gun quotes

Lady to guy with open carry: "why do you have a gun? Are you expecting trouble?"
Guy: "No, maam, if I was expecting trouble I would have brought my shotgun."



"I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy"

“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.”

“Well, in the first place an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.” --Robert A. Heinlein, supporting character, Claude Mordan to protagonist,
Hamilton Felix, in “Beyond This Horizon,” copyright 1942, Street Publications

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity" - Sigmund Freud

Clauset (2009) "Power law distributions in empirical data"

He has some nice tables showing real-world data.

Abstract:

Power-law distributions occur in many situations of scientific interest and have significant consequences for our understanding of natural and man-made phenomena. Unfortunately, the detection and characterization of power laws is complicated by the large fluctuations that occur in the tail of the distribution—the part of the distribution representing large but rare events—and by the difficulty of identifying the range over which power-law behavior holds. Commonly used methods for analyzing power-law data, such as least-squares fitting, can produce substantially inaccurate estimates of parameters for power-law distributions, and even in cases where such methods return accurate answers they are still unsatisfactory because they give no indication of whether the data obey a power law at all. Here we present a principled statistical framework for discerning and quantifying power-law behavior in empirical data. Our approach combines maximum-likelihood fitting methods with goodness-of-fit tests based on the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) statistic and likelihood ratios. We evaluate the effectiveness of the approach with tests on synthetic data and give critical comparisons to previous approaches. We also apply the proposed methods to twenty-four real-world data sets from a range of different disciplines, each of which has been conjectured to follow a power-law distribution. In some cases we find these conjectures to be consistent with the data, while in others the power law is ruled out.

time evolving Dirichlet processes

From a follow-up read from "I'll have what she's having", a paper by Bently called "Evolving social influence in large populations".

He presents a number of applications of preferential attachment in sociology. He then presents a model which is essentiallly a Dirichlet process/Chinese restaurant scenario, with the twist that:

a fixed number of people enter at each step (not just one)
Table choice is based on people who have sat at that table in the last m rounds; thus the process has limited memory (and may no longer be exchangeable!!).

He makes analogy to the neurtral drift aspect of evolution, and comments that evolutionary models are inherently dynamic.

His model:
N initial population
n enter the restaurant at each time-step
mu agent chooses a new table
1-mu agent chooses an existing table, with probability proportional to # at the table

So, can I tie this idea into the quasispecies as memory concept?

Jeremy Rifkin-- the third industrial revolution

At the RSA

He begins with the grim picture. 2 events

1. Oil at $147/barrel. This was June, 2011. He calls it the earthquake, the financial collapse several months later was only an aftershock. Our economy is based on oil. Transport, food, energy, clothes, pharmacuticals. And according to the conservative industry estimates, peak oil was in 2006. When oil hits ~150, the economy shuts down. He predicts a continuing 4 year cycle: economy stops, oil price drops, economy re-starts, oil rises until at 150 it shuts everything down again.
   
2. Copenhagen. No agreement on climate change. Yet the median estimate is +3 degrees in the next 50 years, which will radically change weather patterns (each 1 degree change allows the atmosphere to hold 7% more water)
   

Society moves by finding new sources of energy and communication, which then define the social-political realm. First industrial revolution. Water and steam, combined with cheap printing and pervasive public education to create a literate workforce which could function in it. And gave us the top-down, centralized control nation state. Because a nation/state is about as much as can be controlled in a top-down manner. Second i.r. Electricity based communication, oil based energy. Cars and suburbs. These are all elite energy sources. Elite in that they are concentrated and take huge capital investment to make useable. Also need to be militariliy protected. The vision and the reality I will describe it as vision. He claims it is real, today, and Germany is leading the way. First communication: the internet has revolutionized it, just as the printing press did. The key element is decentralization. Anyone can put up a blog. Next comes decentralized engery. Because energy is everywhere. A bit of solar, a bit of wind, a bit of garbage/sewage, a bit of geothermal... He based it on 5 pillars of the third industrial revolution.

1. Renewable, small-scale energy generation (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass).
   
2. Buildings as power plants. Build the power generation into the archetecture.
   
3. Hydrogen storage tech. Hydrogen fuel cells can transform energy much more efficiently than anything else known (add electricty to water, and you get hydrogen + ox. Burn the hydrogen + ox, and you get almost the full amount back as heat).
   
