Long-term returns in a market economy are always compensation for providing scarce, useful resources to other participants in that market. If the activity is not scarce, and is not useful to others, there is no reason to expect it to to be profitable.

Investment returns aren't “free money.” Over the long-term, they are compensation for providing scarce, useful resources – liquidity, information, and risk-bearing – to other market participants. No useful services are provided to the market by a speculator who follows the crowd and chases glamour stocks higher late in an extended bull market run.

Internships at MERL ===================== Internship1: TeraFlops at the Leaves PI: Bill Butera (butera@merl.com) Recent many-core product offerings are reshaping the field of embedded computing. On-die meshes of light-weight processors have demonstrated dramatic gains in power performance, with the caveat that the programming methods are both novel, and application-specific. In this internship, we will investigate perceptual computing on a sample of these next-gen architectures. Of interest are applications that are a) compute bound, b) inherently mobile, or c) requires close proximity between the computing and the sensing ... preferably all three. The intent is to code, test, & characterize algorithms selected from ongoing machine vision projects. The goal is quantify performance gains, articulate the tradeoffs, build up a useful function library, and capitalize on MERL's visibility within Mitsubishi Electric. Work flow: • install an IDE and dev boards from one of the many-core vendors (TBD) • canvas MERL's imaging projects, select algorithms • port algorithms to SW simulator, test • port to algorithms to HW emulator, characterize • build up a function library • write up results for publication. Skill set: • strong SW/systems hacker capable of independent management of early- rev development boards • experience in application development for embedded systems. • background in machine vision algorithms a strong plus. Summer internship at Mitsubishi Electric Research (MERL) PI: Jonathan Yedidia, yedidia@merl.com Actor-based programming models for parallel platforms Among the most pressing problems at the frontier of computing is performance scaling via parallelism. How to get meaningful applications to scale as the number of on-die cores moves into the thousands ... A new project at MERL looks at implementing Actor-type programming languages on distributed memory systems. The goal is to develop programming methods that support performance scaling and to demonstrate this on error-correcting codes as a first application. With open questions on algorithms, macro-architectures, programming languages, & run-time environments, a core challenge is structuring a project that is both path-breaking and manageable. We are looking for a an energetic contributor to a diverse, dynamic team. If this is you, it would be a great to work with you this summer. Skill set: • strong coding skills in Java and/or Erlang a must. • experience in embedded run time environments, hardware simulation, virtual machine design, are all pluses. • familiarity with belief propagation also useful. • an ACM Turing Award is welcome but not required (management insists that we leave some room for professional growth). Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories is the North American arm of the Corporate R&D organization of the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. Located in Kendall Square, we conduct basic research and advanced development in computer and communication technologies (more athttp://www.merl.com/projects/ ). Rich in signal processing and machine vision expertise, MERL offers an ideal environment for grounding silicon architecture development in concurrency-friendly applications.

The conjunction fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one.

The most oft-cited example of this fallacy originated with Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman [1]:

For instance, a typical report on an industrial catastrophe describes the improbable interplay between a succession of events. Each event has a small probability and limited impact in itself. However, their juxtaposition and chaining lead inexorably to the observed losses. A common denominator of the various examples of crises is that they emerge from a collective process: the repetitive actions of interactive nonlinear influences on many scales lead to a progressive build-up of large-scale correlations and ultimately to the crisis. In such systems, it has been found that the organization of spatial and temporal correlations does not stem, in general, from a nucleation phase diffusing accross the system. It results rather from a progressive and more global cooperative process occurring over the whole system by repetitive interactions.

For hundreds of years, science has proceeded on the notion that things can always be understood--and can only be understood--by breaking them down into smaller pieces, and by coming to know those pieces completely. Systems in critical states flout this principle. Important aspects of their behaviour cannot be captured knowing only the detailed properties of their component parts. The large scale behavior is more controlled by their cooperativity and scaling up of their interactions. This is the key idea underlying the four examples that illustrate this new approach to prediction: rupture of engineering structures, earthquakes, stock market crashes and human parturition.

Tachihara 45GF WoodField

Instead of amplifying atmospheric haze, Velvia ate right through it. Velvia amped up the colors to where they should be, not as they were.

What we can observe directly is the prevailing status of valuations and the quality of market action. We can also look at more than a century of market history and get an idea of what the return/risk profile of the market has been, on average, given that prevailing evidence. As of today – not two weeks ago, not two weeks from now, but today – the prevailing status of valuations and market action is one that has historically provided a strong average return/risk profile, but with rare “outliers” that encourage us to retain a hedge several percent below the current level of the market, strictly to insure against an unlikely further breakdown.

From my perspective, the whole issue of bull market versus bear market doesn't get investors anywhere. Asking whether stocks are in a bull market or a bear market is like asking Columbus what kind of trees are planted along the edge of the earth. The question itself makes a false assumption about how the world works. My view is that bull markets and bear markets don't exist in observable reality – only in hindsight. What gain is there to investing based on something that's unobservable when you can manage your investments based on directly observable evidence?

legislation will then be — in fact, it already is — the battlefield for the fantasies and greed of everyone

This contradiction in ideas is, unfortunately but logically, reflected in events in France. For example, Frenchmen have led all other Europeans in obtaining their rights — or, more accurately, their political demands. Yet this fact has in no respect prevented us from becoming the most governed, the most regulated, the most imposed upon, the most harnessed, and the most exploited people in Europe. France also leads all other nations as the one where revolutions are constantly to be anticipated. And under the circumstances, it is quite natural that this should be the case.

And this will remain the case so long as our politicians continue to accept this idea that has been so well expressed by Mr. Louis Blanc: "Society receives its momentum from power." This will remain the case so long as human beings with feelings continue to remain passive; so long as they consider themselves incapable of bettering their prosperity and happiness by their own intelligence and their own energy; so long as they expect everything from the law; in short, so long as they imagine that their relationship to the state is the same as that of the sheep to the shepherd.

This will remain the case so long as human beings with feelings continue to remain passive; so long as they consider themselves incapable of bettering their prosperity and happiness by their own intelligence and their own energy; so long as they expect everything from the law; in short, so long as they imagine that their relationship to the state is the same as that of the sheep to the shepherd.

This question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all, and there are only three ways to settle it:

1. The few plunder the many.
2. Everybody plunders everybody.
3. Nobody plunders anybody.

Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.

While society is struggling toward liberty, these famous men who put themselves at its head are filled with the spirit of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They think only of subjecting mankind to the philanthropic tyranny of their own social inventions. Like Rousseau, they desire to force mankind docilely to bear this yoke of the public welfare that they have dreamed up in their own imaginations.

Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.

This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat again: These two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

But when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed — then the law is no longer negative; it acts positively upon people. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives. When this happens, the people no longer need to discuss, to compare, to plan ahead; the law does all this for them. Intelligence becomes a useless prop for the people; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty, their property.

Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything — form, face, energy, movement, life — from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere — in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome — the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud.

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (July 1, 1818 – August 13, 1865), also Ignac Semmelweis (born Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp), [1] [2] was a Hungarian physician called the "saviour of mothers" [3] [4] who discovered, by 1847, that the incidence of puerperal fever, also known as childbed fever could be drastically cut by use of hand washing standards in obstetrical clinics

So why were we afraid? We felt we were good at programming, but we lacked confidence in our ability to do a mysterious, undifferentiated thing we called "business." In fact there is no such thing as "business." There's selling, promotion, figuring out what people want, deciding how much to charge, customer support, paying your bills, getting customers to pay you, getting incorporated, raising money, and so on. And the combination is not as hard as it seems, because some tasks (like raising money and getting incorporated) are an O(1) pain in the ass, whether you're big or small, and others (like selling and promotion) depend more on energy and imagination than any kind of special training.

“Scientists don’t know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don’t believe it has any negative impact on people’s lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It’s like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it’s probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It’s an aesthetic thing.”

Take away religion, he says, and people start believing in nationalism, which has killed far more people. Religion is also a good way of handling uncertainty. It lowers blood pressure. He’s convinced that religious people take fewer financial risks.

The grand doctors who once announced that complex carbohydrates are good for you are, to him, criminals responsible for thousands of deaths.

Back in 19th century America, the Catholic Church took on the task of changing the behavior of the poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, in order to prepare them to rise in American society. As this transformation succeeded, employers' signs that said "No Irish Need Apply" began to disappear in the 20th century.

The Jewish community likewise made many efforts to change the behavior of immigrants from Eastern Europe, to enable them to better fit into American society-- and to rise in that society.

The Urban League and other black uplift groups made similar efforts to prepare their fellow blacks to rise in American society. In fact, those efforts began to pay off in dramatic reductions in poverty among blacks, even before the civil rights laws of the 1960s.

The unanswered question is why an approach with a proven track record, not only in American society but in various other countries around the world, has been superseded by a philosophy of tribal identity over-riding issues of behavior and performance.

My friend Nick Calapa sent me the following e-mail:

The one good thing that came out of this whole credit debacle, I now have the perfect pithy response to all the lefties who tell me that the government should take over health care and make it affordable to everyone. You mean the way they made home ownership affordable to all through Fannie and Freddie? How did that work out for you?

The government solved its problem – and it did it by taking away the rights of the senior debt holders to an orderly liquidation – when on the numbers given by the ultimate acquirer the senior debt was likely to be whole or near to whole.

Now the future of WaMu was uncertain. They clearly had plenty of losses coming at them. The company estimated those losses as 19 billion. JPM has estimated 31 billion. On both those numbers incidentally the senior debt holders in WaMu should – in an orderly liquidation – be made whole. Get that – on JPM’s own numbers the senior debt holders should have been made whole – and yet the rights of these debt holders were confiscated.

I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C in mind

Our process words stink. It's much easier for us when we think of an object—and I have apologized profusely over the last twenty years for making up the term object-oriented, because as soon as it started to be misapplied, I realized that I should have used a much more process-oriented term for it.—The Japanese have an interesting word, which is called ma. Spelled in English, just ma. Ma is the stuff in-between what we call objects. It's the stuff we don't see, because we're focused on the nounness of things rather than the processness of things. Japanese has a more process-feel oriented way of looking at how things relate to each other. You can always tell that by looking at the size of [the] word it takes to express something that is important. Ma is very short. We have to use words like interstitial or worse to approximate what the Japanese are talking about.

A couple of years ago we started this project called Squeak, which is simply not an attempt to give the world a free Smalltalk, but an attempt to give the world a bootstrapping mechanism for something much better than Smalltalk, and when you fool around with Squeak, please, please, think of it from that standpoint. Think of how you can obsolete the damn thing by using its own mechanisms for getting the next version of itself.

when I made this slide, C was just sort of a spec on the horizon. It was one of those things, like MS-DOS, that nobody took seriously, because who would ever fall for a joke like that.

my goodness, how do they hope to survive all of the changes, modifications, adaptations, and interoperability requirements without a meta-system. Without even, for instance, being able to load new things in while you're running.

It's very easy, for instance, to grow a baby six inches. They do it about ten times in their life and you never have to take it down for maintenance. But if you try and grow a 747, you are faced with an unbelievable problem, because it's in this simple-minded mechanical world, in which the only object has been to make the artifact in the first place. Not to fix it. Not to change it. Not to let it live for a hundred years.

at the very least, every object should have a URL, because, what the heck are they if they aren't these things, and I believe that every object on the Internet should have an IP [address], because that represents, much better, what the actual abstractions are of physical hardware to the bits. So this is an early insight that objects basically are like servers.

For example, one of those popcorn-sized things moves its own length in just two nanoseconds. One way of visualizing that is, if an atom was the size of a tennis ball, then one of these protein molecules would be about the size of a Volkswagen, and it's moving its own length in two nanoseconds. That's about eight feet on our scale of things.—Can anybody do the arithmetic to tell me uh what fraction of the speed of light, moving eight feet in two nanoseconds is? Four times? Yeah. Four times the speed of light.—Scale.—If you've ever wondered why chemistry works, this is why. The thermal agitation down there is so unbelievably violent that we could not imagine it, even with the aid of computers.

He also pointed out that you have to have something blue to have blue thoughts with. I think this is generally missed in people who specialize to the extent of anything else. When you specialize, you are basically putting yourself into a mental state where optimization is pretty much all you can do. You have to learn lots of different kinds of things in order to have the start of these other contexts.

Terrific ideas hide behind good ones.

He used a metaphor of thoughts as ants crawling on a plane. In this case it's a pink plane, and there's a lot of things you can do on a pink plane. You can have goals. You can choose directions. You can move along. But you're basically in the pink context. It means that progress, in a fixed context, is almost always a form of optimization, because if you're actually coming up with something new, it wouldn't have been part of the rules or the context for what the pink plane is all about.

Or, you can come up with a new concept, which the people who started getting interested in complex structures many years ago did. They called it architecture. Literally, the designing and building of successful arches. A non-obvious, a non-linear interaction between simple materials to give you non-obvious sinergies, and a fast multiplication of materials.

And summing it up:

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

I'd argue that you can do this in Ruby as well. I don't know if Ruby was on Kay's radar in mid-2003.

Whatever each of us as individuals may think of this matter, it has already been decided for us by the overwhelming weight of public conviction. One hundred and fifty years ago [from 1959] public opinion would have no more held it was the business of our government to assure constantly prosperous economic conditions than ... they would have thought it was the business of government to guarantee everyone a happy marriage. Fifty years ago public opinion would have thought it necessary to do such relatively inexpensive things as to establish bread lines and soup kitchens so no one actually starved.

Where does all this leave us? The historically recent but now almost unanimous opinion of both our public officials and their constituents that it is the duty of government to maintain endless prosperity is not likely to change.

The errors peak near the end of the second year of life. Deloache's team says this suggests a real developmental phenomenon: that learning to recognizing an object is a separate mental process from deciding whether it's the right size to use in real life, and that these two processes are acquired at different stages in a child's development.

me: No idea, but it's a unix file system made up of 3d boxes that she has to search for THE FILE TO ENABLE THE DOOR LOCKS BECAUSE THE EVIL DINOS ARE SMASHING IN
root2you: Oooh
Find knowledge is crucial

I had a similar experience when, in my classical period, I tried to read the old testament in the text. I knew a little bit of the Aramaic of the Northern Levant, but not Hebrew. I opened the book, started deciphering and was shocked after reading the very first sentence of the very first book, Genesis. What had been translated into “In the beginning, G**d” was not so in the original. אלהים Elohim is a plural form that could mean “the gods”. What is so monotheistic about “the gods”? And B-reshit בראשית does not necessarily mean the beginning –I see no temporal dimension. It is from “rosh”. It is more likely to mean “principally”.

Just like science –although people believe in “purity” and “purification” of languages the same way they think that knowledge is a nonrandom, directed process.

Thank you Stan Young. I received vindication for the main idea of Fooled by Randomness, the idea of false pattern detection that I later developed into the narrative fallacy, which I summarize as follows: statistical nonexperimental knowledge derived from looking at data is bunk, partly since researchers are very likely to show spurious patterns and regularities (or nonexperimental research leads to pseudoknowledge). Technology makes false patterns easy to detect, abundance of data make them more likely to be salient. If you have a million random and unskilled traders, you will see many people with Warren Buffet’s performance –all of whom, you would be told, “could not have been doing so well out of randomness” and “have a statistically significant performance”. If you look hard enough at large datasets you will see some “nonrandom” regularity somewhere that will fool you, the result of searching and testing and the immensity of the datasets now available to us.

Except that the vindication did not come from economists or philosophers of science (these fields, I keep repeating...), but from medicine. At the AAAS conference in San Francisco I was a discutant of session in which John Ioannidis showed that 4 out of 5 epidemiological “statistically significant” studies fail to replicate in controlled experiments. 4 out of 5 epidemiological studies are fooled by randomness! The epidemiologists worked hard on their computers until they found an association between symptoms and identified possible “causes”, and published the result for academic advancement. These results, of course, will be reported in the newspapers –journalists and your family doctor do not understand the difference between back-testing and clinical trials. Another researcher, Peter Austin, showed how he could find links between health symptoms and astrological signs. (I once showed students that if you generate a 1000 “histories” for 1000 random variables, it would be close to impossible to not see a 95% correlation between two of them, and one that you know is entirely spurious –something called the Wigner effect.)

The problem is that even clinical trials fail to replicate about 25% of the time; simply, the researchers do so many of them that one strange result can show up by accident. It will be the one that is reported. The good news is that the FDA is aware of the problem; it does not like anything nonclinical.

But if spending money does not make me happy, most certainly, having money stashed away, particularly f*** you money, makes me extremely happy, particularly compared to the dark years between the age of 20 and 25 when I was impoverished after having had an opulent childhood. There is something severely missing in the literature, the awareness of the idea best expressed in the old trader adage: the worst thing you could possibly do with money is spend it. Having no argumentative customers increases my life satisfaction. Not depending on other people’s subjective assessment increases my life satisfaction. Not being an inmate in some corporate structure increases my life satisfaction. Not doing some things increases my life satisfaction. Having the option to give everything away to go live as a hermit in the desert or as a social worker in Africa, increases my life satisfaction. Either nobody in these papers and papers tested for that, or he can’t get it published.

This explains why some cannot understand why I can be skeptical and empirical at the same time

"in absence of any reward, the intrinsic reward is self-propagation."

WOW.

Cell loss, cell atrophy 1955 Stem cells, growth factors, exercise
Nuclear [epi]mutations
(only cancer matters) 1959/1982 WILT (Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres)
Mutant mitochondria 1972 Allotopic expression of 13 proteins
Death-resistant cells 1965 Cell ablation, reprogramming
Extracellular crosslinks 1981 AGE-breaking molecules/enzymes
Extracellular junk 1907 Phagocytosis; beta-breakers
Intracellular junk 1959 Transgenic microbial hydrolases

In 2007, Paul Rothemund gave TED a short summary of his specialty, DNA folding. Now he lays out in clear, adundant detail the immense promise of this field -- to create tiny machines that assemble themselves.

* The Gutenberg bible had 252 characters to represent every stroke of the monk's pen. It was made to look like a real book, as a book had been known back then: written by a pen. They imitated the past, nobody knew what a book ought to look like. They didn't know that people would read to themselves---everyone read aloud and listened to themselves (we know this because the people who could read to themselves were written about).
* People think software is hard to write. People think they have to get software from vendors. People think they have to have software standards. People think the web and the internet are the same thing.
* Drawing isn't hard because you don't know how to move your hand. You are just perceiving something too early. You see a table and think it's a table instead of seeing the shape.
* It was a good thing they couldn't measure really accurately the orbit of Mercury back then because Newton would have talked himself out of a really good theory. That was one of the clues for Einstein. This is never ending. Science never finds the truths that the Bible and philosophy talks about. Never. It never really finds a fact and it does a disservice in using old words like 'truth' and 'fact' and 'theory' for completely new meanings.
* Science is about making maps. The mapping language is always more powerful than reality. You can make a map of middle earth and a map of india and they look alike. You have to know something else to tell the difference between the two.
* If you have a class of 30 or so kids, there'll always be a Galileo there.

right on ben i would like the paper done and told before it happened but even at that we would have just pass over it ..i am fully invested and will stay that way til i go broke,,. god bless american it up to him anyways..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We have a blueprint for a state machine that writes a blueprint for another state machine. So we are looking at a blueprint of a state machine that makes blueprints and we are trying to predict the behaviour of the state machines it builds.

This is roughly like looking at Bach’s DNA and hearing the Little Fugue in your head.

Chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA), a selective mechanism for degradation of cytosolic proteins in lysosomes, contributes to the removal of altered proteins as part of the cellular quality-control systems1, 2. We have previously found that CMA activity declines in aged organisms and have proposed that this failure in cellular clearance could contribute to the accumulation of altered proteins, the abnormal cellular homeostasis and, eventually, the functional loss characteristic of aged organisms. To determine whether these negative features of aging can be prevented by maintaining efficient autophagic activity until late in life, in this work we have corrected the CMA defect in aged rodents. We have generated a double transgenic mouse model in which the amount of the lysosomal receptor for CMA, previously shown to decrease in abundance with age3, can be modulated. We have analyzed in this model the consequences of preventing the age-dependent decrease in receptor abundance in aged rodents at the cellular and organ levels. We show here that CMA activity is maintained until advanced ages if the decrease in the receptor abundance is prevented and that preservation of autophagic activity is associated with lower intracellular accumulation of damaged proteins, better ability to handle protein damage and improved organ function.

Readers might be surprised to learn that teeth appear in the fossil record before bones. Shubin tells the story of how conodonts, the plentiful fossil from ancient oceans, puzzled 19th century scientists who debated whether they were animal, vegetable or mineral.

One day a paleontologist discovered what looked like a lamprey fossil. Inside the mouth of this primitive, jawless fish were rows of conodonts - teeth! Those teeth, the earliest on record, had been observed 150 years before anyone realized what they were. It turns out that multiple rows of teeth formed the building blocks of skulls, pushing back - eon upon eon - to cover the brain.

Those first bony-head skeletons, which belonged to a group of fish called ostracoderms, looked "like hamburgers with fleshy tails," writes Shubin. The fossilized skulls of these fish are shiny, like teeth or fish scales. When this skull is studied under a microscope, "the whole shield is made up of thousands of small teeth fused together."

When it comes to time logged on my Mac, I am not a hobbyist and cannot fool around experimenting.

In the early days of monopoly money, bank lending officers were conservative, and they tended to make loans to businesses. And businesses create what are called self-liquidating loans: they borrow money in order to make money. If they succeed in making money, they can pay off the loan – it’s self-liquidating. What’s happened in the last 30 years is that bankers have preferred to lend to consumers and speculators—consumers up until the ’90s began, and speculators ever since. So they have been lending money to people so they could buy cars, lately of course it was homes, and everything all the way down to electronics like VCRs and DVDs players and things like that – people are buying them on credit cards. In the past 4 years there has been a very strong lending to hedge funds, so that they can leverage up even more.

