Divorce the 'Asset'

In the past there were always stories of divorcees who fought over the assets. Now they're fighting not to get the assets (with the mortgage included)
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2008/12/ny-times-toxic-homes-and-divorces.html

All of these 'walking away' stories seemed like media exaggeration at first but now they seem more and more legitimate.

Consultants

from the WSJ, describing the depressed holiday season:

... said Mary Delk, a director in the retail practice at consulting firm Deloitte LLP. "Retailers went from 'Ho-ho' to 'Uh-oh' to 'Oh-no.'"

That is some valuable management consulting wisdom right there. It would make a fine and witty conclusion to a powerpoint presentation.

Universal Question Solved by Math

I think a universal question is, how the hell did I (insert yourself here) get so lucky to exist on this perfect planet in the middle of a universe otherwise devoid of life? I believe it's the inability to rationally answer questions like this that push people toward religious superstition.

Answer:

Bayes rule tells us the probability of something (A) given that we know something else happened (B):




For example, I ask what is the probability that I am so lucky to exist on this microscopic paradise (A) given that I know I exist on this rare planet (B).

P("Lucky"|"Know") = P("Lucky" && "Know")/P("Know")

But since everyone who was lucky enough to live on Earth knows they exist,
P("Lucky" && "Know") = P("Know")
=> P("Lucky"|"Know") = P("Know")/P("Know") = 1

So as long as you're conscious to know that you have been blessed to live against all odds, it's a trivial conclusion.

Myths of the Financial Crisis

Here is a very interesting, 3 weeks young paper discussing some myths of the financial crises (click). Some I partially disagree with but overall it shoots down many of the conclusions being drawn by news sources from the Ted spread data etc.

Perfect Competition

The universe is a free market so communism, embedded liberalism, feudalism, oligopoly, etc arise naturally in a free market. They are short term strategies to gain an upper hand. However the overall force which pits ideologies, countries, and species against each other is survival of the fittest, i.e. free market capitalism.

My opinion is partially inspired by a computational psychology lecture- Since the universe is probabilistic and follows certain laws, any thinking organism that makes rational decisions under a criteria not in alignment with the laws of probability is evolutionarily disadvantaged. Such as this man who foolishly agree to a negative-expectation bet.

It's also partially inspired by a post by Bill Rempel.

And by an essay assignment I'm doing on the Mughal dynasty in India.

Video

This is a test (no audio)

Quant Trading Male/Female Ratio 5:1

Today I talked to Ralph Goldsticker, a managing director of research at Mellon Capital Management and he told me that there are about 5 men to 1 woman in the quant industry. So it's a little better than software development but worse than going the pure business route.

Plasma from the Sun

This video of hot plasma "many times the size of Earth" unfurling from the sun is surreal. I'm not a space guy but that's pretty amazing.

Best Places to Launch a Career

Via Businessweek's amazingly accurate ratings:
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/career_launch_2008/index.asp

Try to find the arbitrage opportunities
(i.e. sort by average pay and look for the lowest rank near the top, weight by # of entry level hires)

The only banks with liquidity now are sperm banks

(Seen on Sproul Plaza)

Memory Article

Here's an interesting article on memory: Wired

Woodhead Index and the Iraqui War

Google has provided me another way to search the world's information (that's their mission statement). In this case it's the intelligence of US citizens. Google Insights allows you to see which regions or cities are doing the most searches for any given phrase. See who's doing the most searches for misspelled words and you can pinpoint "woodhead clusters".

The problem is that it ranks by volume of searches so big cities will always dominate (even if they are not woodheads). I control for this by looking for differences between the city rankings for popular search terms and the misspellings. Sadly, "myspace" is apparently the most commonly searched term on Google so that is what I used to indicate "normal" intelligence.

One insightful result is that Washington was one of the few major anomalous cities to stand out in a search of "Iraqui":

vs. "myspace":

Woodheads are a significant factor in urban economic research so I am glad to make my small contribution.

Forbes Writer Gets Creative

I like this title a Forbes writer came up with: Natural Gas: Booming In The Beltway

Forbes = elementary school potty jokes

Berkeley vs. Labor Union

Berkeley has officially lost it's revolutionary spirit:

It looks like they're holding the signs because otherwise you'd think they were just more homeless. My favorite line from the article on UCB's website:

About 300 employees did not report to work, yet it is unknown how many of them
were participating in the strike.

Gotta love unions. From the article it doesn't sound like anybody has noticed their absense because many workers and custodial staff are not striking.

Lose 11 Pounds in 18 Hours Now!

I keep an excel sheet tracking my weight, water percentage, and fat percentage.

Today I didn't eat breakfast or lunch and then went to sleep and eventually got dinner around 7pm. When I finally left to go eat my weight had dropped all the way to 139.6lbs, the lowest I've seen it since I started tracking.

Just last night when I stayed up till 4am creating diagrams for my future entries on maxdama.com, I weighed myself at 151lbs. The scale is very precise so mechanical error could not be above .2lbs.

The Max Dama diet: lose over 10lbs in 18hrs. I hadn't realized weight was so crazily variable.