4. Smart power grid. Use off the shelf internet tech (routers etc) to make the power grid a distributed resource
   
5. Electric transport (cars/trucks/trains/shipping).
   

These pillars are now a EU parliament directive.

The cultural shift. Socialism/capitalism is dead. Now the divide is top-down, opaque vs open source, transparent, distributed.

investment idea

Just want to remember it, by no means advising it. With the world slipping into recession, a transportation stock seems like a very risky bet. But this one has some merit, and I may want to look into it more.

Box Ships (NYSE: TEU ) .

The company was spun off from Paragon Shipping (NYSE: PRGN ) back in April via an IPO. After a few vessel acquisitions, Box Ships now operates a fleet of seven containerships that transport goods across the globe. Containerships carry some 90% of the world's dry cargo, and Box's fleet is among the youngest, with an average age of just 39 months.

It focuses on medium-size ships (from sub-Panamax to post-Panamax), since there's a lack of supply in that space coming online in future years. The company's strategy is to sign its ships to medium-length charters in order to capture rising containership rates. Currently, the fleet is chartered out for an average of 30 months, so there's some cash flow stability in the business. And for 2012, the company already has 93% of revenue days secured.

Stormy seas
Charter rates have been rough over the last six months or so, with rates being sliced in half and well below their 10-year average. But what matters for Box is what happens when it comes time to charter two vessels -- two that produce the lowest revenue -- whose contracts expire in August 2012. Management expects rates to pick up in early 2012, as supply comes into more balance with demand.

In fact, conditions look good in the containership market longer term, with demand expected to outstrip supply until at least 2015. That should be good news for shipping rates.

Don't get this market confused with dry bulk shippers, where oversupply has crippled the industry. There, shippers such Dry Ships (Nasdaq: DRYS ) , Diana Shipping (NYSE: DSX ) , and Frontline (NYSE: FRO ) have been hurting for several years, and once-generous dividends have dried up faster than a California raisin in Death Valley. Navios Maritime (NYSE: NM ) is one of the few that has managed to maintain a dividend somewhere close to its payout of a few years ago. In contrast, the containership market looks much stronger.

The dividend
In its most recent quarter, the company earned $0.32 per share, a number that should be fairly stable given its chartered ships. So its dividend of $0.30 per share is high for a normal company, but it's not outrageous for a shipper. Because growth capital expenditure is so high for shippers, it's necessary to raise capital via debt or equity offerings anyway, so it can make sense to pay out all profits to shareholders. The company has promised a $0.30 dividend for the fourth quarter, too.

With the downturn in charter rates, the company is looking for opportunities to acquire other vessels at attractive prices. On the conference call, CEO Michael Bodouroglou promised that Box would look for only accretive acquisitions that could boost the dividend. With the company's moderate leverage (for a shipper) of 52% of net debt/total capitalization, it should be able to issue more debt and not dilute equity holders.

With a contracted fleet of ships, we should have some confidence in the company maintaining its high payout.
An expected yield of 6%-8% would be in line with some of its larger peers such as Costamare and Seaspan, meaning the stock might gain somewhere between 46% and 95% from its current price.

Risks
As with any investment, there are risks to Box. Paragon still owns about 21% of the company from the spinoff IPO, and the CEO owns 18% of Paragon and 11% of Box as well. Bodouroglou is also the CEO of Paragon. Also of concern is that Bodouroglou owns the management company to which Box Ships pays a management fee based on daily charter rates. Yes, it's a cozy relationship that bears some watching to see if management is self-dealing.

Another threat to the company is the fragile world economy. Container shipping has been on a decades-long upswing, but as we saw in 2008-2009, a global economic decline could really hurt the industry. And any type of supply buildout like we've seen among dry bulk shippers would wreak havoc on charter rates.

FDR’s Message to Congress, April 13, 1933.

From the American Presidency Project

To the Congress:

As further and urgently necessary step in the program to promote economic recovery, I ask the Congress for legislation to protect small home owners from foreclosure and to relieve them of a portion of the burden of excessive interest and principal payments incurred during the period of higher values and higher earning power.

