock Exchange -- which is responsible for less than a third of stock trades in the country -- halted trading briefly, and that seems to have been enough to stop the collapse before it could devour the entire S&P 500.

Buy orders may also have stopped the free-fall, and I would not be surprised if some of the same boxes that had sell orders at one price also had buy orders at a lower price.

Anyone whose black box sold P&G at $58 at 2:45 p.m. only to buy it back five minutes later at $54 made $6 a share today, when P&G closed at $60.

That math has some conspiracy theorists accusing traders of rigging the market. But I agree with Barry Ritzholtz here: There is no need for panic.

But we do need to keep an eye on those black hole boxes.

How to spot a spoof

"Spoofing" is a trick used by spammers, scammers, and hackers to make an e-mail that came from them look as if it came from somewhere else. We saw this before with the messages purporting to be about a package delivery.

Today I got one purporting to be from Hallmark. There are several red flags:

• It says I received a card, but it doesn't say from whom.
• The subject line starting with "Hey..." is not Hallmark's usual style.
• The "To" line says "undisclosed recipients."
• The subject line is missing a comma after that inappropriate "Hey."

OK, this last one is a copy editor's nitpick. The real clincher is that if you mouse over the "here" link without clicking, a popup shows the link actually directs to a server that's identified only by its IP address and not hallmark.com. It's also set to download a .exe, or executable file.
Since the file is called "Hallmark.exe," the unsuspecting might go so far as to launch it, and install a virus on their computers.
Hallmark offers a few other things to watch for, including these:

• The e-mail will come from the sender's e-mail address, not Hallmark.com
• Hallmark cards are displayed on their Web site, not downloaded.

Spread the word. Hackers will continue to send this garbage as long as there are uninformed people opening it.

Rethinking how we will work in and on space

Wow. The space forum wound up being one of the most engaging such events I think I've ever been to. It's hard to know where to start. Here are some random thoughts:

• As soon as I walked in the room, I spotted Pat Duggins, whom I promptly accosted with a request for him to sign my copy of his book Final Countdown. He's very nice, and has a wealth of knowledge about the space program. I'll give his book a Blatant Plug: It not only gives a detailed overview of the history of the shuttle program, it ties in NASA history at each stage and includes many personal anecdotes to keep things interesting. My favorite is the recollection of adults who were kids on a school field trip to see a shuttle launch on the day Challenger blew up.

• Duggins says the proposed new use of Orion is as "a lifeboat for the Titanic."

• Duggins reminded us of something I had forgotten. In the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey, the space shuttle is operated by PanAm and the space station by Hilton. That's Arthur Clarke anticipating reality for you.

• I overheard someone say Bill Nye was among those at the KSC conference. Nye hasn't updated his blog, so this is unconfirmed. [Update: Nye participated in the human spaceflight breakout session. Sesson leader John Holdren said Nye did such a "fabulous job" describing how the space program can inspire kids, "we're going to enlist him full-time."

• Florida Rep. Ritch Workman believes there is no reason the shuttle cannot be used to close the gap between its current manifest and ... whatever the next new vehicle is. He urges people to contact their representatives in Washington to support this idea.

• The kind of personalities that were appropriate for Mercury ... Apollo ... Shuttle ... are different from the kind of personality that will be suitable for long-range missions. A psychologist interviewed by Duggins for his next book (Trailblazing Mars) said NASA currently looks for Type-A Superman types, but on long-range trips, Clark Kent may be more appropriate.

• The participants agreed on two things. First, what happens in the future will depend on whether or not Congress actually approves the budget. Second, whatever happens, Florida's space industry needs to diversify from launch operations into research, development, and manufacturing.

• When you take notes in Word while recording audio, the keyboard sounds really loud on the playback.

Privatizing the space program

The president didn't say much in his televised remarks that wasn't in the documents released earlier. He did give credit to Rep. Suzanne Kosmas for supporting her constituency, but he pronounced her name "cosmos." Twice.

Once the president had gone and the conference got under way, Norm Augustine gave an overview of his commission's report for those who haven't read it in its 150-page entirety. I have to admit to being among those. I've read parts, but admittedly not all of it. If you want to take a stab at it, you can download a copy here.

Augustine identified the president's plan as the "flexible plan" outlined in his commission's report in Chapter Six, Section Five, Variant 5B. This plan will delegate routine jobs like delivering materials to the space station to commercial carriers while NASA does fun stuff like exploring the asteroid belt. To those who express concern over turning this job over to private industry, he asks whether we prefer to trust the Russians with it, or American companies. It's a valid question.

My major concern with turning spaceflight -- especially manned spaceflight -- over to private industry is the profit motive. Mind you, I'm as big a fan of the free market as anyone, but what we have seen is that the profit motive can lead companies to do crazy things like growing too big too fast and cutting corners on quality and then you're making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

I understand that this plan, by reducing NASA's role in servicing the space station, will have lower operating costs. But NASA must maintain quality oversight, lest we put our crews on rockets with runaway accelerators.

Charles Bolden, at the podium, opened the Conference on the American Space Program for the 21st Century by asking the participants to "go and do good stuff." Behind him is U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson. Photo credit: NASA/Jim Grossmann.

An em-Bolden-ed conference

The concurrent breakout sessions at KSC tomorrow are being described by NASA as a "conference" hosted by Administrator Charles Bolden.

Conference Session Topics:
* Increasing Access to and Utilization of the International Space Station
* Jumpstarting the New Technologies to Take Us Beyond
* Expanding our Reach into the Solar System
* Harnessing Space to Expand Economic Opportunity

The conference will be streamed live at NASA's Web site. Since I can't be on the coast tomorrow, I'll be watching online or looking for a transcript later.

While combing through the Augustine Commission report today, I noticed that the NASA budget got a huge boost, more than 5 percent, for fiscal year 2010. Overall, budget increases for the last 10 years have risen pretty much in line with inflation, 1-3 percent per year. But the FY 2011 is pretty puny by comparison, just a little over one percent. So although the increases sound big when you express them in billions of dollars, NASA's budget is not really getting a huge raise this year. Just a cost of living increase.