You can't make this stuff up. Here may be an example of "self-application" in the real world. Nassim Taleb, who has written extensively on "Black Swans" & "fat-tailed distributions", may have himself inadvertently set off last Thursday's "flash crash" in the stock market !! Elsewhere in the article, it talks about high-frequency trading in places like Chicago, Europe, Austin, Kansas City, NJ, Santa Monica, NYC, etc. I can readily believe that the effective communications latencies among some of these locations are far north of 100 msecs, so it would be impossible for these various computers to agree on a price quickly enough to avoid instability. The Wall Street Journal BUSINESS MAY 10, 2010 Did a Big Bet Help Trigger 'Black Swan' Stock Swoon? By SCOTT PATTERSON And TOM LAURICELLA http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704879704575236771699461084.ht... Shortly after 2:15 p.m. Eastern time last Thursday, hedge fund Universa Investments LP placed a big bet in the Chicago options trading pits that stocks would continue their sharp declines. On any other day, this $7.5 million trade for 50,000 options contracts [big enough to pay off $4 billion in June if the S&P index hit 800] might have briefly hurt stock prices, though not caused much of a ripple. But coming on a day when all varieties of financial markets were deeply unsettled, the trade may have played a key role in the stock-market collapse just 20 minutes later. The trade by Universa, a hedge fund advised by Nassim Taleb, author of "Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," led traders on the other side of the transactionÂincluding Barclays Capital, the brokerage arm of British bank Barclays PLCÂto do their own selling to offset some of the risk, according to traders in Chicago. Then, as the market fell, those declines are likely to have forced even more "hedging" sales, creating a tsunami of pressure that spread to nearly all parts of the market. ...