Implicit in the legislation which I am suggesting to you is a declaration of national policy. This policy is that the broad interests of the Nation require that special safeguards should be thrown around home ownership as a guarantee of social and economic stability, and that to protect home owners from inequitable enforced liquidation in a time of general distress is a proper concern of the Government.

The legislation I propose follows the general lines of the farm mortgage refinancing bill. The terms are such as to impose the least possible charge upon the National Treasury consistent with the objects sought. It provides machinery through which existing mortgage debts on small homes may be adjusted to a sound basis of values without injustice to investors, at substantially lower interest rates and with provision for postponing both interest and principal payments in cases of extreme need. The resources to be made available through a bond issue to be guaranteed as to interest only by the Treasury, will, it is thought, be sufficient to meet the needs of those to whom other methods of financing are not available. At the same time the plan of settlement will provide a standard which should put an end to present uncertain and chaotic conditions that create fear and despair among both home owners and investors.

Legislation of this character is a subject that demands our most earnest, thoughtful and prompt consideration.

Major market move??

This guy predicts that the market will blow in 2012. But he doesn't know if this means huge gains or huge loss.

So he suggests the following:
You're looking to capture a move from the average all the way out to an extreme
Set up a daily chart overlayed with two sets of Bollinger Bands - one with with a setting of 200, 3 (a 200-day simple moving average with bands 3-standard deviations above and below it) and the other with a setting of 200, 2.3.

On a day when price crosses and closes above the 200-day moving average, buy an ETF which tracks your chosen index higher.

Realize a portion (eg. 10-15%) of your gains each time price pierces the upper Bollinger Band at 2.3 standard deviations. Otherwise,

Sell your entire position if price moves back below the low of the day you bought. Occasionally raise the stop to just below a resistance point (a level to which prices fell, found support, then reversed back up and closed higher than the prior high. Position your stop order just underneath the low of that move.)

investment dashboard

It would be cool to code up something like this:

I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping social behaviour-- Mark Earls

Mark Earls and Alex Bentley at the RSA 2011, promoting their new book.

Central thesis: as social animals, humans are predisposed to copy others.

They map human decision making using a 2-by. The axes are "number of options" and "who/how we copy". Given that this 2-by is the core tennant of their idea, I find it odd that it is damn difficult to find an image of this map.

Of course I did find it, buried in a research paper published by Prof. Bentley ("Quality vs mere popularity: a conceptual map for understanding human behavior", Mind and Society 2011)

Boring figure, x axis on wrong margin, and no data plotted.

The four corners are:

1. NW: classical rational actor. Assumes a discernable (and predictable) difference between the options. Popular choices are high quality/high payout.
2. NE: Copy the leader/expert. Copy if better. He relates it to Watts' 2002 innovators, early adopters, and late majority model.
3. SW: Overwhelming choice with little/no difference between outcomes--275 different types of breakfast cereal??
4. SE: Copy the crowd. Power law distribution of outcomes, with the winner a matter of luck.

Timeline evolution popularity of items in the quadrants:

1. NW: r-curve of adoptation. Rapid growth in popularity of the "better" option.
2. NE: a slightly smoother adoptation curve, since the quality of an item is partially based on how many others have chosen it
3. SW: no trend, distribution is uniformly random
4. SE: Best predictor of popularity is current distribution. He links it to a previous paper of his, "Evolving social influence in large populations" Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2010

Camilla Power points out some serious flaws with the book

[the book is] a random scatter of cases and anecdotes ... [which] makes the reader feel equally random: scatterbrained, as if you've been doing idle searches on Google or browsing Wikipedia all day. The kind of theoretical coherence found in the elegant, simple propositions of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene or Amotz and Avishag Zahavi's The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle is not evident.

and views the model as applying mostly to

low-cost decisions on tree-like algorithms that matter little to the decision-maker

The authors respond to the last criticism by saying that true, that is the corner of the map the book focuses on, but only because that is the kind of data they study. The map should apply to all decisions.

But they miss Ms. Power's point. If indeed they mostly apply their model to the SE corner, then she is right, that is what the model examines. And at this corner, the profound impact of the book applies mostly to marketing people. It does not suggest how to create the large-scale social changes the authors wish it to. To smoke or not smoke is a classic Northern question, as the choices are binary with strongly discernable outcomes.

