not all things that swim are bacteria

blah blah blah

2011-03-27T06:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't written anything here for a while for several reasons. And I probably won't write anything here again.

I have posted 2 things in the last 2 days at wgold.posterous.com. I think that will be a superior situation for almost all the reasons I don't post anything here anymore.

Hans Rosling and Data

2010-11-30T18:41:00.000-08:00

Update

2010-11-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

I live and work in Stamford, CT now.

Seems like a decent place with no shortage of people using the words "amenities" and "calibrate".

We'll see how it goes.

A list I made

2010-09-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

Ever since May 31st 2008 I've been poor. I've been poor in Troy and poor in Trinidad. I've been both happy and unhappy being poor in both locations and the one thing I've learned from it all is that I really want to be rich. And stay rich.

"One day I'll be rich and never have to put up with this shit again". I've said this to myself on numerous occasions in the recent past. Probably too much. So I've decided that I should make a list of things to help me define what exactly I mean by rich. A list that will let me know when my desires are getting out of hand: a list to which I can hold myself.

The first goal I set myself was to determine the number of items on the list before I started making it. To do otherwise would just be one small step from giving myself the freedom to append to the list at my own convenience and that would defeat the purpose of having the list. A disproportionate amount of lists have 10 items and I didn't see any particularly strong reason to buck this convention.

Anyhow: I hope to never complain, aloud or to myself, about not having enough money as long as I can afford all the items on the following list.

1. being well-fed whenever I feel like being well-fed
2. not having to worry about where I'm going to get money to pay for my primary residence
3. hassle-free transportation in my day-to-day activities
4. a comfortable mattress
5. appropriate footwear for any sport or recreational activity that I'm participating in regularly at the time
6. a comfortable chair
7. a nice computer monitor (as judged by the standards of the day)
8. regular doctor's appointments
9. nice bookcases that actually hold all of my books
10. season tickets for a professional sports team

(Despite the use of the first-person singular in the wording of these items, I would also like to extend these things to any future members of my household.)

Goodbye Arrow

2010-09-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

The composer and original singer of the biggest hit ever in the history of the soca music genre died this morning.

Every time I come across soca from the early 80s I'm astounded by the length of the tracks. Routinely in the vicinity of 7 minutes.

Caterpillar

2010-08-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

Last week several of the trees in my yard were covered in caterpillars. Today I only saw one.

Comments and Spam

2010-08-29T10:44:00.001-07:00

Previously I used to get a notification email every time someone left a comment on this blog. Over time a higher and higher fraction of the comments were spam.

So a few weeks ago I changed the settings to enable comment moderation. Only problem was that I don't get notified that comments are submitted. I have to go check for comments periodically and then approve the non-spam ones. After non-spam comments are approved they email me to notify me that a comment has been posted to a blog i.e. blogger instantaneously reminds me that I just approved a comment.

In any case I think I've found the solution I needed all along: word verification. In fact the root of my confusion lay in the fact that I just kinda assumed that an entity posting to my blog would be required to do the word verification exercise that I seem to have to do to post on anyone else's blog. Apparently that feature was disabled for my blog and I had no clue because I'd never posted to this blog as a non-admin.

I think it's straight now.

Miss Universe

2010-08-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

It's strange for me to be living somewhere where the Miss Universe contestant is in the newspaper for weeks leading up to the pageant. Or where more people than not seemed to watch the show last night.

Beauty pageants are stupid. They're like dog shows with really attractive women instead of dogs. And the idea that the fact that the contestants have to answer some sort of question makes the whole thing less stupid is, well, also stupid.

According to the internet, the winning final question answer, in response to a question about unsupervised internet usage, (provided by Miss Mexico via translator) was:

I do believe that Internet is an indispensable, necessary tool for the present time. We must be sure to teach them the values that we learned as a family.

Not exactly high discourse.

Whatever. That Guatemalan chick is pretty hot.

Flood 1 - 0 Railing

2010-08-15T07:13:00.001-07:00

footbridge over the Cipero after the recent flooding.

Parrots

2010-08-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

Equilibria

2010-07-31T11:11:00.000-07:00

T&T has two cellphone services: Bmobile and Digicel. On my return my Dad gave me a pre-paid Bmobile phone that I guess had previously been used by any relatives who happened to be visiting at the time. (The large number of people in my extended family living abroad meaning that at several subsets of

Anyhow, it was a good arrangement. I'd buy a $20 card and put credit on my phone as often as necessary. If I wanted to call someone I'd push the relevant numbers in the relevant order and wait for the sound effects to indicate that the person's phone was ringing.

Somehow, primarily because I hardly ever talk on the phone, I managed to not realise out how expensive it was for Bmobile customers to call Digicel customers. It's pretty shocking and obviously way out of sync with what it must actually cost my service provider. I asked my sister and she said "Everyone has two phones". Then I think I remembered reading that T&T has a mobile penetration rate of 1.6, i.e. there are 1.6 active cellphones per person. I even remembered that when I first returned I laughed at how popular dual-SIM phones were.

People don't choose cellphone providers: they get a plan from each provider. Apparently it's comparably expensive for Digicel customers to call Bmobile customers. That didn't make any sense to me at all. It seemed to me that the natural thing to happen would be that one of the companies would be something like this:

Bmobile/Digicel: "Oh hey guys, we'll let you call people on the other network for a cost that's not ridiculous."

People: "Wow. that's a great idea. We're sticking with you."

But I guess that doesn't happen because the companies realise that if they did that the other company would respond almost instantaneously with the net effect being that customers get reasonable prices and the companies lose, what I can only imagine are, unreasonable profit margins.

So now I'm curious as to why we seem to have fallen into this equilibrium as opposed to the one in the US market where the person on the other side of the call has no effect on the rate one pays per minute. Is it just that there's more than 2 competitors? That's what it appears to be.

So simple

2010-07-21T04:34:00.000-07:00

The solution to the problem of having too many things to do is to do one of those things.

Adventures in Teaching

2010-07-17T11:52:00.001-07:00

When I first entered grad school, the department furnished the incoming students with two books that I still own today: How to Teach Mathematics by Steven G. Krantz and Teaching First: A Guide for New Mathematicians by Thomas W. Rishel.
At the time, I had had some experience as a Calculus tutor as part of a service that my undergrad institution provided as well as in informal tutoring situations. Anyhow, I read those two books and they both said a lot of things that made sense. Things that made so much sense that I questioned the value of having them written down: they seemed to be pretty obvious. In fact, if I'd had no teaching experience at all I would have thought these things were obvious because I'd been taking math classes from math teachers for 18 years prior to that.

Maybe it's because the TA seminar as conducted by our head TA focused on the book by Krantz more that I've always been more likely to re-read that one instead of the other. Over the years I'd generally pick it up every now and then and re-read a few pages or a chapter at a time.

As my teaching experience accumulated and became more varied in nature the insights provided would seem to be even more obvious. Yet strangely the more obvious they became the more useful it seemed to have them written down. I became more and more impressed by how comprehensive the book was in tackling the subject of teaching Mathematics. The anecdotal situations in the book aren't just things that happen to teachers but they're things that one can prepare for. Perhaps more importantly, you can actively get better at dealing with these situations.

Anyhow, so there are some appendices to the Krantz book that are guest essays by highly-regarded teachers. These appendices are probably the only parts of the book that I had never gotten around to reading at some point. Last night, I decided to read one and ended up reading one entitled Personal Thoughts on Mature Teaching by David M. Bressoud.

One paragraph read:

I believe that this moment comes to most of us. It might happen when talking with a student in your office. It might be the result of asking something on a test that goes beyond formulaic responses and requires students to draw on their knowledge to synthesize and answer to a question that is not quite like any they have seen before. It might arrive in a written report in which, for the first time, they are required not just to give an answer - which you know they can find - but to explain how they got that answer . Where you thought there was understanding, you discover confusion. It seems that they have learned nothing and that your only recourse is to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

I read that and I laughed. A laugh of recognition. Every teaching situation I'd been in had involved a situation like that and every time I had been taken by surprise. Then I thought about the fact that my advisor probably had several moments like that just in his interaction with me and my ability to half-ass my preparation for any given meeting. Or maybe quarter-assing is the verb I'm looking for here. The point is I thought about that and I laughed again. It's funny cause it's true.