If you look at that progression from businesses to consumers to speculators you can see the loans are no longer self-liquidating. That means somebody else has to go make money: that consumer has to make money somewhere else to pay off the loan for the car, the loan itself per se isn’t going into anything productive. And speculators of course can lose all of that money in a flash. So the bankers are taking huge risks, and you throw that on top of a burst real estate bubble where the bankers have all of their money now, and I think the ingredients of a credit collapse are right there to be had. But they will not precipitate deflation until confidence finally turns down. And even through the biggest drop in 40 years in the S&P confidence never flagged.

Just like in the housing area, there was a tremendous speculation all supported by credit. Credit is behind all of the asset bubbles – not cash, as say in Weimar Germany in 1923; that was a different situation. It’s all IOUs; somebody’s collecting interest on that and someone on the other end is promising to pay. And when all of that collapses I think we’ll see deflation

And credit bubbles have always imploded. The amount of dollars out there that are greenbacks – actual cash – is miniscule compared to the dollar value of credit instruments. So in my view the Fed is utterly powerless to prevent the ultimate deflation of the credit bubble. And some people say, “Well, they can print money.” Fine, that would just make the credit bubble collapse faster as soon as bond holders realize that’s what they were doing. There’s no way out of it.

Three steps to recovery in a banking crisis: 1) devalue currency, 2) recapitalize banks, 3) put in a steep yield curve. Apparently happened in 90 in Scandanavia, 93? in France, 97 in Asia, 2001 in Argentina, and now in America.

Want to succeed? Be ready to fail, says a Rutgers-Camden historian, who notes that big ideas dont come with the alleged light bulb moment, but emerge after countless acts of failure.

{quote The chemical reactions that make up E. coli's metabolism don't happen spontaneously, just as an egg does not boil itself. It takes energy to join atoms together, as well as to break them apart. E. coli gets its energy in two ways. One is by turning its membranes into a battery. The other is by capturing the energy in its food.

Among the channels that decorate E. coli's membranes are pumps that hurl positively charged protons out of the microbe. E. coli gives itself a negative charge in the process, attracting positively charged atoms that happen to be in its neighborhood. It draws some of them into special channels that can capture energy from their movement, like an electric version of a waterwheel. E. coli stores that energy in the atomic bonds of a molecule called ATP.

ATP molecules float through E. coli like portable energy packs. When E. coli's enzymes need extra energy to drive a reaction, they grab ATP and draw out the energy stored in the bonds between its atoms. E. coli uses the energy it gets from its membrane battery to get more energy from its food. With the help of ATP, its enzymes can break down sugar, cutting its bonds and storing the energy in still more ATP. It does not unleast all the energy in a sugar molecule at once. If It did, most of that energy would be lost in heat. Rather than burning up a bonfire of sugar, E. coli makes surginal nicks, step by step, in order to release manageable bursts of energy.

E. coli uses some of this energy to build new molecules. Along with the sugar it breaks down, it also needs a few minerals. But it has to work hard to get even the trace amounts it requires. E. coli needs iron to live, for example, but iron is exquisitely scarce. In a living host most iron is tucked away inside cells. What little there is outside the cells is usually bound up in other molecules, which will not surrender it easily. E. coli has to fight for iron by building iron-stealing molecules, called siderphores, and pumping them out into its surroundings. As the siderophores drift along, they sometimes bump into iron-bearing moleures. When they do, they pry away the iron atom and then slide back into the E. coli. Once inside, the siderophores unfold to release their treasure.

While iron is essential to E. coli, it's also a poison. Once inside the microbe, a free iron atom can seize oxygen atoms from water molecules, turning them into hydrogen peroxide, which in turn will attack E. coli's DNA. E. coli defends itself with proteins that scoop up iron as soon as it arrives and store it away in deep pockets. A single one of these proteins can safely hold 5,000 iron atoms, which it carefully dispenses, one atom at a time, as the microbe needs them.

Iron is not the only danger E. coli's metabolism posts to itself. Even the proteins it builds can become poisonous. Acid, radiation, and other sorts of damage can deform proteins, causing them to stop working as they should. The mangled proteins wreak havoc, jamming the smooth assemly line of chemistry E. coli depends on for survival. They can even attack other proteins. E. coli protects itself from itself by building a team of assassins---proteins whose sole function is to destroy old proteins. Once an old protein has been minced into amino acids, it becomes a supply of raw ingredients for new proteins. Life and death, food and poison---all teeter together on a delicate fulcrum inside E. coli.}

Quick notes:
* on using central limit theorem: reality is as rough on the long run as on the short run.
* lofty ambitions have bad track records. Wanted to be Kepler of complexity, not Newton.
* Ten years of investing returns is just about that of seven days: fortunes are made by huge moves?
* Absolute value of market prices are very correlated
* respect folklore
* roughness and Japanese art

From the inventor of fractal geometry, a revolutionary new theory that overturns our understanding of how markets work. Benoit B. Mandelbrot, one of the century's most influential mathematicians, is world-famous for making mathematical sense of a fact everybody knows but that geometers from Euclid on down had never assimilated: Clouds are not round, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not smooth. To these classic lines we can now add another example: Markets are not the safe bet your broker may claim. In his first book for a general audience, Mandelbrot, with co-author Richard L. Hudson, shows how the dominant way of thinking about the behavior of markets--a set of mathematical assumptions a century old and still learned by every MBA and financier in the world--simply does not work. As he did for the physical world in his classic The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Mandelbrot here uses fractal geometry to propose a new, more accurate way of describing market behavior. The complex gyrations of IBM's stock price and the dollar-euro exchange rate can now be reduced to straightforward formulae that yield a far better model of how risky they are. With his fractal tools, Mandelbrot has gotten to the bottom of how financial markets really work, and in doing so, he describes the volatile, dangerous (and strangely beautiful) properties that financial experts have never before accounted for. The result is no less than the foundation for a new science of finance.

Entwined environment–information transitions have characterized Earth's evolutionary history since its beginning some 4 billion years ago (4 Gyr). Life emerged remarkably soon after surface conditions became habitable, with the formation of oceans and cessation of sterilizing asteroid impacts. The first organisms would have drained the environment of energetically and structurally useful compounds and replaced them with degraded waste products, including methane. An ultimately dull fate for life, eking out a meagre existence on a lifeboat Earth, was averted when closed recycling loops developed, in which one life form's waste became another's food. These loops are large-scale manifestations of the auto-catalytic nature of the cell, locked in as the core of the global 'metabolism' that is still with us.

Despite recycling, life remained energetically limited until the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis, sometime before 2.7 Gyr. This breakthrough in metabolic evolution greatly increased the free energy supply to the biota, giving life a truly global environmental impact. It facilitated the great oxidation of the atmosphere around 2.2 Gyr, but — as the long time lag indicates — other factors were required. Perhaps oxidation had to await tectonically driven changes in Earth's 'anatomy', including the appearance of shelf seas where reduced organic carbon could reach the sediments and be buried.

Although the energetic stage was now set for global dominance by eukaryotes, the emergence of a soft cell-boundary membrane coupled to an internal skeleton and a means for cellular division were also required. These transitions are thought to have been especially difficult, as they required the fixation of thousands of rare mutations.

Eukaryotes may be implicated in the worst crisis of past co-evolution: the extreme Neoproterozoic glaciations of 0.8–0.6 Gyr that were accompanied by a second rise in oxygen. Whenever eukaryotes started to colonize the land surface, there would have been strong selection for traits that accelerated weathering to access rock-bound nutrients. Weathering of silicates would have inadvertently drawn down atmospheric carbon dioxide and cooled the planet, and weathering of phosphorus would have increased global productivity and contributed to oxygen rise. The latter opened the door for the diversification of larger, hard-shelled, animal life in the Cambrian explosion. After that, the triumph of vascular land plants, causing a further rise in oxygen and fall in carbon dioxide, played its part in creating the environmental conditions in which active megafauna (including ourselves) evolved.

In fact, a curious thing has happened in the past 2 years since Taleb began to be famous. I increasingly hear people reference his platonizations while betraying that they don’t actually understand what he wrote. These are super-intelligent people who are good at using appeals to authority to bolster rhetorical arguments, and well-meaning people who simply want to know what the “system” of making wise choices is. This was an obvious danger, since Taleb is writing about truths that most people don’t really want to know. They want to think they know, and they want to act like they know, but deep down they don’t want to think all the way through to the logical conclusion. That’s why mainstream economists have tended to ignore Mandelbrot, and no amount of erudite exposition on the part of Taleb can combat human nature.

This is why I recommend reading Mandelbrot and Popper first. If you understand the implications of what they are saying, and really truly want more, you’ll find more of it in Taleb. To my friends at Department of Defense who were lapping up Mandelbrot in 1992, Taleb is like a drink of fresh water. But if you don’t come to Taleb thirsty, you’ll at best walk away with an arsenal of “clever turns of phrase” that you can use to “dazzle and awe”, all the while lacking deep understanding.

For many types of machine learning algorithms, one can compute the statistically \optimal" way to select training data. In this paper, we review how optimal data selection techniques have been used with feedforward neural networks. We then show how the same principles may be used to select data for two alternative, statistically-based learning architectures: mixtures of Gaussians and locally weighted regression. While the techniques for neural networks are computationally expensive and approximate, the techniques for mixtures of Gaussians and locally weighted regression are both e cient and accurate. Empirically, we observe that the optimality criterion sharply decreases the number of training examples the learner needs in order to achieve good performance. 1.

Biology posts

Besides their expertise in mouse genetics, the authors brought two major assets to their study: 1) they had already carefully mapped the development of the short-tailed fruit bat (Carollia perspicillata, "our model Chiropteran"); and 2) they knew a lot about the genetic control of limb length in other mammals. In particular, they knew that the protein Prx1 is known to influence limb elongation, by controlling the expression of other genes. So they hypothesized that changes in the activity or level of Prx1 might underlie the difference in limb length between bats and mice, and they were well-equipped to do the experiments.

{quote Author Michael Ruhlman and Chef Dan Barber talk about modern industrial farming and agriculture in the United States as part of Chautauqua Institutions week long program called "What's for Dinner: Food and Politics in the 21st Century."}

Natural fois gras! "The high cost of cheap food."

But, very long-term statistics often conceal problems which may arise for investors with portfolios heavily allocated to stocks. This paper will briefly examine historical data and argue for caution in uncritically accepting the hypothesis that stocks are always the best investment for the long-run.

co-evolution between parasites and their hosts have been a prime feature of all evolution, and that the parasites are the most dynamic part of that process. In effect, the course of evolution, perhaps even human evolution, is steered by...the parasites. They are the movers and shakers of planet Earth.

Zimmer also believes that many natural scientists haven't faced the implications of this yet. Many studies of population dynamics and animal behaviour are made without taking into consideration that parasites might affect the populations, and even their behaviour, in dramatic ways.

That's the standard argument for free trade. It does, however, assume a few things. First, notice that all the bread bakers in TVland have become unemployed, and now have to learn how to weld transistors. Meanwhile, Doughnian tech workers now have to learn baking. In the real world, these dislocations are painful. While there are various theorems in economics that assure that it is always possible to compensate the losers from free trade in a way that the nation still benefits, in practice, that compensation often does not occur.

I received a letter recently from a man who grew up in my old neighborhood back in Harlem. When he and I were in the same junior high school, one day a teacher who saw him eating his brown bag lunch suddenly arranged for him to get a lunch from the school cafeteria without having to pay for it.

It happened so fast that my schoolmate had already taken a bite from the school lunch when he suddenly realized that he had been given charity-- and he wouldn't swallow the food. Instead he went to the toilet and spat it out.

By now his brown bag lunch had been thrown out, so he just went hungry that day.

Earthquake activity also may be at the root of the biblical prophecy of Armageddon, the site of the final conflict between good and evil. According to Nur, the repeated destruction of the city Megiddo probably inspired the author of Revelation to script his haunting prediction of the Apocalypse.

For five millennia, the city of Megiddo stood at one of the most important junctions in the ancient Near East, the Nahal Iron Pass. This pass was the only means of traversing the Carmel-Gilboa mountain range on the road from Damascus to Egypt. By controlling this route, Megiddo commanded the course of trade and the march of armies in the Holy Land. Excavations suggest the city was repeatedly devastated by some large force. Archaeologists believe that warring factions were responsible for this destruction. Nur is certain that earthquakes were partly to blame.

When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world.

The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but actually worth solving.

As shown below (using methods that I've detailed frequently over the years) there have been few instances outside of the 1973-74 collapse and late 1990's bubble that 7-year total returns have departed by more than a few percent from what valuations would have dictated. Indeed, the only reason that total returns since 2000 have been positive at all is because valuations are back to historically rich levels (though not as extreme as in 2000). Even today, stocks are most probably priced to deliver only about 5% over the coming 7-year period.

Given that the steepest market plunges generally occur before a recession is widely recognized, my impression is that investors should at least be certain that they can tolerate the impact of a downturn without substantially deviating from their investment discipline. As I frequently note, there is nothing wrong with a long-term buy-and-hold approach to stock market investing, provided investors recognize that the impulse to abandon that strategy can be extremely strong when the market has declined steeply and it seems that there is no end in sight. If you examine the historical record, the norm for bear markets is a loss of about 30%, with a typical frequency of one every 4-6 years.

My intent here is not to encourage disciplined investors to deviate from carefully considered investment plans. But if a recession or a bear market would produce unacceptable losses or would force you to abandon your investment plan, it is best to begin altering your investment position immediately (even if not entirely at once) toward a position that you can maintain regardless of market outcomes. If your position is inappropriate, do not wait for an “ideal” opportunity to change it. Begin changing it immediately, and continue to change it in steps – larger steps when you can get favorable prices, smaller steps when you have to do it at adverse prices. The important thing is to start immediately and decide in advance to move step-by-step over a reasonably limited period of time, until your position is appropriate.

Anytime you discover you are taking too much risk, realize in advance that you will experience some level of regret as you correct it – if you sell your first portion and the market advances, you'll regret having sold anything. If you sell your first portion and the market continues to decline, you'll regret that you didn't sell everything. The way to keep from being “paralyzed” in the financial markets is to realize in advance that gradually changing an investment position will always involve regret. It is better to “lock in” an acceptable level of regret than to risk an unacceptable loss.

Even if specific market outcomes can't be “timed” or “predicted” with any consistency, it is enough that the average return/risk profile of the market differs across various market conditions. This fact may not appear helpful, since it doesn't help to accurately forecast individual outcomes, and that's what people think they need. But consider it this way. Knowing that a coin is slightly biased toward heads won't help much in forecasting an individual throw either. Still, that sort of knowledge can provide an enormous edge when you average the outcomes of a large number of throws.

As for the stock market, it's important to keep in mind that if you look at the 6-month periods before and after the start of a recession, you'll observe that the S&P 500 has almost invariably dropped by about 20% from the high within 6 months before a recession starts to its low within 6 months after the recession starts. The eventual market decline is often far worse, but it's very typical to observe a 20% plunge within that 6-month band around a recession's start-date.

Conversely, the strongest portion of a new bull market often occurs while the economy is still in late-recession. Severe market declines don't neatly overlap recessions - rather, they start before a recession starts and end before a recession ends. For that reason, as Mark Hulbert recently noted, if you measure only between the official start and end dates of a recession, the market's performance is actually fairly flat, on average.

One of the key points I've made over the years is that recessions are not periods of generally slumping demand. If you look at the pattern of industry output during most recessions, the majority of industries are relatively unscathed. Nominal consumer spending has, in fact, never experienced a year-over-year decline in post-war data, and real consumption is generally the most stable class of expenditures.

No, the bulk of the damage in most recessions is confined to particular industries that experience large mismatches between what is demanded and what is supplied. The majority of weakness in GDP during a recession is due to a slump not in consumption but in investment, particularly inventory investment.

In effect, recessions are periods when there is a mismatch between the mix of goods supplied by the economy and the mix of goods demanded. That mismatch causes a buildup of inventories in some industries, and shortages in others. There is no such thing as a “representative consumer” who just consumes less, as Keynes' simplistic modeling of the economy would have people believe. The defining features of a recession are dislocations and mismatches, not “general weakness in aggregate demand.”

What does that mean for us here? It means that if you want to look for recession risk, staring at consumer confidence is the wrong activity.

This reinforces just how strongly crocodiles use association to > > >>learn - give > > >>them a signal associated with a reward, and they'll very quickly > > >>associate > > >>that signal with the reward. And crocs can detect differences in > > >>signals > > >>quite easily, which is why you can say "Food!" and get a response, > > >>and > > >>"Fred!" and get no response. If only my dog was so discerning! > > >>

While the selloff in oil prices is viewed by some as a “stimulus” for the economy, this is a classic mistake of confusing shifts in a demand curve with movements along it.

While the selloff in oil prices is viewed by some as a “stimulus” for the economy, this is a classic mistake of confusing shifts in a demand curve with movements along it. Put simply, oil prices are weakening because the global economy is weakening. That represents a shift in the demand curve. You do not then read the lower oil prices off of the graph and assert that the lower prices will lead to a stronger global economy.

investment is really just another kind of spending to Keynes. Since there is no production function in Keynesian theory, there's no reason to invest anyway. It's not like the investment is what produces the output, for gosh sakes, so the spending might as well be consumption.

Recessions result when a mismatch develops between what is demanded versus what is supplied. Economic downturns are not simply periods where people reduce their consumption of some “representative good.” Rather, we see most industries virtually unaffected by recessions, with a few industries actually experiencing shortages, but with a handful of industries experiencing devastating drop-offs in demand.

That is the second lesson of this delightful book: risky ventures, long shots and random outcomes have a way of looking like good bets, but only after the event.

Other books are equally informative and well written but have more interesting individual focus and panache:
Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health shows hows to add analysis to anecdote,
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk has more intellectual discipline (staying focused on the current topic),
Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities gives a thorough treatment of implications of textbook theory,
The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari gives snippets of contemporary research,
Chances Are: Adventures in Probability has less hackneyed history,
and Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is an engagingly opinionated view of chance in the stock market and life.

(click to add)

(click to add)

The Zimmern book is a more technical book than the Kitto book reviewed earlier on this blog. See what you can of the book here. See something about Zimmern here. As I wrote in the Kitto review, this book was recommended by VDH to me as two great books on the Greeks. I could not agree more.

The book is more technical because it delves into the economic development of Greece. It is very detailed in this respect. There is less an emphasis on the politics of Greece (and Athens) than there is in the Kitto book. There is more emphasis on necessity and growth of Attica. Like Kitto, there is not much on the Peloponnesian War.

At all stages try to see THROUGH the text to the documents on which it is based. Ideally you should try to DEMOLISH the book, break it down into its constituent parts. Obviously, at your stage, you cannot carry this process very far. But try to THINK in this way. The hardest job of all for a normal student at your stage is to break out of the prison of respect for the written word. Behind the most impressive prose lurks an often unimpressive human being. Look at the book as barrier between you and the materials you would use to construct a more truthful picture.

This is the kind of eye you should train. Keep an eye on their style as well as their footnotes. The blander they are, the more easy to read they are, the more effective they are, the more suspicious should you be. There’s only one answer. You must become a monster. Don’t give them a chance. Tear them apart. Be thoroughly unBritish. Get them down and when they’re down, kick them.

Try to develop your critical faculties. One golden rule is to assume that all your books are written by congenital liars. Take nothing on trust.

With the exception of 1929-32, our bear markets occurred against a background of economic expansion.

PHILLIP LASKER: Some analysts say the major difference here is that there's no stock. We don't have the supply of homes here in Australia like in the United States so we're in the going to see that crash in property prices that we saw in the United States.

STEVE KEEN: That's the old supply and demand argument, the favourite harbinger of every economist except me. To me where the demand comes from is people's willingness to borrow money to buy an asset. And that reflects their expectation that the price of the asset rising.

I think something of the orders of 40 per cent of prices are simply financed by people's expectations that the prices will keep on rising. Well when this expectation goes, ultimately goodbye 40 per cent of the current price of houses.

When push comes to shove there is always unlimited demand for "free" services.

When I picked up my newspaper yesterday, I thought I woke up in France. But no, it turns out socialism is alive and well in America. The Treasury Secretary is asking for a blank check to buy as much Fannie and Freddie debt or equity as he wants. The Fed’s purchase of Bear Stearns’ assets was amateur socialism compared to this.

"Someday this capitalistic economy, or what we used to call the capitalistic system, needs to get back on track and that means failure," said Lee Hoskins, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. "You can't have risk-taking without failure."

All government sponsored corporations fail their mission

1 Flag of the United States United States 1,818,000,000,000
2 Flag of the United Kingdom United Kingdom 1,135,000,000,000
3 Flag of Hong Kong Hong Kong 769,100,000,000
4 Flag of Germany Germany 763,900,000,000
5 Flag of the People's Republic of China China 699,500,000,000
6 Flag of France France 697,400,000,000
7 Flag of Belgium Belgium 633,500,000,000
8 Flag of the Netherlands Netherlands 450,900,000,000
9 Flag of Spain Spain 439,400,000,000
10 Flag of Canada Canada 398,400,000,000

(click to add)

Mathematically, the total return on stocks over any future time horizon can be estimated using the following equation. Annualized future total return =

(1 g)(Original Yield/Terminal Yield)1/N - 1 (Original Terminal)/2

Where Original Yield is the original dividend yield (in decimal form), Terminal Yield is the dividend yield expected at the end of the holding period, N is the holding period in years, and g is the growth rate of dividends over the holding period. For example, at the 1982 bear market low, the dividend yield on the S&P 500 Index reached a rich 6.7%. Over the following 16 years, the dividend yield has declined to just 1.4%, while dividends have grown at an average annual rate of 5.4%. Over those 16 years, the total return on the S&P 500 has been breathtakingly high, at over 20% annualized. Why? Do the math. Annualized total return =

(1.054)(.067/.014)1/16 - 1 (.067 .014)/2 = .203 = 20.3% annually

Note the rule: You want to own stocks when the yield on stocks is high, or while favorable market action (interest rates, inflation, market breadth) are uniformly driving the yield downward. Beware when neither is true.

