Random word generator

Assuming letters are iid in a document, this little script will generate random words. Its output is nothing like Machiavelli's History of Florence (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2464) and we probably want a 2d conditional distributions, that would tell us p('a' given previous letter was a 'b').

clear

% Get file contents and lowercase
fid=fopen('History_of_Florence.txt');
file_contents = lower((fread(fid,'*char')));
fclose(fid);

% These are the symbols we're interested in
symbols_of_interest = ['a':'z' ' '];
symbol_frequencies = zeros(size(symbols_of_interest));

% Build iid symbol table and cdf
for i=1:length(symbols_of_interest)
    symbol_frequencies(i) = sum(file_contents == symbols_of_interest (i));
end
cdf     = cumsum(symbol_frequencies / sum(symbol_frequencies));

% Generate!
for i=1:1000
    fprintf('%c', symbols_of_interest(sum(cdf<rand)+1))
end
fprintf('\n')

Some minor modifications give you 1st-order conditional distributions. No two soliloquies are ever alike!

clear

% Get file contents and lowercase
fid=fopen('History_of_Florence.txt');
file_contents = lower((fread(fid,'*char')));
fclose(fid);


% These are the symbols we're interested in
symbols_of_interest = ['a':'z' ' ,.'];
symbol_frequencies = zeros(size(symbols_of_interest));
symbol_frequencies_conditional = zeros(length(symbols_of_interest));

% Build symbol tables
for i=1:length(symbols_of_interest)
    symbol_frequencies(i) = sum(file_contents == symbols_of_interest(i));
    
    this_symbol_locations = (file_contents == symbols_of_interest(i));
    preceding_symbol_locations = [~~0 ; this_symbol_locations(1:end-1)];
    all_preceding_symbols = file_contents(preceding_symbol_locations);
    for j=1:length(symbols_of_interest)
        symbol_frequencies_conditional(i, j) = ...
            sum(all_preceding_symbols == symbols_of_interest(j));
    end
end

% Build cdfs
cdf = cumsum(symbol_frequencies / sum(symbol_frequencies));
for i=1:size(symbol_frequencies_conditional, 1)
    cdf_conditional(i,:) = ...
        cumsum(symbol_frequencies_conditional(i,:) / sum(symbol_frequencies_conditional(i,:)));
end

% Generate!
fprintf('IID: ')
for i=1:1000
    fprintf('%c', symbols_of_interest(sum(cdf<rand)+1))
end
fprintf('\n\n')


% Generate conditional!
this_symbol = 'z';
fprintf('First order conditional: ')
fprintf('%c', this_symbol);
for i=1:1000
    symbol_idx = (symbols_of_interest == this_symbol);
    next_symbol_distribution = symbol_frequencies_conditional(symbol_idx, :);
    this_symbol = symbols_of_interest(sum(cdf_conditional(symbol_idx,:)<rand)+1);
    fprintf('%c', this_symbol);
end
fprintf('\n\n')

Imrotate without cropping

In SAR (and x-ray CT), we create images of the same scene from different angles, so when you watch a movie of the images, you've got a view of the scene that keeps circling it.

Imrotate() in Matlab lets you rotate a NxM image by an arbitrary angle, so you can easily rotate the output of your imaging algorithm. Unfortunately, when you rotate an array, it gets bigger, and so Matlab will place the rotated image in a zero-filled array big enough. You can tell it to 'crop' the output to the size of the input (help imrotate) but then you'll lose the original corners and the new image will have blank corners.

I wanted to not lose any part of the image, so I had to copy all imrotate'd arrays into a bigger array, one big enough to store the image even if it was rotated at 45 degrees. Here's the dirty code to do it.

Npix=2^11; % image size
Ndiag = ceil(Npix*sqrt(2)); % size required to hold diagonal image

img = FORM_IMAGE(Npix);
img2 = imrotate(img, GET_ANGLE());

imgdiag = zeros(Ndiag); % initialize big array
imgdiag( 1+ceil(Ndiag/2)-ceil(size(img2,1)/2) : ceil(Ndiag/2)-ceil(size(img2,1)/2)+size(img2,1) , ...
        1+ceil(Ndiag/2)-ceil(size(img2,2)/2) : ceil(Ndiag/2)-ceil(size(img2,2)/2)+size(img2,2) ) = img2;

DISPLAY_IMAGE(imgdiag);

The size() and ceil() calls work out correctly and this works for 90 degree rotations. You do this for a bunch of images, and elements in your scene will stay in the same place! Lucky!

PID reminder

This is how PID works.

The hardest figure yet 2008-2-2

Ugh. I needed plotxx() from Matlab Central File Exchange (http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=317&objectType=file)

figure;
CO=get(gca,'ColorOrder');
[ax,hl1,hl2]=plotxx(tmaxes*2,[twod_vel(circornot==1); twod_accel(circornot==1); threed_vel(circornot==1); threed_accel(circornot==1)],  ...
    phis(circornot==1),-[twod_vel(circornot==1); twod_accel(circornot==1); threed_vel(circornot==1); threed_accel(circornot==1)]);
set(ax,'yscale','log')
ylabel(ax(1),'cond(R)')
xlabel(ax(1),'Aperture time (seconds)')
xlabel(ax(2),'Aperture angle (degrees)')
set(ax(1),'xlim',[minmax(tmaxes*2)])
set(ax(2),'xlim',[minmax(phis(circornot==1))])
set(ax(2),'yaxislocation','left',...
    'xcolor','k');
set(ax(2),'ylim',get(ax(1),'ylim'))
for i=1:4
    set(hl1(i),'color',CO(i,:)); end
set(hl1(2),'linestyle','--');
set(hl1(3),'linestyle','-.');
set(hl1(4),'linestyle',':');
title('Circular fligtpath')
legend(hl1,'2d velocity', '2d acceleration','3d velocity','3d acceleration')

figure;
CO=get(gca,'ColorOrder');
[ax,hl1,hl2]=plotxx(tmaxes*2,[twod_vel(circornot==0); twod_accel(circornot==0); threed_vel(circornot==0); threed_accel(circornot==0)],  ...
    phis(circornot==0),-[twod_vel(circornot==0); twod_accel(circornot==0); threed_vel(circornot==0); threed_accel(circornot==0)]);
set(ax,'yscale','log')
ylabel(ax(1),'cond(R)')
xlabel(ax(1),'Aperture time (seconds)')
xlabel(ax(2),'Aperture angle (degrees)')
set(ax(1),'xlim',[minmax(tmaxes*2)])
set(ax(2),'xlim',[minmax(phis(circornot==0))])

set(ax(1),'ylim',[1 max(get(ax(1),'ylim'))])
set(ax(2),'ylim',[1 max(get(ax(1),'ylim'))])
set(ax(2),'yaxislocation','left',...
    'xcolor','k');
set(ax(2),'ylim',get(ax(1),'ylim'))
for i=1:4
    set(hl1(i),'color',CO(i,:)); end
set(hl1(2),'linestyle','--');
set(hl1(3),'linestyle','-.');
set(hl1(4),'linestyle',':');
title('Straight fligtpath')
legend(hl1,'2d velocity', '2d acceleration','3d velocity','3d acceleration')

Then copy both figures into Powerpoint...

Pretty color order in default plots 2008-2-2

Matlab has some really pretty colors to plot multiple lines with, but when you do stuff with hold() or line(), you have to specify the color manually. How do you get access to the same pretty colors Matlab uses?

figure;
t = [-1:.1:1];
h = [];
for i=2:2:8
    hl = plot(t, sin(2*pi*t/i));
    hold on;
    h = [h hl];
end
%%% Generates the left image below.
CO=get(gca,'ColorOrder');
for i=1:4
    set(h(i),'color',CO(i,:));
end
%%% Generates the right image.

Convolution in Matlab 2008-1-11

Using conv() in Matlab is one of the most annoying thing about being an undergrad:

fs = 10;
t = (-1 : 1/fs : 10);

h = exp(-t) .* (t>=0);
x = (t>=0 & t<1);

y = conv(x,h);
tconv = (0:length(y)-1)/fs + t(1)*2; %%% The important bit!

figure;plot(tconv, y)

If you're dealing with conv2() and 2d convolution, you can use conv2(..., 'same') to avoid having to mess with axis vectors as above.

PDF-style histograms 2007-12-11

Thanks to Dr Koksal, we know how to use hist() to give us probability density approximations:

vec = randn(1,1e4);
Nbins = 32;
[n, x] = hist(vec, Nbins);
delx=x(2)-x(1);
stem(x, n/length(vec)/delx);

It won't look like the standard bar-chart output of hist(), which actually doesn't use bar() but the lower-level patch(), but it's the same thing. Remember that 'x' here is the bin centers. histc() can be very useful and works on bin edges.

Evaluating symbolic expressions quickly

You know that you can use syms to create symbolic variables and create all sorts of expressions with them, but then when you want to evaluate the expressions for non-symbolic vectors, you run into this problem:

>> syms fx real
>> k=taylor(exp(j*fx),5)
k =
1+i*fx-1/2*fx^2-1/6*i*fx^3+1/24*fx^4
>> fx=[-5:5];
>> eval(k)
??? Error using ==> mpower
Matrix must be square.

Quick fix is to use regular expressions and replace matrix arithmetic operators (/, *, ^, etc.) with dot-operators:

>> keval=regexprep(char(k), '([\^\*/])','.$1')
keval =
1+i.*fx-1./2.*fx.^2-1./6.*i.*fx.^3+1./24.*fx.^4

Now you can evaluate keval on your numerical fx:

>> eval(keval)
ans =
  Columns 1 through 6 
  14.5417 +15.8333i   3.6667 + 6.6667i  -0.1250 + 1.5000i ...

(Careful about using "i" as a variable in your code, since the symbolic expression will use "i" to represent sqrt(-1).)

FFT and Fourier transforms

I know I should know how to do this by now, and 'doc fft' has an example, but:

t = [0 : 0.1 : 50];
ft = cos(2*pi*t); 
N = 2^16; 
f = [0:N-1] / N * 10; 
Ff = fft(ft, N) / length(t); 
figure;
plot(f, abs(Ff))
xlabel('f (Hz)')

Low-level details about plotyy

Here's an alternative low-level way of doing something similar plotyy(), but putting x- and y-axes on the top and bottom of the graph.

From http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/creating_plots/f1-11215.html

Matlab code excerpt:

x1 = [0:.1:40];
y1 = 4.*cos(x1)./(x1+2);
x2 = [1:.2:20];
y2 = x2.^2./x2.^3;

hl1 = line(x1,y1,'Color','r');
ax1 = gca;
set(ax1,'XColor','r','YColor','r')

ax2 = axes('Position',get(ax1,'Position'),...
           'XAxisLocation','top',...
           'YAxisLocation','right',...
           'Color','none',...
           'XColor','k','YColor','k');

hl2 = line(x2,y2,'Color','k','Parent',ax2);

And to make the grid ticks line up:

xlimits = get(ax1,'XLim');
ylimits = get(ax1,'YLim');
xinc = (xlimits(2)-xlimits(1))/5;
yinc = (ylimits(2)-ylimits(1))/5;


set(ax1,'XTick',[xlimits(1):xinc:xlimits(2)],...
        'YTick',[ylimits(1):yinc:ylimits(2)])

Variable sized subplots, with and without plotyy()

The following plot can be made in Matlab and demonstrates the use of

• plotyy() to plot two curves with very different scales using the left and right sides of the plotbox for axes, and
• subplot() with one subplot bigger than another

years=1996:2007;
timevec=linspace(1996,2007, 45);

figure;
subplot(3,1,1)
[ax h1 h2]= plotyy(years, sin(years),  years, exp(.25*(years-1996)))
set([h1; h2],'marker','.');
ylabel(ax(1),'$ div per year')
ylabel(ax(2),'% yield of original price')
grid

title(sprintf('Effects of dividends along on Example'))

subplot(3,1,2:3)
plot(timevec,tan(timevec),'.-')
xlabel('year')
ylabel('Annualized ROR %')
title(('Annualized ROR on dividends alone, for Example'))
grid
xlabel('year')

Note, if you want more than one curve to a single axis for plotyy, you can pass in an array, just like you do with plot:

...
[ax h1 h2]= plotyy(years, [sin(years); sin(years+pi/6)],  years, exp(.25*(years-1996)))
...

Progress meters

In a for loop, print a message every 5% (printperc=0.05) percent:

N=210;           % iterations
printperc = .05; % print every so many percent, e.g., 5%
for i=1:N

    % do something complicated

    if (mod(i, floor(N * printperc)) == 0)
        fprintf('   %3d%% done \n', round(i/N*100));
    end
end

(Could store the output of mod(floor(.)) outside the for loop, but who knows if it'll really help.) Output in this case is like:

     5% done 
    10% done 
    14% done 
    19% done 
...

If your loop doesn't print anything else to the workspace, you can keep reprinting the progress in a single line---very professional!:

fprintf('Completed:   0%%\n')
for i=1:N
    if (mod(i, floor(N * printperc)) == 0)
        fprintf('\b\b\b\b\b%3d%%\n', round(i/N*100));
    end

    % This is complicated:
    pause(.05);
end

The output updates itself on a single line until:

Completed: 100%

Academic research

2008/8/15 Status after ATRC Workshop

• Ziv-Zakai bound, needs p(Z given theta).
• Rigling's suggestion of treating phase error terms as uncorrelated, etc. No good.
• FM phase noise?
• Carin's excellent three hour DP marathon. I understand now! Will investigate using DPs with iHMMs and KSBP.
  • MTL aka lifelong learning!
• Van Trees talks about radar signals with fluctuating targets in Vol 3 (reference here)?

I think still the most interesting question to answer before Asilomar and for the journal paper is: what's the minimum degradation of localizing a set of rigidly-connected point scatterers? Does noise necessarily prevent us from imaging real linear movers?

2007/7/30 ATRC Workshop Poster condensed

This is how I've decided to present our research so far.

Moore and Potter have shown the 3D resolution of circular SAR for a completely stationary point scatterer. This resolution can be seen as a specific case of focusing performance for stationary targets.

We have extended this result to consider the 3D resolution, or focusing performance, for a point scatterer whose position is perturbed with a zero-mean colored Gaussian random process.

2007/6/25 preparations for publication

Today I started reading Mark Stuff's work, which grew out of a conversation I had with Christian yesterday---my research so far has sought the resolution of single point scatterers moving with random fluctuations. It is entirely possible that the resolution of an ensemble of point scatterers improves if they comprise a rigid maneuvering target.

I also implemented a PGA algorithm tuned for low-frequency phase error correction, so naturally it didn't work too well on jittery motion. Wahl, et al., in their paper on PGA, suggest an alternative method of selecting the window width that should address high-frequency phase errors.

PGA is of interest when we can be sure that all scatterers being illuminated have the same phase error, that is, they are translating by the same amount.

2007/6/15 Imaging as estimation

• Follow up on Ron's comment: how does the radar center frequency affect the CRB for otherwise the same sort of random motion? Short answer: lower the frequency, the lower the normalized (to \sigma_x^2=0) eigenvalues of the CRB get for {x}, and for most of {y}. Some interesting things happen with lots of LPF'd (<10%) and strong noise (\sigma^2_{x,y,z} = 1e-6), the CRB for {y} starts to decrease dramatically thereabouts, though less so for lower center frequencies.
• I'm hoping to obtain error variances for estimating {x,y} with images. A tiny 1 meter radius image takes a while to image when I need 2^13x2^13 pixel images, but that's the image sizes I need to get low quantization of the x and y locations (that can reasonably fit with 4 GB ram). Actually, I get good estimates of errors of {x}, but errors of {y} are harder because they're heavily quantized... I use a hand-tuned Parzen window estimator to kludge together a variance for them, stay tuned...
• If this works out, I'll be able to make Dr Moses' figure of azimuth vs. estimator variance, given various forms of random fluctuation.

I need to fully understand the DP nature of Fox's tracking paper and see if we can convert it to use variational techniques.