Then Bressoud continues his very well written article and makes several good points. I put the book down thinking I'd gained something.

Then I went to grade the exams that I had given on Wednesday night that I was going to return to the students this morning (Saturday). And all of a sudden it wasn't funny anymore. Once again I had failed to see it coming.

My dog is old

2010-06-30T19:04:00.000-07:00

My family has had Snowy for about 15 or 16 years. He's almost blind, almost deaf and nowhere as able-bodied as he used to be. I wonder if he has any sense of an impending death. We've never had another dog since we've had him. I have no idea what his life experience is telling him is going to come at the end of all his infirmity.

Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Prime Minister-elect

2010-05-24T21:42:00.001-07:00

I don't know how many countries have a Bryan Adams quoting Prime Minister but in a few hours there'll be at least one. That's just the way we roll.

Voted

2010-05-24T08:40:00.001-07:00

An oldie but a goody

2010-05-10T20:23:00.000-07:00

A couple things

2010-04-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

1. I'm learning Python. I'm truly learning it. I'm learning it well enough to realise that I never really learned Perl or Java. Now, I've never considered myself a Perl or Java programmer but at various points in time I was able to put together some relatively significant apps using these languages. Apps that I actually got paid for.

There's a big difference between learning a language from the ground up and figuring out how to solve the problem(s) at hand. I was reading one opinion that programmers should strive to learn one new language per year and I can definitely see why. I could always see why but now I really understand. I have a much better appreciation of the trade-offs involved in language design as well as how the languages at your disposal affect the way you can frame/approach problems.

2. Law & Order: SVU is starting to really sicken me. Unlike the original Law & Order in which the legal system is the star, SVU is increasingly driven by the salacious story lines which are getting increasingly implausible. My biggest problem however is the dialogue: too much of it is obviously in the script for the purpose of educating the viewer of some piece of information and not very realistic.

Whatever, I'm back to watching almost no tv anyway. Or maybe I should say that I'm almost back to watching no tv.

Adventures in looping

2010-04-08T07:33:00.000-07:00

In 2009, I undertook a quest to learn more about Economics which primarily consisted of reading 10 recommended books (all of which I managed to read while writing reviews of about half I think), following a few appropriately-themed blogs of varying ideologies, re-reading large swaths of my undergrad econ text, etc etc etc.

This year my goal is to become a really good programmer. My strategy basically consists of actually writing code every day. I've become newly acquainted with some languages and re-acquainted with others.

Recently, RTL told me about Project Euler and I've been doing some problems that they have listed there. I've decided to do the problems primarily in Python because it's a language that I had no knowledge of until the last few weeks. For two of the problems I used MATLAB and for two others I solved them with pencil and paper. I've done 32 of the 286 problems thus far (spread over 6 sessions).

The general trend is for the problems to get harder and in many cases the solutions to a particular problem provides insight for others that come later. I was doing them in order but then it occurred to me that maybe I should save some of the "easier" ones for a dry spell.

I really want to get better at counting. By that I mean generating permutations/combinations according to an order dictated by the problem description. I don't think I'm particularly bad at it but I think my skills are definitely sub-par for a wannabe elite programmer. I want to really reduce the debugging time to conceptualization time ratio.

For one particular problem the algorithm I came up with involved generating all the permutations of a string that met the criterion that both halves were in ascending order. It's the kinda task that one can do systematically with pencil and paper trivially but always seems to involve an inordinate amount of debugging when code is involved. And all of that was supposed to happen inside an outer loop in which the length of the string was being incremented. I know that the whole point of the problem is to work on that skill so I'm appreciative of the opportunity for practice. I'm still unhappy with the inelegance of my current code. Maybe tonight I'll get it respectable.

An even number of watches

2010-03-30T12:34:00.000-07:00

I can't believe that I've never noticed this but a few pages into a google image search I've come to the conclusion that Diego Maradona never wears exactly one watch.

There are many pics of him with no watch. A large percentage of those, unsurprisingly, are taken in-game.

I was more impressed by the great consistency with which he wears two watches. As far as I can tell they're always matching watches at that.

World Records

2010-03-19T10:28:00.000-07:00

I like the house of cards.

RIP Iggy

2010-02-28T14:32:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago my cousin's dogs caught this iguana. I'm not sure if I need to give my dad a modeling credit for these photos.

Crinkly Fingers Test

2010-02-23T03:55:00.000-08:00

There's a high correlation between the crinkliness of my fingers and the amount of enjoyment I derived from being in Tobago over the last few days.

Dimanche Gras

2010-02-14T20:05:00.000-08:00

Dimanche Gras just finished.

Congrats to the winners.

Queen of Carnival: Rosemary Jagessar
King of Carnival: Curtis Eustace
Calypso Monarch: Kurt Allen

J'ouvert in a few.

Palance

2010-02-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that I'm not quite as enamored with the song as everyone else in Trinidad but I do love the video.

Palance - JW and Blaze from ForceFed Blog on Vimeo.

San Fernando's best sign?

2010-01-29T05:36:00.000-08:00

Cutting coconut

2010-01-17T10:02:00.000-08:00

I always wanted to have coconut-cutting skills. I was always impressed by good coconut cutters. Most of the time I was consuming coconuts however my dad was always doing the cutting. There were a few occasions when I cut it partially, to expose the white soft part, then drilled a hole.

I mean, anyone can cut a coconut but not many people can do it really well: quickly and cleanly. Anyhow, yesterday I cut one. It wasn't expertly done but I think I did relatively well in the time metric. There's all the safety issues involved with doing it really quickly. Making the hole to drink from wasn't too bad although some of my chops could have been cleaner. Splitting it open to get the jelly I was a little bit more apprehensive about.

Executive Presidency for T&T?

2009-12-09T06:18:00.000-08:00

When Trinidad and Tobago was about to become an independent country the brain trust decided that for the most part our government would be based on that of the UK. Consequently, most of our offices/institutions are analogues of some in the UK: The UK has a queen/king, we have a President (formerly a Governor General); the UK has a Prime Minister (PM), so do we; the UK has a House of Lords, we have a House of Parliament known as the Upper House or Senate; the UK has a lower house, the House of Commons, and we have one too colloquially referred to as 'Parliament'.

So the citizens vote for their member of the Lower House. The Constitution mandates that the President appoint the member of the Lower House who commands the support of most of his/her peers as the PM. The member of the lower house who commands the support of the most members who aren't loyal to the Prime Minister gets to be the Leader of the Opposition.

The President then appoints 15 members of the Upper House on the "advice" of the Prime Minister, 6 on the "advice" of the Leader of the Opposition and 9 of his/her own choosing who are supposed to represent the interests of the general public. (So basically all of the independent senators need to side with the Opposition to equal the power of the government senators).

The cabinet are chosen by the PM and sworn in by the President under the constraint that they be members of one house of Parliament or the other. Which means that some of the government's allotment of Senators in the Upper House is usually allocated for those the PM wants to serve in cabinet who don't have seats in the Lower House.

The President is the head of state and "reigns but does not rule" (that's the whole analogous to the queen thing). How does the president get chosen? well every so often the old president's term is up and the Electoral College votes on the new President who may or may not be the old president. The Electoral College consisting of the combined membership of both houses of Parliament. As far as I can remember the election of the President has been contentious on exactly one occasion and for the most part is a formality in which an agreeable already distinguished citizen is appointed.

So I have a few problems with this system
1) Can we really say that we have 3 separate branches of government if the Cabinet is necessarily selected from amongst the dominant group in the legislature?

2) Regardless of how well these elected officials may conduct themselves in these roles shouldn't the citizenry have the option of decoupling their choices of parliamentary representative and Prime Minister?