Currently, assuming dividend growth speeds up to a 6% rate and that the dividend yield is still just 1.4% in the future, the long term total return on stocks will be 7.4%. But here's a more likely result: suppose the future dividend yield rises even a bit, even to just 2%. If that happens over the next 5 years, investors will earn a total return of zero over those 5 years. Over the next 10 years: just 4% annually. Over the next 20 years: 5.8% annually. Over the next 30 years: 6.4% annually. If the dividend yield rises to the historical average of 4% even 30 years from now, investors will have earned a total return of just 5% annually over that span. Consider that figure long and hard before trusting your retirement plans to a buy-and-hold approach in stocks.

Notice also that given any future stream of dividend, interest or face value payments, the higher the price you pay now, the lower the annual rate of return you will earn over the long run. In other words, when the future long-term return on a security falls, the current price rises.

Bumped

In inaugural years we discover that Democratic presidents are phonies and never meant most of what they said in their populist, anticapitalist campaigns. They could never get reelected if they really delivered on their campaign promises. Inaugural years for Republican presidents remind us that they are phonies, too; they don't do much for the economy or for investors. We get disappointed and pummel stock prices.

inaugural years following a Democratic win in November are better than Republican inaugural years. There is a reason for this pattern. The market expects the worst of a Democratic President and then discovers that he's not so bad for investors. It tends to rebound after the initial premonitions that a Democrat will win. On the other hand, Wall Street expects the most of a Republican and is disillusioned after the election.

In inaugural years we discover that Democratic presidents are phonies and never meant most of what they said in their populist, anticapitalist campaigns. They could never get reelected if they really delivered on their campaign promises. Inaugural years for Republican presidents remind us that they are phonies, too; they don't do much for the economy or for investors. We get disappointed and pummel stock prices.

If you examine the track history of cures since the civil war in the US, you’ll find that the greatest number of true cures have come from military research. I’m not speaking of treatments or therapies - I’m speaking of cures. The reason for this in my opinion is that the resources of the military are quite large, and the mission of the military (winning and keeping veteran care costs as low as possible) is quite different from commercial concerns whose key concern is to have a product requiring chronic dosing that creates trackable earnings for wall st and their investors. So, in short, the incentives currently in the system do not produce cures. It’s literally too expensive for a company to cure anything. The pill to cover the cost of research, development and marketing would have to cost 6 figures each if you only needed to take one - ever.

So, that’s why I love the prize model.

Market tops are created because investors stop looking for a top, and simply extrapolate good news as a permanent feature of the economic landscape. Similarly, market bottoms are created because investors stop looking for a bottom, and extrapolate ongoing bad news. If you remember the lows of 1982, or 1990-1991, or 2002, you'll recall that in each instance, the question among investors wasn't whether the economy would recover in one quarter versus two quarters. The question was how the economy could recover at any point in the foreseeable future. Investors give up hope at bottoms. We don't see that here.

Because, as per the Pragmatists, our ideas about the world are a human construct rather than mirrors of reality, changing ways of manipulating nature lead to changing constructs and to changing notions of truth and authority as well as patterns of behavior (institutions).

Shin described his life of total isolation from the world: "In South Korea, although there is disappointment and sadness, there is also so much joy, happiness and comfort. In Kaechon, I did not even know such emotions existed. The only emotion I ever knew was fear: fear of beatings, fear of starvation, fear of torture and fear of death."

Making a difference makes sense only if you are convinced that you have mastered the subject at hand to the point where any difference you might make would be for the better.

Very few people have mastered anything that well beyond their own limited circle of knowledge. Even fewer seem to think far enough ahead to consider that question. Yet hardly a day goes by without news of some uninformed busybodies on one crusade or another.

Even the simplest acts have ramifications that spread across society the way waves spread across a pond when you drop a stone in it.

Among those who make a difference by serving food to the homeless, how many have considered the history of societies which have made idleness easy for great numbers of people?

Making a difference makes sense only if you are convinced that you have mastered the subject at hand to the point where any difference you might make would be for the better.

{quote [After discussing computing, robotics, geodesic domes, penicillin, radio, investment bank, management, etc.] In other words, the lead time for knowledge to become applicable technology and begin to be accepted on the market is between twenty-five and thirty-five years.

This has not changed much throughout recorded history. It is widey believed that scientific discoveries turn much faster in our day than ever before into technology, products, and processes. But this is largely illusion. Around 1250 the Englishman Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk, showed that refraction defects of the eye could be corrected with eyeglasses. This was incompatible with what everybody then know: the "infallible" authority of the Middle Ages Galen, the great medical scientist, had "proven conclusively" that it could not be done. Roger Bacon lived and worked on the extreme edges of the civilized world, in the wilds of northern Yorkshire. Yet a mural, painted thirty years later in the Palace of the Popes in Avignon ([in France,] where it can still be seen), shows elderly cardinals wearing reading glasses; and ten years later, miniatures show elderly courtiers in the Sultan's Palace in Cairo also in glasses.

The mill race, which was the first true "automation," was developed to grind grain by the Benedictine monks in northern Europe around the year 1000; within thirty years it had spread all over Europe. Gutenberg's invention of movable type and the woodcut both followed within thirty years of the West's learning of Chinese printing.}

{quote One should expect entrepreneurship to be considerably less risky than optimization. ... In fact, there are plenty of entrepreneurial organizations around whose batting average is so high as to give the lie to all but universal belief in the high risk of entrepreneurship and innovation. ... There are also enough individual entrepreneurs around whose batting average in starting new ventures is so high as to disprove the popular belief of the high risk of entrepreneurship. [Monkeys on typewriters notwithstanding.] Entrepreneurship is "risky" mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing. They lack methodology. They violate elementary and well-known rules. This is particularly true of high-tech entrepreneurs.}

The Reagan tax cuts, like similar measures enacted in the 1920s and 1960s, showed that reducing excessive tax rates stimulates growth, reduces tax avoidance, and can increase the amount and share of tax payments generated by the rich. High top tax rates can induce counterproductive behavior and suppress revenues, factors that are usually missed or understated in government static revenue analysis. Furthermore, the key assumption of static revenue analysis that economic growth is not affected by tax changes is di sproved by the experience of previous tax reduction programs. There is little reason to expect static revenue analysis to evaluate the economic or distributional effects of current tax reform proposals much better than it evaluated the Reagan tax program 15 years ago.

It's not too flashy yet. "The order of the words will change," says Griffin. "There will be images that will turn on and off." The images are black-and-white in four shades of grey; a murky newspaper image, at best, but colored by a sheet of transparent, tinted plastic that will be fixed over the top.

Build mathematical expression in LaTeX with these commands:

As I was reading the book via PDF on the flight yesterday, I got another idea for a derivative work:

Take a book and annotate it with contrary evidence and arguments and questions.

Call it the fisking edition.

Mind you, I'm not saying that because I'm going after Lessig or have any intention of doing that edition -- he's too damned smart and too good at arguing his ideas and, as I've said before, I'm too smart to find myself on the losing end of a debate with him even if I do disagree with him. Fisking is just an easy way to describe what I mean.

Or maybe I should call it the Talmudic editions.

I'd love to see someone who does know what he or she is talking about dive into the book and give me either more facts to help me make up my mind or more facts to help me make my arguments. I'd love to hear two sides.

I'd love to see Tim Blair create the annotated edition of any Michael Moore book. Or Matthew Yglesias create a civilized response to the rantings of Ann Coulter. Those would be pure entertainment. I wouldn't mind taking on the blatherings of Republic.com. What books would you take on?

And once we take on these books, the authors can create their next derivative works, replying. And, I know, I'm creating a ringing endorsement of Creative Commons with this. But wouldn't it be great to take a book and break it open at the spine for some back-and-forth?

Why not turn a book into a conversation?

discipline must trump conviction

What was De Vany's secret? For nearly two decades, he'd been eating and exercising as humans did in Paleolithic times – the early Stone Age. He'd come across research suggesting that we should be eating like our hunter-gatherer forebears – lean meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, but no grains, beans or dairy. It had made sense, so he took it up.

As De Vany points out, the fossil record reveals that our cave ancestors were not only slim, lean, fit and healthy, but that they did not generally suffer from many of the diseases that plague us today, such as cancer, allergies and heart disease. What's more, as long as they weren't gored by a wild beast or struck down by infection, they lived as long as we do today. They stayed agile and vigorous until they dropped (no wheelchairs and care homes for them).

How to make good coffee
By Marco on March 24, 2008

If you want cheering crowds, don't bother to study economics. It will only hold you back. Tell people what they want to hear-- and they don't want to hear about supply and demand.

This is a long-term process. In our sound bite world it is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that a deflationary credit unwind is something that will have just happened one Monday when we walk in the office. I always come back to a statement made by someone who lived through the Great Depression: "Just when we thought it was over, it was really only beginning."

1) It will slow the eventual recovery as we enter a Japan-style deflationary credit contraction with the government committed to propping up various non-productive financial entities rather than allowing liquidation.

2) It will result in the eventual downgrade and reduced confidence in U.S. debt.

3) On the other side of the deflationary credit unwind, several years from now, that lower rating and lower confidence will result in sharply higher interest rates and a further stagnation of the economy... very likely right as it looks as if the economy is recovering.

The more profound explanation is that the pen was prepared into an unstable position.

Similarly for the stock market, you have two classes or two levels of explanations. When you witness a crash, most of the time people invoke some news--some recent news--like a new tax law or interest rate increase. Something like that that just occurred a day before or a week before. What we have found in our work is that such local explanation does not actually describe the origin of the destabilization of the market

Interesting, because Alan Greenspan was defending himself in the financial press the other day — and has done many times before — saying that it’s not possible to identify when markets are in bubbles. It’s a view that the prediction industry likes to repeat. But my understanding of Sornette’s science is that this is just not correct; you can identify bubble conditions from within trading price data using the same approach a seismologist does to gauge the susceptibility of the fault lines between tectonic plates to a sudden shift. I think the mathematical model he applied to the housing markets goes by the name of “log-periodic oscillations”. Predicting when the quake will occur, and with what magnitude, is the problem. That is still a work in progress, but one guesses that Sornette will be at the forefront of it as it unfolds.

Changing diet may not be a panacea, and I may already have sown the seeds of my own demise, but you don’t not pay into a pension scheme because you didn’t pay in before. That sort of fatalism does lead to literal and metaphorical penury.

the mean and variance of E are mathematically infinite, which means in practice that the largest SZ in a given time series controls their values (3). As a consequence, variability is dominant and “typical” has no meaning. The energy pdf, and specifically its heavy tail, also suggests an explanation, at a mathematical-conceptual level, for the proclivity and capacity of the human brain to support status epilepticus, a potentially fatal condition characterized by prolonged/frequent SZ during which the brain does not return to its “normal” state, even when SZ activity abates.

De Vany’s concept of evolutionary fitness argues for the reduction or removal of grains from the diet, because they are essentially agricultural products and would not have featured much on a hunter-gatherer’s menu. So when the waiter offered us onion bhaji as a starter, Taleb asked the waiter wryly, as if the poor man would know, “Does Mr De Vany agree with it?” And as the ordering was concluded without any utterance of pilau or naan, the waiter looked understandably puzzled: “No rice? No bread?” You just don’t get too many cavemen going for an Indian near Russell Square these days. But then two come along at once. Now, what are the chances of that?

It’s experimental. Let’s not understand the mechanism. That is Menodotus de Nicomedia*. Now we are hitting on the centre of this book, which is empirical medicine. Don’t have theories. De Vany has theories, but the core of what he is saying is that this is how it seems to work. So existing theories are blind to empirical reality.

It is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology or practical experimentation.[1] Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new, progressive and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end.

Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist traditions, believing the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated; they directly confronted the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.

With regard to the “yen carry trade,” want to know who is the largest investor in that trade? Simple: the nation of Japan. It is the Japanese themselves who are most active in selling yen, buying dollars, and investing in U.S. Treasuries at higher yields. Japan has done this, as China has with its currency, in order to support the value of the U.S. dollar. But as their ownership of Treasury securities has grown, the potential cost of any realignment of exchange rates is becoming dangerously high, so both countries are beginning to diversify their central bank assets into other currencies such as the euro. Accumulating U.S. securities may have been fun while it lasted, but China and Japan are beginning to realize that the U.S. government has no plans to restrain its fiscal irresponsibility (largely because it lacks the capacity for constructive diplomacy).

I am increasingly losing confidence that Wall Street operates on a well-defined base of knowledge. Instead, I am struck by the number of platitudes and false constructs that seem to dominate the investment management industry.

(click to add)

All my life General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ) and Ford Motor (nyse: F - news - people ) have tried to go bankrupt. It takes them a long time because, even at this sorry task, they're not very competent. I have faith. They will eventually succeed, which will benefit Toyota (nyse: TM - news - people ) (107, TM ), the world's leading carmaker.

What Is Soil Carbon Sequestration?

You should warn people that getting into this sport is addictive and that we will never take another country drive without assessing every field, paddock, large lawn, or soccer field we see as a possible launch site.

In earlier times, when goose quill and ink were used on parchment, it was tedious and difficult to correct what had been written. Writers had to be careful. Sentences had to be thought through before being set to paper. One result was sentences that were long and embellished---the graceful rhetorical style we associate with older literature. With the advent of easier to use writing tools, corrections became easier to make; so writing was done more rapidly, but also with less thought and care---more like everyday speech. Some critics decried the lack of literary niceties. Others argued that this was how people really communicated, and besides, it was easier to understand.

The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves. So it's not a recipe for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you're equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth. Thanks to you and your invention, your pupils will be widely read without benefit of a teacher's instruction; in consequence, they'll entertain the delusion that they have wide knowledge, while they are, in fact, for the most part incapable of real judgment. They will also be difficult to get on with since they will have become wise merely in their own conceit, not genuinely so

Extensive governmental control harms the society not just in delivering dismal economic results, but, more seriously, it produces a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.

This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge

If we consider the long-term process described above in terms of the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief, then we are probably transitioning from the Bargaining stage to the Depression stage:

1. Denial: "This can't be happening."

2. Anger: "Why me?!"

3. Bargaining: "Just let me get back to even.", "Can't we stretch it out a few more years?"

4. Depression: "What's the point?"

5. Acceptance: "It's going to be OK."

Of course, considering that even now people are standing in line for Apple (AAPL) iPhones even as the U.S. government is discussing the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie, a move that will further depress the housing market as mortgages and credit become even less available, perhaps many of us remain firmly attached to the denial stage.

Declining gasoline purchases, due to higher prices, are hurting the federal fund that pays to maintain the nation's highways, the director of the Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday.

As Hayek explained when there is an increase in real savings investment, the structure of production expands relative to consumption, so producers costs fall faster than their selling prices and their sales volume increases, so in real terms, their profits increase, even though in nominal terms (say measured in gold oz) they might be falling or the same.

The idea that economic growth requires more money is based on a confusion of the real and the nominal. In fact, economic growth does not depend on the quantity of money at all. Any rate of economic growth can occur with any quantity of money.

(click to add)

Bumped

{quote Success always makes obsolete the very behavior that achieved it. It always creates new realities.}

{quote Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business; it can be justified only as being good for society.

Business exists to supply goods and services to customers, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers, or even dividends to stockholders.}

{quote Asked what a business is, the typical businessman is likely to answer, "An organization to make a profit." The typical economist is likely to give the same answer. This answer is not only false, it is irrelevant. ... Profit and profitability are, however, crucial---for society even more than the individual business. Yet profitability is not the purpose of, but a limiting factor on business enterprise and business activity.}

When you call a generator function, it doesn’t return a single value; instead it returns a generator object that supports the iterator protocol. On executing the yield expression, the generator outputs the value of i, similar to a return statement. The big difference between yield and a return statement is that on reaching a yield the generator’s state of execution is suspended and local variables are preserved. On the next call to the generator’s .next() method, the function will resume executing.

Functional programming can be considered the opposite of object-oriented programming. Objects are little capsules containing some internal state along with a collection of method calls that let you modify this state, and programs consist of making the right set of state changes. Functional programming wants to avoid state changes as much as possible and works with data flowing between functions.

Not surprisingly, the combination of all of these is rare but extremely powerful. In the rare instances when 1) The rate of inflation has been higher than 6 months earlier, 2) Treasury bond yields have been lower than 6 months earlier, 3) the NAPM Purchasing Managers Index has been below 50, and 4) the Gold/XAU ratio has been above 4.0, the XAU has soared at an astounding rate of 123.63% annualized. In contrast, when none of these have been true, the XAU has plunged at -53.21% annualized. That's a gaping difference.

at the bottom of the bear market in October 2002, the P/E hit 33, the same level the bear market began at in March 2000

So emerging panic is not enough – there has to be some basis to believe that a positive shift in investor attitudes toward risk would be sustainable. Again, falling interest rates, moderate valuations, and very strong market action early into the rebound are useful in separating sustainable advances (even sustainable bear-market rallies) from the fast, furious, prone-to-failure variety.

It's useful to remember that the 1929 and 1987 crashes started after the S&P 500 was already down about 14% from its highs.

Over the years, I've noted that bear markets typically involve far greater volatility and far larger short-term advances than investors typically remember in hindsight. The 2000-2002 bear, for example, included three separate advances in excess of 20% from intra-day low to intra-day high, with many more advances in the 5-10% range.

Still, we should not assume that the next significant capitulation will be the last. Bear markets typically involve a series of them (e.g. initial weakness on no news or only fears about interest rates or inflation, initial earnings disappointments, initial evidence of economic weakness, consensus about recession itself, consensus about the deepening of the recession, and eventually the mother of all bear market lows – complete loss of hope and a panic to cut deepening losses and “just get me out”).

Following the Perl Cookbook (by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, published by O'Reilly) spirit, the PLEAC Project aims to gather fans of programming, in order to implement the solutions in other programming languages.

In this document, you'll find an implementation of the Solutions of the Perl Cookbook in the Python language.

The simplest part is the insight that the total return of a stock is equal to the current dividend yield dividend growth rate. Thus a stock currently yields 4% and has been growing dividends at 6% in the past and is likely to do so in the future its long term total return is 6% 4%=10%. Johnson and Johnson is a classic example with a yield which has been around 2% for most of the last 30 years, but with a dividend growth rate of 14%. The total return on JNJ including reinvesting dividends has been 16% over a 30 year period.

(click to add)

Learn to love high quality food and variety. Eat fresh vegetables and fruits as your mainstay. Cook by color and texture, always with an eye to bright colors and a variety of them. Red and green are good. Brown, as in toast, french fries, or cereal, is bad.

Skip dinner now and then and just go hungry until the next morning. Then enjoy a good breakfast. Egg whites and melon are a great breakfast. Smoked salmon and a bit of fresh fruit is a winning meal anytime, but especially for breakfast.

Work out briefly, but with some intensity, 2 or 3 times a week. Hike, walk, and play a lot. I will post a beginning work out soon, but it is not rocket science. Work the big muscles a bit hard, work on balance, core stability and balance, then get out of the gym and walk outside.

Do not fear fat, but cut the bad fats. A good deal of the metabolic syndrome (which virtually all persons with abdominal obesity have) is from the toxicity of excess fat in the blood stream (the beta cells of the pancreas suffer from lipid toxicity). Some of it comes from the abdominal fat itself. But, some of it comes from saturated fat and transfat in the diet.

Eat lean meats, in moderate amounts. Easy on the sauces. Learn to love crab and mussels and lobster. Chicken on skewers loaded with red bell peppers and onion done on the grill is something you should have once a week. Grill vegetables when you are tired of steaming them. Or, sauté them in olive oil and garlic.

Of course, cut the manufactured foods in all forms. You will save money, even though you are eating lobster now and then.

No juices, protein drinks, or diet sodas. You have outgrown your need for milk. Make sure you get next to no fructose (easy to do if you avoid manufactured "foods").

Take some kind of nutritional supplements that provide ample antioxidants and B complex vitamins

{quote The beauty of the 40,000 BC eating model is that you eat no canned, frozen,
packaged, or manufactured food. Your diet consists of fresh fruits and vegetables,
eaten raw whenever possible, and lean meat. I do not eat raw meat because I no
longer trust our food supply. The model offers a conservative strategy for ridding
your diet of empty calories while it guides your food choices to highly nutritious
foods. You don’t have to read labels because nothing you buy to eat comes with
a label (nature doesn’t do this). Some latitude is necessary (I do not believe in
rigid rules for anything anyway), but the 40,000 BC model is always guiding your
choices.}

The essay on Evolutionary Fitness that started it all.

chers, de Soto has sought out detailed evidence from struggling economies around the world to back up his claims. The result is a fascinating and solidly supported look at the one component th

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

Most (all?) large systems developed using Erlang make heavy use of C for low-level code, leaving Erlang to manage the parts which tend to be complex in other languages, like controlling systems spread across several machines and implementing complex protocol logic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic.

I ask him what he thinks are the primary human virtues, and eventually he comes up with magnanimity – punish your enemies but don’t bear grudges; compassion – fairness always trumps efficiency; courage – very few people have this; and tenacity – tinker until it works for you.

We should be mistrustful of knowledge. It is bad for us. Give a bookie 10 pieces of information about a race and he’ll pick his horses. Give him 50 and his picks will be no better, but he will, fatally, be more confident.