Obama Supports FISA

On Wednesday the FISA bill was passed with the support of Barack Obama. From the NY Times:

The measure, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, is the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years. It includes a divisive element that Mr. Bush had deemed essential: legal immunity for the phone companies that cooperated in the National Security Agency wiretapping program he approved after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Check out "Obama Statement on FISA" from Feb 12 '08. The following is copied and pasted from his site in case it is deleted or changed:

Obama Statement on FISA
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Printable
Format
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Michael Ortiz, 202 228
5566
WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) today released the following statement on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Earlier today, Senator Obama voted in favor of the Dodd-Feingold amendment to repeal retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies (S. Amdt. 3907). He also supported other amendments to improve the bill, including the Feingold-Webb-Tester amendment to protect Americans from unwarranted surveillance (S. Amdt. 3979), and the Feingold amendment to protect Americans from the bulk collection of communications (S. Amdt. 3912). "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty. There is no reason why telephone companies should be given blanket immunity to cover violations of the rights of the American people - we must reaffirm that no one in this country is above the law. "We can give our intelligence and law enforcement community the powers they need to track down and take out terrorists without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties. That is why I am proud to cosponsor several amendments that protect our privacy while making sure we have the power to track down and take out terrorists. "This Administration continues to use a politics of fear to advance a political agenda. It is time for this politics of fear to end. We are trying to protect the American people, not special interests like the telecommunications industry. We are trying to ensure that we don't sacrifice our liberty in pursuit of security, and it is past time for the Administration to join us in that effort."

What about the "lessor of two evils", libertarian candidate Bob Barr? He doesn't look [politically, not just the mustache] that great either, he supported the Patriot Act, authored the Defense of Marriage Act, and supported the Iraq war. And he has at least one skeleton in his closet.

Please tell me if you think there are good reasons to vote for any candidate.

Totalitarian Olympics

The headlines about Olympic preparations are always interesting (all from the Financial Times):

"Beijing wants dogs off menu during Olympics"

"China cracks down on cars for Olympics"

"China fund managers asked to stay for Games" (to "ensure stock market stability")

"China shoots dead five ‘holy war’ militants" (who "were a pressing threat to next month's Olympic Games")

"Beijing unrepentant over Olympic motto"

"Beijing issues Olympics clapping guide"

And from NY Times: "No Spitting on the Road to Olympic Glory"

They need to chill out. I've heard dog is actually decent- and it's not like foreigners can read the menu anyway.

Terrorism and Berkeley

The prevailing (stifling) sentiment at Berkeley is that terrorism was fabricated by the Bush "regime" and propogated by Fox News to justify oil ambitions. An article in the FT today about a Taliban suicide attack against the Indian embassy in Kabul surprised me because liberal news sources favorably represent terrorists as merely fighting the oil thirst and westernizing influence of the US. Nothing like this is brought up (is anyone even aware?).

Unfortunately the reasoning behind the attack was not given, the closest thing to an explanation was implied in the statement by the Indian Foreign Ministry, "Such acts of terror will not deter us from fulfilling our commitments to the government and people of Afghanistan". Apparently the Taliban just resents any outside influence in Islamic regions.

Neuroscience and AI

Interesting speech on the neurological difference between man and beast (prediction) and its ignored applications to AI by Jeff Hawkin. He's a lucid speaker and I identify with the logic of his reasoning (which is similar to that of a computer scientist).


It reminded me o f an article I read on Thursday in Seed Magazine (while I was waiting for a haircut) about dopamine. The Seed article explains a biological mechanism which just happens to fit perfectly with Hawkin's theory. Unfortunately I can't link the article because it's restricted but it was quite interesting too and I recommend checking it out at Barnes and Noble or somewhere else. Here's the cover (August 08: "A New State of Mind"):


I'm always interested in AI topics and I'd be happy to discuss.

UPDATE: I found a great follow-up to the speech- it's a phone interview of the same man, Jeff Hawkin. It takes some time to get to the meat and potatoes- but it is really cool and has lots of interesting ideas.

Caltech Physicist Interviewed by Idiot

Potentially great article over at LA Times- unfortunately the interviewer is an idiot and seemingly can't understand responses lucidly enough to dig deeper into the topic.

Here are some excerpts:

The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.

The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.

You don't need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.

Can you give me a simple explanation of entropy?

One way of explaining entropy is to say it's the number of ways you can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice the change macroscopically.

If you mix milk into a cup of coffee, the more mixing that occurs, the more disordered the milk molecules become and the more entropy builds.

If all the milk was somehow separated from the coffee, that would be low entropy.

Did the author really not realize the omelet was a "simple explanation of entropy"?

Another:

Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?

Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don't observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.

I'm not saying this is true; I'm saying this is an idea worth thinking about.

You're saying that in some universes there could be a person like you drinking coffee, but out of a blue cup rather than a red one.

I don't think that's what he's saying at all.

Here's the most original and interesting idea that Dr. Carrol brings up in my opinion:

Our experience of time depends upon the growth of entropy. You can't imagine a person looking around and saying, "Time is flowing in the wrong direction," because your sense of time is due to entropy increasing. . . . This feeling that we're moving through time has to do with the fact that as we live, we feed on entropy. . . . Time exists without entropy, but entropy is what gives time its special character.

Entropy gives time its appearance of forward motion?

Yeah, its directionality. The distinction between past and future. If you're floating in outer space, in a spacesuit, there would be no difference between one direction and another. However, nowhere in the universe would you confuse yesterday and tomorrow. That's all because of entropy, and that's the arrow of time.

Unfortunately the author is not able to carry the topic any deeper. Scientific American fortunately goes into more detail. If anyone would like to discuss these ideas further, leave a comment.

Converted from Atheism

Today I read Demianby Herman Hesse- it converted me from atheist to agnostic. The same author wrote Siddhartha, which I didn't care for, after Demian; both fall into a similar genre. Anyway, the plot and characters and circumstances of me reading it had too many uncanny coincidences.


Interesting book.

Dad's Car Hit a Tree

Dad was driving at night after a storm when the car hydroplaned off the road into a tree. He'll be in recovery for quite a while so I might go home at some point during the summer after all. The doctors said he would fully recover.