3) I am pretty sure it doesn't work. Things don't malfunction on a procedural level but it is my opinion that governments have been blatantly under-performing on a long-term basis. Yet we don't see any viable new options. To draw a somewhat economically-minded analogy we have two businesses (the PNM and UNC) competing to provide a service to the consumer (the electorate). The consumer has switched from one product to the other and then back again all while remaining disappointed. Yet there doesn't seem to be another viable option to be found. This has to be a failure of market design.

So the current PM and Leader of the Opposition (who is also the most recent ex-PM) have both expressed their support for an executive Presidency in recent times. I agree with the idea to the extent that I think that we don't need a ceremonial head of state and also that the head of the executive, and the cabinet as a whole for that matter, should not be members of the Legislature. However I'm not entirely clear on how the actual change is to be implemented. From what I can parse from the radio and newspapers I fear that the intent is to just roll the current President's powers into that of the Prime Minister's which I suspect would just make the situation worse.

Also, we need term limits.

picture

2009-12-05T14:07:00.000-08:00

a few other selections from National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009

Left vs Right I

2009-12-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

from wikipedia:

countries with right-hand traffic countries with left-hand traffic

In some countries you have to drive on the left; in others you have to stay on the right. Countries are "pressured" into switching by, among other things, the presence of neighbours that use the other side. Of course there's a nonzero cost involved in this switch over and consequently it doesn't happen very frequently (In September of 2009, Samoa became the first country in three decades to switch) and is easier for small countries.

A rough calculation tells me that a little more than 2 billion people live in countries in which the left side of the road is the legal one to drive on. This is a clear but sizable minority and includes very populous countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Japan. Also, Australia which holds sway in its part of the world and the United Kingdom which I imagine would be loathe to make a switch despite the fact that its size and population don't stand out amongst those of its close neighbours. From the map above these countries are also a minority in terms of acreage and thus potential capacity for roads.

I wonder if at some point in the distant future we'll have a convergence to an equilibrium where everyone is driving on the same side of the road.

The Two Best Technological Concepts Ever

2009-11-30T11:58:00.000-08:00

1. Corrective Lenses

I am really blind. My vision is so bad that it's amazing that it can be corrected. Yet this correction is actually very easy and, all things considered, cheap.

Occasionally I have some difficulty finding my glasses or contacts in the morning and I'm given enough time to contemplate how useless I'd be in most other historical contexts.

As far as wikipedia can tell, eyeglasses were invented somewhere between 1280 and 1300 and as far as I can tell none of my ancestors would have had access to them until even more recently.

I don't know what I would have done.

2. Cooking

Cooking not only makes food safer to eat but better tasting as well. We should not take this for granted.

On a side note: I wonder if any other animals have the capacity to decide that some tastes are complementary. Or rather I should ask are there any other animals that actively seek to bring complementary tastes together in the same meal. Is there a chimp who would go to the other side of the room to fetch a slice of cheese to go along with another food item that he/she already had in hand?

Walking around Sando

2009-11-16T13:45:00.000-08:00

Today I walked from my house to the CBD and then walked back via a different route. More or less.

Sports

2009-11-12T04:14:00.000-08:00

I like sports. I love sports. I love playing sports. I love watching sports.

I have a lot of misgivings about how seriously people take sports however. I mean, I take sports seriously. What bothers me is how much journalistic talent and resources are dedicated to finding out who the starting quarterback for the Cleveland Browns is going to be. Or maybe the vitality of sports media in a country is a measure of how good life is there.

The people being covered take themselves increasingly seriously (or maybe they don't) and the whole thing just gets perpetuated. Sports talk is saturated with hyperbole and nobody seems to notice it.

Following a routine regular season game (there are 82 of them), LeBron James just described the game plan his coach had come up with as "unbelievable". Fans of the Cavs will be happy to know that the players were able to suspend their disbelief just long enough to carry out said game plan.

The thing is I suspect all of this is inevitable if people like me take sports as seriously as we do in the way that we take it seriously.

Mixed Signals

2009-11-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

I noticed these signs a few weeks ago. Today, KM sent me a pic.

Now I

2009-11-04T10:04:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to the bank to open a bank account. This whole procedure required me to sign multiple forms.

The bank employee overseeing the process was dissatisfied with the level of dissimilarity between the signatures I was producing then and there and the ones that were on any of my valid pieces of ID. Some of this has to do with the fact that all my T&T documents are over a decade old and my signature has evolved noticeably since then. (In fact the signature in my passport isn't so much a signature as it is the 18 year old version of myself writing his name on the line someone told him to write his name on.) The other part of it is the lady being unusually picky about the whole thing and perhaps correctly so.

In the end I had to put great effort into meeting her standards for similarity. Does this mean that I now have to maintain parallel signatures for T&T and US purposes?

Something else I've noticed: I'm taller than a much higher percentage of the adult male population in Trinidad than in the state of New York. I think this is notable because my unscientific sampling of the population of East Flatbush indicates to me that adult males who are either American of Trini descent or Trinis who moved to the US in early childhood seem to be taller on average than the general population of New York State. It seems to me that there is a conclusion to be drawn regarding diet.

Reunited

2009-11-02T07:45:00.001-08:00

Home

2009-10-28T15:52:00.001-07:00

Trends

2009-10-16T09:49:00.000-07:00

This article on cnn.com refers to Paul Shaffer (the bandleader on David Letterman's show) as a walking Wikipedia of rock 'n' roll history.

So Wikipedia has obliterated any recognition of the fact that it is but a single instance of the encyclopedia type? Or do others edit the entries in Paul Shaffer's brain periodically? I suppose the latter is trivially true but I get the impression that that's not what they meant.

A few weeks back I was listening to a radio program and the announcer said something pretty close to "Tomorrow we'll be broadcasting from Tampa, Florida, the home of Wikipedia."

Are we really at the point that Tampa needs to be annotated as the home of Wikipedia? We're not talking about Troy, NY (the home of the largest Flag Day Parade) or Gilroy, CA (the home of the largest garlic festival) here.

HOW to BECOME a GOOD THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

2009-10-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

Gerard 't Hooft has an ongoing project that aims to serve as a roadmap for aspiring theoretical physicists. In his own words

It should be possible, these days, to collect all knowledge you need from the internet. Problem then is, there is so much junk on the internet. Is it possible to weed out those very rare pages that may really be of use? I know exactly what should be taught to the beginning student. The names and topics of the absolutely necessary lecture courses are easy to list, and this is what I have done below. It is my intention to search on the web where the really useful papers and books are, preferably downloadable as well. This way, the costs of becoming a theoretical physicist should not exceed much the price of a computer with internet connection, a printer, and lots of paper and pens. Unfortunately, I still have to recommend to buy text books as well, but it is harder to advise you here; perhaps in a future site. Let's first limit ourselves to the absolute minimum. The subjects listed below must be studied. Any omission will be punished: failure.

http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html

Hugo

2009-10-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

I couldn't help but notice how many plaques there are on campus. The place is littered with class gifts and memorials to alums and faculty. I decided to relocate my plant Hugo Lemonbalm to the area right outside Amos Eaton. I did this a while ago. Can't exactly remember when.

[Some of the pics blow up better than the others.]

These first two pics were taken August 27th.

These two were taken today.

I hope that Hugo can survive the winters. And the grounds staff.

Moving (data)

2009-09-27T10:27:00.001-07:00

I've moved all my data from the Polytechnic Institute's storage facilities to an alternative as my current relationship with the Polytechnic Institute affords me only a fraction of the space I had before.

All my data is safe but it might be the case that I haven't been as thorough as I could be about changing all necessary links in far distant posts. Not that anyone is trawling the archives but I apologize if there are broken links here and there.

I insist on saying 'Troy Pub'

2009-09-27T09:42:00.000-07:00

Today the capital district; tomorrow the world.

(I miss my camera but I'd like to think that the cell phone pics give my journalism some added grit.)

A game that Dirac used to play

2009-09-25T07:57:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I was reading The Strangest Man, a biography of Paul Dirac.