And you and me? Well, the good investment strategy is to put 90% of your money in the safest possible government securities and the remaining 10% in a large number of high-risk ventures. This insulates you from bad black swans and exposes you to the possibility of good ones. Your smallest investment could go “convex” – explode – and make you rich. High-tech companies are the best. The downside risk is low if you get in at the start and the upside very high. Banks are the worst – all the risk is downside. Don’t be tempted to play the stock market – “If people knew the risks they’d never invest.”

Banks should be more like New York restaurants. They come and go but the restaurant business as a whole survives and thrives and the food gets better. Banks fail but bankers still get millions in bonuses for applying their useless models. Restaurants tinker, they work by trial and error and watch real results in the real world.

The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world.

Both maternal and paternal antecedents are grand, privileged and politically prominent. They are also Christian – Greek Orthodox. Startlingly, this great sceptic, this non-guru who believes in nothing, is still a practising Christian. He regards with some contempt the militant atheism movement led by Richard Dawkins.

“Scientists don’t know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don’t believe it has any negative impact on people’s lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It’s like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it’s probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It’s an aesthetic thing.”

Take away religion, he says, and people start believing in nationalism, which has killed far more people. Religion is also a good way of handling uncertainty. It lowers blood pressure. He’s convinced that religious people take fewer financial risks.

He was educated at a French school. Three traditions formed him: Greek Orthodox, French Catholic and Arab. They also taught him to disbelieve conventional wisdom. Each tradition had a different history of the crusades, utterly different. This led him to disbelieve historians almost as much as he does bankers.

But the biggest rule of all is his eccentric and punishing diet and exercise programme. He’s been on it for three months and he’s lost 20lb. He’s following the thinking of Arthur De Vany, an economist – of the acceptable type – turned fitness guru. The theory is that we eat and exercise according to our evolved natures. Early man did not eat carbs, so they’re out. He did not exercise regularly and he did not suffer long-term stress by having an annoying boss. Exercise must be irregular and ferocious – Taleb often does four hours in the gym or 360 press-ups and then nothing for 10 days. Jogging is useless; sprinting is good. He likes to knacker himself completely before a long flight. Stress should also be irregular and ferocious – early men did not have bad bosses, but they did occasionally run into lions.

{quote Those who favor government intervention in the economy often depict those who prefer free competition as pro-business apologists. This has been profoundly wrong for at least two centuries. ...

As noted in earlier chapters, the efficient uses of scarce resources by the economy as a whole depends on a system that features both profits and losses. Businesses are interested only in the profit half. If they can avoid losses by getting government subsidies, tariffs and other restrictions against imports, or domestic laws that stifle competition in various agricultural products, they will do so. Losses, however, are essential to the process that shifts resources to those who are providing what consumers want at the lowest prices-and away from those who are not.}

{quote It has been estimated that the gain in domestic American steel production due to import restrictions led to a net loss in the production of domestic American steel products as a whole. In other words, American industry as a whole was worse off, on net balance, as a result of the import restrictions on steel.

Nor were workers any better off after import restrictions were imposed in order to "save jobs." When new restrictions were placed on steel imports in 2002, the Wall Street Journal estimated that "Illinois would lose five jobs for every one protected, Ohio three for every one and Pennsylvania and Indiana, two for every one." In short, states in which the production of steel and steel products is concentrated stood to lose jobs, on net balance, as a result of policies designed to save jobs by putting restrictions on the importation of foreign steel. A later study confirmed a net loss of American jobs from steel tariffs.}

This happens over and over again. Reactionary policies are put through on short-term considerations and then everyone is surprised when they backfire in the long-term.

The poor help the rich get richer, when the wealthy in poor countries invest in developed nations rather than at home. Red tape, corruption, and risk of confiscation are some of the reasons this happens.

{quote The influence of wealth in the marketplace makes many prefer to move decisions into the political arena, on the assumption that this is a more level playing field. However, among the things that wealth buys is more and better education, as well as more leisure time that can be devoted to political activities and the mastering of legal technicalities. All this translates into a disproportionate influence of wealthier people in the political process, while the fact that those who are not rich often have more money in the aggregate than those who are may give ordinary more weight in the market than in the political or legal arena.}

Again: "The influence of wealth in the marketplace makes many prefer to move decisions into the political arena, on the assumption that this is a more level playing field. [There is, however] a disproportionate influence of wealthier people in the political process."

{quote Regardless of the particular industry or the particular country, if a million new and well-paying jobs are created in companies scattered all across the country as a result of international free trade, that carries less weight politically than if half a million jobs are lost in one industry where labor unions and employer associations are able to raise a clamor. When the million new jobs represent a few dozen jobs here and there in innumerable businesses scattered across the nation, there is not enough concentration of economic interest and political clout in anyone place to make it worthwhile to mount a comparable counter-campaign. Therefore laws are often passed restricting international trade for the benefit of some concentrated and vocal constituency, even though these restrictions may cause far more losses of jobs nationwide.}

{quote Under popularly elected government, the political incentives are to do what is popular, even if the consequence are worse than the consequences of doing nothing, or doing something that is less popular.}

{quote Both social and economic policies are often discussed in terms of the goals they proclaim, rather than the incentives they create.}

{quote The time when "a strong back and a weak mind" were sufficient for many jobs is long past in most modern economies.}

{quote In 1951, most Americans reached their peak earnings between 35 and 44 years of age, and people in those age brackets earned about half again as much as workers in their early twenties. By 1973, people in the 35 to 44-year-old brackets earned more than double the income of the younger workers. Twenty years later, the peak earnings bracket had moved up to 45 to 54 years of age, and people in those brackets earned more than three times what workers in their early twenties earned.}

I'm a little unclear on if "twenty years later" means that the 45-54 group had achieved primacy in 1973 or 1993, but the point stands and is fascinating. Pay(35-44, 1951)=0.5*Pay(20s, 1951). Pay(35-44, 1973)=2*Pay(20s, 1973). Pay(45-54, 1973 or 1993)=3*Pay(20s, 1973 or 1993). Despite the internet revolution, this trend is likely to be in place today, although for different reasons (grad school, student loans, etc.)

{quote Women, for example, have long had lower incomes than men, but most women give birth to children at some point in their lives and many stay out of the labor force until their children reach an age where they can be put into some form of day care while their mothers go to work. These interruptions of their careers cost women workplace experience and seniority, which in turn inhibit the rise of their incomes over the years relative to that of men who have been working continuously in the meantime. However, as far back as 1971, women who worked continuously from high school through their thirties earned slightly more than men of the same description, even though women as a group earned substantially less than men as a group.}

I say again, "As far back as 1971, women who worked continuously from high school through their thirties earned slightly more than men of the same description."

{quote Although people in the top income brackets and the bottom income brackets---"the rich" and "the poor," as they are often called---may be discussed as if they were different classes of people, often they are the very same people at different stages of their lives. An absolute majority of those Americans who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975 were also in the top 20 percent at some point over the next 16 years. This is not surprising.}

{quote When some people are born, live, and die in poverty, while others are born, live, and die in luxury, that is a very different situation from one in which young people have not yet reached the income level of older people, such as their parents. But the kind of statistics often cited in the media, and even in academia, typically do not distinguish these very different situations. Moreover, those who publicize such statistics usually proceed as if they are talking about differences between classes rather than differences between age brackets. Because of the movement of people from one income bracket to another over the years, the degree of income inequality over a lifetime is not the same as the degree of income inequality in any given year.}

{quote a detailed analysis of U.S. Census data showed that there were 39 million people in the bottom 20 percent of households but 64 million people in the top 20 percent of households ... there is nothing equal about those layers. They represent grossly different numbers of people}

{quote The sizes of families and households have differed not only from one income bracket to another at a given time, but also have differed over time. These differences are not incidental. They radically change the implications of "income distribution" statistics. For example, real income per American household rose only 6 percent over the entire period from 1969 to 1996, but real per capita income rose 51 percent over the same period. The discrepancy is due to the fact that the average size of families and households was declining during these years, so that smaller households were now earning about the same as larger households had earned a generation earlier. ... A Washington Post writer, for example, declared that "the incomes of most American households have remained stubbornly flat over the past three decades." It might be more accurate to say that some writers have remained stubbornly blind to economic facts. When two people in one household today earn the same total amount of money that three people were earning in one household in the past, that is a 50 percent increase in income per person---even when household income remains the same.}

{quote Describing people in certain income brackets as "rich" is false for a more fundamental reason: Income and wealth are different things. No matter how much income passes through your hands in a given year, your wealth depends on how much you have accumulated over the years. ... [Therefore] despite some confused or misleading discussions of "the rich" and "the poor," based on people's transient positions in the income streams, genuinely rich and genuinely poor people exist---people who are going to be living in luxury or in poverty all their lives---but they are much rarer than gross income statistics would suggest. Just as most American "poor" do not stay poor, so most rich Americans were not born rich.} Recall that we must remember that income is different than wealth.

And just in case you missed it: {quote When an absolute majority of those in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975 were also in the top 20 percent at some point by 1991, you cannot determine the degree of income inequality between people by looking at inequality between income brackets at a given time.}

{quote The term "productivity" is sometimes used loosely to describe an employee's contribution to a company's earnings. The problem is that this word is also defined in other ways and sometimes the implication is left that each worker has a certain productivity that is inherent in that worker, rather than being dependent on surrounding circumstances as well. A worker using the latest modern equipment can produce more output than the very same worker employed in another firm whose equipment is not quite as up-to-date or whose management does not have things organized as well. For example, Japanese-owned cotton mills in China during the 1930s paid higher wages than Chinese-owned cotton mills there, but the Japanese-run mills had lower labor costs per unit of output because they had higher output per worker. This was not due to different equipment---they both used the same machines---but to more efficient management brought over from Japan.}

Note this: the Japanese firms had lower labor costs per unit while paying higher wages! No arguments about economies of scale can be admitted unless the Chinese-owned firms had lower total costs per unit.

in Japan producers commonly deliver supplies to their ordering companies three or four times a day. At Toyota the volume of warehoused inventories is calculated for only an hour of work, while at Ford the inventories are for up to three weeks. In the Soviet Union, "we have in inventories almost as much as we create in a year."

One of the keys to the rise to dominance of the A & P grocery chain in the 1920s was a conscious decision by the head of the company to cut profit margins on sales, in order to increase the profit rate on investment. With the new and lower prices made possible by selling with lower profits per item, A & P was able to attract greatly increased numbers of customers, making far more total profit because of the increased volume of sales.

In previous decades-from the 1920s into the 1950s-White Castle was the dominant hamburger chain in the United States. People walked to White Castle hamburger restaurants, which meant that these restaurants had to be located in places with high population densities, so as to generate a large volume of pedestrian traffic coming in, enabling White Castle to sell to many people who came from a limited distance. Accordingly, White Castles were , often located near factories or in crowded working class neighborhoods in central cities. And they stayed open around the clock.

Financing was also very different in that earlier era. Unlike later fast-food chains, White Castle did not have franchises. The parent company owned each restaurant and built new ones only when it had the money on hand to pay cash to do so. This enabled White Castle to ride out the Great Depression of the 1930s, when many other businesses, homes, and farms were lost because mortgages could not be paid at a time when money was so scarce.

Indeed, White Castle expanded during the Depression. It was almost ideally adapted to the world in which it existed. But it lost its unchallenged leadership of the industry and began a decline into obscurity when the economy and society changed around its restaurants in the middle of the twentieth century.

As middle-class and even working class people became more prosperous, acquired automobiles, and moved out of the central cities into the suburbs, reducing population densities in the cities, White Castle could no longer count on the heavy urban pedestrian traffic on which it had thrived. Its conservative financing policies meant that it could not expand as rapidly into the suburbs as other businesses which went into debt to do so, or raised capital by requiring their franchisees to put up part of the money needed. The rising crime and violence of the central cities in the 1960s were more of a problem for White Castle than for other hamburger chains located in suburban shopping malls. Staying open all night in low-income urban neighborhoods was no longer safe, financially or otherwise.

Essay idea: certain problems with our society are unsolvable except by automation-derived wealth increases. We can imagine a population of economics-savvy voters, or a political system with incentives structured to maximize throughput, etc.

Balancing education with health care, defense, infrastructure, etc. when they're subsidized by tax money, will fail.

Education of the very young for example I predict will be handled by parents at home (this era of both parents needing to engage in mundane "work" will end).

[entry] Because economics is a study of cause and effect among human beings, it deals with incentives and their consequences. That often leads to radically different conclusions from those reached by people who think primarily or solely in terms of goals.

[entry] While scarcity is inherent, shortages are not. Scarcity simply means that there is not enough to satisfy everyone's desires completely. Only in the Garden of Eden was there enough to do that. A shortage, however, means that there are people who are Willing to pay the price of the product but are unable to find it.

[entry] People are dumber in mobs because they feel that they can do something about what grieves them and don't have to reason carefully about what that is.

[entry] One of the incidental benefits of competing and sharing through prices is that different people are not as likely to think of themselves as rivals, nor to develop the kinds of hostility that rivalry can breed. For example, much the same labor and construction material needed to build a Protestant church could be used to build a Catholic church. But, if a Protestant congregation is raising money to build a church for themselves, they are likely to be preoccupied with how much money they can raise and how much is needed for the kind of church they want. Construction prices may cause them to scale back some of their more elaborate plans, in order to fit within the limits of what they can afford. But they are unlikely to blame Catholics, even though the competition of Catholics for the same construction materials makes their prices higher than otherwise.

If, instead, the government were in the business of building churches and presenting them to different religious groups, Protestants and Catholics would be explicit rivals for this largesse and neither would have any financial incentive to cut back on their building plans to accommodate the other. Instead, each would have an incentive to make the case, as strongly as possible, for the full extent of their desires and to resent any suggestion that they scale back their plans. The inherent scarcity of materials and labor would still limit what could be built, but that limit would now be imposed politically and would be seen by each as due to the rivalry of the other. The Constitution of the United States of course prevents the American government from building churches for religious groups, no doubt in order to prevent just such political rivalries and the bitterness, and sometimes bloodshed, to which such rivalries have led in other countries.

The same economic principle, however, applies to groups that are not based on religion but on ethnicity, geographical regions, or age brackets. All are inherently competing for the same resources, simply because these resources are scarce. However, competing indirectly by having to keep your demands within the limits of your Own pocketbook is very different from seeing your desires for government benefits thwarted by the rival claims of some other group. Market rationing limits the amount of your claims on the output of others to what your own productivity has created, while political rationing limits your claims by the competing claims and clout of others.

In talking about the colonial British rulers' responses to a famine that did not involve price controls, "In an era of democratic politics, the same actions would require either a public familiar with basic economics or political leaders willing to risk their careers to do what needed to be done. It is hard to know which is less likely."

Systemic causes, such as are often found in economics, provide no such emotional release for the public or moral melodrama for the media and politicians as such intentional causes as "greed," "exploitation," "gouging," "discrimination," and the like. Intentional explanations of cause and effect may also be more natural, in the sense that less sophisticated individuals and less sophisticated societies tend to turn first to such explanations. In some cases, it has taken centuries for intentional explanations embodied in superstitions about nature to give way to systemic explanations based on science. It is not yet clear whether it will take that long for the basic principles of economics to replace many people's natural tendency to try to explain systemic results by someone's intentions.

That is why Adam Smith had a high opinion of capitalism, despite his low opinion of capitalists.

As Friedrich Engels put it, "what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed."

Bumped

Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy (Audio CD)

ALGEBRA

This research group investigates the following subjects:
(1) Number Theory : algebraic number theory, modular forms, p-adic cohomology and arithmetic geometry.
(2) Representation Theory : representations of algebraic groups, Lie algebras, quantum groups, algebraic analysis and mathematical physics.
(3) Algebraic Geometry : vector bunbles, Chow groups, motives of algebraic varieties, Calabi-Yau manifolds, open algebraic varieties and theory of singular points.
(4) Ring Theory : differential forms of rings.
(Staff 8, Doctor 2, Master 10)

GEOMETRY and TOPOLOGY

Topology is a discipline of mathematics which considers new purposes and new ways of thinking as important. Geometry is deeply related to physics and promotes progress in mathematics. Research subjects of the geometry group are the differential geometry and representation theory in the context of the Lie groups and differential manifolds. The subjects of the topology group are algebraic topology and topology of manifolds, in particular the theory of 3 and 4 dimensional manifolds, singularities, foliations, knots, and characteristic classes. Geometry related to infinite analysis as well as themes from quasi-crystals, information geometry and computational geometry are also studied.
(Staff 8, Doctor 4, Master 10)

MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS

Many phenomena arising in natural science may be described analytically as partial differential equations. The group on mathematical analysis is devoted to analyzing partial differential equations and providing powerfull mathematical methods for future research in science and technology.
In the theoretical approach, qualitative properties of solutions to partial differential equations, such as existence, uniqueness, regularity and asymptotic behavior of solutions are studied. In the numerical approach, fluid dynamics and reaction-diffusion problems are studied by making good use of computers, for example, mathematical modeling and implementations of phenomena by computer simulation. Several recent developments in the theory of partial differential equations have made possible further progress in computer science.
(Staff 7, Doctor 0, Master 12)

PROBABILITY THEORY and MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS

The purpose of research in this field is to analyze random phenomena in nature and society. The probability theory group studies stochastic processes, stochastic analysis, ergodic theory, theory of chaos and fractals, and the probabilistic approach to mathematical physics.
The mathematical statistics group studies multivariate analysis, statistical inference, model selection design of experiments, asymptotic statistical theory, nonparametric methods, computational methods, data analysis and other topics.
(Staff 6, Doctor 4, Master 12)

GEOMETRIC and ALGEBRAIC ANALYSIS

This research group consists of following subjects:
(1) Geometry : Theory of Lie Groups and Homogeneous Spaces, Differential Geometry, Differential Topology, Algebraic Topology, Complex Geometry.
(2) Algebra : Representation Theory of Infinite dimensional Lie Algebras and Quantum Groups, Algebraic Geometry, Mathematical Phisics, Homological Algebra.
(3) Analysis : Several complex variables, Harmonic analysis on Homogeneous Spaces, Non-linear differential equations.
(Staff 7, Doctor 5, Master 8)

MT uses results of pure abstract mathematics, in particular a classical number theory developed 50-100 years ago, and at that time they were not considered to be useful to the science. These days, pure abstract mathematics are considered to be redundant even in universities, and mathematics departments tend to be closed or changed into informatics. We don't think this is a right way. Pure mathematics shows "unexpected unreasonable effectiveness" in many areas of the science, although its effectiveness is not so easily percepted by the society, compared to other branches of science. We are glad if you take it into consideration that the present society is supported by mathematics developped hundreds years ago, and the next generation might be supported by the modern mathematics which might seem to be too abstract to utilize in the society, just right now.

MT was firstly named "Primitive Twisted Generalized Feedback Shift Register Sequence" by a historical reason. Makoto: Prof. Knuth said in his letter "the name is mouthful."
Takuji:........

a few days later
Makoto:Hi, Takkun, How about "Mersenne Twister?" Since it uses Mersenne primes, and it shows that it has its ancestor Twisted GFSR.
Takuji:Well.
Makoto:It sounds like a jet coaster, so it sounds quite fast, easy to remember and easy to pronounce. Moreover, although it is a secret, it hides in its name the initials of the inventors.
Takuji:.......
Makoto:Come on, let's go with MT!
Takuji:....well, affirmative.

Later, we got a letter from Prof. Knuth saying "it sounds a nice name." :-)

Where do you get your genes? If you are an animal, you inherit them from your parents at the moment of conception, and that's about it. No later incorporation of environmental DNA for you, unless you become host to a parasite or an endosymbiont that somehow transfers bits of its genome into yours (which is a rarely documented event).

Unless you are a bdelloid rotifer, that is.

This odd, microscopic, freshwater animal is making news once again, this time for the startling discovery of numerous chunks of foreign DNA in its genome. In a paper published this week in Science, evidence for massive horizontal gene transfer—from bacteria, fungi, even from plants—into the bdelloid rotifer genome is presented by Irina Arkhipova and Matthew Meselson, scientists at the MBL's Josephine Bay Paul Center and at Harvard University, and Harvard graduate student Eugene Gladyshev.

While horizontal gene transfer is common in bacterial species, it was unheard of in the animal kingdom on such a massive scale – until this study.

Note that this also explains why supercomputers died in the 90’s, but big iron database servers didn’t. Supercomputers were, at heart, about solving either large numbers of small linear algebra problems, or a small number of large linear algebra problems. In either case, the problems were fairly easily distributed with small communication demands- a few megabytes per second- that supercomputers could be replaced by racks of PCs communicating via ethernet. Databases, however, require more communication between nodes (especially if you want to parallelize a single query, or allow multiple queries to access the same table simultaneously), and as such didn’t distribute via ethernet. So Sun and IBM are still profitable, Cray and SGI are dead.

Maybe “inv(A)” should always report a warning:
“Do you really know what you’re doing? … don’t do that again!”. And on the 2nd try, “Cleve says inv(A) is a bad idea.”

If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they're nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.

Some people know at 16 what sort of work they're going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just haven't decided yet whether they're going to be a rock star or a brain surgeon.

Some people know at 16 what sort of work they're going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just haven't decided yet whether they're going to be a rock star or a brain surgeon. There's nothing wrong with that. But it means if you have this most common type of ambition, you'll probably have to figure out where to live by trial and error. You'll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

(click to add)

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 1802

Reverse transcriptase makes trouble in other ways as well. The genomes of most organisms are littered with entities known as retroelements. These are a type of genetic parasite — stretches of DNA that (usually) do nothing useful for the cell, and exist simply to make more copies of themselves. (There are many different kinds of genetic parasite: as much as half of the DNA in the human genome is thought to have originated from them.) The way that retroelements proliferate is complicated, and depends on the element in question, for there are many sorts; but one thing they all have in common is that they, too, depend on the activity of reverse transcriptase.

