Spasms of Google's Stock Ticker



  • So... I recognize that stock markets around the world have been doing some strange and unusual things these past few days. Er, weeks. ...Years?

    ...but I have never seen a ticker go back in time, before. For the first time, I guess we can no longer express the stock markets' performances with a mathematical function.



    On a somewhat related note, does anyone else have the issue with the Shockwave ads and charts on the Google Finance page crashing Chrome and Firefox two out of three page loads? It seems only to occur on my XP-Dell (I know, TRWTF, but it's an office computer) and happened long before this particular WTF, but all the Adobe updates in the world don't seem to fix the problem



  • Adobe: TRWTF.



  •  Looks like some kind of foul-up in the graph drawing function.  Did this by chance happen when you were shifting the timeframe in the viewer?



  • @North Bus said:

    On a somewhat related note, does anyone else have the issue with the Shockwave ads and charts on the Google Finance page crashing Chrome and Firefox two out of three page loads?

    Shockwave? They're in Flash.



  • @Spectre said:

    @North Bus said:
    On a somewhat related note, does anyone else have the issue with the Shockwave ads and charts on the Google Finance page crashing Chrome and Firefox two out of three page loads?
    Shockwave? They're in Flash.

    The Flash file extension, "SWF", technically stands for Shockwave Flash (hooray branding). But only people like Short Bus here actually refer to Flash as Shockwave.



  • @Justice said:

    Looks like some kind of foul-up in the graph drawing function.  Did this by chance happen when you were shifting the timeframe in the viewer?
    No, it actually loads this way when I first navigate to the page. I first noticed it a few days ago, and the size of the fouled-up area seems to increase every day. It looks like Google has some bad data on September 16th or 17th that is slowly going to make its way across the charts, wreaking havoc until someone decides to clean up the mess.

    @Spectre said:
    Shockwave? They're in Flash.
    Yeah, I know. What I was trying to say until my copy/paste went awry is that I receive a "Shockwave player plugin" crash error the majority of the time I visit the page, and then any Flash element I have in every open tab dies.

    Though I still remember wrestling with IE6 when Macromedia Flash and Shockwave were different plugins. 'Twas quite the mess.



  • Coincidence? Of course not.



  • More evidence of that the tunnel-dwelling lizard-people Illuminati have access to a time machine, and use it to interfere with our pure and holy human traditions like the stock market. Some brave soul at Google is trying to expose the conspiracy, but by now surely his brain has been sucked out and replaced by a goldfish.



  • @North Bus said:

    Though I still remember wrestling with IE6 when Macromedia Flash and Shockwave were different plugins. 'Twas quite the mess.

    They still are, albeit they are now Adobe [url=http://www.adobe.com/go/EN_US-H-GET-FLASH]Flash[/url] and [url=http://www.adobe.com/go/EN_US-H-GET-SHOCKWAVE]Shockwave[/url].



  • @North Bus said:


    ...but I have never seen a ticker go back in time, before. For the first time, I guess we can no longer express the stock markets' performances with a single-valued mathematical function.

    FTFY!

     



  • Not even time itself is a function in practice. Ever heard of this invention called "Daylights savings time"?



  • @DaveK said:

    @North Bus said:


    ...but I have never seen a ticker go back in time, before. For the first time, I guess we can no longer express the stock markets' performances with a single-valued mathematical function.

    FTFY!

     

     

    "Function" implies "single-valued".  Those things that are more than single-valued are called "relations".

     



  • @da Doctah said:

    "Function" implies "single-valued".  Those things that are more than single-valued are called "relations".

     

    Formally you're right of course. But informally, it's very common to speak of log, roots, powers (with non-integral exponents), arcus functions etc. as multivalent functions defined on the entire plane (minus a couple of exceptional points for some).[1] So emphasising single-valuedness can be appropriate.

     

    [1]Yeah, regarding them properly, they're nice single-valued functions on their Riemann surfaces, but even most complex analysts rarely do that.

     



  • @Ilya Ehrenburg said:

    @da Doctah said:

    "Function" implies "single-valued".  Those things that are more than single-valued are called "relations".

     

    Formally you're right of course.

     

    ?

    Functions are the expression of the entire set of values. How could they be formally single-valued? If they were formally single-valued, you'd just write down that value instead of the function.

    Also, I am not a mathematician.

     

    Ed.
    Ok I went back to basics on this one. We're good, y'all.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Ilya Ehrenburg said:

    @da Doctah said:

    "Function" implies "single-valued".  Those things that are more than single-valued are called "relations".

     

    Formally you're right of course.

     

    ?

    Functions are the expression of the entire set of values.

    A function (or rather, a mapping) is by definition a rule that links every value of some domain set with exactly one value of another set (codomain). Such mapping doesn't need to be representable by any closed expression (if that's what you mean with expression); some can only be defined implicitly (as partial inverse of a function), others as the theoretically existing solution to some certain differential equation. Anyway, the whole point of a mapping is that each element of the domain is mapped to exactly one value of the codomain. Theoretically, relations are sort of generalized mappings that don't have to map every element of the domain, and any one element can be linked to more than one value (of course, "<" and ">" are relations in that sense).

    But of course, the inverse of a mapping is often not a mapping. However, when a mapping is injective, you can limit its codomain (thus, making it bijective) and this new function can be inverted. However, the inverted mapping will not be defined on the codomain of the original mapping, but only on a smaller domain (like logarithm).

    On the other hand, if a function is neither one-to-one nor onto, you have to limit domain and codomain before you can "invert" it. This is done with the arcus functions; but the resulting partial inversions are NOT multi-valued.

    Edit: Meh, didn't see your edit. Sorry.



  • @Ilya Ehrenburg said:

    Formally you're right of course. But informally
    Informally? My younger brother is getting a PhD in number theory. There is no such thing as "informally" at our family gatherings when it comes to math. Guess I've gotten a little bit used to the speak.



  • @North Bus said:

    @Ilya Ehrenburg said:
    Formally you're right of course. But informally
    Informally? My younger brother is getting a PhD in number theory. There is no such thing as "informally" at our family gatherings when it comes to math. Guess I've gotten a little bit used to the speak.
     

    Well, back in my days, mathematicians were great users of informal to sloppy speech where formally correct speech would be cumbersome, as long as they could suppose the audience would understand correctly because they know what's being talked about. They used to be less sloppy when talking to non-mathematicians (but full pedantic mode was rare). Maybe your brother isn't using informal shortcuts at your family gatherings because of the audience. Or he's just the kind of guy to avoid informal speech. Or custom has changed in the last decades.Whatever.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Ilya Ehrenburg said:

    Maybe your brother isn't using informal shortcuts at your family gatherings because of the audience. Or he's just the kind of guy to avoid informal speech. Or custom has changed in the last decades.Whatever.

    My first guess would be that he's just giving his big brother a hard time and showing off.



  • Hey North Bus,
    I have had issues with Shockwave filled pages for a while now, especially with Firefox crashing. I tried updating/re-installing plugins but sometimes that really does not nothing. Did you ever figure out what was happening with those graphs on Google finance?

    Thanks,
    Bojan


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