The book is obviously meticulously researched and I thought it was very good. Admittedly, biographies of eminently eccentric eminent Physicists/Mathematicians are right up my alley so the subject matter alone was sufficiently interesting but the writing certainly didn't detract from the book.

One anecdote that caught my interest involved a game that the scientists at one of the leading scientific hubs of the time used to play. The requirement of the game was to find ways to express each of the natural numbers using the number '2' precisely 4 times in conjunction with common mathematical functions. For example here are some solutions (obviously not exhaustive) for the numbers 1 to 4.

In general the task becomes increasingly difficult as the numbers get larger.

I'm not sure if I should say how the anecdote ends in the book.

going for a walk

2009-09-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

On Saturday KM and I walked to Albany. We had planned to do it and then on Friday night someone called and reminded us that Saturday was Larkfest. So that was a good sign: there'd be something to do once we got to Albany.

Well Larkfest wasn't really all that so we walked a little more and went to watch the Julia Child movie at the Spectrum. Then we took the bus back home.

KM took some pics and they're below.

Made with Slideshow Embed Tool

(speech balloon gives captions)

ECAV

2009-09-19T05:57:00.001-07:00

This has been an era of much construction at my favourite Polytechnic Institute. Today is the 2nd game at the new Stadium i.e. the ECAV: East Campus Athletic Village. I won't be able to make it but I did go to last week's game which was the first. Coupled with the fact that I also went to the last game at the '86 field I think that bodes well for my RPI-cred.

Coming up with these titles is hard.

2009-09-14T07:07:00.000-07:00

I think that there's a significant possibility that I might actually miss Troy. This is surprising only because I don't really have a history of missing places once I leave. I've undergone what I would consider to be several significant re-locations in my life: twice during my childhood my family moved out of areas that I had lived in for several years, I came to a different country to go to college and lastly I moved to a completely different region of that new country for grad school. From day 1 at the new location however, with the exception of infrequent cravings for specific foods, I don't think I've ever indulged in any activity or thought that might be construed as missing an old locale.

The circumstances of the recent past have kept me busy to the extent that a lot of people I would ordinarily come into contact with on regular basis didn't see me for several weeks. Now that things have returned to normal, conversations with these people tend to include the fact that they haven't seen me in a relatively long time. That usually leads to me revealing that I'll be moving out of town permanently in the very near future. The overall impact of these conversations is that I'm somewhat surprised at how much of a life I've made for myself here over my time here.

I know what country one of the bank tellers is originally from and what one of the others is majoring in. The lady at the bookstore downtown (and the guy from the comic shop) has a pretty good grasp of what I might like and one of the guys who works in the kitchen at Troy Pub always lets me know when they have a good band lined up. Then there's all my current and former neighbours, people I play soccer with and so on.

Before the age of 22, much of my life was dictated by where my parents lived and later by the room and board portion of my scholarship. Moving to Troy (and grad school) was the first major decision that I ever made completely on my own and in the interim I've pretty much been able to live exactly the life of my choosing. It's been real.

So maybe I'll miss it. Or maybe I won't.

Yeah, so...

2009-09-09T07:57:00.001-07:00

Yeah, so I haven't posted anything in a while.

I got kinda busy working on this paper. Then I had to give a talk about the paper. It's all over now: been over for a little while now actually. I just fell out of the habit of putting stuff on here.

2009-08-02T18:59:00.001-07:00

Walking from WRPI to the math department this evening I came across this nest that had fallen. It's pretty amazing what a bird can build with no hands.

There was a hole in the bottom.

A casualty of an unseasonal thunderstorm.

Unfortunately, this seemed to be a weekend for homes to be lost in Troy. A house on 9th Street between Peoples and Sage was burnt on Friday. The lady who lived there always said hi to me whenever I walked by.

New Favourite Error Message

2009-07-30T20:34:00.000-07:00

Easy Street

2009-07-18T03:56:00.001-07:00

so it turns out that for the last several years I've been living in close proximity to Easy Street. However as Whitney Houston once said, "Almost doesn't count".

Too bad the street isn't slightly longer: I would have dedicated the rest of my life to acquiring the property at 123 Easy Street.

Error

2009-07-05T08:43:00.000-07:00

My favourite error message (even independent of the fact that it's generated by my favourite compiler).

one way or the other I'm going to have a lot more free time in a few weeks.

Flag Day

2009-06-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

The Troy Flag Day parade is the largest of its kind in the nation. The 2009 edition
is the 42nd consecutive edition. Clicking on these little pictures turns them into big pictures.

New Roommate

2009-06-06T13:43:00.000-07:00

Today I faced one of my greatest fears

2009-06-01T08:25:00.001-07:00

Today, like many other days in the past, I had lunch in The McNeil Room. However, today was completely unlike every other day. With the purchase of most entrees, the McNeil Room patron gets a choice of two sides. Choices include rice, baked potatoes, a bunch of stuff I've never even considered and mashed potatoes.

For those familiar with my love for mashed potatoes, it probably won't surprise you to know that I ALWAYS get them. Also probably not surprising is the fact that what I really yearn for is to have both of my sides be mashed potatoes. I've just never been able to bring myself to ask for it. Part of that is that I assume that everyone else values the mashed potatoes more than all the other sides (as they should really), and I feel guilty about depleting the supply selfishly. The rest of it is just that I'm a coward.

Today, I went all out; I cast my fears aside.

Guy who works in the McNeil Room: what sides you want with that?
Daryn: the mash and uh... actually can I get two sides of mash?
Guy who works in the McNeil Room: yeah sure, why not?
Daryn: maybe there's a rule or something
Guy who works in the McNeil Room: Nah, you straight

So this is what two sides of mashed potatoes looks like, it has the width of one side but the length of two.

I think I'm going to eat the second scoop first.

A couple things

2009-05-30T12:43:00.000-07:00

1. I owe an apology to the Ruck for not documenting them in my Things I like about Troy series. It's not that I didn't want to: they're my co-favourite bar (along with Ryan's Wake). The batteries from my camera died, I couldn't find my charger* (still can't, now that I think about it I haven't seen it since my last move), I stopped carrying my camera around etc etc etc.

Some other things about Troy that I had in mind.
a) The bridges of Troy - I'd apologize to these guys too if they were people.

a.5) the Hudson River

b) Patricelli's - this is a deli on 2nd Street, almost on Washington Park. They run an adjoining laundromat also and do a lot of catering.

c) Market Block Books - an independent bookstore in downtown Troy.

d) Positively 4th Street - this used to the 3rd member of the triumvirate of my favourite bars. I stopped going after a stupid incident. Things have been straightened out but it just kinda fell out of my rotation.

e) Troy Pub i.e. what is now the Brown's Brewing Co. - During my first couple years in this town, this was a popular choice for my then social circle.

2. May is National Barbecue Month. I'm sorry I didn't find this out earlier in the month.

*-I was able to use someone's charger for a brief period of time once that allowed me to take a few pictures of things.

A Ridiculous Receipt: Rite Aid

2009-05-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

Today, I decided to walk to the Rite Aid that is relatively close to my house for the purpose of acquiring some deodorant. Despite the fact that the prices were noticeably higher than some of the other places one could get similar products, I decided to make a purchase anyway: it might be close to my house but not so close that I'd walk all the way there for nothing.

In any case, I was, and still am, appalled by the size of the receipt.

Here is the stick of deodorant I bought juxtaposed with the receipt for the transaction.

Here is the receipt next to a collection of everyday objects that happened to be on hand.

That's right, the receipt is approximately equal to the combined lengths of a stick of deodorant, a can of root beer, a nail clipper, one big paperclip and one small paperclip.

It seems like a whole lot of trees are being killed unnecessarily.

Molecules to the Max

2009-05-24T08:29:00.001-07:00

On Friday I attended a screening of the movie Molecules to the Max at EMPAC. I had seen posters for it around campus and honestly not put much thought into it. Then one week before the showing, I met the director of the show through some mutual friends and he encouraged me to attend.

