Today was take your bike to work day, which made for some nice variety: There's some interesting scenery quite close to 85 that just isn't visible on my normal commute.

Not as significant as the last two weeks though: I don't think the bicycle got nearly as much out of take-your-bike-to-work-day as the children got out of their take-your-child-to-work-day instances.

Tax day seems like a good day to muse on the meaning of the US having the world's highest marginal corporate tax rate. Given the actual average rates paid, this means we have world-class-abuseable deductions, too. Saner tax policy would be a good thing.

T-Mobile's web site needs me to log in to do various things (including reporting problems). That's fine; I even know my cellphone number which is to be used as an account name.

After I log in, it wants me to set a new password, and supply some information like my name and email address. The tricky part? The fields they want me to fill in are simultaneously "mandatory" (can't submit with them blank) and "disabled" (web browser won't let me type in them).

Originally posted by beth_leonard at End Daylight Savings Time Changes

Today's video-conference was confusingly scheduled, because not all of the participants have matching time zone rules. It's annoying enough having to adjust my clocks, but having to keep track of the time changes in other zones (Arizona: no change. Europe: change on a different day) adds an extra level of silliness.

For somewhat obscure reasons, my new mobile phone doesn't know what its phone number is.

When the carrier called to welcome me to the service today, I asked them what my phone number was. Apparently for privacy reasons they can't tell me.

At some point I'll just call someone with caller-ID so I can find out.

The Futures: The Rise of the Speculator and the Origins of the World's Biggest Markets, by Emily Lambert

This is at its core, a history of the Chicago futures markets. Other cities play into it as well, of course: The Chicago markets in stock derivatives interact strongly with the New York markets. Much of the history was new to me; I had a pretty good idea what sorts of things traded on the Chicago exchanges, but not how that came to be. They grew out of various regional agricultural exchanges. There's always a mismatch between when food is produced and when people would like to consume it, and futures markets provide (through speculators) a way to match up buyers and sellers at different time. Often this works well, other times not so well: The ban on trading onion futures is the result of one such incident. Originally there were many such markets (even two in Chicago), but as transportation improves, there's a tendency for centraliation. That's because buyers and sellers tend to prefer the largest market they can reach.

The book covers much of that history, and the rather amazing cast of colorful characters involved. Some of the interactions are memorable, too: In the aftermath of the 1987 crash, one of the New York bankers apparently asked, "Who is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and why do they owe us a billion dollars?". The answer, of course, being that they were the host of the stock futures market, and in the spectacular 1987 crash, much money was involved in settlement. The sometimes unexpected feedback betwen markets matters: In the 1987 crash, arbitrage between the Chicago and New York markets added to the volatility, and similar effects were significant in the more recent financial crisis. There's a lot of stuff to learn about these markets, and this book is a good source on the more human side of the markets.

Highly recommended.

I recently read two books by Emanuel Derman, both of which have a lot to do with both physics and finance. That presumably has a lot to do with his history: He was a physicist in academia before winding up on Wall Street, eventually becoming head of the quantitative risk strategies group at Goldman Sachs. He subsequently returned to academia.

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, by Emanuel Derman

This is the more (personal) history-focused of the pair, while still having a pretty good dose of both physics and finance. In particular, his description of how VaR (value at risk) models are applied and misapplied enlightening. One of the things that struck me is how often (at least in the narrative) his life was unsatisfying. The decription of how he had to (for work reasons) spend a year away from his young son was heartbreaking.

Highly Recommended.

Models. Behaving. Badly. also by Emanuel Derman

This book is more focused on the nature of theories and models, though is has a sprinkling of his personal history as well. Probably the main point he tries to get across is that the constructs of physics are fundamentally different from those in finance: They both use math, but the theories of physics are very accurate. As he says, for all intents and purposes, Maxwell's laws are the electromagnetic field, not an approximation to them. Even the best models in finance, in contrast, are at best approximations, and often dangerous ones at that. He covers a wide range of topics, including excursions into philosophy and religion.

Conditionally recommended: It's in many ways similar to the other book, and My Life as a Quant is probably the better one to read first.

Feynman Lectures on Computation, by Richard P. Feynman (Edited by Tony Hey and Robin W. Allen. Sadly, it's a posthumous book.)

In a similar spirit to the excellent The Feynman Lectures on Physics, this is a conversion of some of Feynman's lectures to book form. It's a pretty good introduction to a lot of aspects of computers, from obvious topics like breaking up tasks into computer-instruction-sized pieces, to less obvious topics: Reversible computing, entropy, and quantum computing.

I found almost all of it easy to follow: Feynman's presentations are always very clear. The exception was chapter six, "Quantum Mechanical Computers". Much of this was phrased in the language of quantum field theory (bra-ket notation, etc.), which is something I wish I understood better. But after a little review and re-reading that chapter it made sense. Essentially, he's describing a design for a computer where the individual steps are compatible with small-scale quantum mechanics, which is necessarily reversible and so on. Unlike subsequent discussions of quantum computing, his design doesn't depend on using quantum superposition or attempt to do non-classical computing. It's more a thought experiment as to just how small (and low power) a computer can be.