2008/6/9 Results from linearized-model CRB

I need to make certain I understand the difference between eigenanalysis on sub-blocks of the CRB matrix and the entire CRB matrix and picking out the eigenvectors of interest. For example, eigenstuff of CRB{x,y,z} alone shows that the estimability of {y} monotonically increases (minimum variance decreases) with increasing process noise---the opposite of what one would expect. However, I can look at the eigendecomposition of the entire CRB matrix and pick out the eigenvalues here that correspond to the eigenvectors in the sub-block's case, and these eigenvalues match intuition far better.

More importantly than that, I need to figure out how to quantify the sensor noise! Because with \sigma_n^2 = 1 and no process noise, the minimum standard deviation on {z} is about 40 cm. Not great, definitely valuable!

I have achieved a fair amount with the linearized model, but I am still interested in seeing what happens beyond 10^-6 process noise variance (white, low-pass filtered, etc.) and for that I will need a nonlinear FIM estimator. Spall's algorithm's accuracy is not pleasing to me, Dauwels is getting a second look. (I really wish people would only publish reproducible results, i.e., put their code online.)

2008/6/7 Spall's Monte Carlo FIM estimator

I've read a few of Spall's papers using simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation to obtain Monte Carlo estimates of the Fisher information matrixes for complicated data models and have implemented both an example from his student's recent (2007) thesis+paper and my k-space radar linear-movement-with-fluctuations and am testing to see if it can help.

I'm investigating numerical FIM estimators because the Taylor series-based linearization of the original model that we've analytically investigated so far starts to break down at variances of >1e-6 m in position fluctuations, and I can easily imagine target motion with greater standard deviations than one millimeter (sqrt(1e-6)).

Spall's work requires an evaluation of the joint pdf, however, and since I don't have yet a joint pdf for the full nonlinear model (only marginals), I'm using the Gaussian approximation in my implementation. (Picinbono's 1996 correspondence to the IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing was helpful in ironing out the pdf of a complex jointly Gaussian random vector, and fortunately used many of the same matrices used in Delmas and Abeida.)

• I need to draw out the graphical model to derive the full joint distribution for this algorithm.
• Dauwels also has a numerical FIM estimator using marginal distributions and message passing.

So far, I've run Spall's algorithm (on a 3x3 k-space grid and with no process noise---just the Moore/Potter CRB) with many samples and the FIM estimates are varying much more than I'd like, and zeros are not where I expect them (I have >1000 instead of 0 for some FIM elements). However, the principal components of the inv(F{x,y,z}) submatrix does have the property noted by Moore and Potter, they lie along cross range/downrange/off-plane height. The eigenvalue corresponding to the off-plane height eigenvector is way too small.

I've also been reading Gorman and Hero's paper on constrained CRB, and it appears that it can do inequality constraints?

• How are the Moore-Potter results altered if we do an inequality-constrained CRB that forces the scatterer to be within the beam?

Spall has a recent extension of his algorithm incorporating a priori knowledge of the FIM, but they seem to allow only equality constraints. It is possible that we can find some show that some of the zeros in the linearized FIM would be there in the full FIM (e.g., the derivative of the standard covariance matrix wrt \angle A is 0, standard as opposed to the relation, unconjugated covariance matrix cov(x,x*)).

• Aside 1: can I whiten the linearized random fluctuations model and avoid having to build (N_f N_\phi)^2 arrays? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise#Whitening_a_random_vector

Our goals are:

• To estimate simply the position of the scatterer, (x, y, z), and use it as input to an ATR machine.
• TO estimate position and velocity x, y, z, v_(x, y, z) and image the scatterer.

In practice, many scatterers will make up a target and it may be possible to structure the data model to reflect this fact. Scatterers would belong to targets, and the scatterer point cloud could be treated as a clustering problem.

2008/6/4 Todo so far

• enforce finite beam-illumination in data model, based on {x,y,z}, {vx,vy,vz}, and scene_rad.
  • can't really do this with constraints: the fact that the scatterer is out of the scene isn't prior information, it influences the data one gets.
  • if this is enforced with

"To investigate" is code-word for interesting words and phrases that one comes across. Frequently these are left in Gmail's away message box... Full history in User:AhmedFasih.

• There're very nice studies that show that Jews are sub-humans, or can never coexist with Christians. So much for studies eh.
• Regulation only tries to fix past problems. They in turn give rise to future problems, by not trusting people's ability to avoid past problems.
• It boggles my mind. One percent of the American population giving up TV in one weekend frees up the same amount of cognitive energy as all of Wikipedia. We could theoretically have something as big as Wikipedia every weekend with 1% of the population giving up TV. That's how big our cognitive surplus is.
• "Bearers of bad news used to be beheaded. Now they are just denied tenure---or attentive audiences." (Coxe, "The New Reality of Wall Street)
• Nikon D40 promo: "If you've ever wondered why your vacation pictures don't look as good as those magnificent landscapes and flattering portraits seen in countless glossy magazines, chances are you just haven't found the right camera."
  • Ken Rockwell on the Tachihara 4x5 view camera (the kind with bellows and dark cloth, etc.): "No one realizes these cameras are made today and still used for the majority of serious landscape photography."
• hack or die :: "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." (Steve Jobs).
• "Any really good new idea will seem bad to most people; otherwise someone would already be doing it." (Paul Graham)
  • Is this really always true? Sometimes I feel that I'd like to be the first to use a new mathematical tool and win it big that way. Other times, I feel that others must be working on our ideas and we are racing them.
• Thomas Sowell says "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."
• "A moment later the couple went off---he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder..." (Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum)
• Le Corbusier is accused of possessing a "fascination with new experiences that are astonishing but otherwise uninteresting" (Daniel Solomon Global City Blues, originally logged 2004-11-21)
• Nobody wants to get their ass beat to a soundtrack. (Killin Them Softly, Dave Chappelle)
• 196 can't seem to be palindromized. Why? Can Synergetics help? http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/threeyears/threeyears.html
• I think we can do one better than this http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/documentation/vision.htm
  • 'It is no longer magic' tag line for ECE campaign
• You know what was probably the 1919 moment of my life, but in a good way, the plot twist in the comic book of my story---I wanted to build a system that would let me get on OSU's fast internet wherever I was, even if I was walking around outside, so I wanted to build a network from the ground up, from the wireless systems to the packet protocols. And my buddy Ed from work, who was a senior in EE when I was a freshman, told me "Well you know then you'll have to learn statistics, because [and he was taking ece701, queuing theory] a network is all about making sure the probability of delivering all packets are the same." And I was like, "Ooooooh that sounds coooooool" and ever since then I've been satisfied with that path.
• Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm and Numenta (hierarchical temporal memory): "That flexibility [of the human brain] speaks to simplicity, not to complexity"
• There's an article in the OSU magazine about Gene Sharp, and I like what he says: "Peace activists think you get rid of war by refusing to take part and protesting. No! You get rid of war when people have something else they can do more effectively."
• "Periods and commas precede closing quotation marks, whether double or single." (Chicago Manual of Style)
• "Near universal belief in a flawed idea is a necessary but insufficient condition for a primary trend exhaustion" (Mish, http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/12/things-that-cant-happen.html)

• "Experience has shown repeatedly that a mathematical theory with a rich internal structure generally turns out to have significant implications for the understanding of the real world, often in ways no one could have envisioned before the theory was developed." (Thurston, Weeks, 'The Mathematics of Three-Dimensional Manifolds', SciAm Jul84), from Edmondson's "A Fuller Explanation" on synergetics.
• He puts old books online... http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/codex-w3.html and http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/future.html --- "I started with some strange old books about the future."
• "A noble spectacle and one well worthy of meditation, is that of the attempts made in the different ages of the world, to ameliorate the physical and moral condition of man. Each century brings its tribute of fanaticism to this grand cause, which counts nations and kings among its martyrs. Never does humanity rest: one experiment immediately succeeds another, and we advance through revolutions toward unknown destinies." (Blanqui, 1837)
• Means, medians, and modes ought never be confused! They have very deep meanings in estimation theory.

“

”

• From an Amazon review of The Dip: 'Look, the very successful don't read these books. The barely successful can't read these books. So it is written for the somewhat successful, or the person who is looking for "something" else. Here's the shortened version: "Work and study hard. Don't give up. Persevere. However, consider alternatives. Share this book with others."' (http://www.amazon.com/Dip-Little-Book-Teaches-Stick/dp/1591841666/)
• A British attaché during the Spanish Civil War warned that "the greatest caution must be used in deducing general lessons from this war: a little adroitness and it will be possible to use it to 'prove' any preconceived theory". (http://libraryautomation.com/nymas/soviet_tank_operations_in_the_sp.htm)
• "Thanks to Information Age communications, people grow more ignorant every day. Tall weeds of group-think and common knowledge crowd out the few pullulating shoots of real wisdom and truth. Collective dumbness spreads like kudzu. Soon there will be nothing else alive; we will know nothing at all." (Bonner, FRD, pg170)
• More from our series, "If you were a bacterium," http://www.biology.arizona.edu/cell_bio/tutorials/pev/page2.html

1. You can have sex, with males possessing a sexual apparatus for transferring genetic information to receptive females. However, since you are both going 30 mph it is difficult to find each other. Furthermore, if you are male, nature gave you a severe problem. Every time you mate with a female, she turns into a male. In bacteria, "maleness" is an infective venereal disease.
2. Also, at fairly high frequencies, spontaneous mutations cause you to turn into a female.
3. Eukaryotes have enslaved some of your "brethren" to use as energy generating mitochondria and chloroplasts.

• no matter how many threads of deception are woven together / the truth shall illuminate the face of light (gits sac 2nd gig)
• If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do? (Bucky Fuller)
• "I wish I had been born into a world where I wouldn't have to starve, freeze, or be blown to bits by a cannon." (Last Exile)
• "From these causes it arose that Marcus [Aurelius], Pertinax, and Alexander, being all men of modest life, lovers of justice, enemies to cruelty, humane, and benignant, came to a sad end except Marcus" (Machiavelli, The Prince, chap 19)
• Völkerwanderung -> http://www.mnforsustain.org/student_critical_reading_writing.htm (logged 2005-08-07)
• Madagascan ariary
• "Bull markets die with a whimper, not with a bang" (old Chinese proverb)
• 'democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. but notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.' (de tocqueville, quoted on Hayek's Road to Serfdom, pg 29)
• "A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal." (Taleb, TBS, p285)
• "'You could cut prices by half, and still split extremely fat profits with the manufacturers.'" (Asimov)
• http://cdbaby.com/cd/halaas/from/echoes Halaas, the Lucidity Project. Piano and cello electronica.
  • http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Days-Skies-Streaming-Tides/dp/B000UC0LKW/ rolling electronica
• 'the cold told a tale to me / the rain suggested poems.' (kalevala)
• "I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst--those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians." (Nassim Taleb)
• "But the opposition to the gold standard in any form -- from a growing number of welfare-state advocates -- was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state)." (Alan Greenspan)
• 'autopsies should be as useful in the practice of investment as in medicine' (malkiel)
• 'the known is an amoeba! it grows and shifts!' (afrl dude on atr)
• So when you try to lose money, you are just as likely to fail as you are when you try to make money. (http://www.thekirkreport.com/2007/03/learning_how_to.html)
• The Vedas asserts, "Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names," but that is not an excuse to believe untrue things. What one thinks of God is a direct reflection of how one feels about the unknowable thoughts of one's neighbors.
• "the animated bag"
• The forecast for tonight: a few sprinkles, with a CHANCE OF DOOM!
• "We believe that there are general undiscovered theorems about the performance of belief propagation algorithms on loopy DAG's." (McEliece, et al.)
• Dreamtime
• "Are you still committed to revolution?" (Jan 1, 2007)
• chemical widow
• k-space!
• syncretism

I keep a log of progress made towards academic research. This is for extracurricular research.

Ways that you can take responsibility for yourself today

Dima observed that the core lesson we need to teach ourselves is, "Don't rely on someone else to make things better for you." This is absolutely true and all of us, even those that take the most responsibility for our own fortunes, can get better at this vital trait.

What this involves is not relying on someone else to make the right decisions that affect you. This requires a lot of self-introspection and careful considerations of one's actions and impulses. Once you decide to take responsibility for yourself, you have no choice but to critically consider all the things you believe and discard the ones that you haven't verified yourself---leaving the verification of any of your operating beliefs to someone else is the fundamental avoiding of responsibility.

Here are some other ways to take responsibility for yourself every day.

• Don't expect drivers to not run you over when you cross the street. Take responsibility for your own safety as a pedestrian by being alert and defensive.
• Don't expect your boss/advisor to recognize your talents and interests and guide you to the appropriate project. You probably have a lot more control over what you work on, at least in the long term if not the near term, than you may realize.

Please tell me about the ways you take responsibility for yourself! So I can take responsibility for myself too!

The Paul Graham script for creating meaningful novelty

1. overlooked problem
2. meaningful problem
3. simple solution
4. informal delivery
5. crude version 1
6. iterating rapidly

Neither necessary nor sufficient but a good expression of the mindset that can achieve meaningful novelty with more probability.

Bash script

ls  | while read i; do mv "$i" "`echo $i | sed 's/cbr/rar/'`";done

GOSH!

2008-2-4 Japanese cell phone books

I was reading a very social-science-backgrounded take on the "demise of literacy" in America (as if this was the first generation to wail about this, http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9060501) and learned that modern trends in Japanese literature consumption are very promising and are cellphone based! "Rin, 21, tapped out a novel on her cellphone that sold 400,000 copies in hardcover." (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin)

I wish to interpret this through the research of Duncan Watts, whose findings go against a lot of Tipping Point-esque marketing hypotheses:

Note that Watts' research definitely supports the understanding that things go viral. The most dramatic and remarkable example of this has been Ireland's wholesale abandonment of plastic and paper bags, and the entire country's switch to cloth bags for groceries! http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/world/europe/02bags.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5087&em&en=4d29d1ad4315049e&ex=1202274000 what a viral societal upgrade!

Duncan Watts' research

Here's a fabulous article written by Watts: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?pagewanted=all

• "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." There is a huge chasm between ability and payoff.
• "But just because we now know that something happened doesn’t imply that we could have known it was going to happen at the time, even in principle, because at the time, it wasn’t necessarily going to happen at all."

2007-12-11 Notes on scaling goals for systemic unknowns

These are a couple of combined references that deal with the Talebian idea of rampant randomness in long-term planning and how we ought to acknowledge it and then work with it. Ought to not just because it's the right thing to do, but it's the robust and reliable thing to do.

A couple of days ago, I tracked down this observation from Bonner's Financial Reckoning Day (2004, pg. 161-162):

This is really interesting because wisdom could be an empirical approach to dealing with randomness, or is just immune from many kinds of randomness.

And while researching quoting mechanisms in mediawiki, I found this bit quoted by one Mr Zagola in his paper "Soviet tank operations in the Spanish Civil War" (http://libraryautomation.com/nymas/soviet_tank_operations_in_the_sp.htm),

This thread of thinking is an old one: how do you scale your thoughts to account for the fact that, 1) you don't know a lot, and 2) you make up narratives in your head to explain things you don't understand so you think you do understand.

2007-12-11 Ideologies and peak oil

Strangely resonant with the luck-centric ideas in the previous note, we find the following from the pen of Mr Greer, ecotechnologist. Although he is talking about peak energy and limits to growth, the two fundamental questions of interest are, 1) how can we acknowledge that we don't know the answer to hard questions, and 2) what answers we come up with for hard questions. I call for the first to be asked and then the second, in a wide variety of contexts, but most often only the second is even considered to be a valid question. The notion of narrative derived from literary criticism doesn't particularly appeal to me but is a funny way to look at the situation.

2007-12-10 Patterns for success

Emily asks, "Why do ppl try to find a pattern for success?" in reference to an NYT article linking dyslexia to entrepreneurism (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/business/06dyslexia.html).

Because they're social scientists who have no better work but to fish through data for trends. Also, successful people as a rule throughout history have always been paranoid about the causes of their success because they feared deep down that they were just lucky. (Props to Eric Hoffer.) So they like to pay people to come up with important-sounding reasons to justify their success as something other than luck. Only today is luck being acknowledged as a systemic contributor to success in a wide variety of fields. (Props to Nassim Taleb.)

2007-12-09 Character and prudence

The hardest thing for anyone to do, I realize now, is to trust their own character. That is the only real challenge: having faith in oneself to make the right decisions, and faith in oneself to make the best of it when a wrong one is made.