Sometimes, by accident, reverse transcriptase goes to work on a regular piece of messenger RNA, and copies that into DNA. This new piece of DNA may then be incorporated into the genome, giving rise to a new gene — a retrogene.

What’s interesting about this is that the original gene — the one from which the messenger RNA was generated — will still be present in the genome. In other words, the retrogene is a copy of a gene that already exists. However, the retrogene need not end up anywhere near its original. A retrogene may, for example, be inserted into a different chromosome from its “parent.”

It also need not have the same activities as its parent. Because a retrogene is made from messenger RNA, it lacks a control region — the part of the gene that acts as a switch, and determines whether the gene is “on” (and the protein is being made) or “off.” So in order for a retrogene to be functional and actually make proteins, it has to be inserted into the genome in such a way that it can capture the control region of another gene.

As a consequence, whether a newly created retrogene will appear and immediately vanish — or whether it will confer some kind of advantage on the organism and thus spread through the population — depends on where in the genome it gets inserted. If it arrives in the “wrong” place, it may not be able to be switched on; or worse, it may destroy the workings of an existing gene and harm the organism in some way. Hence, only a fraction of the retrogenes that are created will succeed in becoming established.

(click to add)

Backlit grass and trees, just like photographic slides, have much more vivid colors than things seen with light reflecting off of them.

Backlit grass and trees, just like photographic slides, have much more vivid colors than things seen with light reflecting off of them.

9.) TIME EXPOSURES FOR WATER

1/500 shutter speed freezes anything. This does not look as it does to our eyes. This is usually what you see in surfing magazines where every wonderful drop of spray is frozen.

1/30 makes moving water look about natural, if that's the effect you seek.

1/8 gives a nice blur.

1 second starts to get really smooth like this.

Several seconds or minutes starts to make all the whitewater flow into what looks like a fog. Here's an example.

Ask artists for help when you are starting. Ask them how to see and show them your images and ask for suggestions. They will see things that you haven't yet, and will help open your eyes to making better images.

Avoid the friend, neighbor or co-worker who works in computers, science or engineering and always talks about cameras. These people's passion is usually just for the cameras or computers themselves, not about photography itself or art or expressing their imagination visually.

Depth of field at f/1.2 is a few inches (5 cm) at one hundred feet (30m), so extreme AF accuracy is required to make real use of the f/1.2 aperture.

Intelligence, and consciousness, could be seen as simply the result of having a neocortex.

We sometimes wonder about machines resenting their enslavement and taking over the world because people always resent enslavement or have tried to take over the world. But these come from non-cortical drives, specifically emotions such as fear, self-gratification, paranoia, etc. But intelligent machines running cortical algorithms wouldn't have emotions such as these and would just be tools.

I wonder if you could get as effective and adaptable of an intelligence without emotions. Or how effective communication between machine intelligence and biological intelligences would be without the former having some inkling of the latter's genetic heritage.

{quote Intelligence could be traced over three epochs, each using memory and prediction. The first would be when species used DNA as the medium for memory. Individuals could not learn and adapth within their lifetimes. They could only pass on the DNA-based memory of the world to their offspring through their genes.

The second epoch began when nature invented modifiable nervous systems that could quickly form memories. An individual could now learn about the structure of its world and adapt its behavior accordingly within its lifetime. But an individual still could not communicate this knowledge to its offspring other than by direct observation [ed. note: and genes]. The creation and expansion of the neocortex occurred within this second epoch, but did not define it.

The third and final epoch is unique to humans. It begins with the invention of language and the expansion of our large neocortex. We humans can learn a lot of the structure of the world within our lifetimes, and we can effectively communicate this to many other humans via language.}

quote{The job of any cortical region is to find out how its inputs are related, to memorize the sequence of correlations between them, and to use this memory to predict how the inputs will behave in the future. Cortex is cortex. The same proces is happening everywhere: a common cortical algorithm.}{pg. 123-124}

Reptiles have no cortical tissue; they also are generally not trainable. (Birds?) Mammals do, and so exhibit greater facility with memory, prediction, learning, and intelligence. The human neocortex is the largest in the animal kingdom, and has more interconnections. Furthermore, the human neocortex has almost completely taken over motor control, whereas in lower mammals, motor control is still handled by the older non-cortical parts of the brain.

Memory structure: store sequences of patterns; patterns must be in an invariant representation; and finally retrieve them by similarity to input (auto-associative memory).

Looking across the history of science, we see our intuition is often the biggest obstacle to discovering the truth. Scientific frameworks are often difficult to discover, not because they are complex, but because intuitive but incorrect assumptions keep us from seeing the correct answer.

DOFMaster
Depth of Field Calculator

List of AF-compatible lenses for the d40/x

Give me David LaChapelle's camera and I won't get anything like he does, even if you give me the same star performers.

Someone asked "If I got a camera with only 6 or 7 MP, can I make good pictures with it?"

That reminds me about the guy who breaks a wrist and asks his doctor: "Doctor, will I be able to play the piano after this heals?" The doctor replies "Absolutely, no problem!" The man laughs, and points out that that's great, because he never could play the piano before!

Buying a Bösendorfer doesn't mean you can play the piano. Buying a great camera doesn't mean you can create compelling photographs. Good pianists can play on anything and a good photographer can make great images with a disposable camera.

Tetons and Snake River

This big, beautiful poster is about as dramatic as they come. Not only are they spectacular Ansel Adams images, they are Authorized Editions, which means made to the highest quality reproduction standards possible. You can't go wrong with one of these.

Type a keyword or phrase in the box below to search the entire craigslist site:

(click to add)

(click to add)

Small businesses in Emilia-Romagna are also structurally different from the typical small business in the United States. They're not simple suppliers of components to a big companies that lay down the law. In Emilia-Romagna, small firms compete for contracts. But, as a matter of custom and practicality, the winners hire the losers as subcontractors. And there is none of our famous industrial dualism, where workers in small firms must put up with low wages and slim benefits. In exchange for Italy's highest benefits and wages, workers are flexible: They move easily among firms. Similarly, skills and marketing information travel easily among local suppliers.

The government provides what Bolognese economist Sebastiano Brusco calls "real services" -- not just those that make up for market failures, like unemployment compensation and welfare, but services that enable people to work. Emilia-Romagna's female participation in the labor force is the highest in Italy. In part this is because there is a century-old Emilian tradition of women working outside the home, but it is also the result of a strong, independent female workers' movement for adequate daycare. (Today in Modena, about two-thirds of children are in nursery school, as opposed to 4 percent in Naples.)

The beneficiaries of "real services" are people working in small and medium enterprises. In the United States, we usually think of small businesses not only as firms that pay low wages but as especially hostile to any government intervention. Neither is true in Emilia-Romagna. With only 3.9 million people, the region has an amazing 68,000 manufacturing enterprises. (New York State, by contrast, has 18 million people and about 26,000 manufacturing enterprises.) No invisible hand provides Emilian firms with financing, daycare, urban planning, technical assistance, research institutes and specialized laboratories. Small companies can't be expected to devote much capital to research and development. They can't even afford to hire marketing consultants. The regional government arranges for these services -- chiefly by contracting with nonprofit economic research agencies like the internationally respected NOMISMA.

"You know the McDonald's across the street from Il Nettuno?" asks Sabattini. "The guy who holds that franchise is an Italian-American. He came here in the eighties thinking he was going to run that place American-style -- with low wages. It was a hard struggle, but we disabused him of that illusion. Now he pays his McDonald's workers the scale earned by every other worker represented by the Commercial Workers Union." It's a wage scale three times what their Manhattan fast-food counterparts earn.

(click to add)

The subprime mortgage crisis has hit. America is homeless, broke, foreclosed, and in the midst of a financial crisis. Similar to when there were rumors of the draft resurfacing, many of us are saying, “I’m moving to Canada.” However, I urge you to look beyond our friendly northern neighbor to a more majestic and—dare I say—regal era. From the rolling green pastures of France, to the sparkling coastline of Mexico, why live in a cramped, rat-infested junior one-bedroom when you can reign high in your very own castle?

The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.

Voting cannot really increase the masses' well-being. It brings no more hogs to market, builds no more gadgets, improves no meals, nor does it increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. But the masses will believe anything; and after Bismarck and Garibaldi came to believe that this new world of assemblies, parliaments, and election fraud offered a better world, it then became the job of politicians to find a way to appeal to these fantasies.

Orrin Hatch, senator, admitted in 2000 to trying to sneak in provisions to extend the monopoly patent on Claratin for three years beyond its 2002 expiration date into a military appropriations bill. He's the #1 lifetime recipient of pharmaceutical contributions in the Senate, with $791,793 and has actually pulled off this kind of protectionism many other times.

Apparently, high-level employees at Bristol-Meyers Squibb were pressured to give the maximum levels (1k from them, 1k from their spouses) for GWBush's campaign in 2000 and warned that the CEO would be informed if they didn't, the NYT discovered.

This was discovered by the NYT, which Asim kindly found for me: from 2003 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE5DF1E38F936A3575AC0A9659C8B63

There, the reporter says, 'Those donations may soon pay off handsomely for the pharmaceutical business'

It did. This book has a chart, Senators who voted for no price controls on prescription drug for seniors: Yes got $52'000, No got $30'300. Housepeople: Yes got $27'600, No got $11'300.

The cost of running an election is quite high. Without public finance, the campaigners are almost made to turn to lobby groups to raise a lot of quick money. It's like America ignoring Cuba and making them run right into the arms of the Soviet Union, precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Combine this with Sowell's "Basic Economics" to address Foley's "Adam's Fallacy" talks about economic theology as a fallacy whereby short-term economic gains transform into vague long-term societal gains, which is the cornerstone of Smith's theory. Foley also asserts that Smith &co's theories do not mention distribution of wealth, only production of it.

I believe (and need to prove) that the selfish economic pursuits of man lead to positive societal gains mainly through the development of technology. Automation and scientific breakthroughs (e.g., new alloys) are the source of societal justice and are created fastest in the capitalist milieu.

Supply and demand drive prices up and down, and sometimes drive them to 0 (e.g., saddles after the Model T). This seems unfair locally but is societally net a good thing. Conversely it is through high prices that an inventor is spurred into action.

To distribute societal wealth leads to tempering of the inventive spirit and therefore according to my hypothesis leads to economic, cultural, and social stagnation.

We can prove this either by analyzing the past or experimenting in the present.

Dr. Dukas argues that learning evolves to higher levels only when it is a better way to respond to the environment than relying on automatic responses.

Generations ago we would understand thunderstorms perhaps as the roaring and rumbling about in battle of superhuman gods. Similarly today, we reduce the storm to various supposed experiences with friction, sparks, vacuums, and the imagination of bulgeous banks of burly air smashing together to make the noise. None of these really exist as we picture them. Our images of these events of physics are as far from the actuality as fighting gods. Yet they act as the metaphor and they feel familiar and so we say we understand the thunderstorm.

The more I use Fvwm, the less patience I have with the limitations of newer, supposedly better Window Managers. I feel I'm a slave to the preferences, prejudices, and oversights of the author. Why can't I bind the keypad keys in KDE, without having to use a modifier? Why can't I ever have more than two titlebar buttons in Window Maker? What does BlackBox have against pixmaps? Why do so few WM's bother to implement a proper virtual desktop?

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the Japanese market at the time is to imagine that home computers did not exist. From this perspective, the direction that the Japanese electronics industry took makes perfect sense. Everything needed to be designed as stand-alone appliance. The basis for much of this was the digital memory card, particularly the SD card. Digital cameras and camera-phones stored everything on a memory stick, and offered DPOF configuration options for configuring printing options. Color printers went on sale offering SD card slots so that these photos could be printed without a computer in the middle. MP3 players took a similar turn, offering either analog cable connectivity or SD card slots for music transfers. New stereo systems also offered an additional SD card slot. The SD card was like the new cassette. Record stores even began offering machines that sold digital music directly stored on your SD card. 3G phone handsets were released in 2001, and Japanese telecoms envisioned a world where consumers would buy and download music directly onto their mobile phones. It all makes sense if nobody owns a home computer, and when the mobile phone is the dominant form of Internet connectivity.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn't even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €400). That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend...

But if the *2.0 crowd thinks that it'll be deployed in mere media or artistic authorship, they must be a really dull bunch. I predict that huge swatches will be taken up by entrepreneurial enterprise and technical innovation!

And if we at the technical vanguard have to spend a lot of energy in making this math available to the young and the old and the infirm, then so be it! Let's educate the world on practical thermodynamics and Monte Carlo practice and signal processing fundamentals!!!

The best fifteen minutes from Clay Shirky I’ve yet seen:

I do recognize that many investors are bullish on the basis of commodities, fertilizer, basic materials and all sorts of scarcity-oriented investment themes. There are plenty of ways for investors to speculate on that sort of theme if they believe that “this time it's different” and we have entered a new world of permanent global shortages (no reason to convince me of it – just speculate elsewhere). As for me, I continue to believe that the best long-term investment opportunities will come from well-run companies with reasonable valuations, financial stability, and creative, useful products, just as durable long-term investment opportunities always have. So while investors clamor to buy stocks that fit into a pessimistic theme of global scarcity, famine and energy shortages, I'm frankly too optimistic to be bullish here.

I don't want to convey the impression that the market cannot advance further as a result of speculative pressures, but at present, the S&P 500 remains priced to deliver probable total returns of about 2-4% annually over the coming decade (a decade ago, using the same methodology, the projected return was in the range of 0-2%, which is about what we've observed).

(This notion reached its apotheosis in a Wired magazine cover story, "Push!", whose subtitle read "Kiss your browser goodbye: The radical future of media beyond the Web".)

The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence projects generally.) The great popularizer of this error was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to people's understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than Rene Descartes. Doyle has convinced generations of readers that what seriously smart people do when they think is to arrive at inevitable conclusions by linking antecedent facts. As Holmes famously put it "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

This sentiment is attractive precisely because it describes a world simpler than our own. In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic.

Made a list of some seventy-five interests and pursuits that I entertained, from ancient religious syncretism to Esperanto to digital cognizance. I was planning on prototyping visualization and storage apps for it, using Python Gtk Cairo, or Lush Ogre, or Erlang GS/Ex11, but have decided to focus on just four: SAR research, digital cognizance, entrepreneurship, and literature

EX11 is an Erlang interface to X windows. With EX11 you can easily program complex GUIs. EX11 models all widgets as concurrent processes - this results in extrememly compact GUI programs which are very simple to program and understand.

GDB: Marc Faber

every business under the GE umbrella had to be either No. 1 or No. 2 in its class. If not, Welch decreed that the business would have to be fixed, sold, or closed.

Drucker made observation his life's work, gleaning deceptively simple ideas that often elicited startling results. Shortly after Welch became CEO of General Electric in 1981, for example, he sat down with Drucker at the company's New York headquarters. Drucker posed two questions that arguably changed the course of Welch's tenure: "If you weren't already in a business, would you enter it today?" he asked. "And if the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?"

Those questions led Welch to his first big transformative idea: that every business under the GE umbrella had to be either No. 1 or No. 2 in its class. If not, Welch decreed that the business would have to be fixed, sold, or closed. It was the core strategy that helped Welch remake GE into one of the most successful American corporations of the past 25 years.

Other representative GS examples include

Othello: othello:start().
Columns: cols:start().
Bonk: bonk:start().
Mandelbrot: mandel:start().

To run them, make sure you add lib/gs-1.5.5/contribs/ebin/ to your code search path using code:add_pathz/1


If you are lazy or do not want to play with paths, type toolbar:start(). pick the Add GS contribs and clock on the relevant icons.

So what is Sage and what makes it unique? Sage is:

1. a huge distribution of free open source mathematical software
that is surprisingly easy to build from source,
2. a set of interfaces to most other mathematical software
systems, and
3. a new Python library that fills in huge gaps in other open source math software included in Sage, unifies everything offering a smooth user experience, and provides a modern web-based graphical notebook interface with math typesetting and integrated 2D and 3D graphics.

Sage is the first large general purpose mathematics software system that uses a mainstream programing language (Python) as the end user language. Python--easily one of the world's top 10 programming languages--is a powerful and beautiful modern interpreted programming language with an organized and professional developer base and millions of users. Sage also makes extensive use of a Python-to-C compiler called Cython. Thus Sage has a tremendous advantage over every other general purpose computer algebra system, since Python has thousands of third party libraries, sophisticated support for object serialization, databases, distributed programming, and a major following in scientific computing.

(click to add)

(click to add)

This free visualization will let you explore the connections between books, music, or movies.

NetworkX (NX) is a Python package for the creation, manipulation, and study of the structure, dynamics, and functions of complex networks.

Features:

* Includes standard graph-theoretic and statistical physics functions
* Easy exchange of network algorithms between applications, disciplines, and platforms
* Includes many classic graphs and synthetic networks
* Nodes and edges can be "anything" (e.g. time-series, text, images, XML records)
* Exploits existing code from high-quality legacy software in C, C , Fortran, etc.
* Open source (encourages community input)
* Unit-tested

Open Source Graph or Network Visualization Written in Java

* Send this page to somebody
* Print this page



Just as I did the last list "Open Source Structured Graphics Libraries Written in Java" I realized that I needed an entirely new category. Well here's that category, network or graph visualization written in open source Java. It's got some pretty stunning visuals so I recommend that everyone eyeball them.

# Visual cues such as size, shape, and color indicate items' categories, relationships, and relative importance
# Proprietary layout techniques produce aesthetic arrangements that reveal the patterns hidden within your data
# Get a new perspective by "grabbing" and moving items of interest. The graph responds to your actions instantly, arranging itself into new, meaningful orientations

Use this free Java application to explore the connections between related websites.

Brian called it Sci-Fi.. No matter what you call it, the day was one that I will not soon forget.. The multiple glass smooth rides from the south end of Blanchard Hill all the way to the north end of Chuckanut Mountain may never be repeated in my experience..

As you can see from the images, the deep blue backdrop along with the creamy white textures made true sensory overload a real possibility..

The Bald Guy..

The locals were enjoying the glass air too.. On one trip out-and-back I happened upon at least six eagles that were chasing each other through the sky.. I hurriedly fumbled for my camera, but the experience was only a fleeting moment; this image is the best that I got..

By the time I put my camera away I realized that I was quite far out over the bay.. The locals kept going but I chickened out and went back to Chuckanut..

ddd

boss mario (broken remix)

mtk117-oveloe-01-transistor-love.mp3

Learn This Project

When you don't watch T.V. you have a lot of spare time on your hands. What is a person to do with all this spare time? One could make a "list" and then when the fancy strikes him, he could do something on that list and blog how the feat was done. Note that the list is not a set of goals (loose 10lb in 1 month, or do xyz in x time) These are all things that can be done at a whim, or 2 to 3 whims. Some do require some planning, but all of these can be done without waiting on anyone.

(click to add)

In MATLAB®, every function must be in a file of the same name, and you can't define local functions in an ordinary script file or at the command-prompt (inlines are not real functions but macros, like in C).


NumPy code is Python code, so it has no such restrictions. You can define functions wherever you like.

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for Violin, 2 Recorders, 3 Oboes & Bassoon in g RV 576
Europa Galante / Fabio Biondi
Virgin Classics 45527

`Erlang in Real Time' (ISBN: 0864447434) was written by Maurice Castro to support the course `CS584 Real Time and Concurrent Systems' at RMIT University in 1998. A revised edition is available in postscript form from this site in addition to the sample code used in the course.

Designer Ross Lovegrove's self-driving electric bubble car, which turns into a streetlamp at night.

Eco-friendly skyscrapers could help us live in harmony with nature, believes architect Ken Yeang.

So here's the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. Find something that's missing in your own life, and supply that need—no matter how specific to you it seems.

Many of these holographers would go on to produce art holograms. In 1983, Fred Unterseher published the Holography Handbook, a remarkably easy to read description of making holograms at home. This brought in a new wave of holographers and gave simple methods to use the then available AGFA silver halide recording materials.

In 2000 Frank DeFreitas published the Shoebox Holography Book and introduced using inexpensive laser pointers to countless hobbiests. This was a very important development for amateurs as it took the cost for a 5mw laser from $1200 to $5. Now there are hundreds to thousands of amateur holographers worldwide.

1 day old!

(click to add)

Although the current legal status of the IP around the Lisp Machines is unclear, you can now get your hands on the source, and run the environment pretty easily with Linux (or even OS X VMWare Linux)—credit for the Linux port goes to Brad Parker.

4 points by poepping 11 hours ago | link | parent

"We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work." --phaedrus

This statement is somewhat wrong. I gave up T.V. about 3 years ago and this may have been true at first, but as you go on you realize that when you feel tired you are usually just bored, and need to do something. If you are really tired then go to sleep, don't stay awake forcing yourself to be entertained (gorging when you eat?)

It isn't Just T.V. that is bad. Anything that updates is bad since you come back over and over looking for a new fix of "something new"; I've found this activity extremely draining on your ability to go out and do new things; you drop into a mode of wanting to do to a mode of just wanting things to come to you to entertain you. This means that the internet is almost as bad as T.V. (if not worse, more content to surf around) Think of all the things that are currently popular : myspace, youtube, stumble, facebook..etc.. Almost exactly like T.V. People go to those sites to zone out and have information handed to them. The same goes for email, people keep checking their mailboxes hoping to have a new nugget of joy that will keep them busy for a few more minutes.

I started off With No T.V. (cold turkey), I used Movies to supplement the cravings, then I started cutting back on movies, not because I was trying to cut back on them, but because I just don't find them interesting any more. Next I cut out all forms of gossip and news from the internet. Pretty much anything that you read that can make you angry from either a) "how stupid" the person writing it is, or b) how anything like "that" could ever happen, you just need to cut it out; why do you want to work yourself up? This would include sites like slashdot.org, digg, reddit..etc. After cutting these sites out, my over all mood has become much better; those sites just contain thoughts that do you know good what so ever. (How did I read this to be posting on it? Someone sent me the link. Which is a great system; if something is worth knowing, someone will tell you.) After giving up most every news site (they are all tripe that just spread gossip and violence.) I started reading just "creative" blogs (make magazine for example.) Recently I have found that It doesn't matter what you read, since you'll end up just going back to be "entertained". Why is this bad? Because you switch off, you might think to yourself that you'll get inspired by reading inspiring blogs, but you won't. What you'll find out if you are paying attention is that most blogs are just recycled content over and over; there are very few original ideas out there.