Emotional compas

Darn, I do not at the moment recall where I clipped this from. My apologies to the originator!

Helping you to navigate emotionally. Plot your mood along the 8 dimensions.

The power of why

Small children love to have things explained to them. Why, Dad? or How does a nuclear aircraft carrier work, Dad?
This need to make sense of the world, or rather, for the world to make sense, is deeply rooted in the human psyche.


In earlier times, the answers might have come in terms of myth and legend. Myth-based models of reality, however, soon run into problems of consistency. Since these are well known even to the tellers of the myth, it is not always easy to convey the explanations with conviction. One resorts to 'God's superior wisdom,' or 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.' These are all variants of the greatest explanation of all time, which is 'fuck it, lets go get a beer.'

The power of explanations is that they give us control, or at least its illusion. Those who can master the explanation are given great status. These are the experts.

One hundred years ago, religion in Western culture faced a crisis. Thanks to the Enlightenment, science and reason now offered explanations which actually worked. Explanations which allowed miracles. Only very few people really understood electricity, but the ability to telegraph a message across a country was understood by all and appreciated by most. Those who could explain electricity, or who could harness its power, became wealthy and were given titles (Lord Kelvin, I'm talking about you). Disease also fell. Pathogenic organisms could be positively identified. Disease was no longer some whim of the gods, but rather an understandable, if not stoppable process.

This put the Church in a serious bind. It cannot surrender all power of explanation to Science without ceasing to exist. It is not just a question of relevance, it is one of survival.

The Bible warned of this. Man was removed from the garden for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. While the Bible also encourages people to use their reason (one has only to look at the great intellectual successes of the Jewish people), we are not to use reason to determine everything. God viciously protects His domain.

And so today we see a rise of religious fundamentalism, coupled with a conflict between religious belief and science. Religion has said "Choose one or the other".

war on drug madness part ???

From the AP:

The United States is facing an epidemic of lethal overdoses from prescription painkillers, which have tripled in the past decade and now account for more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined. (AP)

Mike once commented that the only reason why illicit drugs were not legal was that it is difficult for companies to comercialize them. You can't patent/copyright cocaine. Perscription meds to the rescue!

taxes

From Bloomberg:

The rate at which the 400 U.S. taxpayers with the highest adjusted gross income actually paid federal income taxes --their so-called effective tax rate -- fell to about 18 percent in 2008 from almost 30 percent in 1995, IRS data show. That’s the tip of the iceberg, since much of their wealth never converts into income on a tax return. ... Billionaires who derive the bulk of their wealth from stock appreciation are using strategies that reap hundreds of millions of dollars from those valuable shares in ways the IRS often doesn’t classify as taxable income, securities filings and tax court records show.

Connecting the dots, Loss of morality

In regard to two recent posts, (how the Republicans lost it by replacing political thought with media populatiry and a rant on how the US has degenerated into a police state)

I have not (yet) gone off on the topic of lack of procecution of any bankers for their huge frauds, or the mortgage forclosure without due process, etc.

These are symptomatic of a lack of morality. Which brings us to this quote from the NYT, from "How China can defeat America"
The author, Yan Xuetong, studied ancient Chinese political theory, from the golden age of such theory-- pre Qin China, when China was a collection of small countries fighting for advantage.

All the schools of politcal thought converged on one insight:

The key to international influence was political power, and the central attribute of political power was morally informed leadership.

The author further suggests that China replace money worship with traditional morality.

Yan Xuetong, the author of Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power, is a professor of political science and dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University.

Oh, America! I tried to teach my son something this weekend, that anything worth doing is hard, requires effort. Morality is hard. Running on sound bites, quick black-and-white judgements and litmus tests, that is not morality. Morality requires deep thinking, considering the other side of the question. Validating the other person's perspective. Thinking is HARD

Maybe we don't do it so well because 20 PERCENT OF THE ADULT POPULATION IS ON PRESCRIPTION MIND-ALTERING DRUGS

Police state

I clipped this photo from The Atlantic.

That is pepper spray the cop is using. A chemical weapon. On people exercising their first amendment rights. How can any true American see this and not feel outrage?