Signor Machiavelli tells us, "The Romans 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." (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli)

2007-12-05 The Golden Bough I

This is from an "abridgment" of the original 12-volume set published in its entirety between 1906 and 1915: the works of Sir James are edited by Robert Frazer, http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Bough-Religion-Abridgement-Editions/dp/0192835416/

The entire book is an attempt at understanding this tradition and led its writer, James Fraser, on a very long journey through ancient religions and taboos and surprisingly how they are still among us today.

The terrain map of this gruesome history: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=p&q=41.733333,12.65&ie=UTF8&ll=41.731227,12.685261&spn=0.06226,0.119305&z=13&om=1

2007.12.03 A comparison of two creation myths

• The Irish (Christian) creation myth from the Lebor Gabála Érenn (http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/lebor1.html#1)

§3. [Thereafter] He gave the bailiffry of Heaven to Lucifer, with the nine orders of the Angels of Heaven. He gave the bailiffry of Earth to Adam [and to Eve, with her progeny]. [Thereafter] Lucifer sinned, so that he was leader of a third of the host of angels. The King confined him with a third of the host of angels in his company, in Hell. And God said unto the Foe of Heaven: [Haughty is this Lucifer], unite et confundamus consilium eius.

§4. Thereafter Lucifer had envy against Adam, for he was assured that this would be given him [Adam], the filling of Heaven in his [Lucifer's] room. Wherefore he [Iofer Niger] came in the form of the serpent, and persuaded [Adam and] Eve to sin, in the matter of eating of the apple from the forbidden tree. Wherefore Adam was expelled from Paradise into common earth.

• And the Japanese one (http://www.interq.or.jp/www-user/fuushi/b-eng/e-myth-1.htm):

Izanagi & Izanami stired the sea with the holy lance called "Ameno-nuboko". So sea water became partly hard , then Onogoro Island be born. Next, Awashima Island be born.

Goddess Izanami said, "I have a hole, and you have a pole, so let's join them." So the baby named "Hiruko"be born. But he was incompleteness, so was floated to the sea. (There is one legend, Hiruko drifted to the north, and reached Ezo, ancient Hokkaido.)

God Izanagi said, "I have a pole, and you have a hole, so let's join them again" So many babies be born, they are Japan Islands.

How strangely one culture's creation myth seem to another! And how seriously we seem to take ours!

2007.11.26 A green path to contentment

No Impact Man (http://noimpactman.typepad.com) is questing to go for a year with a carbon-neutral lifestyle. From http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/moneyhappy/45769

"Author of the blog No Impact Man, Beavan, 43, his wife, Michelle Conlin, 39, and their 2-year-old daughter, Isabella, embarked last November on a yearlong quest to live a "carbon neutral" life in New York City.

"The family follows an austere set of rules: They use no electricity (including not riding the elevator to their ninth-floor apartment) and no carbon-fueled transportation (planes, trains, cars, cabs, buses, and subways). They buy only locally grown, organic (and vegetarian) food at a greenmarket, and won't purchase anything that comes in a throwaway package. And they don't buy anything new (except socks and underwear)."

The two very interesting results:

• "'We lived from paycheck to paycheck before, and had no savings," Beavan says. "Now we live on one salary, and save the other. One of the things we noticed was how much money was flowing out on things that weren't good for us, and that we didn't care about.'"
• "...life is more satisfying. When Isabella gets out of preschool, they hop on Beavan's three-wheeled rickshaw bicycle and tool around town or head over to the river. 'We call it "seeing what happens" -- riding around and looking for adventures,' he says. 'We're so much more engaged in our lives. Things move slower. We spend more time talking to each other, reading, eating together, seeing friends, and going to the park. It's fun to go to the farmer's market and joke with people whose names I know -- a lot more fun than going to the grocery store.'"

They have developed very healthy relationships with consumption and entertainment.

2007-11-5 November feels like Spring with a Chillwind

These early November nights feel just like early-spring nights, with chilled winds manifesting themselves to me by the feel in my headhair, the trees, and the clouds scudding across the sky.

Feels appropriate, given that we're watching Last Exile. To fly in the sky!

2007.10.4 Undergraduate autobiography

To those who like schoolwork: two modes of thinking

I do not like doing classwork nowadays because I blame classwork for certain failures in my undergraduate experience. I feel that it did not prepare me at all for doing real and useful work, work that creates value or in some way benefits mankind. I had to learn a few very important things about doing this kind of work the hard way and while in graduate school. I feel it would have benefited me very much if I'd learned such things in undergrad.

I believe that schoolwork is pretty useless in teaching you to think originally. This failing is because knowing that an answer exists changes your entire thinking process, puts you in a specific frame of mind. Once in this frame, the problem can often be manipulated, massaged, and coddled into yielding the answer that you know must be there. (As Dr Koksal says, the problem is treated as a black box for which you fish around for the inputs to produce the output you expect.) And for years, we train our minds on such things, solving such problems. Understanding this is key, because when working on something totally new, when pushing the envelope, advancing the state of the art, either research-wise, algorithm-wise, implementation-wise, or product-wise, this frame of mind (again, built from years of doing classwork) fails you.

When you're doing something that's never been done before, the fear can be crippling. You face this vast array of choices, the many possible paths that you could go down in your search for a solution. You have no guarantee that the answer you seek lies in the last couple of weeks of class discussion, or somewhere in the book, or in some prerequisite course. A solution might lie through something you've never studied. Another might be in something you did study but forgot. And best of all, there might be no solution.

Facing this requires a mind that delights in the intellectual unknown, that is confident in its own ability to make the best of any situation, that is dedicated enough to pour over literature and self-educate itself, to do whatever it takes to make a positive contribution to the job. Expecting yourself to produce new high-quality results with a classwork-trained mind will result in enormous fatigue, even bitterness.

There are a few ways to obtain experience with this second mode of thinking (the one that works well for original and creative work) while in undergrad---so that you are used to it when you enter the work force (graduate school is after all a job). These include undergraduate research, student projects, possibly internships (though less likely than the previous two).

Startups

I strongly believe in the potential for students to form technology startup companies. This trend is very strong in the computer science community, with its low margins and capital costs, but I believe aspiring to knowledge-generation/wealth-creation, enough to form one's own company to do exactly what one is best at, is a vision that can take you far. The vision might involve graduate work, it might involve industry work, but as I say, keeping this possibility in mind is one that will help you make a lot of right decisions, and indeed can give the clarity of mind to see the decisions that could be made.

The most obvious of these decisions is your course selection.

(Paul Graham is a well-known name in the Lisp and programming language design communities, and a major proponent of startups. His essay "Why not to start a startup" is a great place to start thinking about this possibility: http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html)

Do you want your education to be a butterknife or a scimitar?

David Daniel, myself, and some good friends were working in the lounge late at night in undergrad when a younger ECE student found us and got us talking about course selection and professor recommendations. David came up with a great image that gives you a very easy way to think about the courses you take, and the professors you take them with, (and when, how many, in what combination, etc.).

"Do you want your ECE education to be a butterknife or a sword?" he asked as he drew a butterknife and a scimitar on the board. And the question actually is, curiously, mostly about professors, but also about courses (the order, the number, which ones specifically, etc.).

Some professors and some courses will put you through fire, hammer on you, shape you into a well-made, sturdy, and razor-sharp sword. Others will put you through something else, and you'll come out looking more like a butterknife.

It's a personal decision that you have to make, which guides you every quarter. I believe that knowing that you're making this decision can help you make the right one, and stick to it when the fire gets hot.

Your colleagues, upperclassmen, and favorite professors will give you a ton of advice on the specific answers to this question. (Your undergrad advisors, not much or at all.) Once you have it, act on it!

2007/9/19 Hold!

See User:AhmedFasih for history.

Things I'm putting on hold for MS thesis:

1. Legged robots and analog electronics
   1. http://anybots.com/abouttherobots.html and http://www.tombot.net/beam/robotcircuits.html and http://books.google.com/books?id=bkOMDgwFA28C&dq=&sa=X&oi=print&ct=book-ref-page-link
   2. ECE 722 and ECE 763
2. Automated knowledge extraction and graphical models
   1. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guestrin/Class/10708/schedule.html
3. Finance and the demographic-stock market link

2007/6/26 Correlations!

See User:AhmedFasih for history.

Ken Fisher's book is inspiring me to at least check with real data the lack of correlations in series where everyone assumes there is a correlation.

To begin with, yes, there's a total correlation between Vanguard's money market fund and US prime rate and federal funds rate. However, as Hussman notes (http://hussmanfunds.com/html/fedirrel.htm), these rates aren't tied to the Fed's much-celebrated rate changes. The idea is by loosening monetary policy, banks have more money to lend out and economic activity will increase, but in reality, banks don't need reserves (which the Fed is supposed to provide) to do any lending on savings and CD deposit, etc. The Fed just adjusts its own rate to whatever the market is already at when it meets. Therefore, while money market funds are great now, decline in lending would make them worse, which hopefully will not happen very drastically, but the Fed is reactionary to this process, it doesn't cause it.

I also wanted to look at correlations (or lack thereof) between gas/diesel prices, crude oil prices (US spot prices), Vanguard Energy Fund VGENX, Vanguard's total US stock market index VTSMX, and Vanguard's total foreign market index VGTSX: since 1997, the correlations are

• Energy-Foreign: .88
• Energy-US: .72
• US-Foreign: .87
• Energy-crude oil: .96
• Foreign-crude oil: .83
• US-crude oil: .70

I guess there are no lack of correlations (which is what we want), but it is somewhat comforting to see this. If energy prices (crude oil) is going up, the stock is strongly correlated with that. And that's somewhat correlated (70%) with the broad US stock market.

Documentation via photography.

2008-04.30 The clouds agree to play igo

2008.04.08 Springsummer

2008.01.20 SLR

2007.11.16 an afternoon at the arch library

2007.10.29 winter gives my car spikes and fur

2007.02.03 a memory of a bygone apartment

Personal homepage.

"Reading accounts is dull; economic detective work is the easy way to get to the same conclusion." Tim Harford in Undercover Economist.

Books: read, started, getting

This is more of a "current todo" section, as well as books that I own, since many of these are also todo. There are numerous papers as well, for my research. Separating them by read and unread or partially read works is a foible.

Graphical models, Markov random fields, learning, inference

1. Heckerman, D., A tutorial on learning with Bayesian networks. In Learning in Graphical Models, M. Jordan, ed.. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999. link
2. Butine, Wray, A Guide to the Literature on Learning Probabilistic Networks From Data. IEEE transactions On Knowledge and Data Engineering 1996. link
3. Paul J. Krause, Learning Probabilistic Networks, The Knowledge Engineering Review, Volume 13, Issue 4 (February 1999). link
4. POMDPs for Dummies link
5. Edwards, Introduction to graphical models. 1995.
6. Xiang, Probabilistic reasoning in multiagent systems. 2002.

Some resources from UMD's Graphical Models Reading Group, 2003

• Graphical Models for Machine Learning and Digital Communication, by Brendan J. Frey. 1998.
• McEliece, et al., "Turbo decoding as an instance of Pearl's 'belief propagation' algorithm," IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 16, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 1998, pp. 140-152.
• Ihler, Fisher, Willsky, "Nonparametric hypothesis tests for statistical dependency," IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 52, NO. 8, AUGUST 2004, pp. 2234-2249.
• Chris Hans (OSU Stats prof), et al., "Stochastic Computation For Gaussian Graphical Models," paper and software: http://xpress.isds.duke.edu:8080/softwarelinks/ggm.html

Applied statistics, machine learning, information theory

• Probabilistic Robotics, by Sebastian Thrun, Wolfram Burgard, and Dieter Fox. 2005.
• An introduction to information theory : symbols, signals, and noise / John R Pierce. 2nd ed., 1980.
• Robert, Casella, Monte Carlo statistical methods. 1999.
• Variational Bayesian filtering
• Relevance vector machines

Stanford has a set of courses centered around data mining: http://scpd.stanford.edu/scpd/programs/certs/statistics.htm.

• Huge tome of electrical engineering: from circuits to communications to information theory: http://cnx.org/content/col10040/latest/
• Introduction to probability (pdf) http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articles/probability_book/book.html
• All of statistics : a concise course in statistical inference / Larry Wasserman
• All of nonparametric statistics / Larry Wasserman
• Three books on probability and random variables are
  • Introduction to Probability, by Dimitri P. Bertsekas and John N. Tsitsiklis
  • Intuitive Probability and Random Processes using MATLAB, by Steven Kay
  • The Art of Probability, by R. W. Hamming

Art

• Chinese Landscapes Made Easy, Rebecca Yue (unbelev sky)
• Paint & Draw (drawing, watercolor, oil and acrylic, pastel), by Hazel Harrison (really cool Moroccan-style road and houses)

Biology

• Brendan J. Frey, Beyond Genomics: Detecting Codes and Signals in the Cellular Transcriptome: http://media.itsoc.org/isit2006/frey/
• Cells, Aging, and Human Disease (Hardcover), by Michael B. Fossel (2004)
• Nature's Robots: A History of Proteins, by C. Tanford, J. Reynolds (2003)
• Charles Darwin. The Origin of Species. (Mentor imprint)
• Lewis Thomas (two in one box-set), "Lives of a Cell" and "The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher"
• Course notes for OSU Mansfield's Biochem 511: http://www.mansfield.ohio-state.edu/~sabedon/biochem511.htm

Leisure science and engineering

• The clock of the long now : time and responsibility / Stewart Brand
• The wind and beyond : Theodore von Kármán, pioneer in aviation and pathfinder in space, by Theodore von Kármán with Lee Edson
• Richard Buckminster Fuller
  • Ideas and integrities. 1963.
  • Cosmography.
  • Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
  • Tetrascroll : Goldilocks and the three bears, a cosmic fairy tale by R. Buckminster Fuller
• Introducing Mathematics, by Ziauddin Sardar, et al. 1999.
• 650 Home Plans: From Cottages to Mansions, by Inc. Home Planners.
• Good Housekeeping, 100 Best One-Dish Meals.
• JunkBots, Bugbots, and Bots on Wheels: Building Simple Robots With BEAM Technology, by David Hrynkiw and Mark Tilden
• Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by Mitchell M. Waldrop
• Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology
  • Wikipedia this stuff, this is one sweet book.
• The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity, by Wyn Wachhorst
  • This is a beautiful book. I should buy a copy for Dr Hemami.
• Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions, by Frederick Mosteller.
• How to Lie With Statistics, by Darrell Huff (40th printing)
• Robert Zubrin, The Case for Mars.
  • I love this guy!
• Paul Graham, ANSI Common Lisp.
  • Ditto!!! His essays are awesome.
• Kodak Guide to Shooting Great Travel Pictures.
• LV Tarasov, Basic Concepts of Quantum Mechanics. (Mir Publishers, Moscow, 1980.)
• Microcosmos : four billion years of evolution from our microbial ancestors / Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
  • Great.
• Maxwell Rosenlicht, Introduction to analysis. 1968.
• R. Malone, J.C. Suares, Rocketship. 1977.
• The meme machine / Susan Blackmore
  • Chapter 10: 'An orgasm saved my life'
• George Dyson, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. 2002.
• Athermal fusion?! http://fusor.net/newbie/files/Ligon-QED-IE.pdf
• The serendipity of the American space program: "Sputnik at 50: An improvised triumph" http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070930/ap_on_sc/sputnik_s_secrets (local)
• Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, by Mongan, et al. Recommended by Ross.