After giving up almost all forms of "updating" sources. I have found that I no longer have enough time in a day to do all the stuff I want to get done. If I feel too tired even to read a book (not usable energy as someone stated.) then I go to bed.

There are millions of things to do out there, you just need to find them.

One other mistake I made was when trying to learn a lot of new things I would bounce around between them, which isn't bad, but I found that when I got stuck learning something new, I would switch over to doing something else, which is bad. So If you plan on learning new things, set a time for yourself. If you start an activity stay with it for at least 1 hour (or whatever) to make sure that if you hit a wall you work your way over it instead of moving on to something else. Also, I have found that keep a journal of all the things you learn to be very useful. Whenever you have some free time, you can read through the past things you have learned to refresh your memory.

You can respond to this comment all you want, but as stated i've pretty much given up this type of entrainment (blogs) altogether and I'm just here because someone sent me the link; I wrote this in hopes that it may help some people that are moving down this path already. If you think this was all dumb crap (maybe it is, life systems change over your life.) , well then don't use it. If you have any questions: matt.poepping@gmail.com

But presently, market conditions are strenuously overbought in an unfavorable Market Climate – a condition followed often enough by spectacular vertical losses to be taken as a serious risk, if not a forecast.

As for agricultural commodities, what we are observing is probably not a Malthusian breakpoint, but what I'd call “speculative hoarding.” Essentially, as the prices of commodities rise, particularly in developing nations, there is a tendency to save in the form of real goods. We've observed this historically in various countries as hoarding of every form of physical output, even spoons and other household items.

Supporting that thesis of speculative hoarding, it's interesting that on Wednesday, a news piece came out on Bloomberg noting “Wal-Mart Stores Inc's Sam's Club warehouse unit is restricting the purchase of some rice to four bags a visit because of ‘recent supply and demand trends.' Some consumers have started hoarding rice, the food staple for half the world, as supplies shrink. Some of Costco Wholesale Corp's stores, including locations in California, have put limits on sales of rice and flour, Chief Executive Officer James Sinegal told Reuters yesterday.”

In effect, we are observing a version of tulip-mania with foodstuffs. I would expect that prices will reach a speculative peak, probably within a few months, and then most probably plummet with very little in the way of relief rallies. That is a fairly predictable dynamic once commodity price movements reach the parabolic stage that they have entered lately. Still, it's not clear how high that parabola will ascend, because as the slope goes vertical, small differences in the exact point of the bust will lead to substantial differences in the price at the high. But the world has more arable land and more capacity to bring it into use within months and years than should cause near-term concern about a Malthuisan breakpoint.

Future commodity price levels might certainly be different, on average, in the future than they were in the past, but we should not jump to the conclusion that the long-term boom-bust dynamics of commodities have vanished as a result.

As a side note, the word “intrepid” (adjective: resolutely fearless; dauntless) in the context of fertilizer is strangely reminiscent of the late-1960's “Go-Go” market, when dull little companies gave themselves exciting names to divert investors attention from the fact that they were, in fact, dull little companies – as when Minnie Pearl's Fried Chicken renamed itself “Performance Systems.”

Though Keynes is noted for saying “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” this statement cannot be taken as justification for participating in overextended speculative bubbles. Rather, it is a warning against taking investment positions that risk insolvency.

Second, I have been too optimistic that other market analysts are capable of recognizing erroneous lines of thinking that aren't supported by either economic theory or empirical data.

Bought reasonably freshly roasted coffee beans from Stauf's on Grandview, a drip coffee maker and a grinder.

I'm sticking to juice.

Mark my garden's birthday: 2008-4-26! Tomatoes, mild and regular jalapenos, and chives!

This is but one reason that, all other things remaining equal, I always hire pilots into my start-ups whenever I can, at all levels of the organization, and especially in the top ranks. Where a non-pilot may take a superior attitude to others on his or her team who came to the company with less impressive résumés, good pilots know that there is something valuable to be learned – possibly something life-saving - from even the youngest person, way low on the totem pole, who has nevertheless been at the entrepreneurship game longer. Non-pilots (and especially their spouses) often misunderstand why we spend so much time “hanger flying” with our fellow aviators, and reading magazine articles about harrowing experiences of other pilots – some living to live to tell about it, others written by accident investigators. They do this because it is easier and ultimately more prudent to learn from others’ mistakes rather than learning by making your own mistakes. As we know, man is the only creature with the ability to learn from others’ mistakes, yet often refuses to do so, bound and determined to create his own lesson plans by repeating avoidable missteps.

Uplift that sucker! Sundiver is here!!!

Orangutan attempts to hunt fish with spear

Goodman: What is the localvore movement?

Pollan: The localvore movement is a real new emphasis on eating locally, eating food from what's called your foodshed. It's a metaphor based on a watershed. You know, a certain -- draw a circle of a hundred miles around your community and try to eat everything from there. It's an interesting movement, and I'm very supportive of local food. I think that it's verging on the ridiculous right now -- I mean, you know, because, frankly, there's no wheat produced in a hundred miles of New York. You know, do you want to give up bread? I'm not willing to give up bread. So people get a little extremist about it.

But the basic idea of when products are available locally, eating them and eating food in season, is a very powerful and important idea. It supports a great many values. The fact is that food that's produced locally is going to be fresher. It's going to be more nutritious because it's fresher. You're going to support the farmers in your community.

efficiency is an important value, but resilience is even more important

Nutritionism is the prevailing ideology in the whole world of food. And it's not a science. It is an ideology. And like most ideologies, it is a set of assumptions about how the world works that we're totally unaware of. And nutritionism, there's a few fundamental tenets to it. One is that food is a collection of nutrients, that basically the sum of -- you know, food is the sum of the nutrients it contains. The other is that since the nutrient is the key unit and, as ordinary people, we can't see or taste or feel nutrients, we need experts to help us design our foods and tell us how to eat.

Another assumption of nutritionism is that you can measure these nutrients and you know what they're doing, that we know what cholesterol is and what it does in our body or what an antioxidant is. And that's a dubious proposition.

Music Reading For Keyboard

e to get the buttons memorized and another week to improve my speed with it. This is a great product and

The only way to create a continually moist, nutrient-rich soil ecosystem is to slow down the escape of these critical nutrients and water from the soil. Nature has chipped away at this challenge for 450 million years-the approximate amount of time that life has existed on land-and has come up with a “living soil” that continually cycles the important ingredients of life in place, rather than letting them escape. The home gardener can emulate nature and create vibrant soil, even here amid the rocky regolith of the Methow Valley.

Take nitrogen for example. This element is critical to plant growth. For better and for worse most of the world’s supply of this element is in the atmosphere, which is 78% nitrogen. It exists there as N2, two atoms that are chemically so tightly bound together that they are useless to plants. Eons ago, when bacteria were the only life on the planet, certain bacterial species developed a method of splitting atmospheric nitrogen apart in order to incorporate it into their own chemistry. We know of these today as the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live on the roots of the Legume Family (which includes peas, beans and alfalfa) and a few other plant genera (in our area, alder, bitterbrush, Sheperdia and Ceanothus are all hosts to nitrogen-fixing bacteria). There are also free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil.

The information presented here is based on over 30 years of political activism, years of meditation and wordless wandering in nature, and the reading of literally thousands of books and articles as I sought to figure out why 10,000 years of civilization, progress, science and political struggle have not only failed to reduce the amount of suffering in the world, but have actually increased it to the catastrophic proportions we see around us today.

I love how people project their unhappiness with their lives and their inability to make the best of their own doubtless tragic misfortunes onto the entire human population! This person really believes that the human today lives a less fulfilled life than fifty, 500, or 10'000 years ago! This is the greatest flaw in static thinking.

A growing number of people are beginning to realize that not only have so-called human “progress” and “civilization” led us to the point where we now stand on the edge of an ecological catastrophe, they have also been the cause of a growing human disaster. Granted, a relatively small minority of the world’s people lives the so-called “good life” in the (over-)developed countries, but only at the cost of dire poverty, suffering and injustice for the majority of the world’s people and increasingly severe global environmental degradation, to the point that almost all life on earth is now threatened. And as the rates of cancer, diabetes, depression and other dis-eases of civilization continue to skyrocket, even many of the supposedly affluent are beginning to realize that their material wealth has not brought them true ease, health and happiness. Thus we have, for example, the growing popularity of the “simple living” movement in the over-developed countries.

Some people say that they feel the future is slipping away from them. To me, the future is a big tractor-trailer slamming on its brakes in front of me just as I pull into its slip stream. I am about to crash into it.

JUDEA PEARL

What I take away from that is that we justify our cultural traits in nice-sounding ways and that leads us to denigrate those different than us. So yes, the nomadic lifestyle did have a lot of perks but try building a Moon rocket with the population 10'000 years ago. Agricultures and huge industrial cities will allow us today to enjoy all the benefits of nomadic living and go explore the stars

quote{At this point it’s instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.}

Tumblelog

The Romans never allowed a trouble spot to remain simply to avoid going to war over it, because they knew that wars don't just go away, they are only postponed to someone else's advantage. Therefore, they made war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece, in order not to have to fight them in Italy... They never went by that saying which you constantly hear from the wiseacres of our day, that time heals all things. They trusted rather their own character and prudence— knowing perfectly well that time contains the seeds of all things, good as well as bad.

But for those who want to be rich and famous (or rich or famous), there's no way to do it without daily, unremitting work. It's best if the seeker loves his work so much that he or she doesn't even consider it a burden, but rather a joyful, fulfilling, highly organizing principle of life.

If you feel differently and get your sense of joy or purpose from going to movies or playing pool and hoisting a few beers with your pals, more power to you. But don't expect to be famous or rich.

someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.


If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.


And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

Matt Pharr and Greg Humphries. "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation", Morgan Kaufmann, 2004

Indeed we believe that deep understanding of a small number of algorithms in this manner provides a stronger base for further study of computer graphics than does a superficial understanding of many.

This book is a long literate program.

Cross references, indices, and different fonts for text, high-level language keywords, variable names, and literals should be reasonably automatic and obvious in the source and the documentation.

A traditional computer program consists of a text file containing program code. Scattered in amongst the program code are comments which describe the various parts of the code.

In literate programming the emphasis is reversed. Instead of writing code containing documentation, the literate programmer writes documentation containing code. No longer does the English commentary injected into a program have to be hidden in comment delimiters at the top of the file, or under procedure headings, or at the end of lines. Instead, it is wrenched into the daylight and made the main focus. The "program" then becomes primarily a document directed at humans, with the code being herded between "code delimiters" from where it can be extracted and shuffled out sideways to the language system by literate programming tools.

In my experience, software created with literate programming has turned out to be significantly better than software developed in more traditional ways. Yet ordinary software is usually okay—I’d give it a grade of C (or maybe C ), but not F; hence, the traditional methods stay with us. Since they’re understood by a vast community of programmers, most people have no big incentive to change, just as I’m not motivated to learn Esperanto even though it might be preferable to English and German and French and Russian (if everybody switched).

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

The hunger for knowledge grows as you get more educated (the more you know the more you know you don't know). So there is an excellent remedy for poor motivation: learn more and see how it can impact your and others' life.

Can you spend more than 30 minutes on a totally uncreative and non-intellectual activity (e.g. gossip, adult magazines, unadulterated laziness, etc.)? If yes, you may have a motivational problem.

You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life.

he was able to make another major advance in SuperMemo — computing the difficulty of any fact or study item and adjusting the unique shape of the predicted forgetting curve for every item and user.

In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. "The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do the wrong things," Robert Bjork says. "It's almost sinister."

it's an awful commentary on the value of countless classroom hours. Learning things is easy. But remembering them — this is where a certain hopelessness sets in.

SuperMemo is a program that keeps track of discrete bits of information you've learned and want to retain. For example, say you're studying Spanish. Your chance of recalling a given word when you need it declines over time according to a predictable pattern. SuperMemo tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to, say, 90 percent. When you first learn a new vocabulary word, your chance of recalling it will drop quickly. But after SuperMemo reminds you of the word, the rate of forgetting levels out. The program tracks this new decline and waits longer to quiz you the next time.

(click to add)

Macros can be a conceptual challenge as they erase the line between compile time and runtime. What macros do are expanding themselves into code that are actually compiled.

Lisp for the Web

The placement of teeth in the jaw of a bottlenose dolphin, as an example, are not symmetrical when seen from a vertical plane, and this asymmetry could possibly be an aid in the dolphin sensing if echoes from its biosonar are coming from one side or the other

"Much learning does not teach understanding."

- Heraclitus

Currently there are two models of the American economy, one static, and the other dynamic. The first portrays the United States as a caste system and misapplies the characteristics of a permanent income strata to those only temporarily moving through income brackets. The alternative view portrays a much more complex and interesting social reality in which the composition of income classes are in constant flux. According to this latter point of view, simplistic generalizations about actual persons and families (or "the rich" and "the poor") cannot be drawn from data on a conceptual artifice which does not exist as such in reality.

The new tax return data support the conclusion of earlier research which concluded that the degree of income mobility in American society renders the comparison of quintile income levels over time virtually meaningless.

Wiimote Plugin Video

The eZ430-RF2480 Demo Kit* is a complete USB-based MSP430 wireless demonstration tool providing all the hardware and software to evaluate the CC2480 2.4GHz ZigBee network processor and the MSP430F2274 microcontroller. Our demonstration kit has everything needed to understand and fully evaluate the capabilities of CC2480 in a short amount of time with minimal effort.

Paul Bach-y-Rita

(click to add)

(click to add)

So I can work outdoors!

Designed for research, education, and exploration, Surveyor's SRV-1 internet-controlled robot integrates a 1000MIPS 500MHz Analog Devices Blackfin BF537 processor, a digital video camera with resolution from 160x28 to 1280x1024 pixels, laser pointer ranging, and WLAN 802.11b/g networking (also supports Zigbee 802.15.4 wireless communications) on a dual-motor tracked mobile robotic base. Operating as a remotely-controlled webcam or a self-navigating autonomous robot, the SRV-1 can run onboard interpreted C programs or user-modified firmware, or be remotely managed from a Windows, Mac OS/X or Linux base station with Python or Java-based console software.

Make it as simple as possible but smart enough to broadcast binary data. Use a dipole antenna, get cheap RF transceivers, design a set of waveforms for QAM, write a packeting protocol, and a kernel module to present it to userland.

I was talking recently to a founder who considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to work for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there. He didn't learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't

For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do, at least for programmers. How bad could it be? Well, food shows that pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a random point in America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you. Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories. "Normal" food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing weirdos in Berkeley.

If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common? There are two main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal. You may feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the first couple bites feels great. The other is economies of scale. Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn't. Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it's worth spending a lot to market it.

If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavily marketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that's expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you think most will choose?

Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.

Page 125:
"I sought to cope with all humanly unfavorable conditions, customs, and afflictions by searching for the family of relevant physical principles involved, and therewith through invention and technological development to solve all problems by physical data and devices that were so much more effective as to be spontaneously adopted by humans and thereby to result in producing more desirable life-styles and thus emancipate humans from the previously unfavorable circumstances. ... The new favorable-to-humans environment constituted by the technological inventions and information must demonstrate that new inanimate technology could now accomplish what heretofore could not be accomplished by social reforms. I sought to reform the environment, not the humans. I determined never to try to persuade humanity to alter its customs and viewpoints."

perms([]) -> [[]];
perms(L) -> [[H|T] || H <- L, T <- perms(L--[H])].

1> lib_misc:perms("123").
["123","132","213","231","312","321"]

2> lib_misc:perms("cats").
["cats", "cast", "ctas", "ctsa", "csat", "csta", "acts", "acst",
"atcs", "atsc", "asct", "astc", "tcas", "tcsa", "tacs", "tasc",
"tsca", "tsac", "scat", "scta", "sact", "satc", "stca", "stac"]

(click to add)

et is that doing the same on top of a highly concurrent architecture and message-passing would be much easier if less declarative. To that end I will try to port Frag to Erlang and see what comes ou

Wealth and Religiosity

(click to add)

Instead of 1-5 stars, we ask users to simply answer a single question: "do you regret buying this product?" Yes, or no? (If 'no,' an extra checkbox appears: 'not at all?')

Then, when someone is standing in an aisle looking at a product, they can ask, "what is the probability that I will wind up regretting buying this?" A clustering algorithm can consider all other individuals' votes, along with all automatically-collected joint variables (how long did you own it, what else do you own, how much of a connoisseur are you in this field?), to answer this question with respect to time. There's this much probability that you will regret this purchase in 2 hours, in 6 months, in 10 years, etc.

One may well ask why if Erlang/OTP is so good as an Application System it is not better known outside the telecoms industry. It has a long pedigree and a code base of 1.25 million lines of code. The answer I’m afraid is to be found in the capital requirements of telecoms and web start-ups. In capital intensive industries like telecoms the techies don’t become rich. And rich is the only way geeky stuff gets sexy.

Erlang – The CEO’s View

Historically the unit of concurrency in an operating system is the ‘user’ – a given process should think it is the only user on the computer. An O/S process should have access to full range of functionality of the physical machine. The O/S process doesn’t actually talk to the hardware – it talks to the O/S which handles the hardware on its behalf.

In an A/S the application system itself runs as an O/S process. If an A/S process wants access to the full range of O/S resources is asks the A/S to access them on its behalf.

Given that O/S’s have a user (or an anthropomorphic batch user) as their basic unit of concurrency it comes as no surprise to find that the upper limits on O/S concurrency tend to mirror the upper limit of concurrent sign-ons for timesharing machines – 4,000 to 8,000 concurrent objects.

In order to get around this limitation many applications use an alternative mechanism of concurrency – the dreaded thread. Unlike processes, threads share state and software errors propagate between them. The threaded model in applications has its analogue in operating system design. There was a very popular operating system that didn’t impose memory page writing constraints between applications – they all shared state. MS-Dos was enormously successful, for a while, but it had, a-hem, stability issues.

By comparison with O/S process, Erlang processes are a lot more lightweight with an upper limit of tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent processes – if they want heavy lifting they just ask the Erlang Virtual Machine. Critically the Erlang Virtual Machine doesn’t rely on the operating system scheduler to time share between its processes. The VM is just another anthropomorphic batch user receiving one time slice at a time from the Operating System. Its own time-slicer/scheduler parcels that clock-tick amongst its own internal A/S processes. And the VM underlying the Application System has to replicate a whole host of constructs familiar from Operating System design like spawning processes and loading code. This can be of great benefit, as when, for instance, the Erlang code loader is used to hot load changes – running processes are invited to swap themselves out for newer versions whilst executing.

Erlang in 14 Examples

(click to add)

Morning pages are three pages of writing, performed daily, about anything at all. This exercise overcomes the writer's internal censor and makes writing habitual, she claims.

Each night before you go to bed, prepare a 3x5 index card with a short list of 3 to 5 things that you will do the next day.

onally I go back and forth between being a night owl (99% of the time) and a morning per

And without the proverbial water cooler, there was “no space for casual serendipity”, says Mr Coburn. But these drawbacks were easy to fix. His team now gets together regularly for fun, as if they were a clique of college friends. The group has become closer than any he has ever been part of, says Mr Coburn, and everybody has a “deeper connection to the organisation”.

Beans, squash, and corn.

Individual Starfaring Races: Seven Spin Clans
The Seven Spin Clans are machine creatures left from the AI (artificial intelligence) wars of 280 million years ago (see "Revolt of the Data" in Timeline section). Unlike many digital races, they have official status in the Civilization of Five Galaxies, having gone to great lengths to assuage the almost instinctive fears of oxygen-breathing sapients feel toward autonomous robots. The Foresight Institute inspects regularly to make sure that both hardware and software follows rigorous procedures, to prevent unbridled reproduction.

There are hundreds of makes and models within the clan, and thousands of variations. Indeed, the Spin Clans mainly consist of solitary individuals that constantly redesign themselves, hiring out for complex tasks in widely dispersed locales. On rare occasion, a or so clan members will gather to work on a single short-term project. They also prove useful working with the Zang and other hydrogen-breathing races.

Though they have been socially ostracized by most of the Oxy races of the Five Galaxies, Earth would like to establish diplomatic relations with this clan. If you meet sophisticated machine minds out there, express our interest. Promise nothing. Ask them to come by our embassy at Horst for a visit. But remind them to be discreeet.

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

In PG's world at least, it appears that the novel and wealth-creating things aren't using techniques brand new out of academia (1), and that it's very unlikely that two groups would be doing the same thing (2). Two things that I can't really be sure about in algorithm- or product-level startups.

Also, the value in imitation seems negligible in PG's world of computer applications. Ebay, Youtube, Google, etc., are free or almost free. There's no incentives a competitor can provide to switch or to use both.

Howard Aiken said "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." I have a similar feeling when I'm trying to convince VCs to invest in startups Y Combinator has funded. They're terrified of really novel ideas, unless the founders are good enough salesmen to compensate.

But it's the bold ideas that generate the biggest returns. Any really good new idea will seem bad to most people; otherwise someone would already be doing it.