As the Atlantic article points out, this is not a rouge cop. Rather, it is the nature of policing in the US. And this is why I say the US has become a police state.

This is not the country my family has lived in, fought for, built up, from the 1600s on both my mother's and father's side. This is not the land of the free and the home of the brave. Where do I see liberty and justice for all?

More people in jail than the evil of Soviet Russia which my grandfather so proudly fought against, as a admiral in our Navy, and most of them in jail for the crime of being poor and minority.

20:1 sentencing disparity between those who plea bargin instead of requiring their guilt to be proven in a court of law, as our Constitution demands it must-- does this create an incentive to plea bargin? you bet it does, especially when a) that is what their public defender tells them is their only option. In fact, some 95% of felony cases are settled with a plea bargin.

What is wrong with the repulicans

By David Frum, a GOP heavyweight thinker.

His thesis is that the party surrendered its leadership to the media.

Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it [incites] followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses.

He also shows how this media creates a fantasy world of false information.

The problem with capitalism (global ??)

Wired magazine has an article on changes in the perfume industry. A number of traditional ingredients have been prohibited as they may cause mild allergy in the occasional individual. Most of these ingredients are of natural origin, i.e. oak musk.

The industry has a self-regulating agency, the IFRA, (it has little to no government regulation), they decided on these restrictions. Their reasoning:

We can't do otherwise. If we can't demonstrate a safe usage level, it's not in our best interest to allow that material to continue to be used in a product.

Since each fragrance is destined to move from perfume to lotion, to soap, and any suggestion that it might not be suitable for all people means that a product might not reach its full global market and the profit that come along with it.

In other words, the point is to make money, not great perfumes. Evil.

Richard Rhode's 12 rules for trading

Clipped from Ritholtz

The rules are simple. Sticking to them is what’s difficult.

note to self: Based on the list, learning to count is also difficult

1. The first and most important rule is – in bull markets, one is supposed to be long. This may sound obvious, but how many of us have sold the first rally in every bull market, saying that the market has moved too far, too fast. I have before, and I suspect I’ll do it again at some point in the future. Thus, we’ve not enjoyed the profits that should have accrued to us for our initial bullish outlook, but have actually lost money while being short. In a bull market, one can only be long or on the sidelines. Remember, not having a position is a position.
2. Buy that which is showing strength – sell that which is showing weakness. The public continues to buy when prices have fallen. The professional buys because prices have rallied. This difference may not sound logical, but buying strength works. The rule of survival is not to “buy low, sell high”, but to “buy higher and sell higher”. Furthermore, when comparing various stocks within a group, buy only the strongest and sell the weakest.
3. When putting on a trade, enter it as if it has the potential to be the biggest trade of the year. Don’t enter a trade until it has been well thought out, a campaign has been devised for adding to the trade, and contingency plans set for exiting the trade.
4. On minor corrections against the major trend, add to trades. In bull markets, add to the trade on minor corrections back into support levels. In bear markets, add on corrections into resistance. Use the 33-50% corrections level of the previous movement or the proper moving average as a first point in which to add.
5. Be patient. If a trade is missed, wait for a correction to occur before putting the trade on.
6. Be patient. Once a trade is put on, allow it time to develop and give it time to create the profits you expected.
7. Be patient. The old adage that “you never go broke taking a profit” is maybe the most worthless piece of advice ever given. Taking small profits is the surest way to ultimate loss I can think of, for small profits are never allowed to develop into enormous profits. The real money in trading is made from the one, two or three large trades that develop each year. You must develop the ability to patiently stay with winning trades to allow them to develop into that sort of trade.
8. Be patient. Once a trade is put on, give it time to work; give it time to insulate itself from random noise; give it time for others to see the merit of what you saw earlier than they.
9. Be impatient. As always, small loses and quick losses are the best losses. It is not the loss of money that is important. Rather, it is the mental capital that is used up when you sit with a losing trade that is important.
10. Never, ever under any condition, add to a losing trade, or “average” into a position. If you are buying, then each new buy price must be higher than the previous buy price. If you are selling, then each new selling price must be lower. This rule is to be adhered to without question.
11. Do more of what is working for you, and less of what’s not. Each day, look at the various positions you are holding, and try to add to the trade that has the most profit while subtracting from that trade that is either unprofitable or is showing the smallest profit. This is the basis of the old adage, “let your profits run.”
12. Don’t trade until the technicals and the fundamentals both agree. This rule makes pure technicians cringe. I don’t care! I will not trade until I am sure that the simple technical rules I follow, and my fundamental analysis, are running in tandem. Then I can act with authority, and with certainty, and patiently sit tight.
13. When sharp losses in equity are experienced, take time off. Close all trades and stop trading for several days. The mind can play games with itself following sharp, quick losses. The urge “to get the money back” is extreme, and should not be given in to.
14. When trading well, trade somewhat larger. We all experience those incredible periods of time when all of our trades are profitable. When that happens, trade aggressively and trade larger. We must make our proverbial “hay” when the sun does shine.
15. When adding to a trade, add only 1/4 to 1/2 as much as currently held. That is, if you are holding 400 shares of a stock, at the next point at which to add, add no more than 100 or 200 shares. That moves the average price of your holdings less than half of the distance moved, thus allowing you to sit through 50% corrections without touching your average price.
16. Think like a guerrilla warrior. We wish to fight on the side of the market that is winning, not wasting our time and capital on futile efforts to gain fame by buying the lows or selling the highs of some market movement. Our duty is to earn profits by fighting alongside the winning forces. If neither side is winning, then we don’t need to fight at all.
17. Markets form their tops in violence; markets form their lows in quiet conditions.
18. The final 10% of the time of a bull run will usually encompass 50% or more of the price movement. Thus, the first 50% of the price movement will take 90% of the time and will require the most backing and filling and will be far more difficult to trade than the last 50%.