Universal/historiography

• Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, by Jürgen Habermas
• The hero with a thousand faces, by Joseph Campbell
• The making of the modern mind : a survey of the intellectual background of the present age / John Herman Randall, Jr., 1976 (50 year edition)
• The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer
  • owned
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes
  • owned
• A Study of History / Arnold J Toynbee (vols 1, 6, 1947-1957)
• Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford history of the American people. 1965.
• Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. 1987.
• Machiavelli's The Prince
  • trans. Robert Adams (Norton Critical imprint)
  • trans. Marriott (Britannica Great Books, vol 23 w/ Hobbes)
• Machiavelli's Discourses
  • trans. Crick
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (trans. Reeve/Bowen/Bradley)
• Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (x2)
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. (Britannica Great Books, vol 23 w/ Machiavelli)
• Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier. (Trans. Opdyke)
• Europe: A History, by Norman Davies.
• James Burke, Connections. (Yes, the book to accompany the awesome first BBC series.)
• Introducing Trotsky and Marxism, by Tariq Ali and Phil Evans. 2000.
• HDF Kitto, The Greeks.
  • Wonderful little book.
• The Realities Behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy 1865-1980, by Paul M. Kennedy
• Everyday Life in Babylonia and Assyria / H. W. F Saggs. 1965.
• A history of Greece to 322 BC / NGL Hammond. Third edition.
• Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance, Four Lawgivers: Savonarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Aretino.
• Africa in History, by Basil Davidson (2001)
• Ancient American Civilizations (History of Civilization), by Friedrich Katz (1989)
• Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, by Oswald Spengler
  • From a review by Pillsky on Amazon: "The Faustian Culture, of which America is a younger shoot, based in Western Europe, began to form around 1000 AD and it is marked by spiritual uncertainty, but an innate ability in Spengler's theme of "Technics." Technics involves the use of the reasoning faculties of the Mind in accordance with the physical use and manipulations of objects by the Hand to make whatever that is outside of man's being in Nature subject to man's will. This provides obvious advantages and also extremely serious disadvantages as well. The more a group of human beings became more machine, material and industry orientated, the more they tried to control Nature--the more Nature will eventually bring about the destruction of the human Culture that builds itself up over time and becomes overgrown, the same as individual plants, animals and plants die--as living organisms."

The greatest literature ever

• Homer's Iliad
  • trans. Stanley Lombardo
  • trans. Robert Fitzgerald
  • trans. Smith/Miller (line for line translation in dactylic hexameters)
  • Christopher Logue's translation, whenever complete
• Homer's Odyssey
  • trans. Fitzgerald
  • trans. Fagles
• Dante's Inferno (trans. Ciardi)
• Herodotus, The Histories, (1- trans. de Selincourt, 2- trans. David Grene)
• Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, (ed. Cawley, Everyman's Library)
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (trans. Staniforth)
• Plato
  • Republic (trans. Jowett)
  • Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo (trans. Grube)
  • Five Dialogues: Ion, Symposium, Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus. (trans.: various, Everyman's Library, 1952)
• Plutarch's Lives (trans. Dryden/Clough, one volume Modern Library)
• Ovid's Metamorphoses (Garth)
• Virgil's Aeneid (trans. Fitzgerald)
• Xenophon, Anabasis (trans. Dakyns. Wierd IndyPublish.com imprint?)
• Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
  • trans. JCH Wu, B&N imprint (beautiful, with original Chinese)
  • trans. Lau, Penguin Classics
• The Complete Plays of Aristophanes, Bantam Classics, various translators.
• Tacitus. The Histories. (trans. Wellesley, Penguin Classics imprint)
• Cicero, Selected Orations. The original Latin text with an interlinear English Translation by Frederick Holland Drewey and Others. The Translation Publishing Co., 1961.
• Aristophanes, Three Comedies: The Birds, The Clouds (trans. Arrowsmith), The Wasps (trans. Parker). Ann Arbor Paperbacks.
• The Apology, Phaedo, and Crito of Plato (trans. Jowett), The Golden Sayings of Epictetus (trans. Crossley), The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (trans. Long). The Harvard Classics imprint.
• Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (Modern Library imprint, trans. Frances Winwar)

Epistemology, psychology, and sociology

• If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients, by Sheldon Kopp
• The logic of scientific discovery / Karl Popper
• Memories, dreams, reflections. (Carl Jung's autobiography)
• Montaigne, Essays (circa 1580)
  • trans. Screech
  • trans. Cotton/Hazlitt
• Eric Hoffer
  • The Ordeal of Change (1963)
  • Reflections on the Human Condition
  • The True Believer
  • The Passionate State of Mind
• Carl Sagan. The Demon-Haunted World.
• Essentials of Indian Philosophy, by M. Hiriyanna.
• Don Palmer, Looking at Philosophy, Second Ed.
• George Soros, the Age of Falliability: Consequences of the War on Terror. 2006.
  • He has a chapter about Popper's concept of an open society.
• Philosophy in the flesh : the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought / George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. 1999.
• Crimes Against Logic, Jamie Whyte (2004)
• Toxic sludge is good for you : lies, damn lies, and the public relations industry / by John C. Stauber and Sheldon Rampton (1995)
• Propaganda and the public mind : conversations with Noam Chomsky / David Barsamian and Noam Chomsky (2001)
• Propaganda, Edward Bernays (1928)
• Essential Manners for Men: What to Do, When to Do It, and Why, by Peter Post. (2003)

Economics and finance and urban planning

• The origins of value : the financial innovations that created modern capital markets / edited by William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst. 2005.
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything / Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. 2005.
• The undercover economist : exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor, and why you can never buy a decent used car / Tim Harford. 2005.
• The death of industrial civilization : the limits to economic growth and the repoliticization of advanced industrial society / Joel Jay Kassiola. 1990.
  • Modern rise of economics and the demise of politics
• Industrial development in Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea / Kwong Kai-Sun, et al. 2001.
• Twilight in the desert : the coming Saudi oil shock and the world economy / Matthew R. Simmons. 2005.
• Jane Jacobs
  • Cities and the Wealth of Nations. 1984.
  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 1961.
  • The Economy of Cities. 1969.
• Hedgehogging, by Barton Biggs. 2005.
• My life as a quant : reflections on physics and finance / Emanuel Derman. 2004.
• J DeRooy, Economic Literacy, What Everyone Needs to Know about Money and Markets. 1995.
  • Bland but effective---I learnt about inflation, interest, and liquidity. And the triad of individuals, banks, and the Fed. How interest rates, quantity of money, debt, growth, inflation, exchange rates are related to each other.
• PJ O'Rourke, Eat the Rich, A Treatise on Economics. 1999.
  • Entertaining more than educational; a tour of some of the world's economies (Wall Street, Albania, Sweden, etc.). But I did learn about equity, debt, and derivatives.
• John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics in Perspective, A Critical History. 1987.
  • Keynesian
• Man, Economy, and State, by Murray Newton Rothbard. 1962.
• Security Analysis, by Benjamin Graham, David Dodd. 1941.
• Benjamin Graham, The intelligent investor; a book of practical counsel.
• Economics for real people : an introduction to the Austrian school / Gene Callahan. 2002.
• Free to Choose, by Milton and Rose Friedman. 1980.
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck. 2001.
• The alchemy of finance : reading the mind of the market / George Soros. 1987.
• A history of interest rates / Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla. (Orig 1963, revised last 2005.)
• Dying of money: lessons of the great German and American inflations / Jens O. Parsson. 1974.
• Debt and Delusion, by Peter Warburton. 2000.
• A Beginner's Guide to the World Economy : Eighty-One Basic Economic Concepts That Will Change the Way You See the World / Randy Charles Epping. 3rd ed., 2001.
• The Only Three Questions That Matter: Investing by knowing what others don't / Ken Fisher. 2006.
• The single best investment : achieve lasting wealth with low risk, steady growth stocks / Miller, Lowell. 1999.
  • From FSO. With a thesis that steadily rising dividends are a litmus test of raw earning power, and makes the case that it is this rise in dividends over time that double-compounds the equity's worth. I want to learn from this book more about both the accounting ratios used to determine other aspects of profitability as well as to understand when to sell such stock. I'm thinking of GE as good, and Korea Electric Power ADR (KEP) as not so good (rising dividends since '02, nothing in '06 and after).
• Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse / Peter Schiff. 2007.
  • Also from FSO. If the dollar collapses, foreigners will flock in and purchase all the beachfront property. Have your money in foreign denominations so you'll be a buyer and not a seller!
• Morningstar.com recommends some good classical investing texts:
  • A random walk down Wall Street : the time-tested strategy for successful investing / Burton G. Malkiel. Several decades updating.
  • The only investment guide you'll ever need / Andrew Tobias
  • The Intelligent Investor / Benjamin Graham
• Financial reckoning day : surviving the soft depression of the 21st century / William Bonner with Addison Wiggin
  • Read this all the way through. Very interesting section on demographics of stock markets.
• Suggested by Jim Puplava on the Great Depression:
  • America's great depression, by Murray N. Rothbard (great summary of Austrian economics, online at http://www.mises.org/rothbard/agd/contents.asp)
  • The forgotten man : a new history of the Great Depression / Amity Shlaes
• The case against the Fed / Murray N. Rothbard
• The road to serfdom / F.A. Hayek
  • Classic libertarian philosophy written during the socialist-trending nations in the post-WWII West.
• Whatever happened to penny candy? Fast, Clear, and Fun Explanation of the Economics You Need For Success in Your Career, Business, and Investments (An Uncle Eric Book), by Richard J. Maybury
• A demon of our own design : markets, hedge funds, and the perils of financial innovation / Richard Bookstaber
  • Great FSO interview, this guy "didn't cause the 1987 crash or LTCM, but let's just say he was at the controls."
• Gold: The Once and Future Money, by Nathan Lewis
  • FSO interview. Hopefully will answer the questions about cornering of the market should we return to a gold standard. I want platinum-backed currency. It's stable!
• Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: Unleashing the Power of Financial Markets to Create Wealth and Spread Opportunity, by Raghuram G. Rajan, Luigi Zingales
  • http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3652
  • "The recent increase in militarism across the globe may hopefully be only a minor footnote in history. If it is not, however, we should be on guard — for such times bring faith, perhaps excessive faith, in the powers of government."

Some books on accounting and Austrian economics cited in FSO editorials such as this. The Cleveland Fed also publishes some potentially very valuable material.

Languages

• The Everything Learning Latin Book, by Richard E. Prior
• Dumas, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, adaptation in simple French by R. de Roussy de Sales.
  • Sweet!!!
• George Sand, Lettres d'un Voyageur
• Albert Camus, L'étranger
• Jean Cocteau, Les enfants terribles
• Jean Anouilh, Le Voyageur sans Bagage suivi de Le Bal des Voleurs.
• Saint-Exupéry, Pilote de guerre.
• Pliny, Fifty Letters.
• A Pocket Chinese-Russian-English Dictionary, arranged by the Rosenberg Graphical System / John S. Barlow. University of Hawai'i Press. 2000.
• English Grammar for Students of {Latin/French/German}.
• Teach Yourself Latin / Gavin Betts. (This is the real deal, Roman Latin, not Church Latin.)
• Cours Pratique de Francais pour Commencants / E.B. de Sauze. 1927.
• Victor E Francois. First Latin with Collateral Reading, Book One. Allyn and Bacon's Junior Latin Series. 1926.
• Hans H Orberg. Lingua Latina I: Familia Romana
  • Learner entirely in the Latin.
• Practical Chinese Reader I, Commercial Press, Beijing, PRC.
• E.J. Neather, Mastering French. Hippocrene Master Series.
• A.H. Groton and J.M. May, Thirty-eight Latin Stories, Designed to Accompany Wheelock's Latin.

Fiction

• Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett
• Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
• Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Jorge Luis Borges.
• Don Quixote, by Cervantes
• Herman Hesse
  • Steppenwolf
  • Siddhartha
• Conned again, Watson! : cautionary tales of logic, math, and probability / Colin Bruce. 2001.
• Walden / Henry D. Thoreau.
• Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn, 2000.
  • "There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even recognize my own ___."
    • (Answer: "toothbrush in the mirror." Fabulous.)
• Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (props to Wikipedia's Borges entry)
  • Borges: "Those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books."
• Not a book but... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnyQrkXJc5k Team 459 FIRST 2002 3d Animation!
• David Brin's Uplift universe, beautifully long blurb and amazing timeline! http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780553377965&view=excerpt

No idea...

• Dhalgren / Samuel R. Delany
• Programming the Human Biocomputer, by John Cunningham Lilly
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan. By Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson

Things to do before 30

Section started June 23, 2006.

• backpack in europe and stay in prague and vienna. (contact zak and dennis and victoria first)
• paraglide. if possible, by the ocean, and through mountain ranges (alps?)
  • Early-September 2006. Santa Barbara, http://www.flyaboveall.com
• ski.
  • March 4, 2007, http://www.skimadriver.com/
• snowboard. (crazy skateboard with caster, snowboard for roads)
• learn jazz piano/improv well.
• run 10 miles.
• live in san francisco, seattle, portland, cambridge, or someplace old american urbanist for at least 6 months.
• visit hong kong or shanghai or tokyo etc for a few days. (shinjuku, tribeca)
• make money buying and selling an option.
• regain fluency in french, and some erudition in golden age latin. (maybe periclean or homeric greek :/ might have to give this 20 years)
• learn harmonica

Things to get

Originally, a Christmas wishlist on facebook. Imported here for posterity.

1. Marshall McLuhan ahtonology.
2. A Norbert Weiner anthology. At least his Norbert Weiner's "Cybernetics" (1948).
3. More undershirts and Fruit of the Loom knit underpants (with solid colors and gray waistband) and black and white socks. (Actually, hold the phone on this one, a huge underwear injection happened for the Florida trip.)
4. Cloud's giantassed sword from Final Fantasy 7. Sharp so nobody will mess with me in downtown Aachen.
5. Swimming speedo.
6. An Eric Hoffer compilation.
7. cloak
8. pattern analysis knowledge

House log

Ahmed has filled out paperwork to move all IRA savings to Vanguard. Today is the day I start self-managing my portfolio! AhmedFasih 19:24, 4 June 2007 (EDT)

AhmedFasih 23:52, 20 May 2007 (EDT)

Ahmed tries to do a handstand off the couch but leaves a butt-shaped imprint on the wall. :( AhmedFasih 13:20, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

Rick walks into Apt 710, sees Ahmed splayed shirtless on the coffee table getting a massage. Tim hears the commotion and comes out of his room, looks around, and informs Rick, "I'm not wearing any pants." I'd like to know what was going through Rick's head at that point.

This past week, Ahmed has leveled up smoothie skill, egg salad sandwich skill, eating after working out skill, and most recently started building OMO skill. AhmedFasih 22:11, 27 February 2007 (EST)

Quotes

• stay safe lil duckie

Hatem: I'm done with exams now, so I've got plenty of time :P
me: Congrats!!!
 Lol, I remember the post-exam period as being one of immense laziness
 And screwing around
 and gaming
Hatem: haha
 sounds like the pre-exam period :P

root2you: my engagement present; a recipe:
pomegranate liquor - 2 oz
triple sec - 1.5 oz
1tsp fresh squeezed lime juice
top off rocks glass with cranberry juice
most excellent drink

• Sevarius to Xanatos: "Don't you have some junk bonds to sell?" (Gargoyles)

• I'm a baby hacker, I can spell "CHEEEEEEEESE"!

Sandbox

This is from the Main_Page!

• http://www.mexicanpictures.com/headingeast/2007/08/night-trains-morning-trains.html
• http://www.archive.org/details/Michael_Badnari
• http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2007/06/05/researchers_track_how_spores_break_out_of_dormant_state.html
• http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2007/06/05/modeling_the_restless_brain.html
• http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2007/06/03/math_that_powers_spam_filters_used_to_understand_how_brain_learns_to_move_our_muscles.html

607S (06) BUSINESS ASSOCIATIONS - SHIPMAN

3 HOURS FIRST SEMESTER, CONTINUED FOR 3 HOURS SECOND SEMESTER

"This course--which is beneficial for any lawyer--begins by covering agency and partnerships in some depth, for agency and partnership principles pervade the law and our society. Most of the work of the world is done by agents (e.g., employees) working for principals (e.g., employers). Agents have the capacity to change their principal’s legal relations with third parties (e.g., respondent superior liability), an awesome power. Partnerships are simply mutual agencies. One who sues will usually carefully consider whether to sue the agent, the principal, or both; the answer usually depends on agency law. And corporations can, of course, act only through human agents--the corporation’s officers and employees. As a final example of the sweep of agency law, note that franchising law is, in considerable part, built upon agency law. Moreover, agency law superbly illustrates the “connectedness” of life and the law, as one analyzes the triangle of agent/principal/third party and adds to that other parties such as insurers. Limited liability companies and Registered Partnerships are covered in an introductory way, for these new forms of business associations will have great importance in the future. About two-thirds of the course is devoted to the business corporation--formation, operation, and fiduciary duties. The course is designed to give a student sound introduction to most office practice and planning issues, as well as most litigation considerations. A substantial part of the course is devoted to the extensive federal law in the area, but most of the course covers state law, which predominates in the business associations area. Most coverage of state law is devoted to Ohio law, though considerable Delaware law is also surveyed. Among the statutes that are a part of the course materials are prints of Chapters 1701 and 1707 of the Ohio Revised Code. The course assumes NO prior knowledge of economics, business, finance, or accounting. We build from the ground up; and we study finance, economics, etc., only as they interest a judge, legislator, regulator, administrator, or practicing lawyer.