The movie is the brainchild of some RPI professors and, as I understand it, RPI hired this small team to move up from NYC and work on the movie for the last 5 or so years. Along the way they've employed the use of a lot of talent from RPI/the area.

The stars of this animated film are anthropomorphisized atoms that have been sent on a mission. It is quite good: the visuals are excellent, as is the writing and music. And it's a great chemistry lesson at the same time.

During the credits, as well as at the wrap party, I was pleasantly surprised to find out just how many friends and friendly acquaintances of mine were involved in the project.

I guess I'm biased but I'm pretty sure that this movie is really good.
The trailer can be seen here.

How good is text to speech software currently.

2009-05-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

I've added a streaming mp3 version to the last post for experimental purposes.

Have the trees chosen to protect me?

2009-05-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

Last summer, my car spent almost all of its time in the same parking spot outside my then apartment. It was moved relatively infrequently. On one of these rare occasions I returned from picking someone up at the airport to learn that a friend of one of my neighbours had parked in the spot and subsequently had a tree fall on his car. I had been gone for maybe an hour.

Last week I used KS's car to drop him to the airport. Naturally, I parked the car outside in the parking spot I would usually use in the back of my house. Next thing you know a freak storm hits and two of the trees next to the car topple. Fortunately, these trees weren't as large as the other one and the car is intact.

Could it be that the trees of Troy have chosen to protect me? to attack cars that they don't associate with me if said cars try to take my parking spots?

The tree from last year (I took some pics after it was moved aside)

Cell phone photos of the 2009 incident

A Keynesian Beauty Contest

2009-05-14T09:14:00.000-07:00

B-mobile is running* a Keynesian Beauty Contest. Fans of the T&T football team get to vote on a starting lineup for the next game. You get to vote for a player at each position and one wins by having your entire lineup correspond to the that of the general public's.

Back in Keynes' time there was a popular newspaper contest in which the faces of many attractive females were published and readers had to vote for 6 of the faces. The person(s) that voted for the six most beautiful won. The six most beautiful were determined by the number of votes.

So one wasn't actually choosing the 6 most beautiful faces but rather one was trying to guess which 6 faces would be most popular. But considering that, what you really want to do is figure out which 6 faces the general public was likely to guess would be the most popular choices as far as the 6 most beautiful faces were concerned. You see where this is going...

A similar game is to have a group of people guess 2/3 of the average guess.

* - IMO, there are some obvious flaws in B-mobile's contest 1) one can vote for some players at multiple positions 2) they've chosen a 4-4-2 formation when the team plays in a 4-5-1 just as often 3) there are 4 options for the first centre back and tomorrow there will be 4 new options for the 2nd centre back, so in essence they've ruled out some pairings as theoretically impossible. Some of these precluded pairings are ones that have actually featured in relatively recent games or are somewhat popular wishes among fans of the team.

I would have had fans pick any 11 players with a few restrictions i.e. at least one goalkeeper, 1 forward and 3 defenders.

An idea brought to fruition

2009-05-13T18:48:00.000-07:00

A couple months back, over some beers at Ryan's Wake Duncan hatched a scheme: to have an event where people commuted between Troy and Albany by riverboat for a day.

After many weeks of hard work, he actually pulled it off. He got some a boat, some musicians, food, everything. The respective mayors were even on hand for the morning trips to issue proclamations.

Apparently a lot of media came out in the morning. I wasn't able to make it. I did get down there in time to catch the arrival of the evening boat to Troy.

Anyhow, Congrats Duncan.

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Indian General Election

2009-05-13T07:00:00.001-07:00

RELD had a link to this image in his gmail status.

My first thought on seeing this is that people who had to vote earlier might feel disenfranchised as those who vote later have more information at their disposal regarding which candidates are likely to be associated with more powerful voting blocs and consequently more effective in carrying out their agendas.

RELD pointed out that the people who vote earlier get to set the trend.

I have no idea what the logistics involved in an Indian General election are but it seems to add a few strategic (game theoretic?) nuances to the whole thing.

The surface of the sun

2009-05-10T13:35:00.001-07:00

This stunning image shows remarkable and mysterious details near the dark central region of a planet-sized sunspot in one of the sharpest views ever of the surface of the Sun.

I think I'm going to have to check out those pictures of the day somewhat regularly.

HT: Caveman Forecaster.

the law is complicated

2009-05-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

According to this

Facebook private messages are governed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which forbids communications providers from intercepting user messages, barring limited exceptions for security and valid legal orders.

I just kinda figured that facebook implicitly had the right to intercept messages. It seems to me that I'm voluntarily making an entry to a database maintained by facebook and asking that they make it readable by a specified set of users. An analogous "real-life" situation as I understood the situation prior to today would be my leaving a note for a friend at a mutual friend's house. I might be annoyed if the middleman read the note or forgot to notify the intended recipient that a note was left for them but I'm not sure what legal ground I'd be standing on.

Because of my assumption, I have made great effort not to share meaningful information via facebook messages. I guess I'd always thought of facebook messages as a noticeboard that they were letting me use and not as a carrier of messages. In any case, their practices are such that I'll continue to refrain from sharing information via that medium.

hmmm

2009-05-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

From: NYTimes Economix Blog

55 Years ago today

2009-05-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a video of the entire 4 minute race.

At the end of that season, Roger Bannister retired from athletics to concentrate on his career as a medical doctor.

the difference

2009-05-05T20:25:00.001-07:00

I was wondering what the difference between mutual funds and hedge funds were.

I found this site, which gives an explanation that doesn't seem implausible.

Conclusion: Hedge funds are just like mutual funds. Only riskier.

Sport

2009-05-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

from: Post Secret

Robert Clay Allison

2009-05-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

thanks to C.R.

Dispatch from campus

2009-05-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

The end of another semester. It's been very busy. The Student Sustainability Task Force has once again set up their annual FTW (Face the Waste) Installation.

This week all the installations have been up near the footbridge but during Earth Week they were at various locations around campus. Basically there was an installation for each type of waste that's common on campus (aluminum, electronics, cardboard, plastic, food). For straightforward reasons the food installation couldn't be left up for as long as all the others.

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Good job SSTF. This is the Ecologic wiki page for the original FTW (last year's) for some more info about the project.

Also happening recently, an IED group built a wind turbine outside the math department as their final project. Regrettably, they didn't get much wind on the day that I saw them.

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Inspired

2009-04-27T07:34:00.001-07:00

Danny MacAskill is pretty good at what he does and JPM keeps putting me onto good stuff.

How many years into the new millennium are we?

2009-04-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

So, I'm reading this book and it casually mentions

the advent of the 20th century was celebrated on January 1, 1901, not January 1, 1900

Now, that makes sense to me. Back when people were making a big deal about the new millennium I remember thinking that everyone had it all wrong: the new millennium should start after the 2000th year had been completed. (There was no year 0)

So now, I'm a little bit curious about this. Back in the Y2K days I had just assumed that we were just being consistent with past celebrations. Now, I find out that we used to do think about it in the "right" way and switched at some point in the few generations that passed between 1901 and 2000.

I guess maybe the turning over of the most significant digit in our year format was just too good of a marketing opportunity to pass up.

Happy Anniversary RPI Mechanical Engineering

2009-04-24T12:04:00.001-07:00

Today the Mechanical Engineering Department at RPI celebrated their 100th anniversary. They had a celebration on the '86 Field featuring food, games and music by members of the RPI community.

Things I learned at this celebration

1) There was a relatively popular band in the late 60s and early 70s named Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. After the band disbanded, one of the members went on to become a Mechanical Engineering Professor at RPI.

2) Pushball is more intense than any sport I had played prior to today.

Pictures of the event here (several photos taken by B.C.)

Trajectory

2009-04-22T12:02:00.000-07:00

When I was a child visiting my father's country of Trinidad, where progress, it was often said, was roughly about 20 years behind the States, I could see this was true.

By the 1990s, progress had leaped to being just 10 years behind the States

in 2005, the gap had reduced to five years

In 2009, I am told that Trinidad is just three years behind the States, and I believe it's true.

the preceding are quotes from this article. I'm not recommending that you actually read the article but I am somewhat amused by the idea that, on current pace, Trinidad will probably be decades ahead of the United States before we know it.