First synth

Ok, it is pretty bad, but at least it makes some noise!

stock markets vs private equity

Interesting perspecitve clipped from here.

Brett Arends, Marketwatch

if Amalgamated Widgets is currently trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $50 a share, but under the right management, and with the right strategy, it should really be worth $100 a share, you would expect the public markets to get it there. You would expect stockholders would get the upside at least into the $90 to $100 range. You would not expect, in an “efficient” market, for AW to drift around at $50 or so, maybe for years, before being taken over by a private-equity firm for $60 … and then sold back to the stock market five years later at $120.

Private equity consistently beats the market, by an order of magnitude.

Cognitive Dissidents

New word, thanks to Barry Ritholz

A cognitive dissident is a person who refuses to change their beliefs despite overwhelming evidence that they are wrong.

someone who has a fervent belief based not on evidence or reason or data or logic. Do not waste your time convincing them the earth is not flat; their cognitive facilities simply will not allow them to recognize the world is round.

Brian Eno on bizarre instruments

From the telegraph

Brian Eno talks about technology and music.

Hypothesis. Advances in technology allows new kinds of instruments, which bring about new kinds of music.

example- iron casting allowed stronger piano frames, and thus the creation of the piano forte, or condert grand, in the mid 1800s. The piano forte could hold its own against a full orchestra, and music was changed.

Best cool instrument: Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium (1906). The first truely portable electronic instrument. It weighed 200 tons, and was transported by rail. The only amplifier which had been invented was the telephone receiver.

Thaddeus would pull into town, announce his concert, and plug his instrument into the town's central telephone exchange. To listen, you took your phone off the hook.


And a bit from Brian's bio: He made his great breakthroughs by playing the VCS3, an early synth. Since no-one knew how to play it, no-one could tell him he had bad technique.

And a wonky comment from the forum:

Eno as the first person to create an electronic instrument out of a group of human beings - U2.

-- from the person who claims to have been the one who demo'd the VCS3 to Brian.

Leonard Cohen day

The youtube playlist is my soundtrack.

Highlights
Hallelluja (of course)
A thousand kisses deep
Tower of Song
Avalanche
Who by fire

ok, so the whole thing rocks!

Javier Mas.

11:11 11/11/11

What I am looking at

11:11 11/11/11

What I look like

Luxembourg- McNugget

Today's amazing fact.

Background: The Chicken McNugget (introduced 1979) was the brainchild of Rene Arend, the first Executive Chef at McDonalds.

Amazing fact: Arend is from Luxembourg.