A liquidity crisis is when you write a check for more than the amount in your checking account. You suddenly realize that you need to sell a big securities position to cover it, but selling everything at once might only get you “fire sale” prices. In this case, you need a loan for a few weeks to give you time to work out of your securities position. Without that short-term “liquidity,” the check might bounce even though you really do have the assets to pay it off. In contrast, a solvency crisis is when the only asset you have to cover that check is an IOU from your Uncle Ernie, who keeps promising “I'll pay you every dime as soon as I win it back on the ponies.”

until 1908, scientists routinely used the laws of physics to rule out the possibility that man would ever fly. Five years after their first successful flight, and in spite of many public demonstrations, the Wright Brothers' invention was still being ridiculed as a hoax in the press and scientific community. It was not until President Theodore Roosevelt ordered public trials that the Wrights were finally vindicated.

Did Johann Bessler, like the Wright Brothers, employ an unknown physical principle to achieve the "impossible?"

Simon Newcomb, after proving that human flight was "utterly impossible," conceded that it might one day be possible, but only by the discovery of some entirely new material or force of nature. In essence, that is what happened. The Wright Brothers employed principles of Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics that were completely unknown to Physics at the time.

Worse, as population levels declined and the economy contracted, the pottery on hand would have been more than adequate for immediate needs, removing any market for new production.

When archeologists uncovered the grave of a sixth-century Saxon king at Sutton Hoo in eastern Britain, for example, the pottery found among the grave goods told an astonishing tale of technical collapse. Had it been made in fourth century Britain, the Sutton Hoo pottery would have been unusually crude for a peasant farmhouse; two centuries later, it sat on the table of a king. What’s more, much of it had to be imported, because so simple a tool as a potter’s wheel dropped entirely out of use in post-Roman Britain, as part of a cascading collapse that took Britain down to levels of economic and social complexity not seen there since the subsistence crises of the middle Bronze Age more than a thousand years before.

Actually all color sensors are B/W sensors with RGB filters permanently painted on top of alternating pixels.

Photos made during epic light are much better than those made under lesser light with filters attempting to compensate.

(click to add)

In Laws of Media (1988) and The Global Village (1989), published posthumously, Marshall McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology (i.e., any medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:

* What does the medium enhance?
* What does the medium make obsolete?
* What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
* What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media.

(click to add)

Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Script and papyrus created the social environment we think of in connection with the empires of the ancient world. The stirrup and the wheel created unique environments of enormous scope. Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike. In our time the sudden shift from the mechanical technology of the wheel to the technology of electric circuitry represents one of the major shifts of all historical time. Printing from movable types created a quite unexpected new environment---it created the *public.* Manuscript technology did not have the intensity or power of extension necessary to create publics on a national scale. What we have called "nations" in recent centuries did not, and could not, precede the advent of Gutenberg technology any more than they can survive the advent of electric circuitry with its power of totally involving all people in all other people.

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

Slide 14: orientation columns!

Computer vision can be a powerful tool for HCI applications

Anamorphic illusions drawn in a special distortion in order to create an impression of 3 dimensions when seen from one particular viewpoint.

Lots of details on CRP, urn model, stick breaking, implementation details, theoretical details.

I need to think more about HTM's layout for vision, and move away from Condensation's use of somewhat arbitrary features.

Ponder the Maunder

Skeletal thoughts for free markets.

In the static and extremely short-term view, the current situation in "free market" societies seems unforgivable.

Most of my peers and I associate wealth with doing something right. We suspect that while many fortunes may have been made through rapine, far fewer today go this route than before the free markets began, simply because it's so much easier to make money honestly (if not sustainably).

It is incredibly easy to make money. I know people who paint other people's houses who are millionaires. People who started out mortgaging a carwash. I don't want you to be offended in any way but I think this point of view can only take hold when one has little real experience with making money-products (getting paid by a customer) as well as little experience with the attitudes and lifestyles of the poor who are the recipients of income distribution ideas.

My sister-in-law-to-be (a CPA) tells us about her days as a Big Sister, working with inner city families, where there'd be no food in the fridge but the mom will have done up hair.

It's totally true that the crushing poverty that my family left behind in India penalizes its victims without mercy, and it requires superhuman courage combined with luck (this tells you what I think of my two parents who independently came from complete poverty to beat the system, meeting in after-college training at the same work facility) to escape. I don't feel that the poor millions in India are lazy. But I do believe that the free market approach will, and in fact is currently raising far more people's standard of living far higher than the previous system could.

Standard of living is life expectancy, number of man-hours worked per unit of real production (as in, what someone paid for your output).

The know-how, the supply chains, the manufacturing centers, and distribution chains.

I think though that you don't support a bureaucratic approach to a wealth distribution system as an alternative to the free market which you loathe and which I can live with. But the reason that I'm at all interested in economic democracy is that I think it's the natural extension to free markets, not at all any kind of replacement. I think that more sustainable (if non-exponential) profits can be obtained through ecologies of small employee-owned businesses, where 'profits' concretely mean customer-driven sales, not government-mandated constant demand (such as for auto insurance) or government-granted monopoly (like the FDA). I'm in the process of coming up with an empirically-tested methodology for business management deriving from our belief that such a system of novel product design and product manufacturing can result in far more efficiency and innovation.

Nationalizing health care will only make static the current system of doctoring and greatly hamper the development of novel health care provision systems as well as breakthroughs in research. I don't present this as a regurgitation of someone's theory but simply transferring my knowledge of engineering systems to doctoring.

BUMPED: "Part of the reason this subject is so contentious is that some of those most vocal on the subject of wealth—university students, heirs, professors, politicians, and journalists—have the least experience creating it."

Will people create wealth if they can't get paid for it? Only if it's fun. People will write operating systems for free. But they won't install them, or take support calls, or train customers to use them. And at least 90% of the work that even the highest tech companies do is of this second, unedifying kind.

There continued to be bribes, as there still are everywhere, but politics had by then been left to men who were driven more by vanity than greed.

In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

Doing what people want is not the only way to get money, of course. You could also rob banks, or solicit bribes, or establish a monopoly. Such tricks account for some variation in wealth, and indeed for some of the biggest individual fortunes, but they are not the root cause of variation in income. The root cause of variation in income, as Occam's Razor implies, is the same as the root cause of variation in every other human skill.

Part of the reason this subject is so contentious is that some of those most vocal on the subject of wealth—university students, heirs, professors, politicians, and journalists—have the least experience creating it. (This phenomenon will be familiar to anyone who has overheard conversations about sports in a bar.)

Students are mostly still on the parental dole, and have not stopped to think about where that money comes from. Heirs will be on the parental dole for life. Professors and politicians live within socialist eddies of the economy, at one remove from the creation of wealth, and are paid a flat rate regardless of how hard they work. And journalists as part of their professional code segregate themselves from the revenue-collecting half of the businesses they work for (the ad sales department). Many of these people never come face to face with the fact that the money they receive represents wealth—wealth that, except in the case of journalists, someone else created earlier.

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

{excerpt Just talking about freeing slaves---advocating immediate emancipation---was behavior at the the outer limit of the ideological continuum. By engaging in armed action, including murder, John Brown made mere verbal abolitionism seem much less radical. Brown's willingness to go to the gallows for what he thought was right had a moral force of his own.}

It is so interesting to see how ideas and events have consequences far beyond what any may imagine while planning them or immediately after they have occurred. Unintended consequences are amazing. Black swans are beautiful.

(click to add)

Bumped

Note 2: It seems that Discordeaux frequently succombed to spells wherein
he could only speak a Divine Tongue of some sort that no one could
understand but himself. We are sorry that we have no translation
of this most apt comment.

In the words of one of the Apostles Of Eris, Discordeaux (Jean The Eristentionalist): "Gorf stlikkter heenoc queslipper flix." (note 2)

If I were a business leader who wanted to minimize the impact of global warming-related interferences in my business, I think I would fund policy students through scholarships and the like because I'd know that policy wonks are far more useless at instituting real change (the enemy of most businesses) than the productive engineer or scientist.

I use NPR only as a gage for what a segment of the unthinking are being told to believe, so I gather from this story that businesses like the one above are funding such stories.

A key differentiator of what leads to great photos is people's ability to imagine what they want. It's the same in life: people who know what they want naturally gravitate towards things that get them there. People without a clue spend their lives running in circles.

There's an old wives' tale about pro photographers getting good shots because they take so many and cherry pick. Not true.

(click to add)

(click to add)

Learning from the Japanese City: West Meets East in Urban Design

Manhattan at Night. D80, 12-24mm @ 24mm, Auto ISO @ 1,400, f/4 @ 1/8 hand-held.

Is this where I read the passage regarding the transition from hearth goddess worship to Olympian sky gods worship? In a larger passage explaining why Apollo and Zeus figured in so many varied myths, because these were names assigned to local gods when the larger mythology swept over them?

Nope! It's from HDF Kitto: The Greeks - Page 199
'If he was a god, like Hyacinthus, he might become his ... supplanting gods were
more and more identified with Zeus or Apollo, it began to appear that Zeus ...' (google search)

An "uncensored" abridged version,
full of speculation about Christ.

I use a nice field of view calculator which will give angular field of view in degrees for horizontal, vertical and diagonal with whatever format and focal length you want to throw at it. I hate all this nonsensical "crop factor" stuff. Why not just talk in terms of horizontal field of view, or diagonal field of view. The calculator is available at http://www.mat.uc.pt/~rps/phot os/angles.html.

The usual "crop factor" is based on the relative length of the sensor diagonals, but 4/3 System format has a different format proportion compared to 35mm and Canon's 1.6x crop sensors, so the equivalent focal lengths are always approximate. Here are some precise numbers based on a Canon sensor size of 14.8 x 22.2 mm, an Olympus sensor size at 13 x 17.3 mm, and 35mm film at 24 x 36 mm, with 200mm, 150mm and 300mm lenses respectively:

System Focal Length Horiz Degrees Vert Degrees Diagonal Degrees
Canon "1.6x" 200.0 6.3533 4.2380 7.6323
Olympus "2.0x" 150.0 6.6008 4.9625 8.2516
35mm film 300.0 6.8673 4.5812 8.2490

What? You don’t want to carry around a tripod? Comon… if you are going out to shoot beautiful pictures, you better get serious. Also, if you have it over your shoulder or carry it in an aggressive way, it makes an effective weapon.

I can still recall the excitement of seeing the visualization "come true" when I removed the plate from the fixing bath for examination. The desired values were all there in their beautiful negative interpretation. This was one of the most exciting moments of my photographic career.

Nice animated time line of human migration sent to me by Paul Saffo (via Jim Warren). The coolest thing I learned was the very exciting day about 80,000 years ago when a massive volcanic eruption caused a 6 year darkening of the skies!
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

{comment The old is mechanistic labor? The new is unifying? Isn't this what I've been thinking about wrt shrinking the supply chain of manufacture and design, instead of breaking a task into 1 million subtasks and throwing 1 million monkeys at it, integrate it into 10'000 subtasks, with monkeys just 100 times smarter.}

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. ...

"Jobs" represent a relatively recent pattern of work. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute "mechanization" and "specialism." These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time.

Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and "human" service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty. ...

"Come into my parlor," said the computer to the specialist.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways.

(click to add)

(click to add)

The concept of time is inextricably tied to awareness; appropriately it is measured in terms of the frequency of detectable repeating events.

The necklace grows out of Fuller's insistence that every child is born a genius-endlessly curious, probing, full of wonder about everything. If a child's questions are rewarded with answers that feel right, that is, correspond to his experience, the inherent genius will blossom. More often, not challenged creatively by tedious memorization that doesn't seem to relate to the world around him, a child simply learns to play the game. Fuller's conviction that children spontaneously leap at the chance to understand Universe when excited by true and comprehensive information was a primary motivating force behind synergetics. His aim was to supply models to elucidate the wonders of science to adults and children alike.

This, along with education and political corruption, are problems that will be solved precessionally by automation through digital cognizance.

Also, the threat of a growing lower class and expanding poverty.

From the introduction by Robert McChesney:

What is unusual---perhaps unprecedented---is for a working journalist to take on the industry in which he or she works. ... He is breaking the implicit code of silence that compels journalists to look the other way when the issue turns to how corporate control and commercial pressures have distorted and degraded our communication system.

This is not to suggest that the many working journalists who may well sympathize with Danny Schechter are cowards because they refuse to speak up. One of the important functions of the profession of journalism is to make journalists and the public regard issues of ownership and control as unimportant to explaining how the media operate. It is worth noting that professional journalism was born almost a century ago precisely during the era that newspaper ownership was consolidating and advertising was becoming the primary means of support. Urged on by the largest publishers, professional journalism was supposed to assure readers that the news could not be influenced by owners or advertisers or the biases of the journalists themselves.

In fact, as Ben Bagdikian has pointed out, professional journalism internalized the overall political values of the owners and advertisers, and recognized a decontextualized "neutral" coverage based upon "official sources" as legitimate news. ...

But increasingly concentrated corporate ownership and hyper-commercialism, along with the complicity of the political establishment that benefits from a depoliticized citizenry, have effectively destroyed the autonomy and democratic capacity of journalism over the past 15 years. In 1982, Bagdikian calculated that fewer than 50 conglomerates dominated the US media, and that figure seemed scandalous at the time. By 1997, he put the figure at around 10 enormous firms, after waves and waves of mergers and acquisitions. As recently as the 1950s, most journalism was produced by firms that devoted the lion's share of their resources to that enterprise; today the largest news gathering organizations are part of entertainment empires owned by firms like Disney and Time Warner. Journalism, like amusement parks, TV shows, action movies, and music CDs, exists to generate profit, pure and simple. And in this brave new world, a firm's journalism is required to support its other commercial activities, not to mention its political objectives. ...

Indeed, one of the growth industries of the 1990s is of journalists who have thrown in the towel on the profession and have moved into academia, retirement or some other field. Numerous memoirs and exposes of journalism have been published. Entire shelves at the library include books by people like ex-*Chicago Tribute* editor James Squires or former CBS legend Walter Cronkite bemoaning the death of journalism at the hands of Wall Street, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue. All of these studies link the decline in political understanding, debate, and participation, to the tabloidization and commercialization of journalism. ...

Nobody understands these issues quite like Danny Schechter. He combines a remarkable understanding of the best scholarship on the topic with the street smarts of a working journalist who knows who to cut through the bull and get to the point. He develops his critique while providing us with a lively tour through his remarkable career at Boston's WBCN, Harvard's Nieman Fellowship Program, CNN, ABC News, and as the producer of the brilliant public television programs *South Africa Now* and *Rights & Wrongs.*

The corporate media giants, advertisers, and other powerful forces that benefit by the status quo have no interest in encouraging the discussion. It is quite all right to bash the media for its alleged "liberal" bias; indeed, our airwaves are dominated by millionaire right-wingers who constantly assert such claims with no sense of irony. But it is strictly forbidden for there to be a candid analysis of the implications of corporate media control on our journalism, culture and democracy.

Unlike most of the other critics, however, Danny Schechter hasn't thrown in the towel on journalism or the possibility of changing this nation for the better. ... The solution is not for journalists or citizens to put their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong; that option is no longer tenable. The solution is to tell the truth, actively discuss and debate the situation, and seek out workable solutions. And any solution will have to involve structural changes that reduce the amount of control corporate executives have over media content, and increase the diversity of viable noncommercial media.

Danny Schechter also rightly emphasizes our need to reform our media if we want to rejuvenate our democracy. Journalism has always been indelibly linked to democracy, from the passage of the First Amendment in 1791 to the dictum of "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted" in the late 19th century. Journalism should be feisty, controversial, engaging, and honest. Like politics, it should be fun, and it should always piss off those in power. Today's journalism has substituted celebrity lifestyle exposes, trivia, shopping tips, crime and violence, and subservience to business, for anything remotely democratic. Little wonder so few young people read or watch the news anymore. ...

We need 50, 100, 1,000 Danny Schechters. And we need everyone to take his words to heart and to begin to demand a media system that serves our democratic needs rather than the commercial imperatives of a handful of massive corporations.

From a review:

Mr Dalrymple shows in essay after essay how the choices the underclass in Britain make determines their destiny. There are countless parallels to American life - the rampant gambling that goes on in casinos and in bingo parlors (and those who cannot stop then blame the casino for their problem!); the spending of needed cash on lottery tickets; the horrible standard of education that graduates illiterate young adults who can barely add in their heads; the ignorance of science, history and math that students display; women who go from one violent man to another, making baby after baby with them and then saying they "love him" and cannot leave him. The stories are pathetic and frustrating because the "victims" are their own hindrance. They live in some sort of parallel universe where they have no more control over their emotions or actions than a squirrel or a worm, and blame their problems on the government, the bureaucracy, their parents, the pubs, the casinos, their teachers... everyone carries the victim's sin on their own shoulders, because the underclass itself is not responsible for anything.

Some reviewers have noted that the author does a lot of complaining, yet has no answers. That is the point of the book, isn't it? There is no one outside of these people who can change them. More government agencies? More welfare money? More policemen? What? The entire theme of the book is the relinquishing of personal responsibility by the underclass so that they can live and die as they see fit and someone else can foot the bill. How many young men in Britain are forced to rob cars, rape women, steal food, skip school, have numerous children by numerous women, tattoo and pierce themselves, drink themselves silly in pubs, etc? What magic pill is there for these miscreants that does not come from inside the individual himself?

it's hard to tell good hackers when you meet them. I can't tell, even now. You also can't tell from their resumes. It seems like the only way to judge a hacker is to work with him on something.

in fact, you get bigger rewards in your time if you work on matters of passing importance

Bumped

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.

Toppled a flower vase and rolled around in the spilled water. Got taken to the bathtub and washed. She looked horrendous... poor thing.

Automatt > Collections * > Techniques
High Dynamic Range

Currently shooting with a Canon EOS 30D

EF-S 10-22mm
EF 28-105mm
EF 50mm
EF 100mm macro
EF-L IS 100-400mm

HDR or High Dynamic Range photography

Made from multiple images, shot at different exposures, to raise the dynamic range of the final result.

First you take three identical images at different exposures, and then you do some math.

This produces a an effect that is closer to matching what the eye sees when looking at the same image. Except when it doesn't.

introHDR photos with the GIMP

(click to add)

"PHOTOGRAPHY AS A FAD is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze."

-- Alfred Stieglitz
The American Annual of Photography, 1897

Mount: Canon EF USM
Focal Type: Wide-angle zoom

Macro forces – Changes in the marketplace:

* Amazon EC2 – Every new internet startup wants to use EC2. It's an inexpensive, outsourced datacenter – but ONLY if your application can scale dynamically.
* Intel Core 2 Duo – SMP in your laptop. Now developers can see the benefits of SMP-capable applications first-hand, even during the prototype stage.
* Hadoop and Google's MapReduce – buzz is building about these parallel-computing systems for tackling massive datasets using commodity hardware. But these are ONLY useful for batch processing.
* Ruby on Rails scaling woes – buzz started with an interview with a Twitter developer full of great quotes

(click to add)

(click to add)

Where Heilbroner celebrates the overlap between economics and other human activities, Foley criticizes "Adam's Fallacy," the artificial division between the economic sphere, in which pursuit of self-interest leads to social good, and the social sphere, in which good results from unselfish actions. Uncritical acceptance of the fallacy, which the author labels "economic theology," leads to the belief that short-term economic gain necessarily favors vague, long-term social gains. Unemployment and cultural destruction caused by free trade, for example, are ignored from a naïve faith that unrestrained trade leads to a greater good for a greater number. Foley finds some brilliance and rigor in the works of all his subjects, while also accusing them of sloppy thinking unsupported by data, which has led to heartless, misguided policies.

(click to add)

This is another supporting theory for my alternative view of HTMs encoding causes solely by the motor actions they prompt.

Technics is not to be understood in terms of the implement. What matters is not how one fashions things, but what one does with them... Every struggle with a problem calls for a logical technique. There is a technique of the painter's brush-strokes, of horsemanship, of navigating an airship. Always it is a matter of purposive activity, never of things. And it is just this that is so often overlooked in the study of prehistory, in which far too much attention is paid to things in museums and far too little in the innumerable processes that must have been in existence, even though they may have vanished without leaving a trace.

Every machine serves some one process and owes its existence to thought about this process. All our means of transport have developed out of the ideas of driving and rowing, sailing and flying, and not out of any concept such as that of a wagon or a boat. Methods themselves are weapons.

(click to add)

Jacopo Belbo, who was almost fifteen years older than I, later convinced me that every generation feels this way. You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weekly magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great classics of literature. My father, not because he was stingy, but because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. “The purpose of this magazine,” I pontificated, quoting the ad, “is to educate the reader in an entertaining way.” “The purpose of your magazine,” my father replied without looking up from his paper, “is the purpose of every magazine: to sell as many copies as it can.”

That day, I began to be incredulous.

Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity. Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.

Incredulity doesn’t kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don’t believe in them, the collision of two ideas— both false—can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.

Exu, Uluru, Atra-Hasis.

Read first over December 2006. This time Emily reads it aloud on road trips.

Cumberland, MD and Maryland in general are really nice!

I've been pondering this a lot lately. The production of existing and design of new products both today are done by breaking down the process into a million hypersimple sub-processes, each of which can be thrown at a monkey to execute. This leads to all sorts of problems, in the monolithicity of corporateness, and avoiding this by encouraging integration of tasks and using fewer, but smarter monkeys would be more profitable and efficient.

One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts.

The true test of a language is how well you can discover and solve new problems, not how well you can use it to solve a problem someone else has already formulated. These two are quite different criteria.

At Toyota Motor Company, Taichii Ohno and Shigeo Shingo, began to incorporate Ford production and other techniques into an approach called Toyota Production System or Just In Time . They recognized the central role of inventory.

The Toyota people also recognized that the Ford system had contradictions and shortcomings, particularly with respect to employees. With General Douglas MacAurthur actively promoting labor unions in the occupation years, Ford's harsh attitudes and demeaning job structures were unworkable in post-war Japan. They were also unworkable in the American context, but that would not be evident for some years. America's "Greatest Generation" carried over attitudes from the Great Depression that made the system work in spite of its defects.

