Typical Night in Berkeley

Walking back from the gym I noticed a crowd around an SUV, some peering under it. It looked like a cat was hiding under so the family with the car didn't want to drive away and risk running it over. I asked what it was- it was a loose, possibly feral, Guinea Pig. Since the family was dressed up and I was coming back from the gym and dirty, I volunteered to crawl under and chase it to safety. So I did.

After that I went to an Indian restaurant because I had a $50 gift certificate for the place from a friend. After some fuss, they gave me food and marked the gift certificate down to $42 to account for the meal. Ten minutes into eating, an old Indian man, possibly the manager, came by my table and asked to see the certificate, then confiscated it because they thought it was forged or somehow not authorized.

Hofstadter's Law

Here's a beautiful little quote/law with a double meaning that acts itself out:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.

(hint: it's called lazy evaluation for the non-computer scientists)

Randomized Algorithms: for Job Promotion

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/12/13/random-promotions-and-the-gervais-principle/

Opinion on Fire Trucks

Fire trucks should play something heroic like The Ride of the Valkyries instead of the dreadful wailing noise they do now.

Job Title: "Distressed Trader"

http://www.thirdave.com/ta/people-investment-team.asp

My Plagiarized Autobiography (In Progress)

Demian will constitute most of the chapters covering my early years up to the end of high school. I might also add in some other anecdotes but the writing quality of those parts will be worse.

On the way home

On the BART
The tough-looking gangster-dressed guy in front of me was reading "A Guide for the Ghetto"

Chapter: "How to Hustle and Win"
A crucial, bolded point from the book: "You ain't worth sh*t if your word ain't worth sh*t"

At the bus stop
Two couples making out, both extremely passionately. Big lady dancing nearby starts meandering over and then whispers "they should go get a room"; Me: "no it's ok"

Man nearby the stop, who I found was named Edward Brown, told me a Greek myth, among other things, about a man (don't remember the name) who carried a lamp around during the day looking for just one other real person, and didn't find one. Said Berkeley felt the same way except for me, for listening

The effective dimensionality of human personalities must be high, since odd encounters are so frequent

Good parable and saying

An old Korean saying my roommate told me,

When you laugh, the world laughs with you. When you cry, you cry alone.

A good saying I read in a good book,

Once there was a scorpion who wanted to cross a stream. He asked the frog to take him across on his back. The frog said, "no. you will sting me and I will die." To which the scorpion replied, " if I sting you then I will drown. The frog saw the scorpion's reasoning and agreed to take him across.

Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog, plunging his barb into the frog's back. With the frog's dying breath, he asked the scorpion, why? To which the scorpion relied, "it is my nature." Then the frog died and the scorpion soon drowned.

Investing in Individuals

Here's an interesting thought- http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2009/07/taking-me-inc-p.html

It gave me an idea. Global development to reduce poverty hasn't been taken up by the private sector as much as by the non-profit/government sector. It's just not profitable without there being any barriers to entry (like a patent) after development has taken place. For example if a company built wells for clean water and roads in an undeveloped area, any other company could come and profit from that area, decreasing the ROI for the company that developed the area in the first place. However, if the development company could invest in the individuals in the area, like the article suggests, then it could make development a viable business.

For those who have never really thought about global poverty, if you look up some statistics on clean water availability, diarrhea death rates, and proportion of people living in slums, you will see that it's a huge problem and potentially a huge opportunity.

Visual Proof

http://www.billthelizard.com/2009/07/six-visual-proofs_25.html

Beauty and Compression

from: http://www.springerlink.com/content/v600430w7734235j/ (not me)

I postulate that human or other intelligent agents function or should function as follows. They store all sensory observations as they come—the data is ‘holy.’ At any time, given some agent’s current coding capabilities, part of the data is compressible by a short and hopefully fast program / description / explanation / world model. In the agent’s subjective eyes, such data is more regular and more beautiful than other data [2,3]. It is well-known that knowledge of regularity and repeatability may improve the agent’s ability to plan actions leading to external rewards. In absence of such rewards, however, known beauty is boring. Then interestingness becomes the first derivative of subjective beauty: as the learning agent improves its compression algorithm, formerly apparently random data parts become subjectively more regular and beautiful. Such progress in data compression is measured and maximized by the curiosity drive [1,4,5]: create action sequences that extend the observation history and yield previously unknown / unpredictable but quickly learnable algorithmic regularity. We discuss how all of the above can be naturally implemented on computers, through an extension of passive unsupervised learning to the case of active data selection: we reward a general reinforcement learner (with access to the adaptive compressor) for actions that improve the subjective compressibility of the growing data. An unusually large data compression breakthrough deserves the name discovery. The creativity of artists, dancers, musicians, pure mathematicians can be viewed as a by-product of this principle. Good observer-dependent art deepens the observer’s insights about this world or possible worlds, unveiling previously unknown regularities in compressible data, connecting previously disconnected patterns in an initially surprising way that makes the combination of these patterns subjectively more compressible, and eventually becomes known and less interesting. Several qualitative examples support this hypothesis.

At Borders Bookstore

Interesting time at the Union Square Borders:

Good juxtaposition of books in the reference section: "Amazing Things to do as a Family", "Pessimists Guide to History"

Finding philosophy in the screenplay writing section (am I becoming Californian after all?). Rollo May definition of existentialism: dissonance between belief that universe has a purpose and the lack of purpose in one's own life.
"How to write an unlikable protagonist" - interesting chapter.

Travel section is very crowded, one chubby guy in cheap half-suit stands in front of the US travel section; Idaho

Guy sitting in coffee shop area with a big stack of webprogramming books. Moved on from them, skimming through magazine: "Practical guide to handguns"

At Starbucks

Friday night I'm at Starbucks, writing, around 10pm at night.
Attractive girl approaches, friend waiting hesitantly around the corner.
Offers to give me a free haircut.

Explains that she works at an upscale salon down the street and needs models for practice.
I ask "Are you serious?" "Yes"

Monday I walk past Prada into Vidal Sassoon for a supposedly 100$ haircut.
Not bad.

Ridiculous Stress Test News

From the WA Post:

"The government will not require Bank of America Corp. to raise any new capital as a result of its stress test, although the company will be required to increase its holdings of common equity, the most dependable kind of capital, by about $35 billion"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/06/AR2009050602182.html?wprss=rss_business

"the most dependable kind of capital"- how much less knowledgeable could this article possibly sound?

It makes sense after you read that they are switching the gov's preferred shares to common, but not getting more, however they still seem pretty clueless.

Majority voting is inconsistent & cyclical

Condorcet's voting paradox demonstrates how solid democracy's foundation truly is.

Persons 1,2,3 are voting for candidates A,B,C with the following individual preference lists:

Person1: A>B>C

Person2: B>C>A

Person3: C>A>B

Using a majority voting rule, we can see that A would beat B, since A>B in two out of three peoples' preference lists. Similarly, B>C and C>A. 

But then A>B>C>A which is obviously unreasonable. 

The Dow Knows all

The Daily Show: The Dow knows all

Irrationality

News

The Onion is the only news network telling the truth

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/al_qaeda_also_fed_up_with_ground

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/9_11_conspiracy_theories

Math, with a capital 'M'

from UC Berkeley's job board:

Employer:	Cutler Group LP
Division:	N/A
Title:	Trading Analyst
Qualification:	Qualified applicants must be self-motivated, have a history of superior academic achievement, and possess a strong aptitude in Math. For the Trading Analyst role, special ....

How unimpressive.