Aaaand I am wondering-- is he related to the Arend of bakery and chocolate glory?

source info

Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains

Daniel Wolpert

My goodness, this guy get carried away. He is in principle right, the brain exists to move the body. This idea had been in serious scientific circulation since at least the 1930s, but each generation seems to forget it. See, for example Rhythms of the Brain by Gyorgy Buzsaki. Or better, give a listen.

Mr. Wolpert's problem is he tries to explain EVERYTHING from this point of view. No, sorry.

I sometimes wish I had not moved away from brain science. The bit which I have yet to see discussed in all of this "the brain is for movement" stuff is the role of the cerebellum. I believe it is critical to just about everything, but most people dismiss it.

Ironic Research

From Micheal Lewis's article on Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow)

The review highlighted a big difference between Micheal and my thinking. Michael is explaining an experiment which illustrated a point of theory, and I am tracking right along with the theory. It is about using a rigged roulette wheel to test the anchoring affect.

Kahneman knows how interesting all of this is. What he doesn’t seem to notice is the natural question that springs into the mind of the lay reader: Who rigs up a wheel of fortune to show how people can be deceived by a number?

So I guess I am not a lay reader!

The summary:
System 1 (fast thinking) is the mental state in which you probably drive a car or buy groceries. It relies heavily on intuition and is amazingly capable of misleading and also of being misled. The slow-thinking System 2 is the mental state that understands how System 1 might be misled and steps in to try to prevent it from happening. The most important quality of System 2 is that it is lazy; the most important quality of System 1 is that it can’t be turned off.


And as Bill James wrote (to Kahnerman, in 1985, quoted in the same article),

Baseball men, living from day to day in the clutch of carefully metered chance occurrences, have developed an entire bestiary of imagined causes to tie together and thus make sense of patterns that are in truth entirely accidental,” James wrote. “They have an entire vocabulary of completely imaginary concepts used to tie together chance groupings. It includes ‘momentum,’ ‘confidence,’ ‘seeing the ball well,’ ‘slumps,’ ‘guts,’ ‘clutch ability,’ being ‘hot’ and ‘cold,’ ‘not being aggressive’ and my all time favorite the ‘intangibles.’ By such concepts, the baseball man gains a feeling of control over a universe that swings him up and down and tosses him from side to side like a yoyo in a high wind.

I commented on this tendency yesterday.

Ageing: Forever young?

Ageing: Forever young?

When a cell ages, it damages its neighbors. So if you kill all the 'old' cells, you reduce this damage and, while you do not extend lifetimes, you do keep fitness until the end of your days, at least if you are a special lab mouse in a particular experiment.

Old cells are those which have reached the Hayflick limit (the upper bound on the number of times a cell can multiply, and is about 60 times in humans).

Rats, can't find my earlier post discussing that mortality is foundational to morality and spirituality. Social obligations and fear of death.

Viking navigation: Sunstruck

Viking navigation

Reporting on an article by Guy Ropars in Proc R Soc, postulating that the magic stone referenced in the sagas, which could point to the sun even on cloudy days, was icelandic spar.

Iceland spar is a form of calcite that splits light into two beams. If the light is polarised, there is only one way to orient the crystal to produce beams of equal intensity. Find this orientation by looking through the crystal at the sky at a time when you can see the sun, mark the sun’s direction on the crystal, and your mark will always point towards the sun when you match the beams from even a tiny patch of blue in an otherwise overcast sky. Dr Ropars’s experiments suggest the method is accurate to within 5°.

Got that? Good, let's get to the boat.

Getting sick

A friend of mine was ill recently. He wrote

I believe that this type of disease, i.e. the common cold and similar afflictions are expressions of weakness and fundamentally psychosomatic...

implying that illness was an expression of moral failure. I should add that this friend is really, really strong. He integrates strength of character, strength of morals, and strength of body.

His opinion on disease is not uncommon. It is an echo of many thousands of years of human thought and tradition. Recall that the germ theory of disease, and even the contagion theory are relatively recent, and were all rather contentious at the time. The best explination, the best way to make sense of apparently random weakening and/or death is ill favor from the gods. This could be because the gods are whimsical, or it could be that one has displeased them, or failed to live up to their standards. Alternately, it could even be that the disease is God's way of bringing his faithful home, i.e. the Koran's statement that he who dies from disease is a martyr, or the tolerance, even embracing, of death from disease while on pilgrimage.