"The December exam (25% of your grade) will cover work in the first semester. The final exam (75% of your grade) will cover the whole course. There are no papers or memoranda. We will use a standard casebook and book of statutes and offset materials. The course is quite operational, planning-oriented, tactical, pragmatic, and transactional, although we also cover traditional legal doctrine, analytical, and policy matters. This reflects the real world.

"This course involves a great deal of reading, and students will have to integrate various doctrines and practical considerations--a reflection of what a lawyer actually does. Moreover, statutes and regulations--as well as caselaw--are common in this course, as is true in life. On the other hand, the course is not nuclear physics. The course requires only considerable constancy of effort in preparation--and in integration and review." http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/registrar/2003-04/0304-coursedescrip.html

Foucault's Pendulum inspired studies

8

http://spitecast.com/wiki/index.php/FC_8 contradicts http://www.huge-entity.com/2006/03/on-nature-of-shattering-god-in-stained.html and I am inclined to believe the former. See Image:Review_of_'Iranian_Manichaean_Turfan_Texts_in_Publications_since_1934,'_ed._Weber.pdf, a review of a compilation of the Turfan texts. I am attempting to track down translations of all recovered fragments.

Enlil

   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...

Getting this from the library!

I am currently

• Am rejoicing at completing my instapaper implementation! http://junod.ath.cx/mediawiki/adump/displaydb.php may take over my logging here.
• Wanting to build robots, furniture, and programs to impress Anybots -> http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/build/build/index.htm
• To do with HDR:
  • Set up CHDK on the A620 and to get bracketing: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ#Q._What_can_I_use_exposure.2Ffocus_bracketing_for.3F
  • Also, enable RAW so we get better HDR results, avoiding the contrast compression of JPG. (http://www.easyhdr.com/about.php see the example photo)
  • read the EasyHDR tutorial, seems to have good info http://www.easyhdr.com/tutorial.php?sub=2#s
• somehow got to reading about Blender and Modo (comparisons at http://www.tdt3d.be/articles_viewer.php?art_id=99), getting "Essential Blender," and high dynamic range images: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging
  • HDRI will allow me to capture great photographs from multiple exposures!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Grand_Canyon_HDR_imaging.jpg
  • And I have done so now using http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/!!!
  • Dramatic skies, here I come! I can now capture them, as this fellow did! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sunset_hdr_combined.jpg
• very interested in viral societal fads! Ireland has as a nation abandoned paper and plastic bags and switched to cloth bags! Duncan Watts' research looks good too! http://smallworld.columbia.edu/description.html but I'm reading so much now, books take longer and longer to rotate, and for every one that moves off, three get on my reading queue!
• excited about learning about the great bear market of the 1970s and the following bull market of the 80s and the 90s in " Bull: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-1999," by Maggie Mahar
• also, I'm going back and reading "Confessions of a Medical Heretic" by Robert Mendelsohn, an understanding of which is very dear to me.
• scared about having to pay for Matlab:
  • http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
  • http://maxima.sourceforge.net/screenshots.shtml
  • http://arclanguage.org/
• HAVE FOUND THE OLD REFERENCE TO THE Club of Rome REPORT!!! It was in Bucky's "Critical Path", page 248. Thank you Amazon! Paraphrasing: "the authors at the Club of Rome are not aware of the importance of scrap metal recycling."
• Researching TRIZ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ and will get the book.
• reminded that David Brin created some beautiful and stunning dreams with the Uplift saga: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780553377965&view=excerpt We owe him for the phrase "digital cognizance". From "Contacting Aliens: an illustrated guide to David Brin's Uplift universe".
  • I am amazed at how many interesting and silly stories, novels, games, and TV shows involve galaxy-spanning hyperadvanced civilizations... http://forums.spacebattles.com/archive/index.php/t-104789.html and by the people who catalog them!
  • http://goand.net/ro/w/Quick_Overview:_the_world_in_2052 is one example of I'm sure a billion futuristic visions.
• Very pleased to be revisiting synergetics through Amy Edmondson's "A Fuller Explanation" (fully online)
• Intrigued by Garet Garrett (who also wrote about Henry Ford in "The Wild Wheel") and his views on FDR &co's revolt against the American enterprise and replacing it with statism: http://www.mises.org/story/2726 (published in "Ex-America"). Thankfully, a government's ability to borrow endlessly must end, but what interests me is that to him, the undermining of the system came from academics, not wealthy businessmen.
• very excited about this 1880 translation of M. Blanqui's "History of Political Economy in Europe"
  • "A noble spectacle and one well worthy of meditation, is that of the attempts made in the different ages of the world, to ameliorate the physical and moral condition of man. Each century brings its tribute of fanaticism to this grand cause, which counts nations and kings among its martyrs. Never does humanity rest: one experiment immediately succeeds another, and we advance through revolutions toward unknown destinies."
• have purchased a beautiful copy of Toynbee's "A study of history", the abridged and illustrated coffee-table-sized volume published in 1972 for 50c!
• going to make myself read up on state-of-the-art computer vision in HCI with this amazing course at Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs377s/syllabus.htm#calendar
• interacting with Ian talking about the practicalities and the metaphysics of cooperative enterprise and "economic democracy"
  • Bologna http://www.uwcc.wisc.edu/info/bologna.html
  • Vanek interview http://www.ru.org/51cooper.html
  • An example from Ohio http://dept.kent.edu/oeoc/OEOClibrary/1042_rollover_co-ops_MN_case_study.htm
• Delighted that Dr Endy of BioBricks has pointed me to Eric Kandel's work on the molecular basis of memory http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/kandel.html
• Relishing "Capitalism" by George Reisman (http://www.capitalism.net/), found through a great technical article he wrote about credit expansion: http://www.mises.org/story/2847
• Reading a slew of amazingly interesting books:
  • "The Golden Bough," by James Frazer, new abridgment by Robert Fraser
  • "The art of doing science and engineering: learning to learn" by Richard Hamming
  • "Good to great: why some companies make the leap... and others don't" by Jim Collins (suggested by AnupG)
  • "Rule #1: the simple strategy for successful investing in only 15 minutes a week!" by Phil Town (an easy introduction to the Graham-Dodd-Buffet school)
  • "The myth of the rational voter: why democracies choose bad policies" by Bryan Caplan (by way of Freakonomics blog)
  • "Blue Ocean Strategy: how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant" by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (found in Borders)
  • "Popper: philosophy, politics and scientific method" by Geoffrey Stokes (to better understand falsificationism)
  • "The great upheaval: America and the birth of the modern world, 1788-1800" by Jay Winik (also from Borders)
  • "A guinea pig's history of biology" by Jim Endersby (ditto)
  • "Reminiscences of a stock operator" by Edwin Lefèvre (from FSN)
  • "Common stocks and uncommon profits" by Philip A. Fisher (ditto)
  • "The big three in economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes" by Mark Skousen
  • Jacob Liberman's "Take off your glasses and see" (what is "open focus"?)
    • Media:Liberman_PRC_eye_exercises.pdf
• Enjoying a quaff of Reed's Extra Ginger Brew! http://www.reedsgingerbrew.com 26g of ginger in each bottle---delicious!
• Intrigued by the possibilities of using Google's MapReduce (and possibly BigTable) architectures in the implementation of Widrow's cognitive memory:
  • http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html and its OSS implementation Hadoop http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/
  • http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html
  • Background lay article on Google's cluster, which they call "the cloud": http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm
• I have reformatted my computer and reinstalled WinXP and discovered the following very nice things:
  • ECE gives us Virtual PC 2004 for free, so I am going to run all my shady things inside it. No more risk of hand-rolled trojans bound to funny applications.
  • WinDjView, lightweight and nice-to-use Djvu book reading http://windjview.sourceforge.net/
  • Foxit PDF reader, infinitely nicer to use than the horrible Acrobat garbage Adobe is so proud of. Lightweight and nice to use. GPL'd. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
  • PDFCreator acts like a printer to create pdfs. Very easy to use, GPL'd. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
• Reading this book from 1915 called "How Diplomats Make War" which starts out with a quotation from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. http://books.google.com/books?id=aME1AAAAMAAJ
• Reading about the FDA's history, and how every expanse of its powers was precipitated by a crisis. Myopia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDA#Early_history
• Intrigued by the work of Peter Drucker, who studied management: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker#Basic_ideas and plan to read his work (from the 30s onward!) to aid in Stephen and Paul and my own researches into a revolutionary theory of human resources.
• reminded---by discussion of Bill Bonner's idea from Financial Reckoning Day that rules like "love thy neighbor" and "buy low, sell high" take many hundreds of years to integrate into a culture---to read Herman Randall's The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age. When will individual liberty become a common cultural rule, or the understanding that there's no free lunches?
• excited that I understand a lot better how ATP is used to power some cellular functions! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?highlight=atp&rid=mcb.section.335#360 The key is to see that "work" can mean changing the world's configuration physically but also chemically: some reactions won't happen until their participants react with fuel to overcome the original reaction's activation energy. When that happens, the work is done: the muscle contracts, the ions are transported, etc.
  • de Gray suggests Alberts' graduate-level book on biology called Molecular Biology of the Cell
• going to watch this FF12 compilation of cut scenes and major action shots! http://videogamesheaven.net/movie-final-fantasy-xii.htm
• thinking about getting some shoji paper doors: http://www.shoji-living.com/us.html
• three books I'm pumped about reading
  • Microbiology Demystified by Tom Betsy and James Keogh :P
  • Advanced Digital Signal Processing And Noise Reduction by Saeed Vaseghi
    • on HMMs and adaptive algorithms and a LOT of other neat stuff
  • Neural and Adaptive Systems: Fundamentals Through Simulations by José Principe, Neil Euliano, and W. Curt Lefebvre
    • Text for ECE 779 that talks deeply about regression, classification, and LMS adaptive algorithms
• excited about this bit from Understanding Biotechnology by Aluizio Borem, Fabricio R. Santos, David E. Bowen
  • "The construction of artificial genes and their transfer into other organisms (a process called transgenics or recombinant DNA) can actually be accomplished at a rather simple laboratory, in comparison with the sophisticated laboratories used for nuclear engineering."
• excited about a new (1998) abridgment of Golden Bough that includes the racy stuff they didn't want to include in the original abridgment one hundred years ago, by Robert Fraser.
• oohing and aahing over Celtic words: a list of Irish names (http://web.ncf.ca/bj333/HomePage.boys.html) led to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_mythology and its four cycles of Irish mythology: the Mythological Cycle, The Ulster Cycle, the Fenian Cycle and the Historical Cycle.
  • 'Amargein - (aw-VEER-een) Old Irish=ama "singing, song" + gein "birth." Most celebrated bearer of the name was the druid poet and judge of the Sons of Mil, legendary ancestor of the Irish. He pronounced the first judgment given on Irish soil, and his magic ensured that the Sons of Mil would triumph over the Tuatha De Danann. A traditional name in the O'Clery family.'
• Excited about acquiring the following:
  • McCrone's "Going inside: a tour round a single moment of consciousness"
  • Sokal and Bricmont's "Fashionable nonsense"
  • Kandel's "In search of memory"
• Got read "Edison and the Electric Chair : A Story of Light and Death" by Mark Essig, very interesting reading about the business history of Edison and Westinghouse
• Interesting in acquiring and reading about:
  • "The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800" by Jay Winik
  • "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant" by Kim and Mauborgne
  • "A Guinea Pig's History of Biology" by Jim Endersby
  • "To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" by Henry Petroski
• Reading some chapters of Donald Norman's Design of future things online: http://www.jnd.org
• Reviewing ideas of Bucky Fuller again (a few years later) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
  • "If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?"
• Studying monopolies in Austrian thought in response to http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/tyranny-of-the-media-will-new-fcc-regs-enforce-majority-rule/
• Really into Faber's May 2005 Gloom, Boom, Doom report: http://www.gloomboomdoom.com/gbdreport/download/GBD0603.pdf It is packed with discussion of K-waves and their social, military, economic, and investment implications through history and the future.
• Reminded to read Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman by Ross Lovegrove and Ken Yeang, profiled in CNN's Just Imagine.
• Getting interested in designing a network for cities to connect students and teachers, similar to Shibuya University's new approach to un-formalized education: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/11/01/sakyo.qa/
• Wishing there was a place like the Lexington Public Library (Kentucky) that I could read for hours at a time.
• Watching Planet Earth and getting supercharged about genomic engineering.
• Enjoying Marc Faber's Tomorrow's Gold a LOT. Instead of picking stocks in a losing market, buy a winning market.
• 
  Excited about building a flying boat like this beautiful Savoia Marchetti S-55 Santa Maria http://www.ne.jp/asahi/airplane/museum/cl-Epln/TW004e.html !
• 
  Learning Chinese on MIT OpenCourseWare!!! (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-101Spring-2006/CourseHome/index.htm)
• Falling back in love with the imagery and Zen of haiku (http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Haiku-Poets-Hass/dp/0880013516/ is Robert Hass' Essential Haiku featuring Basho, Buson, and Issa)
• Very artistically charged after my purchase of a Dali daily calendar with very beautiful reproductions of his coolest works, e.g., Still Life Fast Moving and Second before waking.
• studying startups and how to create a culture of startups http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/how_to_kick_sil.html
• trying to find a copy of "Reforming the health sector in developing countries: the central role of policy analysis," Health Policy and Planning; 9(4): 353-370, 1994.
• returning to, and hoping to complete, Dietrich Dorner's The Logic of Failure (abandoned in fall of 2004) for insights into policy-making in complex systems
  • "If we want to capture this chapter in a visual image, we could liken a decision maker in a complex situation to a chess player whose set has many more than the normal number of pieces, several dozen, say. Furthermore, these chessmen are all linked to each other by rubber bands, so that the player cannot move just one figure alone. Also, his men and his opponent's men can move on their own and in accordance with rules that the player does not fully understand or about which he as mistaken assumptions. And, to top things off, some of his own and his opponent's men are surrounded by a fog that obscures their identity." (p42)
• excited about waterless composting toilets: http://www.envirolet.com/
• trying to get Inconsolata font to work in Matlab: http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
• enjoying going back over Jacobs' Economy of Cities
• Searching for what Jane Jacobs had to say about Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome.

I forget names!

• Scott Arrington (muppet)
• Brian Romer
• Scott Pochatilla
• Rick Freuler
• Stephen O'Connell

On "History of Political Economy in Europe"

M. Blanqui's L'Histoire de l'Economie Politique en Europe, cited by Marc Faber in his wonderful book Tomorrow's Gold, has started out wonderfully!

It is written in 1837. In his preface, he states "It may perhaps be well to state here the motive which induced me to undertake this work. When called, about twelve years ago, to the Chair of History and Political Economy, which I occupy today, I was not long in perceiving that there existed between these two sciences relations so intimate that a person could not study the one without the other, nor thoroughly understand them separately."

In his first chapter, he beautifully talks about our inherent desire, nay, need to improve the condition of our fellow man:

He even has something to say about political vs. economic democracy? "The feudal system, so fatal to the laborers, who were enslaved to the land, is full of instruction valuable to the political economist. It was the extreme division of sovereignty, as we today behold the extreme division of property."

On Keynes

From http://www.financialsense.com/fsn/BP/2007/1013.html, around [9:59]

This is a really interesting idea, especially for my mind that has recently lost its libertarianism: in http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/andy.denis/research/keynes.htm, one Dr Denis states,

2008-1-14 SNP500 monthly purchases

Previously I've looked at inflation-adjusted returns on the S&P 500 over various time horizons, but these have always been one-shot purchases. Nobody invests like this---most people invest a certain amount every month.

