Author: Tim

Investmenting: up arrow good, down arrow bad.

Last night I went to this investment meeting, where a bunch of people in suits told me about the economy, and why they’re doing a good job. I took a few notes and wanted to share.

Oh, and in reference to the title, the first speaker, in one of his first slides, put up two graphics. One was an up arrow that essentially said “good”, and a down arrow that essentially said “bad”. Are you kidding? What’s your fee percentage, again?

Anyways…

Apparently, the Fed has backed 75% of the banking system. I think they’re really trying to bolster faith for the short term that the problems we’re having will be satisfactorially resolved.

A thought of my own: I know that the government can’t just print money to pad things out. If they do, inflation, or hyper-inflation is the consequence. But, even though market values have dropped wildly, the real tangible values are still there. Companies still have huge amounts of assets, both physical and knowledge. The underlying value of lots of these things are still there, they’re just wildly underpriced. As long as the government doesn’t issue more money than the real underlying value, then we won’t see insane-o inflation. I don’t know if this is true, but something sounds right about it.

They made the point that recovery comes way before the worst of the downturn. For example, the recession of 1973-1974 was already recovering by 1974, but unemployment (one of the big indicators that people look to) didn’t peak until 1975, at 12%.

Because of the tech bubble, as well as the current credit crisis, we are in the worst decade of the past 140 years. Some people are calling it a “lost decade”

An idea of mine, based off something they mentioned: just because the money economy is dropping doesn’t mean invention and scientific progress is stopping. Innovation continues & current progress keeps moving forward. Once the current bullshit stops, there’s going to be a big surge.

2008 inflation: .2% — that’s 2-tenths of a percent. Ridiculously low.

They look at investments with a worst-case mentality. They assume $25/barrel oil for oil companies; worst case unemployment for economically sensitive companies; failure of R&D for biotech companies. Right now they’re looking for cheap stocks that will benefit from high government spending.

Merck is one of the companies they look at. Even though some of their drugs are going off-patent soon, there’s still enough for them to be healthy. Existing drug lines will be able to supply 2/3 of their current market capitalization, even as far out as 2012, year-end. I like this, since it means they can have huge R&D failures, but still be very likely to be a safe bet for the longish term.

Martin Atkin made the point that they don’t do as well when the market does something weird, but that when things go back to normal, they position themselves so that they end up doing better than normal. I think this is interesting because there’s always reports/bitching of investment companies missing very successful black swans. I don’t think that is a real problem. Normally, things are normal. So, most of your strategy should be planning for normalcy. When something crazy happens, it is by definition, unusual. So, since you can’t predict it, you do a bit of planning for worst cases, and handle problems as they arise.

New Pi Day, June 28?

Check it, bitches. Pi is wrong! Since pi is so often used as 2pi, this guy argues that it should be redefined as 6.28! (PDF link). It’s a short read, non

Thanks to Emil Gilliam for the link, and for his very cool looking service, Noted. I’m checking it out as a replacement for Sandy. Ah, Twitter, you sure fucked that one up, didn’t you? Even if you’re going to roll out a replacement, leave it running for the meantime so you don’t lose the momentum!

Voxeo, Tropo, & ORUG

I went out to ORUG tonight. Voxeo was presenting a thing they’re working on, Tropo. Disclosure: they bought us dinner. Full disclosure: I think this thing is really tight.

I used to help set up phone systems in high school, and phone trees have always seemed like kind of a mystery. Tropo lets you build whole phone apps, and it’s ridiculously easy. It’s basically a phone system DSL. They handle text-to-speech, speech-to-text, playing recorded sound files; there’s lots of convenience things for capturing different types of inputs, handling error cases, recording calls, transferring calls, etc. They give local phone numbers in different area codes, they’ve also got Skype integration, and a few other ways to connect to the system. The very cool part is that it’s all free to play around with, but once you start using it for commercial reasons, then you have to pay.

Ever hear of Google’s Grand Central? With this, you could easily make your own. I’ve been playing around with a few things using Tropo’s Ruby setup, and I’ve put the demo code on GitHub. Very cool stuff.

You can write apps in Ruby, PHP, Python, Javascript, and Groovy (“Java++”). There’s a bunch of example code on their site, and development is really easy to do. For example:

answer

digits = $currentCall.callerID.to_s.split('')

area_code = digits[0..2]
city_code = digits[3..5]
subscriber_number = digits[6..9]

# single dashes get spoken as 'dash', use doubles for a pause.
# Double commas don't work, neither do extra spaces
say "-- -- -- S-up. Your phone number is -- #{area_code.join(',')}--#{city_code.join(',')}--#{subscriber_number.join(',')}"

hangup

There is a debugger that you can print messages to. Right now there’s a *ton* of output to it, but you’ll find your messages in there.

One thing: I was getting a message that the caller was “not accepting calls at this time”. I realized this was a parse/compile error in my script. So, if you can’t get something to load, check it. The debugger doesn’t seem really helpful with this, I got a generic seeming Java Exception for a variable name typo. They use Java under the hood for tons of stuff, so even though I’m writing Ruby code, it gets interpreted in Java.

I did learn a cool fact about these phone trees. You know how a lot of phone trees suck when you try and talk to them? Well, for speech-to-text conversion, you can only get around an 80% success rate. The reason is that phones are only around 64kbps of data. There’s too much loss for the algorithms to work well. That’s why apps that run on the local computer/phone are able to do better — they embed part of the recognition algorithm in the client.

And, on a final note: skateboarding through downtown is awesome.

Ignite Orlando

Last night, we had Ignite Orlando. For those of you who don’t know, an Ignite event consists of presentations, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide = 5 minute presentations.

