Everyone is rightly planning for the worst-case scenario. Across Europe, that worst-case scenario is already playing out.

Marty miscaught his coin and sent it spinning across the room, where it disappeared under the sofa.

An artist who perceives curvatives will also get the same impression when looking at the perspective.

A more bewildering development is the array of complex, computer-assisted trading techniques that, in taking the stock exchanges by storm, have become a major cause of the market's extraordinary peaks and valleys. The most controversial is known as program trading, in which computers, for example, launch massive buy and sell orders.