Then we can obtain a plot like this, where we show the annualized returns on all 30-year-long periods, assuming lump-sum investing and monthly CPI-tied investments, deflated by a kludgy approximation of Shadowstats' alternate CPI measure, from http://www.shadowstats.com. (Official governmental CPI-adjusted version of this figure is at Image:30yr SNP monthly vs one-shot CPI.png.) All the following images are on the same axes for easy comparison.

• 10, 15, 20, and 30 year nominal returns, lump-sum investment and regular monthly CPI-tracking investing.

Nominal lump-sum

Monthly nominal

• Same time horizons but CPI-adjusted returns:

Lump-sum CPI-adjusted

Monthly CPI-adjusted

• Same time horizons but this time, deflated with Shadowstats Alternative CPI.

Lmp-sum SGS-adjusted

Monthly SGS-adjusted

Matlab code and required data files: Image:Snp buy-sell monthly analysis complete.zip (21KB).

Obviously, the monthly investing charts indicate higher volatility and more extremes, e.g., the run-up before 1929 and the 1970s bear market. This puts the last nail on portfolio-theoretic buy-and-hold strategy. Marc Faber's global cycles approach, or the Graham-Dodd-Buffet technique, will be more fruitful for the incredulous investor. Here's a choice quote from the 4th edition of The Intelligent Investor:

Graham refers to today's conventional retirement advice as "an illusion"!

Aside: this is a handy plot, simply showing the S&P 500 ticker price, as well as the price adjusted for dividends (and scaled to be the same as the ticker price in 1939).

Faber on Kondratieff

Faber provides this chart of Kondratieff waves in his excellent book, Tomorrow's Gold (2002).

Paths to wealth through common stock

This book was published in the 50s by Philip Fisher, Ken Fisher's father. From the 1959 edition:

On inflation

This is the best description of inflation I've found outside of Austrian economics:

"The first and probably the most important thing for the investor to realize about inflation is this: As long as the overwhelming majority of Americans maintain firmly held existing opinions concerning the duties and obligations of their government, more and more inflation is inevitable.

"Why is more inflation so sure to come? Because under the economic system we have established, the seeds of inflation sprout not in times of prosperity but in times of depression. About eighty per cent of our federal revenue is derived from corporate and individual income taxes. This basic source of federal funds is notoriously sensitive to the level of general business. It shrinks sharply on even moderate downturns in the general economy.

"However, this is not all that happens when general business gets bad. We have enacted laws including unemployment insurance and farm relief which make mandatory a sharp increase of government payments in just these same periods of bad business when federal income is lowest. Furthermore, these laws already on the statute books are almost certainly but the smallest part of the special outpouring of government money that would occur whenever a truly severe depression might develop. Examine the actions of Congress in even the mild depression of 1958 [and the recession of 2007, cf., homeowner bailouts, Fed rate cuts, renewable energy research, etc.] and this becomes obvious. All sorts of proposals were immediately advanced for helping the economy at the expense of the national treasury."

On the expectation of government

"While in 1958 events proved the slide so short-lived that few such measures were put into effect, can anyone with the least understanding of the practicalities of partisan politics doubt that in a more prolonged period of poor business, our elected officials would almost unanimously choose tens of billions of annual deficits in preference to having the voters again undergo the hardships of a major depression? ... It can be granted that huge deficits are bound to produce more inflation. We can also be well aware of the injustices and hardships that result from important rises in the general price levels.

"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. At that time public opinion would have done little more. In the then still strong agricultural economy, this was hardly enough to have produced deficits of inflationary proportion. The federal income tax, of course, was still a thing of the future. Percentagewise the national government's incoming revenues did not fluctuate quite as violently with every change in the economic weather vane as they do today.

"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. Unfortunately when hard times come the only major cure known to government is to spend enough more than is taken in taxes to create sufficient new purchasing power to reverse the trend. This also produces more inflation. Occasional downturns in business seem as much a part of the price we must pay for all the other advantages of a system of free private enterprise as a lower standard of living for everybody, less goods produced and a loss of personal freedom seem the price that must be paid by those living in countries where the government is the only employer. Therefore, as long as we maintain the benefits of our free economic system, unexpected downturns will occasionally appear. As long as we are democratically governed and public opinion reacts as it now odes, these will be followed by more and more inflation."

Free enterprise

I'm very interested in startups and entrepreneurial engineering in electrical engineering and applied statistics.

• "How to get rich in America: A dozen entrepreneurs, a dozen success stories: proof that you don't need a lot of money to make a go of it, but you do have to be smart about how you invest your energy." link (local copy Media:12_entrepreneurs_CNNMoney.pdf)

Hussman price-to-peak-earnings

Ken Fisher and John Hussman have both big gripes about the P/E ratio. Fisher likes to look at its reciprocal, the E/P ratio and compare it to historic global interest rates to value equities (the Fed model). Hussman likes to look at price-to-peak-earnings (http://hussmanfunds.com/popup/pricepeak.htm), reproduced here (using Shiller dataset). So interesting!

2007.11.17 Unofficial SGS CPI deflation of the US stock market

Oh the humanity!

This is the most shocking thing I have seen in quite a while.

What are these figures: in the top row, we show the earnings and price of the S&P 500 companies historically, deflated by the official CPI inflation rates. On the bottom row, we deflate the nominal values with an alternative, more accurate measure of inflation as tracked by John Williams' Shadow Government Statistics report (http://www.shadowstats.com/). (This service has been used by Marc Faber in his presentation to US Funds investors: browse http://www.usfunds.com/webcast/). The two inflation measures are identical until 1983, when Mr Greenspan et al. began screwing with it. (More exposition in the image description.)

Looking at the bottom right chart above reveals that the US stock market has gone nowhere since the early 2000s. Or, since the late 80s. Or equivalently, the early 70s!

And in fact, why should it have gone anywhere? Earnings haven't done anything (bottom left chart above). In fact, we can look at this figure to the right of nominal US GDP deflated by the same SGS CPI inflation numbers (so alternative real GDP). Why haven't I been shown either of these pictures before?

• I should qualify: the connection between lack of earnings and [apparent] lack of long-term price moves doesn't always work. Image:SGS_GDP_1790.png shows US GDP over the entire period profiled above, deflating it with various inflation numbers, and we see that real GDP grew considerably during many periods of flat earnings and sideways price movements before the 1980s.
• The colors correspond to Kondratieff waves as delineated by Faber in Image:Kondratieff wave, Faber.jpg. And "shady" means my calculation of the SGS data from images of the charts. The SGS stats themselves are probably great.
• Dividends probably make this situation better than it is made to appear here. Without redoing all the analysis including dividends, just take a look at an S&P 500 dividend-paying index fund deflated by SGS: Image:SGS-deflated VFINX.png.

2007-10-31 Are dividend-weighted/income funds the way to chase long-term dividend returns?

So from previous analyses presented briefly below, we understand that it is possible to earn reasonable to fantastic annualized returns from dividends alone, treating dividend-paying stock as bonds that never mature---with a fluctuating coupon rate.

E.g., collecting dividends from WMT over the last 32 years yields 20% annualized; MO returns 6% by 12 years, but yields about 15% if held for the last 22 to 30 years.(All numbers annualized and looking at dividends paid through October 2007.) These numbers are really intriguing! Wal-mart stock, paying dividends of no more than 2% of price at any given time over the last few decades, has returned 15% annualized in just dividends! All this without selling the stock!

Those are some great numbers! Two questions that emerge:

1. How hard is it to identify the WMTs and the MOs and the BAs of the world? what makes them obvious, e.g., we'd assume that annual trailing yields would be high.
2. And more urgently, can buying and holding dividend-weighted index funds or ETFs reproduce such results? Can an index of the highest-yielding stock at any given time (in practice, reweighted every 6 months) capture these profits? (Wisdomtree's DEM and its index)

I cooked up the following plots to try and answer this important question. Each plot profiles a stock or a mutual fund/ETF and plots the annualized returns on just dividends as a filled contour. Also on each plot is the annual trailing yields (total dividends paid over each year divided by the price at the end of the year). Sorry the plots are not journal quality.

• It turns out that current trailing yields don't really separate the BAs from the AAs.
• It's also important to analyze the stocks that we have data for from the 60s (i.e., ones that went through the bear market from '60-'80). We're probably heading into another such 1-2 decade long bear market, in the US at least.
• It takes most of these high-quality value stocks a long time to reach fat yields. There's a great dearth of data for high-yielding investments like REITs and dividend-weighted ETFs (DEM, LOR).
  • It's completely unclear if DEM's index construction tracking high-yielding stocks will automatically lead to the very positive results profiled here.
  • DEM, et al., may be simply "income"-oriented instruments, and we may have to look at "dividend-achievers" funds to own stocks that regularly increase both earnings and dividends. Examples are VDIGX, Vanguard's dividend growth fund, which after 14 years is at about -2.5% annualized. ValueLine also has an index of stocks with good dividend appreciation track records. Where would I find a global index?
• Keeping all of the above points in mind, I could study VGDIX's composition, and investigate DEM's index construction more.

Stocks as bonds
Wal-mart stock bought exactly 32 years ago yields 20%, but slightly less if bought earlier or later (35 years)	Altria aka Phillip-Morris has been a great stock to own (37 years)	Boeing in plots like these is really impressive also (45 years)	Exxon-Mobil (37 years)
Citigroup is one of the few profiled here that has a high current trailing dividend yield (24 years)	Coca-cola is also a darling value stock (45 years)	GE's dividend yields only started being noticeable a few years ago (45 years)	We have a lot of data for Alcoa Aluminum, but its dividends have really not added up (45 years)
Dupont also has a long history, but has given us a little better long-term yields (45 years)	Caterpillar is another infrastructure play, but as a bond, it's not so good (45 years)	Johnson and Johnson plays on the healthcare and consumer staples themes that gets 6% (37 years)	Aqua-America is a water utility (20 years)
Vanguard's REIT index may be a way to capture gains like the above but faster (11 years)	PNRZX, Jennison's metals+energy fund is actively managed (7 years)	Vanguard's dividend growth fund may be the way to capture the above results, but has reached only -2.5% in (14 years)

In trying to understand how to construct a portfolio to best capitalize on this.

• http://www.enervest.com/main/page.php?page_id=15 EnerVest's Canadian income trust funds, with a constant dividend stream of ~84c a year (over almost 10 years) and a share price trading between $5-8. That doesn't seem to be the way to go, but why? Aren't earnings increases and increasing dividends the key to WMT's success?
• http://www.frozennorth.org/C37209561/E20060614152757/index.html A technical look dividend-weighted index funds vs capitalization-weighted ones. But nothing specific.
• http://www.indexuniverse.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2852&Itemid=307 Here's a specific look at the WisdomTree vs iShares approaches to dividend-weighting by the drive-by finance media. "One key difference between the WisdomTree funds and the iShares fund is the weighting scheme. The iShares ETF tracks a "dividend weighted" index, meaning components are weighted based on dividend yield. In contrast, the WisdomTree indexes weight stocks by the cash value of dividends paid (i.e., dividend yield X market cap)."
  • Which one is better? I don't really have access to historic market cap values. And the above analysis shows that current yield doesn't really tell you much about prospects for consistent long-term future growth, so I'm thinking WisdomTree may win this argument. What other arguments remain to be had about dividend-weighted funds?

Long-term investing trends

The CPI-adjusted S&P 500

Contourf plots of S&P 500 returns, very interesting:

Historic returns of the S&P 500

CPI-adjusted historic returns

Inflation levels over this historic period

Dividend-only returns are a major part of total returns

I've been studying several large (Dow-level) companies' stock for which I had data from the early 60s to not only understand what the next twenty years would bring, but also to study the role of dividends in total stock returns. An example is shown here. (Altria, aka Phillip Morris and Walmart are the only two stocks surveyed that had better-looking graphs. Other examples were JNJ, C, KO, XOM, etc.)

Dividend-only gains and total gains for Boeing (BA)

Thoughts on long-term investing via ETFs and low-cost/free brokers

Zecco.com currently allows 10 free stock/ETF trades a month, with a $30/year IRA fee. interactivebrokers.com and mbtrading.com are also slightly higher-priced alternatives. I am planning on switching my IRA to one of these accounts.

Here are some tickers I'm looking at for this tax-sheltered retirement account:

• LOR: too high expense ratios (1.6%)
• PID, probably has very low yield
• PAF: Asia ex-Japan div yielders?
• DEM and DND: WisdomTree ETFs with great yields! http://www.wisdomtree.com/etfs/estimated-dividend-yield.asp?col=9&dir=0
• DBA, what everyone's going to be talking about in 2 years like they're talking about energy today
• VEU, Vanguard's all-world non-US ETF (heavy Europe weight)
• and of course, PNRZX, metals and energy.
• I'd like to own silver through http://goldmoney.com

Wealth-creation through investing vs. entrepreneurship

I've been thinking about catching the decade-long exponentials, the bull markets that span a decade, as an alternative to starting a successful engineering research company towards retirement.

1. energy and metals in the 2000s, 26.15% annualized 2000-today in PNRZX (active metals+energy fund)
   1. Check out http://www.wisdomtreeindexes.com/index-details.asp?indexid=57#backtest, the WisdomTree International Basic Materials Sector Index backtest---10 year returns are 18%
2. US equities in 90s, 17.6% annualized 1990-2000 in dividend-included VFINX (S&P 500 index fund)
3. Japan in the 80s, 25.5% annualized 1984-1990 on Nikkei 225
4. gold in the 70s, 31.3% annualized 1970-1980, spot price per oz
5. what was the 60s?

and the question occurs, could one reach retirement in 10-15 years through frugal living and very smart investing?

Retirement spreadsheet

Look at this picture to draw some conclusions towards this question. You can have a spreadsheet to try out these things: Media:Fast-retirements-thru-exponentials.xls

What this tells me is that you could retire in less than 15 years without starting a company and wealth+knowledge-creation, by just working a good job, being frugal, and not making any investment mistakes.

But is this second route practically less difficult to pull off? And will you be as productive in a retirement after this plan than if you went with engineering entrepreneurship?

2007/10/2 S&P dividend 136-year analysis

Dividend howto (for future reference...)

First, here's a toy example I made to calculate annualized rate of return on dividend-paying investment in Matlab with the Finance Toolbox (easy to get):

clear;

%% Inputs
datebought = '1/1/2001';
datesold = '1/1/2005';

dollarsbought = 5;

pricebought = 10;
pricesold = 16;

dollarsdivs = [.5 .9];
pricedivs = [11 13];
datedivs = ['1/1/2002';'1/1/2004'];

%% Convert some inputs
datenums.bought = datenum(datebought);
datenums.sold =  datenum(datesold);
datenums.divs = datenum(datedivs);

%% Calculations
sharesbought = dollarsbought / pricebought;

sharesowned = sharesbought
div_interval = (datenums.divs >= datenums.bought & datenums.divs <= datenums.sold );

for i=1:length(datenums.divs)
    if (div_interval(i))
        sharesowned = sharesowned * dollarsdivs(i) / pricedivs(i) + sharesowned;
    end
end

dollarssold = sharesowned * pricesold;

%% Outputs
ror = xirr([dollarsbought, -dollarssold],[datenums.bought datenums.sold])

S&P analysis

So you repackage that, and write some wrapper code to deal with the data at http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. From Robert Shiller's book "Irrational Exuberance", this dataset gives monthly S&P 500 price, trailing 12-month dividends, and lots of other data from 1871/1 to 2007/6.

Then you make a matrix, showing the annualized rate of return (that's what XIRR does) assuming something simple like dates bought along the vertical axis and dates sold on the horizontal. Assume you buy and sell only on the first of January each year. Plot it:

Mesh of the 3d return surface

Ooh, aah. (Media:SnP_bought-sold_1year_mesh.fig Matlab fig file.)

So this looks useful. Let's redo the analysis, with buy and sell dates every 3 months from January 1871 to June 2007. This matrix is easily displayed as date sold vs. years held and on a 2d image. Now this is educational!