What about Tobago? Whatever happens, you can rest assured that I'll be monitoring the situation closely.

Baseball

2009-04-22T06:04:00.000-07:00

It seems that the Yankees management could use a lesson in probability. Or perhaps, they might want to flip a coin many times and see the results.

Or they could get better pitching.

Looking for a tunnel

2009-04-21T07:38:00.000-07:00

Almost exactly 2 months ago I received this link in an email. It talks about a tunnel running beneath Congress and Ferry Streets near 6th Ave that's soon to be filled in.

Based on the facts that 1) it sounds like a major project 2) I've seen no signs of a major project and 3) I know that most large-scale construction projects aren't done in winter I'm guessing the actual filling in hasn't been done as yet. Shortly after I read about the article, CR reported overhearing a conversation at a local establishment about a tunnel in the same general area that was accessible. We figured it had to be the same tunnel.

BZ and I tried to find it recently. We were unsuccessful. We figured that the entrance would be in the woods on the southern side of route 2 so we went and looked around. We didn't find any tunnel entrances but we started encountering signs of settlement almost immediately after entering the wooded area.

By the end of the expedition we had come across a few homeless camps. Only one guy was at home but there were obvious signs that several people lived in the area. We asked the one guy about the tunnel and he said that the entrance had been closed up many years ago. He recommended that we go down to the Troy Public Library as they had a lot of information about it down there.

I took a few pictures. It was weird taking pictures of people's homes so I didn't take too many of those. The following pic should give some clarification of the area we were in: the purple demarcates the region that most of our search was done in, the red is the location of the first picture at the link to follow and the green points out the region that the article says the tunnel runs under.

some of the pics I took here.
(In the very last pic there's a guy in the distance that we saw coming back from downtown with what looked like some groceries. We thought he was cutting through to go to south Troy but he just sat down in his area and started smoking a cigarette and taking in the world. He's almost dead center of the pic.)

Book Review: The Worldly Philosophers

2009-04-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

Title: The Worldy Philosophers
Author: R.L. Heilbroner

I finished reading this book about a week and a half ago. It was the first of the books I'm reading that I didn't re-read large swaths of and I didn't take any notes so I hope the few days in the interim haven't have too much of an effect on my recollection.
Heilbroner apparently wrote this book while working on his doctorate. For this alone, he would have earned my praise. What about the actual book?
The thing that remains with me most clearly is the idea that the field of economics was unnecessary before the advent of the market economy and consequently the history of economic thought is really an accounting of the evolution of capitalism. Before reading this book I had a mental image of capitalism and socialism being on opposite sides of a spectrum with societies littered along the joining the two. Now I visualize capitalism as an creature (a bear to be honest) that took some time to mature and is now mutating itself into another type of creature while fighting off the smaller wily creatures that embody social movements.
The general form of the chapters is part biography of a historically significant ideologue and part synopsis of his ideas. As you would probably expect, there is much interplay between the individual's experience and observations and their doctrine. Some of the chapters (two if I remember correctly) focus on more than one person. Some of the people gone over are Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Parson Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Marx, Keynes and Thorstein Veblen.
The book is well written, as I expected: it came well-recommended after all. This along with its modular format made it very easy to read coherently in bite-sized pieces.
All in all, a good read. An educational one at that.

People have crazy ideas

2009-04-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

I shouldn't engage in speculation, but, if I had to guess, I'd say that when Ueli Gegenschatz woke up this morning he managed to keep it real.

Thanks to KS for sending me this.

Out with the old

2009-04-19T10:54:00.000-07:00

I'm a Mets fan. Well actually, I'm a guy from another country who likes the Mets more than any other baseball team. In any case, I did have a hell of a good time at Yankee Stadium once.

Interview with a Lifeguard

2009-04-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

An interview with a Venice Beach lifeguard.

Shocking fact I learned today: most people who get rescued by a lifeguard just walk away without saying thanks.

What Americans want

2009-04-15T10:43:00.001-07:00

According to the stat counter on this blog, visitors have come from 12 of the United States. So I asked myself: what would I have to do to get people from other states? So that led me to 2nd question: what are those people in the other 39 states searching for? (DC is included here so that's why the numbers add up to 51. They're in the list of states that have already sent a representative.)

well, if I used Google insights correctly, I think have some insight on this crucial issue.
Here's the list of most searched for terms by state:

Alabama - alabama	Alaska - alaska	Arizona - phoenix
Arkansas - arkansas	California - lyrics	Colorado - colorado
Connecticut - lyrics	Delaware - delaware	District of Columbia - lyrics
Florida - lyrics	Georgia - georgia	Hawaii - hawaii
Idaho - idaho	Illinois - Chicago	Indiana - indianapolis
Iowa - iowa	Kansas - kansas	Kentucky - lyrics
Louisiana - louisiana	Maine - maine	Maryland - lyrics
Massachusetts - Boston	Michigan - lyrics	Minnesota - minneapolis
Mississippi - mississippi	Missouri - St. Louis	Montana - montana
Nebraska - omaha	Nevada - las vegas	New Hampshire - lyrics
New Jersey - lyrics	New Mexico - albuquerque	New York - lyrics
North Carolina - lyrics	North Dakota - north dakota	Ohio - lyrics
Oklahoma - oklahoma	Oregon - portland oregon	Pennsylvania - lyrics
Rhode Island - lyrics	South Carolina - lyrics	South Dakota - south dakota
Tennessee - nashville	Texas - lyrics	Utah - utah
Vermont - vermont	Virginia - lyrics	Washington - lyrics
West Virginia - west virginia	Wisconsin - wisconsin	Wyoming - wyoming

It appears that states can be classified into 3 groups
1) Those in which the state name is the most popular search
2) Those in which the state's largest city is the most popular search
and
3) Those in which 'lyrics' is the most popular search.

It seems to me that the three things Americans desire most might be affirmation, lyrics and directions.

I have a few other thoughts but I'll try to concretize them before following up. Hopefully it will give me an opportunity to plot a few sweet graphs.

I might have to do some editing of the post to get the html for the table right once I click publish.

Protocol laid out

2009-04-13T16:50:00.001-07:00

The best thing.

2009-04-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”
--T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone

HT: the happiness project.

Umbrellas

2009-04-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

Today, just as with most other days, I was looking at the Today's Pictures feature on Slate. The theme of today's series is "April Showers" but I think the real stars are the umbrellas.

I went to the wikipedia article on umbrellas and read that.

I liked these images the most (from both sources)

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I think I understand the appeal of Facebook

2009-04-09T06:32:00.001-07:00

During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college I purchased a PC. Over the next couple of years, as one of the relatively few Trini students who owned computers on a campus with relatively many Trini students I would often get a lot of people visiting my dorm room for the purpose of using the computing facilities that were available therein.

At some point, there was a mini Sims craze. The already heavy foot traffic increased noticeably. There never seemed to any time period that the computer wasn't in use: I'd go to sleep with one of my friends playing Sims and wake up to another one playing the Sims. It didn't last very long, but it did exist and I too participated in this short-lived craze. Even at the time I was mystified at the appeal of guiding video game characters through mundane daily activities.

I've come to believe that the appeal lay in the fact life was reduced purely to a game of strategy.

The thing with the Sims was that you'd have to get expansion packs ever so often to add new elements to the game. As far as I can tell (I've never actually played these games) but games like Second Life took this one step further: it's done on a much larger scale and you get to experience it from a first person perspective.

Which brings us to facebook. Facebook is effectively the sequel to Second Life.
Facebook is addictive because it's the best video game ever: life itself.

2 classics

2009-04-06T18:02:00.000-07:00

Ads from T&T in the 1980s.

The first one is an all-time favourite of mine that I used to have on my old web page at some point. A friend recently re-dug them up.

Take win Guardian.