I re-presented some of my AAC09 Oauth talk. It was a lot of fun — the presentation format is cool. Everyone seemed to dig the presentation, the XKCD rip off, and the picture of Angelina Jolie 😀 (You’ll have to see one of my presentations to find out.)

Adam Wiggall was on hand taking pictures, here’s the links:

Stereo effects

Before I got burglarized and subsequently moved, I kept my stereo on a shelf next to my drums. Great for practice.

Since I’ve moved, my drums are stored offsite. Not that bad of a deal, since I can still bring the laptop to listen & practice. So, now my stereo is back in my office. The left and right speakers are now in opposite corners of the room, roughly equal distance from my head. One is at sitting head level, one is higher up.

Why does this matter? I was listening to some music the other day, and noticed it was easier than normal to hear the panning, and the different mixes between left and right. I thought this was interesting, and did some Googling — stereo effect distance speakers — and a page talking about calibrating in anechoic chambers caught my eye. It was such a cool page, I wanted to share it. I realize it’s from a speaker manufacturer, but it still has good info.

It’s an article called “Stereo Effect” by William R. Dudleston. The section called “The Physiology of Localization” was especially interesting. It talks a bit about how our ears are separated by about 6 inches, which is the exact distance required for the waves hitting each ear to be exactly out of sync at the frequency our ears are sensitive to. This makes it really easy for us to hear which direction something is coming from. Then it describes a bit about how the shape of our ears mask different frequencies so that we can get more info than just left and right, but also up and down, and forward/back. Basically, the location and shape of our ears are tuned perfectly for us to hear in 3 dimensions. Not surprising, but the mechanics of the description are great.

After a while, the article starts selling you a bit on their hardware. But until then, it’s a solid read.

Actually, this reminds me of something I read a while ago; I think it came from a THX engineer. Apparently, when they calibrate their theaters and the speakers — yes they calibrate the theater itself — they don’t sit in the very middle of the room. Sitting slightly to the left or right makes a difference in the stereo effect, making it more pronounced. So, when you go to an action movie, sit slightly off-center. The movie may sound better.

How to eat grains

Our digestive system is designed to handle a high-quality omnivorous diet. By high-quality, I mean one that has a high ratio of calories to indigestible material (fiber). Our species is very good at skimming off the highest quality food in nearly any ecological niche. Animals that are accustomed to high-fiber diets, such as cows and gorillas, have much larger, more robust and more fermentative digestive systems.

I’m unclear about this. Fiber is allegedly good for our bodies.  But this article, called “How to eat grains” claims that the greatest health benefits come from semi-fermented fibers. So, things like soaking beans in water actually improve the amount of nutrients that our digestive systems can absorb from them. This is interesting, because in another post on this site, there’s a claim that whole wheat bread may actually be bad.

Based on my reading, discussions and observations, I believe that rice is the least problematic grain, wheat is the worst, and everything else is somewhere in between. If you want to eat grains, it’s best to soak, sprout or ferment them. This activates enzymes that break down most of the toxins. You can soak rice, barley and other grains overnight before cooking them. Sourdough bread is better than normal white bread. Unfermented, unsprouted whole wheat bread may actually be the worst of all. 

Given the numbef of cultures that eat a lot of rice, I might be digging in a bit more frequently. Good thing I like sourdough, too. 😀

Drumsticks for practice

A while ago, I made some practice sticks. They’re basically half-sticks that you can easily carry in a pocket, and use for practice whenever you’re not busy for a few minutes. Helps with practicing your handling, and reduces the amount of time you have to look like an idiot carrying a set of drumsticks through the grocery store.

This isn’t really a “how to make these” post, since they’re pretty simple. Just take a drumstick and saw it in half. Then, sand the ends so they’re smooth. Done.

Practicing drums, or “1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n”

I’ve been practicing the drums more, and I’m starting to have a few breakthroughs.

I’m noticing that a lot of it is about combining limb movements. I got a practice book that talked about “limb independence”, but I think it was leading me down the wrong path. Maybe at higher levels of drumming, I’ll be focusing more on independence, but since I’m still getting started, I think that “limb combination” is actually more important.

I used to look at music and say “okay, so here’s the pattern for the hi-hat, and then here’s the pattern for the snare, and here’s the pattern for the bass drum”. Then, I’d try and play each of them at the same time. This is a great way to drive yourself crazy.

Instead, I’m focusing on counting — the “1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and” beat counting thing. It makes it easier because I know at “1” I have to hit the hi-hat and bass, at the “and” I hit bass only, “2” I hit hi-hat, “and” is nothing, “3” is hi-hat and snare, and so on. So, it’s really like playing a single pattern of combined movements, rather than each limb doing it’s own thing.

After I do this for about 15 minutes or so, just playing and counting a few measures, I start getting that independence developed, but the independence goes away after a while and it’s back to a single pattern of combined movements. Doing the counting really helps keep it on track. I can totally see how this is the basis for a good foundation, however. After a hundred or so hours of this type of practice, I can see how someone could be really solid at picking new stuff up quickly.

One other thing that’s really helping is a piece of software called Guitar Pro. It seems good for learning either guitars, bass, or drums. There are a bunch of sites with tabs to learn from, so it’s a great way to make practice much easier. You not only get what the notes are, but also the rhythm. (Edit: runs on Windows or OSX, thanks Jason)

Also, in searching for info on this, I came across this paper, “A Perceptually Driven Dynamical Model of Rhythmic Limb Movement and Bimanual Coordination“. I have no idea what it means, but it sounds fancy.