Right. So people are "the explaining animal," always looking for sense and meaning in a world which is in fact dominated by chance. That does not make the explination correct or true. And in this case, it is false false false.

Yes, a healthy body, good diet, fresh air, exercise, regular sex, all of that does contribute to a stronger immune system better able to ward off pathogens. But if this was enough, then European diseases would not have killed 90 FUCKING PERCENT of the population of the Americas. The natives ate only organic food, worked out all the time, didn't breath industrial pollutants, and, ok, so I don't know how often they got laid, but they pretty much lived the way the health gurus tell us we should. And they died in the millions from smallpox, measles, influenza.

We can beat these diseases. In fact, many of them have been beat, or are on their knees. But some are still with us. If we want to get rid of the little bastards, then it helps to put the blame on the right place. And we do want to get rid of them.

A whistleblower you haven't heard

A whistleblower you haven't heard

The guy started whistling around the house at age 4, because his dad whistled. Now he is the world champion. An amazing talent, and a joy to listen to!

Christopher McDougall: Are we born to run?

Christopher McDougall

So you need to ask?

He imagines the origins of humanity as a hunting pack which uses its ability to sweat to run its prey to exhaustion and death. Running thus promotes both compassion and competition, good health, and community spirit.

Now I like to run, and wish I made the time to do more of it. But what I really like is to pick up heavy things. My legs feel soooo goood squatting 100+ kilos. I dream of deadlifting 200 kg, that is going to be so fantastic! Maybe I got too much of the neanderthal gene, who knows.

And why do people look in awe at men who are strong. I mean really strong. Guys who are great runners just don't inspire the same sense of awe in others, not unless you know. Running skill doesn't radiate in the same way.

Still, a talk worth watching

Drug resistance

Rolf Muller (spelling!!) uses bacteria to produce compounds which inhibit/destroy tuburculosis bacteria. But of course resistance develops.

So, an interesting question: The ones producing the compound have resistance, otherwise they would suicide. The resistance which evolves in the target bugs, does it evolve the same mechanism as the producers use?

Is the resistance capacity built in the genome but turned off in the wild type? Or does it develop a 'new' capacity?

Collaborative consumption revisited

Another TED talk on this subject, by a truly aweful speaker. But two good quotes:

Better stuff, easily shared

and

The brand is the voice, the product is the souvineer

with the last quote ties into earlier comments on Marx and fetishism.

The three H's

Great design should have
Head (it should be thoughtful)
Heart (it should have meaning and passion)
Hand (it must be well executed)

Octopus

My favourite marine animal, except that I am fascinated by all the other ones. Clippings come from Deep Intellect, by Sy Montgomery (Orion Magazine)

Octopus intelligence evolved when they abandoned their shell, enabling novel hunting and sheltering strategies.

Contrast with human intelligence, which is supposed to be driven by social needs.

He also offers a great description of the beasts:
"No alien is so startlingly strange. ... an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, squirt ink"

He later mentions that they can see (at least colors) with their skin

Morgan Spurlock: The greatest TED Talk ever sold

Morgan Spurlock

This guy is great fun! The talk is on the making of his movie on product placement/branding-- the one where he had companies pay to have their products placed in a documentary about product placement.

Embrace you fear-- that could be his credo, and the lesson from the film. The people who bought in saw huge returns. The *big name* companies all turned him down. Too risky, not enough "control". I also got the feeling (he shows some of his presentations) that they viewed him with total contempt, as if his very existance was an insult to their sanctity.

Bruce Aylward: How we'll stop polio for good

Bruce Aylward

A great man, with a great quest. We do have the little bastard on the run, and I agree, we MUST finish it off.

Polio took my father's brother at age 16.

Honor Harger: A history of the universe in sound

Honor Harger

Some great clips, if you ever want to make a mix tape "This is the sound of Saturn"...

Mencken quote

To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

from Wikiquote page on
H L Mencken. 1920

Bill Ford: A future beyond traffic gridlock

Bill Ford

Good talk, but he does have a bad vocal tick

Will smart, networked cars save us?

Fords original vision was to give everyone personal mobility. Pre car, most people lived their entire life in a 25 mile radius circle.