2009-04-02T06:43:00.000-07:00

Last night, in a game that was no ~~doubted~~ doubt viewed on television by many residents of Trinidad & Tobago and by members of the diaspora throughout the world, the Trinidad and Tobago national football team was convincingly defeated by that of the United States. 3-0.

This morning, the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian newspaper has managed to do what I heretofore considered impossible: they've established themselves as being even more incompetent than the other daily newspapers in the country.

For a while it was hard to tell as grammatical and factual errors seemed to be evenly distributed. Atrocious writing was a secondary concern. I suppose that all factual errors are equally egregious from the standpoint of propositional logic but somehow the guardian's current front page seems particularly egregious to me.

Anyhow, seeing that I'm not a bad sport, I'd like to congratulate the US team. In particular, I'd like to congratulate Jozy Altidore for his hat-trick.

Landon Donovan, as good of a game as he may have had last night, didn't actually score any goals in last night's game.

Google Insights

2009-04-01T12:11:00.001-07:00

So after reading this blog, I decided to go play around with Google Insights, a Google product that I'd used once before. (Perhaps the findings of my previous interaction will show up here in the near future).

This shouldn't be surprising at all, but the trends of the popularities of 'Karl Marx' and 'Socialism' as search terms mirror each other greatly. (Marx in blue, Socialism in Red. At least they were a very blue blue and a very red red before compression of the image.)

edit: I've now added the links as I think the flash animations there convey the trend similarities better.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Karl%20Marx%2CSocialism&cmpt=q

The graph showing the trends of 'Ayn Rand' and 'Milton Friedman' exhibits the same thing. (Rand in blue, Friedman in red) with the notable exception of the spike in searches for Friedman immediately following his death in November 2006.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Ayn%20Rand%2CMilton%20Friedman&cmpt=q

Now, it seems to me that these related search terms would behave in the same manner corroborates the idea that these graphs reflect substantive information about the zeitgeist and not just sampling error. Although, now that I think about it as I write, I don't know why this concerned me as surely the pool of google searches isn't what would call a small sample by any measure. Perhaps I should have thought that through before starting this paragraph.

In any case, it seems as though, it's just a matter of time before we can go through news archives and quantify the impact of news stories.

Things I like about Troy: Famous Lunch

2009-03-31T14:40:00.001-07:00

Well I finally got around to going to Famous Lunch. In fact I've been there at least twice sans camera since I started documenting stuff. It just never worked out.

They gave me an informative document written by a historian who's been a customer for more than 45 years. I'll just let that do the talking.

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Click here for Famous Facts
and
here for the Famous Lunch menu.

Strange world

2009-03-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

If I told you that there was a magazine published by a really popular celebrity which goes a single-letter title (the celebrity's first initial), and is subtitled as "the <celebrity's name here> magazine" and has had that celebrity on the cover every single month since April 2002, would you believe it has consistently been one of the best-selling magazines in America, and consequently the world, since its inception?

would anyone else find that situation somewhat implausible?

In other news: congratulations are in order to one Mrs. Michelle Obama of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC. Mrs. Obama has just become the first person to share the cover of O, the Oprah magazine with Oprah Winfrey.

Book Review: A Random Walk Down Wall Street

2009-03-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

Title: A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Author: Burton Malkiel

The title A Random Walk Down Wall Street= was first published in 1973 and I'm not entirely sure how much the edition I read has in common with any of its multiple predecessors. The book has obviously been augmented over time as it contains quantities of quotes, anecdotes and data from the very recent past. I recall at least one referral to something that happened as recently as 2006.

The book was informative throughout but, to me, became less interesting as it drew to a close. My level of interest was a function of what I wanted to get from the book: the book started as a somewhat academic guide to the mechanics behind investing, finance, stock markets etc and gradually evolved into an investing guide in which much terminology was defined and relatively specific investment advice was dispensed. Of course, those whose interests differ from mine may well find the latter sections to be more useful. In fact, it is arguable that the boring parts might yield more utility for me in the future.

Malkiel presents cases against the efficacy of both technical analysis and fundamental analysis. Technical analysts believe that they can profit by recognizing patterns in the movement of stock prices while fundamental analysts believe they can out-research their competitors and thus make smarter picks.

Burton Malkiel is a proponent of the efficient market theory. Most importantly, this hypothesis implies that you can't plan to beat the market and as such Malkiel is an advocate of a simple buy-and-hold investment policy in which the investor holds a diverse portfolio of securities.

He makes a strong case against actively managed portfolios which I believe can be summarized as follows:
1) success by actively managed portfolios in one time period isn't a very good predictor of success in the following time period.
2) the number of actively managed portfolios that outperform the market in any given period isn't any greater than one would expect by chance.
3) the gains of actively managed portfolios are often canceled out by transaction fees.
4) Any successful strategy soon becomes popular and in so doing eradicates its own potency.
5) What's the point of actively managing a portfolio if the chances of beating the market are negligible?

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, I liked this book most when it was using anecdotes and analogies to provide some insight into human nature. Malkiel is a good communicator and managed to package a lot of education into the brisk read that was the first few hundred pages.

The last few chapters of the book, serve as a guide and would probably make very good reference material for the average investor. I found the exposition of some of the analytical/numerical arguments and examples to be somewhat tortured but this is probably for the best as the average reader may not have my level of comfort with mathematics.

Some of the investment advice offered may be dated to the extent that they seem to be predicated on relatively recent numerical values for inflation, interest rates, market returns and the like. In any case, it seems that Malkiel updates the editions of the books at a relatively high frequency.

All in all, a good read.

Update: thus far I've read 3.5 of the 8 books on the list that I hadn't read to completion before. The two that I've read before will be books 9 and 10. The one that I've read partially will be number 8.

good luck ladies

2009-03-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

The WPS inaugural game is on later this evening. 6pm ET on FSC I believe. LA vs Washington.

I don't possess an encyclopedic knowledge of women's soccer but many of the world's best players are in the league and today's game is a good representation of that. Marta, Shannon Boxx, Abby Wambach and Homare Sawa are some of the players that I recognize from today's rosters. Should be a good game.

Not to put down the MLS, of which I'm a fan, but this should be a better approximation of high-level international football.

Understandably, the league will do everything in its power to get Marta in the spotlight.

I couldn't find a free picture of Marta (the one on wikipedia didn't seem appropriate), but I'd be surprised if more than a handful of people ever read this. The pic accompanied this season preview on cnnsi.com and is credited to Shelly Castellano/Icon SMI

March 28th

2009-03-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

On this day in 1991, along with 29,000 other 11-year olds in Trinidad and Tobago and many more throughout the English-speaking Caribbean, I took the Common Entrance exam.

My number was 28101. Rakesh was sitting next to me and Shivanand was behind me. Shawn was in front of me sitting next to a fella named Ribeiro and Bernard was in front of Shawn. I can't remember who was next to Shivanand. Somebody else whose last name started with 'Ram'.

At some point, Bernard and I ended up teaming up to fight Shawn because Shawn was trying to take people's erasers. The lady who was examining had to call in the head examiner to help her calm things down.

Five sections: maths, english, social studies, science and composition. I was confident that I was going to pass for Pres because I was sure I wrote a good essay. I think the topic was 'A mistake I will never make again' or something like that. I was proud of myself because I had used the word 'cabaret' which I had just learned the day before.

I didn't think I needed lessons but I suppose my parents were doing the responsible thing by sending me. Standard 4: lessons. Easter Holidays: lessons. August holidays: lessons. Standard 5: Lessons. The exam was over before lunchtime.

My father was waiting for me outside; he had brought two hot dogs for me to eat. This was a good thing as I was very hungry.

Tulip bubble

2009-03-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

The book that I'm almost done with is, to me, at its most interesting when it's providing anecdotal evidence about human nature.

There are many vignettes about historical episodes and results of clever psychology experiments. I think the one that will stay with me the longest is the first: the story of the Tulip bubble of the 17th century.