Rates of return on the S&P 500 dividend-inclusive, with 3 month granularity

Definitely some food for thought for the indexers and the exponential-chasers.

E.g., the returns over a 20 year horizon, accompanied with the stock market price:

20-year annualized returns in the S&P 500

Code and data files available! Includes Matlab script and function, CSV file from Shiller's data, and saved Matlab workspace (so just load it and run the plot commands in the shell m-file to view the results and change stuff). Change lines 48 and 49 if you want more or less granular anaysis. Media:IE_SnP_1871-2007_analysis.rar

Individual investments

• http://www.wisdomtree.com/etfs/fund-details.asp?etfid=16 I really like DND and DEM---high-yield Asian and emerging market ETFs (low expenses!). Compare that to LOR (1.6% annual expense ratio).
• Tyhee gold junior in Yellowknife
  • http://www.tyhee.com/projects/project_description.php
  • http://www.stockhouse.com/bullboards/forum.asp?symbol=TDC&table=list&all=0
  • http://www.agoracom.com/ir/Tyhee
• EnerVest income funds
  • http://www.morningstar.ca/globalhome/StockQuickTake/quote.asp?Ticker=EIT.UN&ExchangeId=TOR&TimeFrame=YA
  • http://www.enervest.com/main/page.php?page_id=15
  • 10 years held as bond: 4.3% annualized
  • 20 years held as bond: 11.5%
  • 20 years held and sold at 3 times what you bought it for: 15.8%
  • 20 years held and sold at 30 times what you bought it for: 25.5% (Media:EnerVest_simple_analysis.xls)

Taxes and money

• http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul319.html Ron Paul on gold. Great article and this excerpt reminds me that I need to study the 1970s and early 80s and Mr Volker's regime very carefully to see how inflation was curtailed and if it may be repeated in today's Hillary-land.
  • "These were momentous monetary events, and every knowledgeable person worldwide paid close attention. Major changes were endured in 1979 and 1980 to save the dollar from disintegration. This involved a severe recession, interest rates over 21%, and general price inflation of 15%."
• http://www.elementsetn.com/ProductsPage.aspx?subsection=prod6 Rogers commodities index ETFs!!! Energy, metals, and agricultural baskets.
• http://www.crbtrader.com/crbindex/ Extensive xls-based historical data on CRB, monthly closing prices since late 40s, charts, sub-sectors...
• http://www.etfsecurities.com Great UK-based commodity etfs! Agriculture, cattle, metals, energy...
• http://goldmoney.com the best way to own gold and silver (not paper metals!)
• http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/ "Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities in the United States" with yearly prices for at least gold and silver since 1900 :)!
• http://www.interactivebrokers.co.uk/contract_info/index.php IB's rules for almost all domestic and foreign exchanges! (the other competitor to IB is http://www.mbtrading.com)
• http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html Bastiat! from mises.org and quoted in GaveKal Research interview on FSO, who said (paraphrasing) "Don't buy any of our books, just go and read Bastiat's book 'What is seen, and what is not seen' and you'll know everything about economics.'
• GaveKal funds: http://gavekal.com/GCLSite/FundInfo.aspx?fundid=1
• http://www.kitco.com/charts/livesilver.html I like these silver (and gold) charts.
• http://www.bankrate.com/brm/rate/mmmf_highratehome.asp?params=US,416&product=33 the going rates for <$10k high-yield savings and MMA accounts.

Info and articles.

• US Federal income tax 2007: http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/article/0,,id=164272,00.html
• US state income tax 2006 (questionable): http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/228.html
• Ohio municipal and school district income taxes: http://tax.ohio.gov/online_services/thefinder.stm
• "The 13 Most Overlooked Tax Deductions" regarding federal taxes http://www.kiplinger.com/features/archives/2007/01/deductions.html

• Implications of foreign equity mutual funds for US investors? http://www.fairmark.com/mutual/foreign.htm
• Lazy portfolios via major fund families http://www.fundadvice.com/portfolio.html#vanguardequity
• Pre-Clinton CPI and other monetary indeces. The graph on the front page should be CPI. http://www.shadowstats.com/
• How to compute your personal rate of return in an investment, because it is probably different than what Morningstar says it is for the year: http://news.morningstar.com/classroom2/course.asp?docId=3228&page=1&CN=COM

What I'm learning from the recent spat of FSO Big Pictures transcripts:

• "The analysts start slashing the earnings for companies and then what happens is the companies come in and warn they had to slash the earnings estimates lower and then they come in and beat the estimates." I.e., companies do very tricky things with their accounting and their expectations and their projections. It might be hard to be selective beyond a specific sector and never get burned.
• They expect this summer to be very turbulent, and a couple of the ensuing thoughts are important.
  • All markets are correlating because of ramping liquidity. Partly involving momentum ETF traders who play in energy, gold, etc.
  • This summer, when gold, etc. hit the doldrums and if I have some money lying around, buy some gold or gold equity ETFs and sit on them. Might require an account with ScotTrade.

• Greenspan, in 1967, on gold, credit expansion and the welfare state, and its goal of wealth redistribution http://www.usagold.com/gildedopinion/greenspan.html
• How financial companies make money http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/benson/2007/0727.html
• Galbraith's article "THE 1929 PARALLEL," The Atlantic v259.(Jan 1987): pp62(5).
• http://www.sectorspdr.com/ Very cool breakdown of S&P500 ETFs.
• http://www.economymodels.com/stockstime.asp EconomyModels has a great set of essays, on simple concepts like stock markets as investment vehicles but with very broad points of view (Also essays about fractality of the markets and fat-tailed stable Levy-based options pricing)
• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279 Forty-seven minute documentary on banking and it's control of money as debt. Very interesting.
• http://www.mskousen.com/Speeches/investing.html This guy wrote a book "Investing in One Lesson" and I love this article---people don't make as much money in real estate or stock markets etc., as much as they make money building homes or running a brokerage or building a business. (local copy Media:Skousen_investing_in_one_lesson.pdf)
• http://www.usfunds.com/webcast/ -> http://www.usfunds.com/webcast_redirect/index.asp?url=http://eventcenterlive.com/cfmx/ec/login/replay.cfm?Room=2146000352 Marc Faber's presentation "Gloom, Doom or Boom? Analysis of the Global Economic Expansion"!
• Bankrate had an interview with Phil Town, called "Mutual funds are for losers". Reproduced here. Media:Phil_Town_rule_1_interview.pdf I need to learn to recognize great companies. But not so much to buy them, since I'm still balancing Marc Faber's insight, growth over value.

My news sources

I hit about 3-4 of these on 75% of days.

• http://www.foreignpolicy.com
• http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/
• http://www.marketminder.com run by Ken Fisher's investments. Boy do they cheerlead!
• http://economist.com/
• http://www.europac.net/
• http://hussmanfunds.com/weeklyMarketComment.html
• http://www.financialsense.com/
• http://www.guildinvestment.com/ARhome.asp?RQ=AR,1&GID=35&sPID=35&ARList=1
• http://www.mises.org/default.aspx (Beautiful libertarian and economic daily essays)
• http://www.lewrockwell.com/
• http://www.dailyreckoning.com/
• http://www.dailyreckoning.us/blog/

On photography.

• I frequently think of this area of Yunnan province in south China, of the rice paddies of Yuanyang: http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/photo226855.htm

2008-1-19 Completed system

• Canon FTb $33.03 ($41.08 total)
• Canon FTb (with broken film advance roller) with Canon 50mm f/1.8 SC lens (with broker aperture), $33 ($41 total)
• Vivitar FL 17mm F/3.5 lens, $68.85 ($85.85 total)
• Makinon FD 24mm f/2.8 multi-coated lens, $23.27 ($34.62 total)
• Canon FTb (various problems) with Canon 28mm f/2.8 lens, $38 ($48 total)
• Sears FD 135mm f/2.8 lens, $6.99 ($17.49 total)

One of the bodies came with a nice Canon camera bag and leather covering, and another with a lens strap :D. I still have my shutter release cable from my Ricoh SLR set (Pentax K mount, which Zainab has inherited) and it works with the FTb, and I still have my tripod with one remaining head :)

My final FTb works great, except the meter seems to be very underpowered, I'll go get new batteries.

2007-12-20 An FD SLR system

I purchased my first bit of Canon FD gear on the 17th and it arrived on the 19th: Sears 135mm f/2.8 for $17.49.

Ken Rockwell has the right idea! http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/free-digital-camera.htm "Free Full-Frame Digital SLR!" = Nikon F4 + Costco development, scanning, and CD archiving.

Some great-looking deals for any of this old equipment are here: http://www.adorama.com/catalog.tpl?op=itemlist&cat1=Used&cat2=Canon%20Manual%20Focus&cat3=Lenses

2007-12-12 Canon full-frame bodies

Comparing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Canon_DSLR_cameras and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Nikon_Digital_Camera_List, I want to get a Canon full frame and a couple of primes (bright 50mm and bright wide in the low 20s). Photo.net asserts that the XTi would be a better value than, say, the 5D which I really like (http://photo.net/equipment/canon/5D/), unless:

• "you love wide angle photography and want to have a good choice of wide angle lenses
• you want to take pictures in low light without a flash"

Mainly low-light.

2007/9/30 Superwides for supersights

• Was poking around phpwiki dumps for some reason (I think to track down Haiku) and found among other things, excerpts from Ben Franklin's autobiography, and a journal entry about super-wide-angle lenses.

That's the lens he's talking about

Thursday, 2005/11/24:

In risking losing the insights available in the Reader's Comments on Photo.net's treatise on What about an old 35mm SLR? (http://www.photo.net/equipment/35mm/old-slrs), I will record Mr Pang and Mr Bromfield's comments here.

Mr Bromfield on why wide-angles excite me:

My style is for ultra wide-angle lens, available light -- usually early morning or evening -- and hand held. The ideal system for me was an Olympus OM2n with the unique and superb Zuiko 21mm F2 lens. Still no manufacturer makes a lens in this class so fast, and what with the technology going into zoom lenses, nobody probably will.

Auto-focus is completly unnecessary with a system that provides depth of field from around 1 metre to infinity at f4!

(A couple were going for 1000-1500 on ebay)

Anyway, I tracked down a review of 4 modern super-wide-angle lenses for digital Nikons: http://www.nikonians.org/nikon/nikkor-12-24mm/super-wide_shootout_6.html

• 22:09, 10 August 2007 is the datestamp for saving this photoblog: http://www.mexicanpictures.com/portfolio/ amazing literature, "Travels Without Maps," Tibet, India.

• Found that from http://www.mexicanpictures.com/headingeast/2007/08/night-trains-morning-trains.html

Futurelang isn't quite research-in-progress, but it's not science fiction either. These are my goals.

• Immortality virus
• Digital cognizance (moving into active research!)
• Human-machine augmentation
• Aerial cities
• Interplanetary travel
• Interstellar exploration
  • This page shows the best comparison of the sizes of planets and stars ever: http://jfaughnan.blogspot.com/2007/03/earth-measure-of-all-things.html
• Planetary terraforming
• Chibi robos vs. Pikmin (artificial macroscopic life)
• The most important thing: an end to self-centeredness and irreseponsibility.

And specifics...

BioBricks

Drew Endy of MIT gave a talk at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress and talked for an hour about his iGEM and BioBricks efforts:

• 2600 article by "Professor L"?
• Make article on building your own eletrophoresis machine?
• Rockefeller work on molecular control (genetic?) on memory and behavior?

Awesome!

Using the tongue as a vision sensor

As Dr Levitt put it in the excellent Freakonomics blog, "We use our eyes to see, so it seems logical to conjecture that if you didn’t have eyes, you couldn’t see. What I love about science is that these sorts of limiting beliefs routinely get blasted out of the water."

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010901/bob14.asp University of Wisconsin researchers are working on electrodes-on-tongue as a mechanism to replace the eye with the tongue as the primary visual sensor. Paul Bach-y-Rita, one of the researchers, says "You don't see with the eyes. You see with the brain."

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/video/286-mixed_feelings.html This video contains examples of vision-impaired and balance-impaired individuals. An amazing story in it is about a woman who couldn't balance: with the tongue technology, she regained her balance but remarkably, she continued to have her sense of balance after she took out the device! She uses her device very rarely and just has her balance! Her brain is not only restructured but it has learned to associate balance with another sensorial input source!

Let's begin human augmentation!

Lynn Margulis on the microcosmos

Astrobiology Magazine has a four-part interview with Margulis on the 20th anniversary of the publishing of Microcosmos which talked about the microbial world and its contributions to planetary evolution: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article2111.html (part 4 of 4, Google will give you the others). In this part on "Bacterial intelligence":

• "For example, take Foraminifera - they're single-celled sea creatures, protoctists. The Egyptian pyramids are built of their shells. A colleague of mine put one of these forams in a dish with a small crustacean animal, like a water flea. He was going to watch the crustacean eat the foram. The foram's a single cell, and smaller, right? And he saw the foram kill, trap, and completely destroy and eat the animal. He's got beautiful movies of it. So that group of organisms not only can eat animals, but they can make hunting towers, and they can hunt from the top of the towers."
  • Wow!!! Where can I find these videos!?

Design of transport and housing

Ross Lovegrove is a long-time designer (Walkman, e.g.) and is profiled on CNN's Just Imagine 2020: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/27/lovegrove.qa/

• Nature is fat free, it's fit. You tell me what you see in society that's fit, in terms of objects, products, people often.
• "Tell us about the process when you design something." Take the water bottle again. You find a trinity between process -- how you make these bottles industrially and efficiently; material -- the material is nontoxic, doesn't leech into the water; and is beautifully optical; the ergonomic value that you get through the surface so it means everybody who engages with it has this sort of, "Oh my goodness!" and structure -- the new digital process -- you couldn't have done that years ago, it's a totally contemporary product. The bottle is a bit of a eureka because everything works in harmony.

The design that caught my eye was bubble-shaped solar-powered autonomous cars that are shared by a city, which rise up above the street at night on a stick embedded in the ground and act as streetlamps: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/27/lovegrove.vision/index.html (see "Renditions of 'Car on a Stick'"). Or better yet, track down the video of animations: http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/just.imagine/transport/

Next we have Ken Yeang, designing the EDITT Tower in Singapore: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/07/16/yeang.qa/ Animated video of his project and vision: http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/just.imagine/livingspaces/

• "EDITT Tower is a project where we wanted to exemplify all our ideas in one single building. I should add it is a tower and towers are the most unecological of all building types. Generally a tower uses 30% more energy and materials to build and to operate than anther structure, but towers, as a built form, will be with us for a while, until we find an economically viable alternative. My contention is that if we have to build these towers then we should make them as humane and as ecological as possible. It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it.
• "In the EDITT tower we tried to balance the inorganic mass of the tower with more organic mass, which means bringing vegetation and landscaping into the building. But we didn't want to put all the landscaping in one location. We wanted to spread that over the building, integrate it with the inorganic mass and that we wanted to have it ecologically connected. So we've put the vegetation from the ground all the way up the building and that whenever the building.
• "Then we wanted it to be low energy, so we had photo voltaics in its façade particularly facing the east and west side and on its roof so it would have its own energy source. We also wanted to collect water so that we could be independent from the water supply. We put water collection on the roof, but because the tower has a very small roof area we had sunshades which were scallop shaped so we could collect rainwater through them as well. So in many ways it feels like a human made ecosystem in a tower form."

Evolution of the eye

November 2006 National Geographic carries a long article called "A fin is a limb is a wing" by Carl Zimmer. This diagram was copied from it. Text-only article local copy: Media:NatGeog_fin_limb_wing.pdf.

This really tweaks my curiosity about whence the heavily discretized appearance of nature and speciation. Where's the link between the giant panda and the red panda, the chimpanzee and the human, the polar bear and the grizzly bear? This diagram and the article may really help me get a grip on how tiny gene-level evolution manifests as radical differences in phenotype:

1. "But nearly 150 years after Darwin first brought this elegant idea to the world's attention when he published The Origin of Species, the evolution of complex structures can still be hard to accept. Most of us can envision natural selection tweaking a simple trait--making an animal furrier, for example, or its neck longer."