The last chapter on physical aspects of computers (VLSI and so on) provides a fascinating glimpse into circuit design before I got into it: Back then, it wasn't obvious that CMOS was going to be the dominant way to design chips. Still, most of the chapter maps very well to what I did when I was a chip designer.

Highly recommended.

One of the more noteworthy provisions of the proposed legislation is that it calls for blocking entire sites to deal with infringing content. This is unfortunate in terms of collateral damage: A site like LiveJournal could be blocked over content that I (as a user) have no control over, as a consequence of going after "bad guys". (A similar mechanic is active in the recent takedown of Megaupload. I'm sure there was infringing content, but there's a lot of inconvenienced non-infringing users as well.) Sites with a lot of user-generated content would be in trouble, especially if it's uneconomic to have a site administrator police everything. Wikipedia would essentially have to shut down, as a most visible example of the problem.

From a economic viewpoint, though, this is a pretty good example of the tragedy of the anti-commons. Unlike the similarly-named case with no property rights, a case of overlapping property rights can lead to under-use of a resource. SOPA would extend the property rights of intellectual-property holders to include the privilege of blocking content that is merely co-located with infinging content. Given the number of potential rightsholders to negotiate with, this blocks off a lot of useful activity. It also does so at a less-direct level: Where is the line drawn between infringing and non-infringing content? With lots of people to potentially offend, a lot of now-legal parody and commentary becomes legally risky. Yes, it's legal, but you have to argue that after they shut down your site ... so why bother in the first place? (This chilling effect is probably a significant motive behind the legislation in the first place.)

As a side issue, adding new legal processes (paths outside the judiciary, DNS blocking requirements for ISPs, etc.) deserves careful scrutiny: It is claiming, more or less, "Due process is too much work." On the contrary, due process is vitally important.

All of this is orthogonal to the question of exactly how much protection intellectual property should have; Even if it needs still more protection (I don't think it does), the proposed mechanisms are a poor way to accomplish that.

It looks like I'll be starting work at Google shortly. This is an exciting change, and I'm really looking forward to it. (Totally rearranging our household schedule, not so much.)

I'll be in SRE, doing some mysterious combination of software and system administration.

I was doing something related to Fermat primes, and noticed that my TI-84's interpretation of 2^2^5+1 isn't 4294967297 as I'd expect (famously divisible by 641), but rather 1025: It's interpreting it as ((2^2)^5)+1. How'd they get the order of operations wrong there?

I was recently considering how unbacked currencies can lose value: In the old days of the gold standard, the fact that a dollar was theoretically convertible into gold kept the value of a dollar more-or-less stable. (The occasional suspension of convertibility and mining improvements notwithstanding.)

With a fiat currency, there's nothing in particular to keep the value from slowly (or quickly!) inflating away. But there may also be nothing to restrain volatility. Certainly after the Bretton Woods system collapsed the currency movements have been much wilder. The question that I don't have an answer for is to what extent is the mere fact that the currencies aren't backed responsible. Certainly there are other possible reasons: Transactions in general are faster and easier than they used to be, etc.

On the way back from taking the children to school, I saw a sports car with a license plate frame reading, "Paid for with seized drug money". That's probably true: The car had a tax-exempt license plate.

This seems wrong to me on a couple of levels. To start with, I'm uneasy about civil-forfeiture in general. It is a necessary tool in contexts like the historical pirate ship cases: The owner of the pirate ship can't be brought to trial, but taking the ship to stop the piracy is justifiable.

So historically, civil forfeiture applied in cases where a trial was impossible. That has been lost, and it is now used in cases where bringing a trial is inconvenient. It's a lot easier to take a pile of cash from an unsympathetic individual (and place the burden of proof on them that it's legally gained) than it is to prove wrongdoing.

But the sports car bothers me in another way: Is this really a good use of police funds? Money is fungible: If seized assets are being used to fund law enforcement, they should be used more or less like any other funding (ignoring for the moment perverse incentives). If you can't justify spending taxpayer money on something, spending seized money on it doesn't make sense either.

Obviously I don't have the whole story: I don't know whose sports car it was, or why they had it. But I still find it unsettling.

The Proud Tower, by Barbara W. Tuchman

This is an excellent history book, much like her other output. (I'm fond of The Guns of August, for example.) As the subtitle ("A Portrait of the World Before The War 1890-1914") implies, it's about the now-distant pre-WWI world. There's a lot of selection involved, as she points out in the foreword. The focus is limited to western Europe and English-speaking North America, but even so she says she could have written such a book three times without repeating.

The result still feels like a broad view of a world that is in many ways quite different (Aristocracy doesn't matter much anymore), but in many ways all-too-familiar: The discussion of the anti-war movement and negotiations seems very much like the climate-change negotiations of more recent history.

I found almost all of the book compelling reading, but I did get bogged down in the section about musical composers. Probably more significantly, after reading the book I have a much better idea of what the Anarchists were all about (to pick a single example out of several). The time I spent reading was well-spent.