Toyota soon discovered that factory workers had far more to contribute than just muscle power.

Is Jacobs right about import replacement? We have to verify everything empirically.

I'm sorry but you are completely wrong on what Jacobs calls "import replacement." She takes great pains in The Economy of Cities (especially Chapter 5) to distinguish this from "import substitution," which IS a discredited doctrine (and she herself effectively discredits it no later 1969 than when this book was published). In her system, imports serve to spur local innovations, some of which can be exported. While the end of most versions of import *substitution* is self-sufficiency, import *replacement* is part of a dynamic process in which local economies network to form dynamically stable global economies. What's fascinating about this analysis is that Jacobs emphasized the importance for trade of both diversity of skills and knowledge and the diversity of tastes, suggesting the importance of the latter in driving the former.

In 2003 and 2004, when Donald Coxe, BMO Global Strategist and writer of the Basic Point publications, first started describing what was occurring in China, he explained the process in terms of the theories of an well-known urbanist but mostly unknown economist, Jane Jacobs.

This story, on Japanese manufacture, is lengthy but so good I have to quote it in full:

Bicycles were extremely popular in Japanese cities at the end of the nineteenth century, when the import of goods that Japanese manufactures could not compete with on price — or could not make at all — was damaging the national economy. Clearly, if bicycles could be made in Japan, both the massive demand for an individual means of transport and the national economy would be server at the same time. As Jane Jacobs points out in her book The Economy of Cities, Japan could have responded to this challenge by inviting foreign manufacturers to establish plants in the country — though this would have brought little profit to the Japanese themselves. Or they could have built a factory of their own — which would have required large investments in specialised machinery and the training of a skilled labour force. The Japanese followed neither of these options. Instead they exploited an indigenous talent for ‘economic borrowing’ — or imitation, as non-specialists would call it. It worked like this:

Not long after the importation of bicycles had begun, large numbers of one- and two-man repair shops sprang up in the cities. Since imported spare parts were expensive and broken bicycles too valuable to cannabalise, many repair shops found it worthwhile to make replacement parts themselves — not difficult if each of the shops specialised in making only one or two specific parts, as many did. In this way, groups of bicycle repair shops were in effect manufacturing entire bicycles before long, and it required only an enterprising individual to begin buying parts on contract from the repairmen for Japan to have the beginnings of a home-grown bicycle manufacturing industry.

So, far from being costly to develop, bicycle manufacturing in Japan paid for itself at every stage of its development. And the Japanese got much more than a bicycle industry from the exercise. They had also acquired a model for many of their other industrial achievements: imitation and a system of reducing complex manufacturing work to a number of relatively simple operations which could be done in small autonomous workshops. The pattern was applied to the production of many other goods, and underwrote the soaring economic success of Japan during the twentieth century. Sony began life at the end of the Second World War as a small shop making tubes on contract for radio assemblers. The first Nikon cameras were exact copies of the Zeiss Contax; Canon copied the Leica; Toyota Landcruisers were powered by copies of the Chrysler straight-six engine.

He proceeds to examine the Fed's policies of the 1920s, demonstrating that it was quite inflationary even if the effects did not show up in the price of goods and services.

The people became numerous...
The god was depressed by their uproar
Enil heard their noise,
He exclaimed to the great gods
The noise of mankind has become burdensome...

- from the ancient Sumerian epic Atrahasis

The previous entry refers to another segment of the article:
"Tablet I contains a creation myth about the Sumerian gods Anu, Enlil and Enki, gods of sky, wind and water, "when gods were in the ways of men" according to its incipit. Following the casting of lots, heaven is ruled by Anu, earth by Enlil, and the freshwater sea by Enki. Enlil assigned junior gods to do farm labor and maintain the rivers and canals, but after forty years they rebelled and refused to do hard labor. Instead of punishing the rebels, Enki, who is also the kind, wise counselor to the gods, suggested that humans be created to do the work. The mother goddess Mami is assigned the task of creating humans by shaping clay figurines mixed with the flesh and blood of a slain god. The under-god Weila or Aw-ilu, was slain for this purpose. After ten months, a specially made womb breaks open and humans are born. Tablet I continues with legends about overpopulation and plagues. Atrahasis is mentioned at the end of Tablet I."

I am very interested in this kind of syncretism, whereby the myths of one culture are adopted by another. (e.g., Ishtar, Isis, and the ancient Greek hearth goddess?) It is the genetics of mythology, of cultures. I believe Frazer talks at length about this, if only I could read.

Burkert traces the model drawn from Atrahasis on a corresponding passage, the division by lots of the air, underworld and sea among Zeus, Hades and Poseidon in the Iliad, in which "a resetting through which the foreign framework still shows".

"At its height, Manichaeism was one of the most widespread religions in the world, with Manichaean churches and scriptures existing as far east as China and as far west as the Roman empire." These are the fragmentary remnants of that great religion. These scraps of paper!!! Oh the agony, the pointlessness of it.

Digitales Turfan-Archiv

Mitteliranische Texte in manichäischer Schrift

Weber, Dieter (Hrsg.): Iranian Manichaean Turfan Texts in Publications since 1934
Journal Indo-Iranian Journal
Publisher Springer Netherlands
ISSN 0019-7246 (Print) 1572-8536 (Online)
Issue Volume 44, Number 4 / December, 2001
DOI 10.1023/A:1013012409451
Pages 370-372
Subject Collection Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
SpringerLink Date Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Available at http://junod.ath.cx/mediawiki/index.php/Image:Review_of_'Iranian_Manichaean_Turfan_Texts_in_Publications_since_1934,'_ed._Weber.pdf

# The exit is usually where the entrance was."
# He who limps is still walking.
# In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.
# The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.
# Even a glass eye can see its blindness.
# To whom should we marry Freedom, to make it multiply?
# I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.
# You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
# Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.
# Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork? (Hence the title Cannibals with Forks by John Elkington)
# If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?
# No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
# All is in the hands of man. Therefore wash them often.
# Do not ask God the way to heaven; he will show you the hardest one.
# If you are not a psychiatrist, stay away from idiots. They are too stupid to pay a layman for his company.
# Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don't bite everybody.
# The first condition of immortality is death.
# Suppose you succeed in breaking the wall with your head. And what, then, will you do in the next cell?

The people became numerous...
The god was depressed by their uproar
Enil heard their noise,
He exclaimed to the great gods
The noise of mankind has become burdensome...

- from the ancient Sumerian epic Atrahasis

Welcome to the Foucault's Pendulum Concordance Wiki

This list was researched by Anthony Burgess with the purpose of understanding Foucault's Pendulum. The words and subjects herein are widely considered archaic or esoteric.

(click to add)

marcwildpassion | profile | all galleries >> Landscape

For the first time, new research shows that entrepreneurs are five times more likely to suffer from dyslexia then your average UK citizen and this has major implications for this Government’s key aim of creating a more entrepreneurial British society through initiatives such as this week’s National Enterprise week.

A recent rant of mine mentioned cities, which led to a meandering discussion about cities and rural areas on my board, and led me to realize that not enough people have read Jane Jacobs.

"To fundamentally shift the strategy canvas of an industry, you must begin by reorienting your strategic focus from competitors to alternatives, and from customers to noncustomers of the industry." (p28)

# Hardcover: 256 pages
# Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; 1 edition (February 3, 2005)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1591396190
# ISBN-13: 978-1591396192

Code and Data
IJCV Article ``Nonparametric Bayesian Image Segmentation''

Download

(click to add)

Carl Edward Rasmussen and Christopher K. I. Williams
MIT Press, 2006. ISBN 0-262-18253-X.

This book is © Copyright 2006 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The MIT Press have kindly agreed to allow us to make the book available on the web. The web version of the book corresponds to the 2nd printing.

(click to add)

NASA dips into bargain basement with new satellite

(click to add)

SUGGESTED READINGS

The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.

Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion
By P. T. Bauer
"Political power enables rulers forcibly to restrict the choices open to their subjects. But possession of wealth does not by itself confer such coercive power in this crucial sense. Wealth can sometimes secure a degree of political influence, although the likelihood and significance of this possibility are apt to be much exaggerated." <-- Doubtful.

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."

"For society as a whole, nothing comes as a 'right' to which we are 'entitled'. Even bare subsistence has to be produced.... The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it... The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more the providers have to carry the load." Thomas Sowell, quoted in Forbes

The National Debt is $9.2 Trillion!

"In languages like High Performance Fortran, concurrency is mainly used to increase computing performance. Erlang, together with languages like Occam and Concurrent Pascal, instead assumes that the most important use of concurrency is to model real world concurrency. Of course, this doesn ot mean that concurrency cannot be used to gain computational speed in these languages."

(click to add)

(click to add)

Craig Venter
Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention
Monday, February 25th, 02008

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought
Monday, February 4, 02008

* Neal Ferguson long now speaker + alternative histories & silent evidence
* better at doing than knowing
* theories <- entertainment
* He talks about how if religion was the old opiate of the masses, he prefers it to the new opiate, the stock market
* I'm afraid of stock markets, but i take other risks
* ULTRA-conservative: when you can't predict probabilities, rely on memories. Keep around the oldest members of your society for their remembrances.

Andromeda Galaxy Pentax *istD with filter and 300mm telephoto lens

Various deep-sky objects taken with a standard (unmodified) Toucam

Macro forces – Changes in the marketplace:

* Amazon EC2 – Every new internet startup wants to use EC2. It's an inexpensive, outsourced datacenter – but ONLY if your application can scale dynamically.
* Intel Core 2 Duo – SMP in your laptop. Now developers can see the benefits of SMP-capable applications first-hand, even during the prototype stage.
* Hadoop and Google's MapReduce – buzz is building about these parallel-computing systems for tackling massive datasets using commodity hardware. But these are ONLY useful for batch processing.
* Ruby on Rails scaling woes – buzz started with an interview with a Twitter developer full of great quotes

Imagine Google Docs Spreadsheet doing simple calculations on the client, heavy calculations on the server. Maybe you push more calculations to the server when the client has a weak CPU like iPhone.

%% The Little Schemer – implemented in Erlang %% Copyright 2008 Matt Kangas. All rights reserved.

Bumped

(click to add)

So we ask: is the personal computing experience (counting the equivalent of the OS, apps, and
other supporting software) intrinsically 2 billion lines of code, 200 million, 20 million, 2 million,
200,000, 20,000, 2,000?

WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND

Programming the Cell Processor
It may be tricky, but the performance gains are worth the effort
On a Pentium 4 HT running at 3.4 GHz, this algorithm is able to check 24-million edges per second. On the Cell, at the end of our optimization, we achieved a performance of 538-million edges per second. This is an impressive result, but came at the price of an explosion in code complexity. While the algorithm in Listing One fits in 60 lines of source code, our final algorithm on the Cell measures 1200 lines of code.

Satellite hacks!

PID (proportional, integral, derivative) control is not as complicated as it sounds. Follow these simple implementation steps for quick results.

An Introduction to Erlang

The coolest thing I learned was the very exciting day about 80,000 years ago when a massive volcanic eruption caused a 6 year darkening of the skies

In fact, private groups of Amateur Radio operators around the globe have built and sent dozens and dozens of Amateur Radio communications and science satellites to orbit since the first, OSCAR-1, was launched on December 12, 1961.

MEME VIRUS!

Ideas
1) Parkour
2) Get good at hacking cameras and SATCOMs

I've encountered more than one Common Lisper who is suspicious of brevity for the sake of brevity, but the major advantage of Lisp is supposed to be that you grow your language up to meet your problem. Today, at least for pedagogical purposes, our problem is we want to make Common Lisp act a bit more like Matlab. And we are going to do it with reader macros, since our major aim is to express as concisely as possible vector operations.

(defun slurp-stream4 (stream) (let ((seq (make-string (file-length stream)))) (read-sequence seq stream) seq))

By the way, on the matter of hype: People have always been quick to announce “the next software development revolution,” usually about their own brand-new technology. Don’t believe it. New technologies are often genuinely interesting and sometimes beneficial, but the biggest revolutions in the way we write software generally come from technologies that have already been around for some years and have already experienced gradual growth before they transition to explosive growth. This is necessary: You can only base a software development revolution on a technology that’s mature enough to build on (including having solid vendor and tool support), and it generally takes any new software technology at least seven years before it’s solid enough to be broadly usable without performance cliffs and other gotchas. As a result, true software development revolutions like OO happen around technologies that have already been undergoing refinement for years, often decades. Even in Hollywood, most genuine “overnight successes” have really been performing for many years before their big break.

The qualifications and relations of individuals will highly influence their fate and is therefore of great interest to their player. This all makes for highly unpredictable game dynamics as the state of affairs on the 'world stage' is the product of the interplay of a myriad of events on the micro level.

This makes so much more sense today than in summer of '06!

MCMC methods in a nutshell

(click to add)

What if Ruby were more popular than LISP, and more powerful than Python? Would that be enough to make Ruby interesting?

I prototyped extensively before coming up with the final version of OpenPoker and tried Delphi, Python, C#, C/C and Scheme. I also wrote a full-blown poker engine in Common Lisp. While I did spend over 9 months on research and prototyping, the final rewrite only took about 6 weeks of coding. I attribute most of the time and cost savings to choosing Erlang as my platform.

;;; This is an implementation of an infix reader macro.

Common Lisp Matrix Math Library

Bumped

1) Chinese restaurant problem, 2) stick-breaking, and 3) Dirichlet processes, all related.

By Michael Jordan. Slides at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/nips-tutorial05.ps

By Erik Sudderth.

An Erlang Course

A New Single Pixel Camera

LIST OF TOP LECTURES (counting since March 2007): Page 1 of 70 > Next Last




[syn] 7304 views, 03:02:12
Basics of probability and statistics
Mikaela Keller
25 comments





[syn] 5960 views, 04:59:19
Machine Learning, Probability and Graphical Models
Sam Roweis
12 comments





[syn] 3320 views, 01:00:47
Gaussian Process Basics
David MacKay
1 comment





[syn] 3265 views, 05:02:23
Statistical Learning Theory

CMU's snake robots look really cool! Some stick their heads out of the ground and look around with curiosity!

In a similar experiment, subjects were asked the last two digits of their social security number and then asked what they would be willing to pay for a consumer product (e.g., bottle of wine, wireless computer keyboard, video game). Similarly, the price customers were willing to pay was positively correlated with the (random) digits of the customers’ social security number. For example, subjects with social security numbers in the bottom 20% priced a bottle of Cotes du Rhone wine at $8.64 versus subjects with social security numbers in the top 20% who priced the same bottle at $27.91.

Title: LISP Machine Progress Report
Authors: Bawden, Alan
Greenblatt, Richard
Holloway, Jack
Knight, Thomas
Moon, David
Weinreb, Daniel
Issue Date: 1-Aug-1977

Because all of the mathematical results of network theory apply to certain specialized and idealized mechanical systems, as well as to certain specialized and idealized electrical systems, we can say that in a sense network theory is *more* general than Maxwell's equations, which do not apply to mechanical systems at all. In another sense, of course, Maxwell's equations are more general than network theory, for Maxwell's equations apply to all electrical systems, not merely to a specialized and idealized class of electrical circuits.

To some degree we must simply admit that this is so, without being able to explain the fact fully. Yet we can say this much. Some theories are strongly *physical* theories. Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations are such theories. Newton's laws deal with mechanical phenomena; Maxwell's equations deal with electrical phenomena. Network theory is essentially a mathematical theory. The terms used in it can be given various physical meanings. The theory has interesting things to say about different physical phenomena, about mechanical as well as electrical vibrations.

Often a mathematical theory is the offshoot of a physical theory or of physical theories. It can be an elegant mathematical formulation and treatment of certain aspects of a general physical theory. Network theory is a treatment of certain physical behavior common to electrical and mechanical devices. A branch of mathematics called *potential theory* treats problems common to electric, magnetic, and gravitational fields and, indeed, in a degree to aerodynamics. Some theories seem, however, to be more mathematical than physical in their very inception.

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Video Lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman

If you'd like to know a little bit more about how we came to use OCaml as our primary development language, take a look at these slides from a talk we gave at CUFP 2006, a conference for commercial users of functional programming.

(click to add)

Overall, a song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.

Overall, a song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.

Graphical models such as factor graphs allow a unified approach to a number of key topics in coding and signal processing such as the iterative decoding of turbo codes, LDPC codes and similar codes, joint decoding, equalization, parameter estimation, hidden-Markov models, Kalman filtering, and recursive least squares. Graphical models can represent complex real-world systems, and such representations help to derive practical detection/estimation algorithms in a wide area of applications. Most known signal processing techniques -including gradient methods, Kalman filtering, and particle methods -can be used as components of such algorithms. Other than most of the previous literature, we have used Forney-style factor graphs, which support hierarchical modeling and are compatible with standard block diagrams.

ontparnasse tower. This panorama is made from 8 photos taken with a Canon 400D EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 at 28mm, f/8.0, 25sec and ISO 100. Hugin and Enblend wer

ABSTRACT

Multitask Learning is an approach to inductive transfer that improves generalization by using the domain information contained in the training signals of related tasks as an inductive bias. It does this by learning tasks in parallel while using a shared representation; what is learned for each task can help other tasks be learned better. This paper reviews prior work on MTL, presents new evidence that MTL in backprop nets discovers task relatedness without the need of supervisory signals, and presents new results for MTL with k-nearest neighbor and kernel regression. In this paper we demonstrate multitask learning in three domains. We explain how multitask learning works, and show that there are many opportunities for multitask learning in real domains. We present an algorithm and results for multitask learning with case-based methods like k-nearest neighbor and kernel regression, and sketch an algorithm for multitask learning in decision trees. Because multitask learning works, can be applied to many different kinds of domains, and can be used with different learning algorithms, we conjecture there will be many opportunities for its use on real-world problems.

(click to add)

(click to add)

R. Buckminster Fuller

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

This interdisciplinary course provides a hands-on approach to students in the topics of bioinformatics and proteomics. Lectures and labs cover sequence analysis, microarray expression analysis, Bayesian methods, control theory, scale-free networks, and biotechnology applications. Designed for those with a computational and/or engineering background, it will include current real-world examples, actual implementations, and engineering design issues. Where applicable, engineering issues from signal processing, network theory, machine learning, robotics and other domains will be expounded upon.

3 Introduction to Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) (Guest: Paul Robertson) (PDF)

Localization, SLAM, Kalman Filter, Large Scale SLAM
4 Vision Based SLAM (Guest: Paul Robertson) (PDF)

Topological Maps, Hidden Markov Models (HMM), SIFT, Vision-based Localization

Nonparametric Belief Propagation (NBP) is an inference algorithm for graphical models containing continuous, non-Gaussian random variables. NBP extends the popular class of particle filtering algorithms, which assume variables are related by a Markov chain, to general graphs. NBP's computations are based on efficient sampling algorithms which avoid the need to discretize high-dimensional spaces. Currently, NBP has been applied to several computer vision problems, but it also has many potential applications in other fields.

The most complete and up-to-date reference for the SIFT feature detector is given in the following journal paper:

David G. Lowe, "Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints," International Journal of Computer Vision, 60, 2 (2004), pp. 91-110. [PDF]

Abstract
We consider the problem of learning Bayes Net
structures for related tasks. We present an algo-
rithm for learning Bayes Net structures that takes
advantage of the similarity between tasks by bi-
asing learning toward similar structures for each
task. Heuristic search is used to find a high scor-
ing set of structures (one for each task), where the
score for a set of structures is computed in a prin-
cipled way. Experiments on problems generated
from the ALARM and INSURANCE networks
show that learning the structures for related tasks
using the proposed method yields better results
than learning the structures independently.

One of my students, Alex Niculescu-Mizil, has developed a method for multitask learning of Bayes Net structures.

PREASYMPTOTICS, INVERSE PROBLEMS, AND PLATONICITIES: LECTURES ON RISK & PROBABILITY

HTM

Phantom captains, driving mechanistic bodies, with a sense of what perfection is. "The goal is not 'housing,' but the universal extension of the phantom captain's ship into new areas of environmental control, possibly to continuity of survival without the necessity of intermittent 'abandoning ship.'"

(click to add)

This was a good graphic novel-to-TV adaptation, and the WB buried it because of how much underground circulation it got... The graphic novels were really pretty cool, almost Borgesian/Ecoian.

Huge icicles and waterfalls and iced staircases!

(click to add)

(click to add)

Norbert Wiener

Owned! I love this, absolutely nothing has ever stimulated my vision of airlife than Ansel Adams' large format shots.

Illustrated and abridged! Owned!

Author Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 1889-1975
Title A study of history

Author Fuller, R. Buckminster (Richard Buckminster), 1895-
Title Nine chains to the moon

(click to add)

Iliad

Although the Robert Fagles translation is modern, popular, and easy to understand if you've never studied Greek, Richard Lattimore's classic translation captures the feeling of the original Greek more accurately.

I loan because: helping create businesses that people value enough to uphold the rule of law benefits everyone.

chemistry of short and long term memory

Cell and Molecular Biological Studies of Memory Storage

(click to add)

Probabilistic Graphical Models

10-708, Fall 2006

School of Computer Science, Carnegie-MellonUniversity

“Cognitive” Memory and its Applications

by Bernard Widrow

Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference
By Judea Pearl

From: googletechtalks

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

(click to add)

30 minutes at the Book Loft, German Village. Must buy two of these, frame each page, fill a room with them.

Bumped

Features
* 640 x 480 native resolution
* Displays a virtual 62" screen 9 feet distant

# Particle methods as message passing,
# A numerical method to compute Cram�r-Rao-type bounds for challenging estimation problems,
# Sequential clustering by loopy belief propagation,

I've been a college professor type for a bit and while listening to and vaguely contemplating Yet Another Commencement Address, and its trite cliches and nonsense about the future I decided to write my own