2. "The common ancestor of most animals had a basic tool kit of genes for building organs that could detect light. These earliest eyes were probably much like those found today in little gelatinous sea creatures like salps: just pits lined with photoreceptor cells, adequate to sense light and tell its direction. Yet they were the handiwork of the same genes that build our own eyes, and they relied on the same light-sensing opsins.

"The lens too did not appear out of nothing. Lenses are made of transparent proteins called crystallins, which can bend light "like protein glass" as one scientist says. And crystallins, it turns out, existed well before evolution put them to work in the eye. They were just doing other jobs.

"Scientists have discovered one crystallin, for example, in the central nervous system of sea squirts. Instead of making a lens, it is part of a gravity-sensing organ. A mutation may have caused cells in the early vertebrate eye to make the crystallin as well. There it turned out to do something new and extraordinarily useful: bring the world into focus."

Specifics of futurelang

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_c an extrasolar planet that theoretically lies in the inhabitable zone around its red dwarf star, with gravity 2.1x Earth's. Visiting it in some 300-500 years (preferably arriving then, but probably leaving since it's 20 light years away) with crazy robots to withstand the gravity (unless we've got antigravity).
• Perhaps we can visit it using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29 which basically comprises of a huge thick concrete disc with a little hole in the center to drop nuclear bombs underneath and detonate them. High velocity and high specific impulse would have enabled its inventors (Dyson, etc.) to visit the outer solar system within their lifetimes.
• A more modern spacetravel technique may be subspace/hyperdrive: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18925331.200.html based on Heim's unheard-of theories.
• The oddest thing---a fungus which takes over an insect's mind and tissue, making it climb a stem before killing it and sprouting its spores from its head: Cordyceps is a indeed one of the strangest creations ever: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/331826/ant_fungus/ Do you think we can study it to learn the insides and outsides of macrobiologic control?
  • "Get this: Cordyceps lloydii (you really need to click the link and see the photos) attacks living ants and secretes a chemical that compels them to climb to the top of the Costa Rican canopy and attach themselves to leaves; then the mushroom erupts from the ant's head or body to disperse spores into wind currents." (from http://www.mushroomexpert.com/cordyceps_militaris.html)
• http://www.palantirtech.com/products.html the alternative to purely machine-oriented statistical tools---advanced knowledge gathering.
  • "We are designing algorithms to solve novel search problems across heterogeneous information. Our information exploration technology allows analysts to understand complex relationships."
• Digital cognizance is quite well-transitioned into research, but here's the Jaynes connection.

I was talking to Chen the other day online about robots and something connected in my mind. A few years ago, I read this book by Julian Jaynes, who basically I think devoted most of his life to research that is represented in that book:

http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072/ and summarized http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29

It's a historical/anthropological book but he basically says that until about 1000 BC, humans weren't intelligent---they didn't have conscious introspection like we have today. Rather, they were all schizophrenic, where one half of the brain "spoke" orders to the other half which followed, and this voice was interpreted by everyone as "gods." And so all the deities that ancient mythology records (he works a lot with the Greek stuff in Homer) were actually the pre-intelligent split-brain telling the person what to do, which served the same purpose that introspection serves today (except the latter is much better).

Anyway, in the first part of the book, he talks about how you don't really need consciousness to do a lot of the things which you think a human needs to do. Basically, to use tools, have writing, build pyramids, wage war, you don't need a conscious intelligent brain in today's sense, you might be able to get away with just a simpler high-level commander proto-intelligence.

So maybe he is right, it'll be interesting if robotics and machine learning can prove his theory right when all the anthropological research can't. And if his theory is right, we might be able to build some very sophisticated robotic organisms without having to replicate the hugely complicated human thought process.

Maybe there's huge potential in belief propagation in graphical models and other probabilistic learning techniques (http://ssg.mit.edu/nbp/)!!!

Also left a discussion on amazon's page for the paperback version of the book.

• Scientific American had a couple of articles on junk DNA:
  • "The Unseen Genome: Gems among the Junk" Image:Unseen Genome 1.pdf
  • "The Unseen Genome: Beyond DNA" Image:Unseen Genome 2.pdf

New route for heredity bypasses DNA

From http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2008/01/04/new_route_for_heredity_bypasses_dna.html:

A group of scientists in Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology has uncovered a new biological mechanism that could provide a clearer window into a cell's inner workings.

What's more, this mechanism could represent an "epigenetic" pathway -- a route that bypasses an organism's normal DNA genetic program -- for so-called Lamarckian evolution, enabling an organism to pass on to its offspring characteristics acquired during its lifetime to improve their chances for survival. Lamarckian evolution is the notion, for example, that the giraffe's long neck evolved by its continually stretching higher and higher in order to munch on the more plentiful top tree leaves and gain a better shot at surviving.

The research also could have implications as a new method for controlling cellular processes, such as the splicing order of DNA segments, and increasing the understanding of natural cellular regulatory processes, such as which segments of DNA are retained versus lost during development. The team's findings will be published Jan. 10 in the journal Nature.

Princeton biologists Laura Landweber, Mariusz Nowacki and Vikram Vijayan, together with other members of the lab, wanted to decipher how the cell accomplished this feat, which required reorganizing its genome without resorting to its original genetic program. They chose the singled-celled ciliate Oxytricha trifallax as their testbed.

Ciliates are pond-dwelling protozoa that are ideal model systems for studying epigenetic phenomena. While typical human cells each have one nucleus, serving as the control center for the cell, these ciliate cells have two. One, the somatic nucleus, contains the DNA needed to carry out all the non-reproductive functions of the cell, such as metabolism. The second, the germline nucleus, like humans' sperm and egg, is home to the DNA needed for sexual reproduction.

When two of these ciliate cells mate, the somatic nucleus gets destroyed, and must somehow be reconstituted in their offspring in order for them to survive. The germline nucleus contains abundant DNA, yet 95 percent of it is thrown away during regeneration of a new somatic nucleus, in a process that compresses a pretty big genome (one-third the size of the human genome) into a tiny fraction of the space. This leaves only 5 percent of the organism's DNA free for encoding functions. Yet this small hodgepodge of remaining DNA always gets correctly chosen and then descrambled by the cell to form a new, working genome in a process (described as "genome acrobatics") that is still not well understood, but extremely deliberate and precise.

Landweber and her colleagues have postulated that this programmed rearrangement of DNA fragments is guided by an existing "cache" of information in the form of a DNA or RNA template derived from the parent's nucleus. In the computer realm, a cache is a temporary storage site for frequently used information to enable quick and easy access, rather than having to re-fetch or re-create the original information from scratch every time it's needed.

"The notion of an RNA cache has been around for a while, as the idea of solving a jigsaw puzzle by peeking at the cover of the box is always tempting," said Landweber, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. "These cells have a genomic puzzle to solve that involves gathering little pieces of DNA and putting them back together in a specified order. The original idea of an RNA cache emerged in a study of plants, rather than protozoan cells, though, but the situation in plants turned out to be incorrect."

Through a series of experiments, the group tested out their hypothesis that DNA or RNA molecules were providing the missing instruction booklet needed during development, and also tried to determine if the putative template was made of RNA or DNA. DNA is the genetic material of most organisms, however RNA is now known to play a diversity of important roles as well. RNA is DNA's chemical cousin, and has a primary role in interpreting the genetic code during the construction of proteins.

First, the researchers attempted to determine if the RNA cache idea was valid by directing specific RNA-destroying chemicals, known as RNAi, to the cell before fertilization. This gave encouraging results, disrupting the process of development, and even halting DNA rearrangement in some cases.

In a second experiment, Nowacki and Yi Zhou, both postdoctoral fellows, discovered that RNA templates did indeed exist early on in the cellular developmental process, and were just long-lived enough to lay out a pattern for reconstructing their main nucleus. This was soon followed by a third experiment that "… required real chutzpah," Landweber said, "because it meant reprogramming the cell to shuffle its own genetic material."

Nowacki, Zhou and Vijayan, a 2007 Princeton graduate in electrical engineering, constructed both artificial RNA and DNA templates that encoded a novel, pre-determined pattern; that is, that would take a DNA molecule of the ciliate's consisting of, for example, pieces 1-2-3-4-5 and transpose two of the segments, to produce the fragment 1-2-3-5-4. Injecting their synthetic templates into the developing cell produced the anticipated results, showing that a specified RNA template could provide a new set of rules for unscrambling the nuclear fragments in such a way as to reconstitute a working nucleus.

"This wonderful discovery showed for the first time that RNA can provide sequence information that guides accurate recombination of DNA, leading to reconstruction of genes and a genome that are necessary for the organism," said Meng-Chao Yao, director of the Institute of Molecular Biology at Taiwan's Academia Sinica. "It reveals that genetic information can be passed on to following generations via RNA, in addition to DNA."

The research team believes that if this mechanism extends to mammalian cells, then it could suggest novel ways for manipulating genes, besides those already known through the standard methods of genetic engineering. This could lead to possible applications for creating new gene combinations or restoring aberrant cells to their original, healthy state.

Source : Princeton University

Rule of law

Peruvian shepherd boy whose six sheep were killed by a taxi

I have had a lot of trouble understanding my feelings towards crushing poverty and associated helplessness that was endured by the majority of the world today. As my emotions changed from confusion to energy for directed action (over the last couple of years), I've grown more and more aware of how important the rule of law is in human society.

Were it not for this photograph that eventually (partially) saved the young shepherd, this would have been the only thing that could have compensated the boy. The lack of law to which the boy could have turned to directly causes his poverty. And it may be that rule of law ceases to be an ideal and becomes reality only with free markets.

My political platform

I beleive in three major points of campaign, which I believe all people can admit to rooting for:

• I'm against entitlement, and a nanny state. (Our culture has become one of complacency by entitlement-driven federal policy.)
• I'm against extremism and fanaticism. (These are social ills that are not acceptable today.)
• I believe in future-oriented management of natural resources. (Conservation and exploitation should be done responsibly, with concern for the future.)

Comments therein...

• "Former Member of Radical Islam Questions Faction" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11778628 I particlarly was interested in his attempts to introduce an open debate in the Muslim community for another ijtihad. As I put it:
  • "What is more important?, to care about your neighbor who may happen to be Hindu or Jewish, or to subjugate the non-believers? I firmly believe that the latter has NO place in the broad Muslim community, and our first role ought to be to bring this interpretation to all reaches of the Muslim community."
• "Cashing in on responsible trade" http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2007/07/06/AM200707064.html Reports on "a report today linking ethical business practices to higher profits."
  • The UN cannot be confusing correlation with causation. Neither can Marketplace.
  • "Zadek says by 2050 the market for so-called 'responsible trade' could be worth around $750 billion." That number is 1.6% of today's global GDP. How on earth is this market significant today, let alone in 40 years?
• Two public-to-public banking organizations: Kiva.org and Prosper.com.
  • http://kiva.org connects microlenders to borrowers around the world, loaning at 0% interest. Among other things, what an amazing way to do charity: add as much as you usually give in charity every year, and keep reinvesting the loans that are repaid. Your "charity" will go unimaginably far this way, teaching people to fish, instead of giving them food. This is one of the ways that societies undergo rapid change.
  • http://www.prosper.com also enables public-to-public microlending but it's attraction is the often incredible rates offered by lesser-than-creditworthy borrowers: 10-25% APR on your loan, with the ability to automatically spread your investment across many borrowers (reducing the pain of the occasional default).

Ron Paul & presidential analysis

Issues, Dr. Paul's positions, and why the issues are important to everyone:

Foreign Policy

• Overall role of foreign policy: what is America's role in the global order. (Believes in a non-Interventionist foreign policy of the founding fathers.)
• Osama bin Laden: the mastermind behind 9/11 and views on bringing him to justice. (Believes we should focus on finding Osama Bin Laden.)
• Starting the Iraq war: Was it a good idea at the time, given the intelligence and geopolitics at the time? (Voted against the Iraq War.)
• Current and future troop deployment in Iraq: views on future American role in Iraq. (For bringing the troops home from Iraq.)
• Draft and Selective Service (databasing young men eligible for conscription in times of war). (Wants to get rid of Selective Service registration.)
• Federal law enforcement and espionage agencies: what role do they have to play in American foreign policy. (For phasing out Homeland Security, and eliminating terrorism/blowback at the source through reduction of the CIA's activities.)

Constitutional Rights/Liberties

• National identification and privacy: is the risk for abuse worth the security increase? (Against Real ID Act/National ID cards.)
• Patriot Act: should we suspend civil liberties? (Voted against the Patriot Act.)
• Will not abuse Habeas Corpus.
• Against gun control
• Has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
• States not the Federal government should decide on abortion.
• Believes matters such as drugs should be handled at the State or personal level and wants to eliminate the War on Drugs.

Economy/National Sovereignty

• Has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
• Has never voted to raise taxes.
• Against the ICC, NAFTA, GATT, WTO, IMF, and CAFTA.
• Against establishing the North American Union.
• Against government regulation of the internet.
• Against government subsidizing corporations, i.e. Big Oil/Agra
• For abolishing the I.R.S. and the Federal Income tax.
• For the eventual abolishment of the Federal Reserve.
• For the legalization of industrial hemp.
• For abolishing the estate tax.
• Wishes to withdraw from UNESCO.
• Against government regulation of the internet.

Health Care

• Proposed legislation that would give seniors a tax credit equal to 80 percent of their prescription drug costs.
• Paul sponsored the States' Rights to Medical Marijuana Act.
• Believes matters such as drugs should be handled at the state or personal level.
• Introduced the Family Health Tax Cut Act which would reduce the financial burden on low income parents struggling to meet their children’s medical expenses.
• Introduced a bill that would reduce the FDA’s restrictions on truthful health claims of dietary supplements.
• Will use the 100's of billions of dollars we save from bringing the troops home to support health care and Social Security while weaning the younger generations off.

Education

• Against increased federal control of college curricula, grading, and teaching practices.
• Proponent of education tax credits.
• Introduced the Teacher Tax Cut Act.
• Believes Federal vouchers are not the solution for our failing public schools.

Immigration

• Supports legal immigration
• Believes brithright citizenship is being abused--meant for the posterity of citizens/legal immigrants only.

• I'd like to get this MediaWiki skin: http://www.dd-wrt.com
• Someday, I might learn AJAX, etc., and use http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ to build blogs and finance tools (not like http://worldofsolitaire.com/)

2007/9/27 Introduction

In mental development since October 2005, the name of this wiki engine comes from Dr Utkin (ECE 750, linear control class) who used it as a technical term, as well as a character or characters in a somewhat serious superhero graphic novel. Prior to that, since summer of 2004 I had been thinking of knowledge management systems, especially a 3d hand-in-air-controlled knowledge visualization engine called megaDB.

I think that finally, for now, MediaWiki and a few specific extensions and templates (DynamicPageList and Scroll box) can fulfill this role.

E.g., for standard table with borders,

<DPL>
  namespace=|User|Internal
  createdby=AhmedFasih
  modifiedby=AhmedFasih
  include=*
  ordermethod = lastedit
  order = descending
  resultsheader = ====latest edits:====\n
  shownamespace = true
  addeditdate = true
  adduser = true
  format=__NOTOC__,\n=%PAGE%=\n\n{| class="wikitable" border="1"\n|style="width: 500px; height: 25px; overflow: scroll;" valign="top" |\n,\n|},\n
</DPL>

Next, for a two-column format with scrollboxes, the following needs both ParserFunctions and Variables extensions. I didn't use it because it's too narrow.

{{#vardefine:ARTICLENUM|0}}
<DPL>
  format= \n{| class="wikitable" width="100%" border=1\n,{{#vardefine:ARTICLENUM| {{#expr:{{#var:ARTICLENUM}}+1}} }}\n{{ #ifeq: {{ #expr: {{#var:ARTICLENUM}} mod 2 }} | 1 | {{!}}-\n{{!}}valign=top width=50%{{!}}\n | \n{{!}} }} \n=%PAGE%=\n{{scroll box|width=100%|height=100px|text=\n,}}\n,\n|}
  namespace=|User|Internal
  createdby=AhmedFasih
  modifiedby=AhmedFasih
  include=*
  ordermethod = lastedit
  order = descending
  resultsheader = ====latest edits:====\n
  count=20
</DPL>

Important links:

• http://semeb.com/dpldemo/index.php?title=Category:DPL_Manual