Highly recommended

The Meaning Of It All, by Richard P. Feynman

This is essentially a transcript of three talks that Feynman gave, on the topic of science, scientific reasoning, and unscientific reasoning.

As expected, he's clear and insightful, discussing how science works, the limits of how it can be applied, and when other approaches are appropriate. Like much of his work intended for a general audience, he avoids scientific jargon. This can be slightly frustrating: He has a wonderful discussion on hypotheses, testing hypotheses, and the problem (temptation?) of using the same data that inspired a hypothesis as a test. Having recently reviewed the appropriate parts of probability, I know exactly what math he's talking about; but the general reader won't. (They may not need it either, of course.)

Recommended

Recently the stand for one of our monitors broke, and even more recently another monitor had the light for the screen fail.

Fortunately, they're the same model, so I just swapped pieces, and now have only one broken monitor instead of two.

(I realize that the monitor mount is standard, and the fact that the two monitors were nominally identical isn't actually necessary.)

President Obama's announcement that he'd make the final decision on the Keystone XL pipeline has had a presumably unintended effect. Getting approval on an alternate pipeline path would take at least another year. The Canadians want to sell their oil; if the US path to selling the oil is tied up by politics, then they'll actively seek to sell the oil to Asian markets instead (via a pipeline to Canada's west coast.)

The odd thing is that this consequence is worse than many of the other possibilities. If Obama had kept quiet, the pipeline would presumably gone forwards, with the result of a lot of construction (20,000 jobs, apparently), and improving our energy security. If he'd announced support, we'd have the same result, but he'd be able to claim some credit. If he'd announced that he'd kill the project, he'd gain favor with green constituents, (while of course giving up the economic benefits). But the in-between choice effectively kills the project, while annoying the Canadian government, and signaling governmental paralysis. There had to have been a better way to handle this.

Rule 34, by Charles Stross

This is a sequel to Halting State, and a pretty good follow-on. It has many of the same properties as the first novel: It's written in second-person (a nod to the presentation for a lot of computer games), follows multiple characters, and involves a lot of near-future police work. Unlike Halting State, the theme isn't computer games, but rather spammers and the sorts of products they push. Other parts have changed somewhat as well: The 2nd-person writing somehow feels less intrusive, and the more subtle aspects of the story matter more: There's a lot going on that doesn't show up directly in the text of the story (reminiscent of his excellent Palimpsest), so the ending requires a fair amount of thought to understand.

Conditionally recommended. If you want more like Halting State, it's a worthy continuation; but not a really good place to start (especially given the subject matter).

We went out with a bunch of the childrens' friends (and associated parents) to see Puss in Boots.

It's sort of a mashup of a bunch of faerie tales, with substantial reinterpretation. It makes about as much sense as the original source material, but the visuals are pretty cool, and the story mostly holds together.
.
Conditionally Recommended: It's about what it sounds like.

I was thinking about MF Global's odd (and unfortunate) repo-to-maturity trade, and concluded that one of the developments is that government bonds are effectively money.

In the not-so-distant past, large banks loaned each other money as loans, but the current trend is to post high-grade bonds as collateral. More formally, it's a sale with an associated repurchase, which mostly works out as a loan, but is much simpler in bankruptcy.

So, in practice, financial entities (banks and so on) can get money for these bonds very easily. So easily, that they effectively are money. (Except when they suddenly aren't, as in Greek bonds.)

In such an environment, a central bank can't effectively increase the money supply by buying government bonds, because as a first approximation, they're just trading money for money. The inflationary effects now mostly happen when the money is borrowed, not when the central bankers buy the debt.

In case anyone else is interested in a step-by-step guide to setting up an Android development environment on a Debian Linux system, here's (minus some typos that I retried), what I did:

First, system-administrator steps, as root:

Install the tools I was missing, and make them the defaults. Having the wrong version of java or keytool make for mysterious errors.

apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre eclipse ant-doc
update-alternatives --config javac
update-alternatives --config java
update-alternatives --config keytool

Install the Android development stuff, from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

cd /usr/local/lib
tar xvfz ~jleonard/android-sdk_r13-linux_x86.tgz

Then set the permissions to something closer to what I'm used to:

find android-sdk-linux_x86/ -nouser -print0 | xargs -0 chown root.staff
find android-sdk-linux_x86/ -print0 | xargs -0 chmod go-w

Then have it update to get the various SDK targets:

cd tools
./android list sdk
./android update sdk

Then a bunch of user steps:

Add relevant stuff to my to PATH; I appended

:/usr/local/lib/android-sdk-linux_x86/tools:/usr/local/lib/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools

Make a directory for Android projects

cd src
mkdir android
cd android

I then scp'd over my keystore from my other computer; but if this were my first install, it'd be

keytool -genkey -v -keystore release.keystore -alias signkey -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 20000

(This also involves picking passwords, and new key ID stuff)

Then, time to generate a project

android create project --target android-13 --path example --package com.slimy.example --activity example
cd example

In AndroidManifset.xml, add an SDK version tag:

 <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="13" />

Also, build.properties needs to know about the signing key, append

key.store=../release.keystore
key.alias=signkey

Building the project is a simple

ant release

To install and test it, connect an Android device, and enable USB debugging

adb install bin/example-release.apk

It's also quite possible to test with a software simulator, but because they're emulating a different instruction set (that's then running bytecodes), it's significantly slower than testing with real hardware.

For a debug version, doing

ant install

will build and install with a debug key.

ant uninstall

can also be useful.

Steps not involved in the process: Writing any code, paying any money. Doing an app that's more than a "Hello, World" obviously involves editing the relevant .java classes, and setting up to distribute through the Android Marketplace involves a $25 registration, which I haven't yet done.

I've just started trying to build apps for Android, and one of the steps is to sign the package.

However, for the keys I've generated myself, I kept getting an error along the lines of:
"keystore load: Invalid keystore format"

The problem turns out to be that there are two different versions of keytool on my Debian system, one from gcj-4.4-jre-headless, and one from sun-java6-bin. Despite substantial similarities, they do not produce compatible output.

Frustrating, but solved now.

I rebooted our home server today, after only 600-some days of uptime. It was probably due anyway, really.

Lands' End is having a sale on swimwear, and the structure of the sale is kind of interesting. Nearly everything has a big discount (65% off or so), and they're pretty clearly trying to sell off all of their inventory. (Apparently their southern-hemisphere seasonal demand isn't enough to justify year-round inventory.)

The interesting part is how they're pruning items from the display: As inventory on an item goes away, it stops showing up in searches. Along the same lines, the sizes and colors available don't list all the possibilities that (presumably) existed pre-sale. The end result (presumably) is that they'll be able to sell off nearly all of their inventory, without making a lot of user-visible changes. (It's a bit odd that a search for bikini tops yields only one result, but this is presumably nearing the end of the sale.

Not quite as big an adaptation as the demand-management computer manufacturers do (free upgrades from components that they're short of), but still pretty cool.

I wanted an Android device, in hopes of eventually doing some software development. Since we were also preparing for a long car trip, it seemed like a good time to get an Android tablet: Tablets for games and movies are very effective at keeping the children entertained on long trips.

After a small amount of research, I concluded that there are three good choices for tablets at present: The iPad 2, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. Since I already have an iPad (albeit 1st generation), and I wanted an Android device, I looked at the differences between the Galaxy and the Transformer. The Transformer is cheaper in the keyboardless form, but its expansion keyboard is significantly more expensive than the Galaxy's keyboard (keyboard+tablet is about the same). After typing on each of them a little bit, I decided that I liked the Transformer's keyboard better. Neither keyboard is really what I want in a keyboard, due to the severe size constraints. If a keyboard has to match a 10" tablet, it's going to be cramped. The Transformer's keyboard does have some other neat features, though: It has two USB ports, a SD card slot, and best of all, extra battery. It attaches/detaches fairly easily, and closes with the tablet as a combination sleep signal/case. Essentially, I picked the Transformer over the Galaxy because I liked how the optional keyboard worked better.

Another feature I'm happy with is the microSD port on the tablet itself. With my iPad, I can't fit all the movies I'd want on it, which is tough because the children can't reliably predict what they'll want to watch. With the Transformer, I can put movies on a microSD card (or cards), and the 16 GB of built-in storage (I didn't go for the 32 GB model) is plenty.

The Android environment has taken a little getting used to, mostly because my tablet experience has been on the iPad. The design philosophy is just different: It has a visible filesystem, and apps are often structured as a stack of screens. The app store model is significantly different as well: Apple is pretty picky about what goes into the app store, tending to enforce a minimum quality level and exclude some kinds of content (is there a Scheme interpreter there?). It also delays patches, which can be annoying. The Android market, in constrast, seems to be much more of a free-for-all. I'll have a better feel for that after a little more exposure.

The system does seem a little bit quirky. For example, the various apps deal differently with the keyboard. Some of them lock in landscape orientation when the keyboard's attached, but one (that I've found so far) remains locked in portrait mode, which is kind of strange. Still, there's a lot to like; I'm not sure whether I'll wind up using my iPad or my Transformer more.

Recommended.

Beth and I took the children to see Legoland and California Adventure earlier this week. It seemed like a good time: Many schools (but not ours) have started, so the parks shouldn't be too crowded. Also, it was Beth's birthday.

Legoland was fun, having pretty much what you'd expect. There's something of a paradox, though: Fundamentally, the most fun Lego-related activity is to build stuff, but we can do that at home. If Legoland was closer, I'd probably get a membership and take the kids occasionally (they did have a good time!), but I don't think we'll be making the trip very often.

California Adventure was sort of strange: It's very much a Disney theme park, only without all the familiar attractions. They were fun, but I found myself wishing we could do some of the more familiar ones. Our family in particular kept running into the height requirements: The big roller-coaster had a 48" minimum, which disappointed Peter. He was (eventually) OK with riding the other coaster, though (There are only 2 in the park). Amber at 40", plus-or-minus, was disappointed several times. She enjoyed the flying ride enough to want to retry, only to be disappointed when they ruled her not-tall-enough the second time around. Similarly, there are some 42"-minimum areas in the wilderness-themed play area, which would have otherwise been ideal for Amber. (I'm mystified why the horizontal climbing wall has that high of a requirement.)

At the end, we watched the "World of Color" show, which was spectacular. It's by far the most impressive thing I've seen done with fountains, even without the other elements. It's strongly reminiscent of Fantasmic, but with more space, and a more suitable park layout. There wasn't particularly much story to it, but we were watching it for the effects anyway.

I'm not sure how often we'll go back: Park-hopper tickets are noticeably more expensive, and if I have to pick one park, it'll be Disneyland. If somehow we did a multi-day visit, park-hoppers would make sense, but the children don't really have the stamina for even a full single day. Amber fell asleep for the World of Color part, and Peter fell asleep while riding on my shoulders on the way back.

Overall, fun, and good to see with friends, but I don't think we'll do the trip the same way again.

At Legoland, I picked up three more of the Lego games: Banana Balance, Pirate Plank, and Minotaurus. (There was a 30% off special on games, and I kind of wanted them anyway.)
We have a few of the other Lego games, and they've been popular with the children, especially the Heroica sets. Most of the games are fairly simple (at least by my standards), as appropriate for the target age ranges. Still, the games do encourage tinkering with the rules, which could add some depth.

In that regard, Pirate Plank is a welcome surprise: The key mechanic is fairly simple: Either add another player's color to the die, or advance the pirates for each square already on the die. Unlike most of the Lego games, the optimal strategy isn't immediately easy to solve for. There's a tension between moving the other pirates early on, and adding markers for later play.

Banana Balance has a physical dexterity aspect to it: If you knock the monkey off the tree, it costs you a banana, and knocking over the tree costs you all your bananas (and ends the game). I anticipate being able to balance the game with rules like "Daddy has to play one-handed".

Recommended (any of them) for the playing-games-with-young-children case, not so much for grown-up play.

Occasionally I see comments about some company hoarding cash, often in a Keynesian context of how much better the economy would be if these companies would just spend everything they could.

But I don't think that's the relevant factor. It's probably more useful to think of it in terms of raising money in the credit markets. Companies don't have particularly smooth cash flows: Some quarters are better than others, and expenses can be quite uneven if they include big-ticket items like land purchases or acquiring other companies.

Many companies can borrow easily, particularly banks and bank-like entities with liquid collateral. But places at the other end of the spectrum (tech companies, for example) can't borrow as easily: the interest rates are higher, and it's harder to borrow at all.

So they do the next best thing: They retain some of their earnings (instead of paying dividends or some such), and invest that in the short-term money markets. In doing so, they buy the finance flexibility of a higher credit rating. Instead of borrowing at the last minute, they sell liquid securities, or just don't roll over short-term loans. So, to a degree, differences in borrowing ability or willingness to move investments around get arbitraged away.

This isn't just limited to companies: China's amassing of huge foreign-currency reserves could just be a workaround for the fact that foreign lenders aren't eager to loan into a less-transparent economy with a local currency.

Beth and I were doing some trading earlier today, and were looking at a stock we might want to own. Usually we do this sort of thing with options: Sell a put contract, so we get the stock if it goes down (and keep some money if it goes up). But it goes ex-dividend soon, which favors a buy-write, but none of the call strike prices were really that appealing.

So we just bought the stock.

(Well, we placed an executable limit order: A market order is bad during a flash-crash or other weird situation.)

Last night Beth & I went out to see Cowboys & Aliens.

The movie is one that depends a lot on your expectations: If you go expecting a mindless action flick, it's really pretty good. But if you expect depth, you'll be disappointed. It did, as promised, have both cowboys and aliens in it.

Recommended.

Tiassa, by Steven Brust

Tiassa is the most recent Vlad Taltos novel, and fits the series nicely. It's a compelling read, and fills in still more details of the Drageran world. Its unexpected element is a section about Khaavren, in the style of The Phoenix Guards. I like both styles, but it's a bit disconcerting to see them together. The two views do provide a fascinatingly more complete picture of Khaavren.

Unlike some of the other recent books in the series, this one is essentially spoiler-free. There are certainly references to major spoilers, but ones that won't necessarily give away the surprises.

Highly recommended.

I recently bought a Wacom Bamboo stylus for use with my iPad, on the theory that for some uses, a stylus is a better input device than a finger.

In actual use, it's a sometimes thing: There are a number of tasks for which I prefer to use fingers (especially if multitouch is relevant), some for which either was is fine, and some (drawing) for which the stylus is definitely better.

It turns out that there are quite a few types of styluses for sale, and from reading reviews, there's a lot of personal preference involved. I picked the Wacom one because, having used some of their tablets, I'm convinced that they know how to make good styluses. Their entry, at about $30, is far from the cheapest choice, but looks to be durable and well-designed for the role. I had somehow expected the tip to feel solid, but it's clearly hollow and deforms easily. That's an advantage, as it winds up giving a nice tactile feedback about contact.

It works with the iPod touch as well, but that usage seems less compelling somehow.

Recommended, though personal preferences will matter a lot.

I was just walking next to Amber, and she was holding my umbrella (uncharacteristically for this date, it's raining).

I'm really not used to looking down at the top of an umbrella.

Doing xkcd in 3D is interesting enough, but the method used is very xkcd: It's the lightly-tuned output of a computer-vision system. Words fail me.

Beth and I were discussing a statistics problem the other day, and it turns out that no one had ever explained to her how to do a multiple-variable linear regression. (Possibly because it doesn't come up all that often.)

So I showed her the derivation and method for solving one, and she got it very quickly. I've grown accustomed to having to work hard explaining math, and it was break to just have someone get something more or less immediately.

A few weeks ago I had a fever, which presented the opportunity to corrlate what I felt like doing with my temperature.

(in Celcius, as the numbers happen to work out that way)

At 37, I feel like doing normal stuff.
At 38, I don't feel like doing anything.
At 39, I feel like lying in bed (sleep optional).

Fortunately, I didn't have the opportunity to take data points outside that range.

I was just working with a student, and they had a probability problem where:

P(A or B) = 1/2, but P(B) = 3/4

This really isn't a context where P(A and not B) is allowed to be -1/4.

Beth and I just played a few games of Dominion, with a card set somewhat inspired by donaithnen's game report. We picked Chapel and Mint to explore the how-to-start question with those, cards, and randomly generated the rest: (After rejecting Witch, Sea Hag and Saboteur as annoying)

Chapel
Pearl Diver
Steward
Loan
Feast
Mint
Vault
Treasury
Market
Minion
(and Platinum/Colony)

We tried a few different starting choices, using "tournament start" (pick 3/4 or 2/5 split, instead of dealing randomly)

Mint/Copper turns out to be a fairly effective start, but in the last game I tried Chapel/Vault, which wound up working really well. I was pretty lucky, though: I drew Chapel, Copper 3xEstate on my 3rd turn (trash it all), and then 5 Copper on my 4th (buy Mint, trash it all). So I wound up with a 4 card deck, which predictably bought Silver, Market, Gold, Platinum on the next 4 turns. That's about as good of a Dominion start as I can imagine.

We'll probably play this set (or a slightly modified set) again: There are a number of interesting decisions to be made.

Iorich, by Steven Brust

Another Vlad novel, one which shows more of what-happens-next. I enjoy reading the books that establish more backstory, but I really do look forward to figuring out how Vlad deals with his current predicament.

The essential problem in this story is that his friend Aliera has been arrested for the capital crime of studying pre-empire sorcery. That's obviously a political move of some sort, and the initially opaque politics are keeping the usual players from helping Aliera as they usually would. Vlad is left with the task of arranging that some measure of justice be done (matching the house of the Iorich, of course), ideally without any of his enemies managing to get him killed.

It's difficult to discuss much more without spoiling other books, and being as late in the sequence as it is, but somehow the book manages to avoid explicitly revealing the spoiler from Orca (that [spoiler] is [spoiler]). So as to avoid saying "spoiler" over and over again, I'll leave it at that.

Highly recommended, but not the book to start the series with.

Barbarians at the Gate, The Fall of RJR Nabisco, by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar

This is yet another economics and history book in my quest to better understand Wall Street. This covers the proposed LBO (leveraged buyout) of RJR Nabisco, the bidding war that followed, with extra background for lots of the key figures involved. As I read the 20th anniversary edition, it also has some discussion of the long-term aftermath, providing perspective beyond what was available when it was coverage of current events.

This is clearly a well-researched book, one in which the authors had talked at length with many of the principals of the story. There are occasional footnotes describing when different people's recollections of events differ. It's also well-written, and has a plot with interesting twists and turns, all the more interesting because it's real history.

One of the surprises for me, especially given the subtitle, was how sympathetic most of the players appear. To be sure, there are character flaws: Management that may not have the best interests of shareholders at heart, bankers that may be overly focused on fees, and so on. But it'd be hard to classify people as "good guys" or "bad guys", which is refreshing.

I now understand the function of an investment banker much better than I did before. In many sorts of deals, immense amounts of money need to be raised, often as an all-or-nothing matter. The role of an investment banker is to know who has money to invest, who needs money, and to put them together in mutually acceptable ways, while taking any residual risk that the deal might have. To make it harder, during the era covered, many of these deals were made in competition with opposing investment bankers. I still doubt that investment banks truly earn all of the money they get, but they serve an essential role.

Highly recommended.

More Money Than God, by Sebastian Mallaby

This is a history of hedge funds, from Alfred Winslow Jones's 1949 introduction of his "Hedged fund" up to the current financial crisis. There's a lot of history there, and a surprising amount of variety. A. W. Jones's original plan was essentially a stock-picking one: Stocks that he thought undervalued, he bought, and he shorted stocks he thought overvalued. To the extent that he was right, this had two benefits: If the whole market moved up or down, the long and short positions more or less canceled out, providing some stability. It also allowed his fund to make money on both sides of a trade: If the shorted stock went down, and the long stock went up, they made money twice as fast as someone who is just picking value stocks.

A number of strategies were based on similar value pricing, but far from all of them. One of the early hedge funds made a lot of money merely by being willing to trade stocks in large volume. Under normal circumstances, a large fund that decides it wants to sell a position has a problem: Trades have market impact, and change the price. If you want to sell more stock than people want to buy, the price will collapse. But a sufficiently well-capitalized trader can make a market in such things, with significant margins.

Strategies related to commodities trading play a significant role as well: Knowing what information hasn't been fully absorbed by the market helps identify real trends, and keeping track of the positions of other traders helps in figuring out when a bubble might pop. One of the hedge fund managers, Paul Tudor Jones II, went farther than that: He often set out to pop bubbles on purpose, to significant financial gain.

The later development of multi-strategy funds added a complication: When a leveraged trader loses money, they sometimes have to sell out of positions to meet margin calls. Unfortunately, that moves prices, possibly leading to more margin calls, etc. (That's the effect that did in Long Term Capital Management.) But when funds are in multiple markets, a surprising move in one market can lead them to sell unrelated securities. If the disturbance is large enough, multiple markets will panic simultaneously, for no fundamental reason. The strangest example of this was the "Quant quake". Shortly before Bear Stearns failed, there was a week where the complicated positions favored by quants started rapidly losing money, presumably because some quant somewhere was selling out of a position. The strange thing being that the effect was largely invisible to ordinary investors (unlike 1987), because it was spreads between securities that were largely affected. This sort of effect is presumably the main reason for "systemically important" and "too big to fail" sorts of talk.

There's a lot more of that kind of information in the book (it's a thick book), all of it highly readable and much of it thought provoking. The final chapter is more or less a defense of hedge funds: They certainly pose risks, but there are significant benefits as well (for example, Farallon's preventing a banking collapse in Indonesia). But more significantly, hedge funds may well be the least risky structure for large scale finance. In the recent crisis, no hedge funds required bailouts, which is conspicuously not true for banks, GSEs, and even some governments.

Highly recommended

Beth's had an iPod touch for a while now, and when the 4th generation (with cameras! and high-res screen!) came out, we both got those. Given my usage habits, I was also tempted by the larger screen of an iPad.

So, after a chance to see my cousin's iPad up close at Thanksgiving, I bought one the day after thanksgiving. The timing turned out to be fortuitous: Both the devices and cases had significant discounts. I wound up getting the cheapest iPad (wifi-only, 16 GB storage), and an Incase case.

It's serving it's intended role as a bigger iPod touch fairly well: As I now have 2 such devices, the children don't fight over them (much). They each get one, at least on those occasions (movies during car trips, etc.) where that makes sense. It's also quite handy as a portable web browser, with the excuse being that I'd use it for that with students.

It turns out that there are a number of differences between the iPod and iPad, some of them kind of bizarre. Some of the apps that are preinstalled on the iPod are absent on the iPad: The weather, stock and calculator apps are missing. The "Music" app is renamed to "iPod", as well. Within some of the apps, the UI has been reworked for the larger screen, which is usually welcome. In general the larger screen just feels bigger: It'll run iPod apps in a smaller rectangle, with the option of running them either at original size, or magnified 2x. Some apps are coded to take proper advantage of the larger screen.

From a usage perspective, some of the change is a simple, if nonobvious, consequence of the device just being bigger and heavier. Things like touching the intended spot on the display is easier, as the spot is bigger. Accelerometer-based games are slightly harder, because it takes more to move a bigger device. The bit which surprised me most is that I use the rotation lock (don't let the screen auto-rotate) a fair amount on the iPad, but almost never on the iPod touch. It's enough heavier that I set it down, and that's a more likely to rotate in a way that I don't want.

The larger battery is a mixed blessing: A full charge lasts noticeably longer than on the iPod, but it's enough hungrier that I more or less need to use the wall-charger that came with it, instead of charging through the computer's USB port. The bigger speaker is nice: The iPad sounds better than the iPod, though it's still clearly limited by size. (I should really get my external speakers set up with it.)

Overall I'm pretty happy with it. Like many pieces of modern electronics, it's mostly a matter of what you'd use it for. Beth wouldn't use one, but mine gets a fair amount of use.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

Somehow I hadn't previously gotten around to reading this classic dystopian novel, and I read it mostly to fill in that hole in my education. That put me in the interesting position of being familiar with lots of references to Brave New World (aside from the usual mainstream references, places like Cyteen and even the Paranoia RPG). So I was finally able to put these references into their proper context.

In terms of story, the narrative isn't all that compelling, but the book isn't fundamentally about the story: It's about a view into a dystopian world, where society is managed for stability and happiness, albeit not in a manner that is particularly appealing to outsiders. The character of the "savage" is presumably introduced to make that point, and it does highlight the elements of that world that really are abhorrent (but which might seem nice at first glance).

The book has clearly aged (it was first published nearly 80 years ago), but probably not in ways that matter. The biology in particular seems implausible, and social norms have changed to limit some of the impact. Promiscuity is much less taboo than it was, for example.

A comparison to 1984 is pretty much inevitable: They're both classic views as to how a government might mismanage society, and at a metaphorical level, they're both warnings that need to be listened too. Neither the drift towards a police state, nor the bread-and-circuses (and more) approach to pacifying a society is a good thing, and both trends demand vigilant opposition.

Recommended: This is at the very least a book that educated citizens should be familiar with, and it's quite readable, too.

Today's xkcd is very cool.

Or maybe I'm just into economics, relativity and quantum electrodynamics.

The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, by Roger Zelazny

This is a 6-volume collection of all of Roger Zelazny's short works. It's therefor a must for any serious Zelazny fan: It's not only a convenient collection of old favorites, but also includes the occasional previously unpublished story. It also includes commentary, footnotes and the other sorts of extras to be expected from an authoritative collection.

I'm not really sure what to say about the collection: Readers of SF will presumably already be familiar with Roger Zelazny, and not need an introduction. Suffice it to say that many of these stories are among my favorites, and I'd have trouble picking one (or even a few) as favorites, as many of them are superb. So I'll mention three memorable stories, not necessarily my absolute favorites:

"For A Breath I Tarry" This story follows the struggles of robots left over after humanity has gone extinct, having deeply misunderstood human intentions.

"This Moment of the Storm" The core of this story is, unusually for Zelazny, not particularly rooted in SF. It's really about the people in a small town overwhelmed by rain & flood, showing humanity both at its best and worst. But alongside that is an interesting study of the effects of slower-than-light travel and cold-sleep. The protagonist has done a fair amount of travel, so while he's biologically 35 or so, he was also good friends with the current mayor's grandfather, on a previous visit. Either the musings on space travel or the storm story would be good, but together they're exquisite.

"Comes Now The Power" I can't think of another short story that emotionally moves me more than this one. It's about a telepath who has lost use of his power, and is probably best read unspoiled.

Highly Recommended (yes, the whole collection)

(Also, thanks to Lynn for letting me know the collection existed: I'm not in the habit of looking for new books from favorite dead authors.)

This evening Beth and I went out to see Toy Story 3. It's certainly a worthy sequel to the previous Toy Story movies, up with the best movies Pixar has made. (Though, on reflection, I still like Incredibles a bit more.)

Oddly, this was the first movie where I had the "favorite toy" reaction that they were probably aiming for in the first place. I played with a Chatter Telephone when I was little, watched my much younger brother play with it, and have watched my children play with it too. (My father repaired it along the way.)

The old favorite characters are as they should be. That is, much as I remember them from the earlier movies, with occasional previously-hidden depths. I'm reluctant to say too much more about it: This is a movie that's better seen without spoilers.

It felt like seeing it in 3D didn't add that much. Or more accurately, the story was compelling enough that I didn't pay much attention to the 3D.

Highly recommended

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis

This is Michael Lewis's take on the recent crisis in the financial and housing markets. There were a few people who saw the crisis coming, and The Big Short centers on their stories. For some reason the people he chronicles are highly unusual characters: That's presumably partially because they're more interesting to describe, but more because anyone willing to bet that Wall Street has collectively lost its mind must be out-of-the-ordinary.

Two examples that particularly stuck in my mind are Cornwall Capital, and also Dr. Mike Burry. Cornwall Capital started out as two guys in a Berkeley garage with $110,000. They wound up with a strategy involving options: Find things that are 10-1 long shots, but priced as if they're 100-1. They were lucky enough to be right three times in a row, giving them enough capital to matter. Dr. Burry was an even less likely investor. As a medical intern, he started blogging about investments in his free time (medical interns essentially don't have free time). At some point he decided to start a hedge fund instead of being a doctor, and did so successfully.

Much of the story details how the securitization ecosystem worked, with all the pieces from the originate-and-sell lenders, the investment banks, the insurers (AIG), the largely-duped rating agencies, and the final buyers of the destined-to-collapse CDOs. There are a number of lessons to be learned there, including that Wall street is neither as efficient or as simple as it looks.

Highly recommended

Priceless, by William Poundstone

This feels very much like Poundstone's other books. He picks an interesting topic, and discusses the topic, its history, and the (usually colorful) characters associated with it. This time, his topic is behavioral economics and related psychological quirks.

There's a pretty standard rational-actor model in economics. The problem is, of course, that people don't match the model, in sometimes striking ways. One of the examples from the book involves an auction for some MBA students. The quirk was that the bidders were asked to write down the last two digits of their social security numbers before the auction. That really shouldn't matter -- but somehow the highest bids came from the 80-99 group, and the lowest bids from the 00-19 group.

There are a lot of similar effects, discussed in some detail. Also discussed are how people take advantage of these quirks: There's a reason that lots of things are priced at $xx.99, and it's not innocent.

Highly Recommended

Bartholomew and the Oobleck, by Dr. Seuss

This is the sequel to The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, in which King Derwin decides that the existing weather is unsuitable, asking his magicians for something new. Bartholomew, now a page boy, has to help with the consequences.

It's not quite as charming as the 500 Hats, but if you've ever wanted more like the 500 hats, this is a worthy sequel.

Recommended