From wikipedia (as of 03/27/09):

Tulip mania or tulipomania (Dutch names include tulpenmanie, tulpomanie, tulpenwoede, tulpengekte, and bollengekte) was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed.[2] At the peak of tulip mania in February 1637, tulip contracts sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble.[3] The term "tulip mania" is often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble.[4]

entire article here

reading all this economically-themed material has really reinforced a simple idea: bubbles come and go; recessions come and go; people stay the same.

Something I've always wondered/Technical Monopoly

2009-03-24T07:38:00.001-07:00

So I was read this post on Paul Krugman's blog and it made me laugh.

It's good to know that Nobel Prize winners have to stay home to get their cable/internet service set up but it re-raises the question that I ask every time I go through one of those ordeals: why can't these companies provide more convenient time frames for customers?

The typical scenario is that you call them up and they respond by giving you a small selection of large time slots in the next couple weeks to choose from. All these time slots correspond to hours during which the average person is at work/school and are very large compared to length of the actual visit, e.g, one might be notified that the technician is going to come by sometime between 8am and noon next Wednesday.

It's got to be because in most areas there's only one viable cable provider right? As far as I can tell, most municipalities grant long-term cable franchises to a single provider. (NYC has granted two franchises; Time Warner is the sole franchise holder for much of upstate NY.)

Is this genuinely a case of a technical monopoly as M. Friedman talks about in Capitalism and Freedom? Is it the case that the nature of the service portends that only one provider can survive in the average market?

It seems that the majority* of stuff out there is written from a libertarian viewpoint with the viewpoint that cable isn't a natural monopoly but regulation is effectively used as a means of preventing competition. Examples:
A recent blog entry
Cable Television: An unnatural monopoly. Written in 1984, this is a more rigorous article from the Cato Institute that still seems timely.

It makes perfect sense that the side agitating for change would be the more vocal but some good points are made here.

Peace's formula for habit momentum

2009-03-23T15:35:00.000-07:00

So, there's a burgeoning collection of cans, mostly root beer, on my desk. Ever since I discovered the cheapest vending machine on campus, it has become part of my routine to get a can on my way to the office.

Today, during a conversation with my officemate Peace, the question arose: assuming that I continued to gain one empty can per day, at what point would my can collection pay for my root beer habit for the rest of my life?

Empty cans can be exchanged for 5 cents and a can costs 50 cents at the vending machine. If I had 100 cans I could exchange them and buy 10 more root beers which would leave me with 10 cans that I could convert into one last root beer. If I bought enough, at some point I'd have enough to cover my habit for the rest of my life.

Peace did some scribbling and came up with this general formula that allows even those in Michigan to plan ahead:

m = (nd(1-x) - cx)/b

where
m-the number of days from today at which one's collected cans start covering one's habit
N-total number of days one expects to live past today
x-cans received/cans turned in, while recycling
b-number of cans bought per day
d-number of cans drank per day
c-number of cans previously accumulated

Heads vs Tails

2009-03-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

So I just flipped a standard issue American 25 cent piece, i.e. a quarter, 150 times. Why? Well, the most immediate catalyst was a passage in the book I'm currently reading, but mostly I did it because I'd never actually done it before even though I've actually participated in many in-class discussions of what sort of stuff I might observe if I was to flip a coin a large number of times.

So anyhow here are the results:

the sequence:
HHTHTHTHTTHTTHTTHTHHHHHTTHHTTTTHHTTTHHHTHTHTHTTTTTTTTTHHHTHHHTTTTHTHTHHHTTT
HHTHHTHTHTHTTHTHHTHTTHHHTHTHTHHHTHHHTHTTTTHTTTTHHHTHHTHHTHHHTTHTTTHHTTHHTHT

# of Heads: 74
# of Tails: 76
Longest Streak: 9 Tails (5 Heads was the 2nd longest)

There were 47 streaks of length 1 (including the very last flip), 18 of length 2, 12 of length 3, 4 of length 4, 1 of length 5 and 1 of length 9.

The following motion chart should give you a play by play. Feel free to try out the different visualization options. Yes, I do realize a motion chart is overkill for visualizing this data(For some reason I had to give 4 digit years as the times in order for the animation to work).

Book Review: Peddling Prosperity

2009-03-17T14:46:00.001-07:00

About a week and a half ago, I finished Peddling Prosperity, the 2nd of 10 books on my Reading List. My intent was to read the books in order but that's not going to happen as I'd rather wait till a book becomes available at the library than buy it at the bookstore.

Written by Paul Krugman in 1994 and subtitled Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations, this book was, I think, an appropriate read on the heels of my reading Capitalism and Freedom: Milton Friedman's book was a highly theoretical work urging the people of the early 1960s to come over to his way of thinking while Krugman's features, among other things, a retrospective of which of Friedman's ideas were implemented and which of those were successful.

There were two threads running through this book concurrently. As you might expect, these threads are mutually reinforcing.

The first was the elucidation of the idea that there is a significant gap between academia and politics and a class of pundits has come in to being in response to this, often having disproportionate influence while having insufficient grasp of the subject matter. The general public understandably tends to assign credit/blame for the current state of the economy to the government of the current or the recent past. As such there is always a market for those who can promote quick-fix solutions with a straight face. Also, we end up with the phenomenon in which the pundit class is able to con the general public into believing fallacies for purposes of political expediency e.g., some talking heads would have you believe that increased productivity by American workers would aid in some mythical competition with the rest of the planet when the truth is that the level of productivity of workers in other countries don't seem to have any significant effect on the quality of living in the United States.

The second major theme is that there are often good ideas to be found on both the left and right sides of the ideological spectrum and Krugman does a very good job of providing anecdotal evidence for much of these. I'm not an economic historian, but as far as I can tell he gave a fair enough hearing to the successful/unsuccessful ideas of both sides even though it's relatively easy to figure out that he is somewhat to the left himself. Basically, economics is hard to do because you often can't run any meaningful experiments before hand to test stuff out. Sometimes you get it wrong and sometimes you get it right. Over the long term however, the frequency, duration and severity of recessions have all decreased. So we're more or less on the right track.*

The connection between the two is illustrated by giving examples of "experts" in the media or political spheres latching on to the convenient pieces of well-fleshed out ideologies, using them as talking points in the process of wielding outsized influence and power.

I thought the book was a relatively easy read, but it did drag in some sections. I suppose if you're going to write a primer for the common man you might as well err on the side of being too verbose in your explanations. None of the two main ideas in the book were surprising to me but it was good to see points being made while being accompanied by multiple real-life examples.

I don't know if that's what he meant but the above is what I took from the book.

future?: Krugman also makes some diagnoses regarding some of the policies of the then young Clinton administration: he isn't particularly impressed. I'd be interested in getting some more meaningful information about how history has judged those particular decisions.

*- it seems to me that the entire field of economics is based on the assumption that we can always keep making/consuming more stuff. Implicit in this is the assumption that while we might well run out of a particular resource our total pool of resources is effectively never-ending.

Seeing that I put that video up

2009-03-14T13:07:00.000-07:00

I might as well, put this slideshow up. While I had the code running to generate all the frames for the video of the preceding post, I drove around Troy taking pictures of every building I'd lived* in since I arrived. I then ran all those pics through the simple matlab function I'd written and I got these pics. Seeing that I have fond memories of all these locations I'm using this as further documentation of things that I like about Troy.

(I can't seem to find the pic of the apartment building that I actually lived in for the longest period of time. If I can't find it, I'll go re-do the process and surreptitiously slip it into the slide show at some point. Also, I had yet to move into my current place at the time. Pics are ordered.)

Made with Slideshow Embed Tool

*-I decided that a meaningful criteria would be that I paid rent. At one of the houses, some people let me stay at their place for free over the summer and I left them my tv at the end.

I'm due

2009-03-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

So I haven't posted anything in a while. So, to achieve the goals of consolidating my online presence and getting back in the rhythm of posting, I'm embedding the one video I ever updated to youtube.

It's only a couple seconds long and I did it entirely using matlab. It wasn't difficult and was a fun way to procrastinate on a Saturday evening a few months ago.

Based on a pic of my niece.

Click this pic for a behind the scenes look at the making of the movie: