Pull My eFinger

Not-So-Quick Thoughts On The Economy

2011-08-08 22:24:28 GMT

First I want to comment on the S&P downgrade of US bonds. My comment is it does not matter one bit. The rating scale is an arbitrary measure. It doesn't matter if US bonds are rated AAA or CCC. What matters is the quantity of entities that want to buy US bonds. To wit, the real true rating is a function of supply and demand.

What irks me about the downgrading is our politicians wasting their breath arguing about which party is to blame over the downgrading. Firstly, on a long time scale they're both equally to blame for the current craptastic economy. Secondly, the downgrading doesn't matter.

OK, so now on to quantitative easing. We've done it twice recently. At the time they were both described as the economy's panacea. Clearly they were not. But here we go again, it appears that a third round of quantitative easing may be on its way in. Terrible, this idea.

Quantitative easing is a mechanism by which the government may legally steal your wealth. Over a span of many months or years, it results in inflation. Which means that e.g. groceries cost more at the grocery store. Which means that if you convert your savings (be it in the bank, in your 401k, wherever) to goods, you have less wealth. If you have $100 today, you can convert it in to 20 gallons of milk. But next year that same $100 will buy you maybe 18 gallons of milk.

So why does the government even consider quantitative easing? A couple reasons. The most obvious is that it makes debt appear smaller. If you owe $100 on your credit card today, in a few years your salary will adjust for inflation and that $100 will seem like $90. It holds at the national level as well. We sell $100 in bonds to China and guarantee them a 10% return after 3 years... well if inflation is 15% over three years then really we've given them a -5% (negative five percent) return. Which is great for us but bad for China.

(And that's another reason why quantitative easing is bad. It makes your investors unhappy. Eventually investors stop buying bonds. This is what's happening in Greece, Portugal, Italy, et al. these days. In fact, after the second round of quantitative easing China demanded a meeting with President Obama to express their dissatisfaction.)

The second reason why the government likes quantitative easing is because it adds liquidity in to the economy. "Liquidity" is jargon for cash. Which is great. Except the liquidity is given to private banks (all of it!). Not to you. Not to me. To banks. Banks then choose how to distribute the cash. Some of it finds its way to you and me through e.g. home loans. But much of it finds its way to those with connections to the banks, those that can guarantee assistance to banks in their times of need (bailouts).

If the liquidity was directly distributed to the populace, then quantitative easing would be much easier for me to accept. But it's not.

So in short, if all you've got is debt, quantitative easing is great. But if you've been responsible and you've spent only what you must and you've saved the rest, quantitative easing is terrible.

A third point I want to make, and this is very important, is that a falling market can be good for you and me. You have to understand that wealth is relative. If everybody's stock portfolio climbs 10%, well then you haven't really accumulated any new wealth. When you go to buy a house, you'll be competing against people whose portfolios have also climbed 10%, and the cost of the house will accordingly climb by 10%. The only way you can accumulate wealth is when your wealth climbs relative to other people's wealth. If your portfolio declines by 5%, and most other people's portfolios decline 10%, well then your wealth has increased by 5%.

Do not fear a falling stock market. Embrace it. Perfectly healthy economies have, at times, rapidly declining stock markets. It is a necessary function. Big companies, at times, need to crash and burn (stock price go to zero). Small companies will rise from the rubble. The time in the interim period between those two points is worrisome, no doubt. The key is to not prolong the interim period, which unfortunately is what our government has done since 2008.

My Quick Thoughts On The Debt Ceiling Issue

2011-07-30 02:20:00 GMT

One of the consistent topics on my blog is the incompetence of our elected politicians. But this recent episode of "fight over small potatoes with the right hand while raping the country with the left hand" has caused me to rethink my position. Our politicians aren't incompetent. Just the opposite, in fact. They're quite competent.

I've come to think about it this way:

Question: Who are the idiots? Is it the people that are continually re-elected in to political offices, thereby guaranteeing themselves a life of wealth and luxury, or is it the people that continually re-elect them?
Answer: The people that re-elect them.

Who are the idiots? Is it the people that vote in favor of tax increases and bond auctions, or is it the people that pay taxes and ultimately years later pay off the bonds?
Answer: The people that pay.

Who are the idiots? Is it the people that exploit massive tax loopholes for the wealthy, or is the people that allow the loopholes to come in to being and persist?
Answer: The people that allow them.

Question:Who are the idiots? Is it the people who utilize unnecessary social safety nets, or is it the people that potentially have equal access yet don't utilize them to maximum effect?
Answer: The people that don't utilize them.

I'm on the wrong end of the stick on all counts.

(I need to clarify the first of those four. I honestly cannot remember the previous president, senator, representative, or governor for whom I voted that won their election. However, the candidates weren't dependent on my vote and the result of the election was if I had voted in their favor.)

I'll remain an idiot until I act in some way as to e.g. retire my currently-elected politicians, or excuse myself from their representation.

I also want to write about where we should go from here. How do we wiggle our way out of this debt ceiling issue? The obvious answer is in the short term we must temporarily raise the debt ceiling, and in the longer term drastically lower spending on Social Security, Medicare, military, and various other massive government expenditures.

But if I were president for a year, that's not what I'd do. I'd let it burn. I'd allow our country to default. Here's my line of thought, and I do admit my line of thought is a bit self-serving.

I've been working for roughly 10 years, since the year 2000. During that time span, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone from 11,723 (January 1, 2000) to 12,143 (today). That's a gain of 3.6% over 10 years. To put that in context, the DJIA fell today by 0.79%. So, basically 20% of the previous 10 years' gains were wiped out in a single day. That's not to say 0.79% is a massive decline; it's to say a 3.6% gain over 10 years is tiny.

3.6% over the previous 10 years is considerably below the rate of inflation over the same time period (31.1%). Effectively, if you've invested any money in the market over the last 10 years, you would have been better off stashing your money in a savings account. Depending on fees, you may have been better off stashing your money under your mattress! That 3.6% gain over 10 years is my (and your!) 401k.

So here's my conclusion. I've got roughly 20 working years remaining. In those 20 years, I need the country to realize real economic growth. I need the stock market to realize significant gains. If the DJIA must fall to 5000 before it can once again achieve a stable upward flight trajectory, so be it. What I can't have happen is for the market to remain mired in 0.30% year-over-year gain, and for inflation to grow at 3%.

Imagining A Tesseract: An Exercise Of Futility

2011-03-01 00:50:32 GMT

The middle seat on an airplane between two strangers can be the most boring location on the planet. Often times, when in such a position, I find my mind wandering. Some of those times, I try to imagine a tesseract.

What's interesting about that is that the tesseract is a four-dimensional shape. So it's probably impossible to imagine. Probably impossible. (I certainly can't do it.)

What I try to do is first imagine a ho-hum everyday familiar two-dimensional square. Then I "prepare" the square to enter the third dimension by adding five additional squares. I imagine the connections between the edges of the squares. In this first picture I've labeled the edges of the squares so it's easy to visualize the edge connections:

When you connect the edges what you get is a ho-hum everyday familiar three-dimensional cube. Note that when I write "connect the edges" what I really mean is "rotate the edges 90 degrees." Here's the resulting cube:

Then, I "prepare" the cube to enter the fourth dimension by adding seven additional cubes. I imagine the connections between the faces of the cubes. In this picture I've labeled the faces of the cubes with color so it's easy to visualize the face connections:

Now here's the really, really hard part. You need to imagine the like-colors as "connected" -- yellow to yellow, blue to blue, red to red, etc. Think about it for a few seconds before reading ahead...

What your brain will try to do is bend or stretch the cube faces to fit, but that's very wrong. Your brain will want to bend and stretch the cube faces because it's been living in three dimensions for so long, and at this point after so many years it's firmly entrenched in three dimensions.

But, no, do not stretch the faces. Do not bend the faces. What you need to do is "rotate" the faces by 90 degrees.

The question you should be asking is, in what dimension can the faces be rotated 90 degrees? For a square, the answer to that question is: rotate it 90 degrees in the third dimension. For a cube, the answer is: rotate it 90 degrees in the fourth dimension. If you're able to do that, you'll have a picture of a tesseract in your head.

I've never been able to imagine a tesseract. The best I can do is have a vague notion of a face "waiting" for its complementary face. "Waiting" isn't the best word, because that implies chronology of some sort, and chronology (time) plays no part with a tesseract. But there really isn't a good word for it, again because we're too entrenched in three dimensions.

Looking back at the image of the unfolded tesseract (the third image) it has some odd properties. If you could somehow find yourself in the very top cube, and you attempted to exit out the top of the top cube, you would find yourself not outside the tesseract but inside the bottom of the bottom cube. If you attempted to exit out the right side of the top cube, you would find yourself entering the middle of the tesseract. Strange indeed. Such is the nature of the fourth dimension.

If we could somehow build a tesseract in our three-dimensional world, what we would see is the tesseract appear as infinite three-dimensional slices. Such a train of thought makes me think about our familiar three-dimensional world, and how each Planck-length quantum of our existence is but one of those infinite slices (that we all share together, apparently simultaneously). And what we're building one Planck-length quantum at a time is the four-dimensional universe.

We experience three dimensions, but very certainly our existence is of four dimensions (or more). I enjoy thinking about it.

Exoplanet Catalog For Android

2011-02-07 21:20:34 GMT

Frequent readers (reader?) of my blog will notice that I've not posted for a couple months. So what have I been up to?

Well, besides the holidays and the associated vacations, I've been working on my first Android application.

I bought my first Android device (Droid smartphone) about 18 months ago with full intentions of dipping my feet in to the smartphone app writing world. At the time, I knew it would be a challenge. I've never constructed a program with a user interface. I've never written a Java application. So basically, writing an Android app was like learning how to walk and learning how to speak a new language. At the same time.

So, for my first Android application I wanted to do something that would be relatively simple, and yet somewhat useful to a select group of people. I also wanted it to be engaging for myself. I settled on an astronomy application.

The application is titled "Exoplanet Catalog" and it's available for free on the Android App Market. It's been available for about two weeks now. The reception so far has been much better than I anticipated. As of this writing, Exoplanet Catalog has somewhere over 400 active users.

Whenever I tell people about my app, the first question is "what does it do?" What it does is present information about extra solar planets in an intuitive and informative manner. Obviously, Exoplanet Catalog is not for the general public. But for amateur and professional astronomers, it's a useful, engaging app.

Here are a few screen shots.

This is the main window. It's got two selection options. One is an sorted list, and the other is a graph. The sorted list presents a list of all planets sorted by the selected criteria. The graph presents data about all planets in graphical form as per the horizontal/vertical axes selected.

Here's a graph of "discovery year" versus "planet mass." What's interesting about this is our technical ability to detect extra solar planets has enabled a 10² decrease in planet mass over the previous 15 years! This is simply incredible, and wasn't at all apparent to me until I viewed this graph for the first time.

If the user selects a planet from the sorted list (not shown, but you can probably imagine), the details for that planet and parent star are presented.

If you've got an Android device, please download Exoplanet Catalog! Let me know if you've got any suggestions or feature requests. For a while, before moving on to my next app, I'll continue to learn Android programming by adding new features on to Exoplanet Catalog.

More About Extrasolar Planets (Gliese 581g)

2010-10-02 01:02:40 GMT

The recent discovery of Gliese 581g has earned many headlines. More than any other extrasolar planet, for sure. So much that I've been asked twice about it. Which is twice more than I've ever been asked about the topic prior to this week.

So, I'll start off with what is remarkable to me. What I am impressed with is the Gliese 581 system now has six confirmed planets. That is absolutely remarkable! It wasn't so long ago that the sum total of all known extrasolar planets was just six. And now we've got six around one star!

And now I'll write about what I'm not impressed with. Despite all the headlines, it's not at all Earth-like. Applying my model for Earth-like planets:

- 581g's absolute minimum mass (minimum!) is more than 3 times that of Earth.
- 581g's minimum radius is 1.3 times that of Earth, but might also be as high as 2.0 times.
- We're not yet able to measure 581g's surface temperature, nor its atmosphere, nor detect surface water.

Thus at present all we can say is 581g may meet at most one of two criterion required for an Earth-like designation (and probably meets zero of two).

The media seems to have a fascination with the term "goldilocks zone". Meaning the planet revolves around its parent star in an orbit that is neither too close in (too hot) nor too far away (too cold) for liquid water to exist. What I want to say about that is liquid water is not solely a function of temperature. The freezing/boiling point of water is also a function of atmospheric pressure. So the question of liquid water is actually a very complex one, not one that can be summed up with a buzzword.

I think the term "goldilocks zone" should be repurposed as an indicator that we possess the technology required to observe an Earth-like planet. Again, referencing my Earth-like model, for now with current observational technology this means any extrasolar planet in question would need a mass +/- 50% that of Earth's, and a radius +/- 50% that of Earth's. Do those two parameters say anything at all about liquid water? No! For that we'd need to characterize the planet's atmosphere, which is beyond our present-day technological limits.

Another Update On The House (Curtains)

2010-09-20 00:54:44 GMT

Some of the curtains went up today. Here you can see the curtains in the living room:

This was the view about two years ago just after the hard wood floor went in:

You can't tell from the picture, but the curtain rods extend continuously from one end to the other. I repurposed an electrical conduit piping 90 degree elbow as a curtain rod elbow. The conduit had a nice smooth bend to it and joined snugly on to the curtain rods. The curtains pull back nicely over the conduit in to the corner. All it took was some imagination and silver spray paint. In addition, the silver spray paint was also used to paint the conduit to match the rods.

The triangle window will be my next conquest. I have the curtain and the rod for it. I'm not quite sure how to hang it, though. The curtain will of course slide down the rod without some sort of contraption to hold it in place. I'm thinking I'll use a light-weight string to hold the grommets the appropriate distances apart, which can double as draw string to pull the curtain open (similar in function to blinds). Or maybe I'll just leave the triangle window uncovered. Thoughts?

The Last World Cup Post For Four Years, part 2

2010-07-05 23:56:45 GMT

As predicted, the United States defeated Algeria. We did make it a little more dramatic than necessary. Landon Donovan's stoppage time goal won the game at 1-0. As a reward for winning Group C, we were matched up against Ghana in the round of 16.

If you'll recall, we played and lost to Ghana in World Cup 2006. That game ended 2-1. Unfortunately, so did World Cup 2010.

I'll take two items away from World Cup 2010.

1. The United States is right there. So close. We nearly beat Ghana. In fact, the game's tenor felt as if we would beat them. It was close, but in the end we lost. Then Ghana advanced to play Uruguay, and despite what the official score sheet says (Uruguay victory via penalty kicks), Ghana defeated Uruguay to advance to the semi-finals. Maybe in World Cup 2014 we have a slightly better player in a position or two, and we're able to beat the likes of Ghana, and advance to the semi-finals.

2. FIFA (the official world soccer organization) really needs to assist their referees. The referees are doing their best, but the game has become too fast. The referees simply can't make perfect calls for every close play, and in the modern game there are loads of close plays, which means there are an increasing number of wrong calls.

The United States had two goals taken away on wrong calls. And when your aggregate World Cup goal tally is five goals, as is the case for not just the United States but almost all 32 teams, two goals are imperatively important!

The most egregious decision went against England. England scored a goal to even the score at 2-2 versus the Germans. But wait. The goal was not called a goal. Despite crossing the goal line by approximately two feet. How is that possible? Because the game is too fast. While the linesman is busy checking for offside players, the ball crossed the goal line, but then bounced back across the goal line in the other direction.

What should happen is FIFA should introduce technology in to the game. Put a location sensor inside the ball. Have computers track the ball. Computers would know with 100% accuracy if the ball had crossed the goal line. Also, computers would not cause a delay in the game at all. Not even a single second, which I believe is an important points for a game like soccer which has literally non-stop motion.

I'll go a bit engineerish here and point out that if a computer knows the instantaneous location of the ball, it also knows the velocity, acceleration, and direction of the ball.

Acceleration -- meaning the computer can track when the ball is kicked or otherwise passed, which is an important part of the offside rule. (Offensive players must be behind two defensive players at the time of the ball's passing from the passer to the receiving offensive player.)

Direction -- meaning the computer can track if a pass is forward or backwards, which is an important part of the offside rule. (Offensive players are considered not offside if the pass to that offensive player is a backward pass.)

Based on acceleration and direction, we're halfway to defining offside completely within the realm of a computer's brain. All we're lacking is the offensive player's location relative to two leading defensive players, and the referee's discretion that the offensive player was or was not involved in the play.

Location -- if we're to have a computer track player's location for the offside rule, we'll have to redefine the player's location slightly. At present, an offensive player's location is in violation if any part of his/her body is forward of the last bit of the defender's body. So in theory, a long strand of hair could have an offensive player offside. No way a computer can track that. My idea is to redefine this part of the rule as the offensive player's shoes must be behind the defensive player's shoes. And we can put a location sensor in the shoes of each player.

Referee's discretion -- is simple. If the offensive player is in offside violation at the time of the pass, and the pass is forward, and he/she leads too many defenders, then the computer can buzz the referee's earpiece. The referee can then decide if the violating offensive player is involved in the play.

Will all this happen? No way. But if I were in charge of FIFA, it sure would. Soccer purists everywhere would hate me. But at least goals would really be goals, and the fans could trust that the calls were correct. In my opinion, we'd see scoring increase as well.

Probably Not The Last World Cup Post For Four Years

2010-06-22 22:07:01 GMT

Today is the big day for the Americans. Just under nine hours now to match start. We need a win versus Algeria, or a tie and hope for help from the Slovenians in the form of a tie or victory over the English.

Our previous match, versus Slovenia, was ridiculous. We went down 2-0, then came back even at 2-2, and finally scored the apparent match winner putting us up 3-2. But for some reason known only to the referee, the goal was disallowed.

We tied the Slovenians, two goals for each side.

Anyway, I'm hesitant to pick scores for the two big matches tomorrow. I have a feeling we'll pull it off this time, unlike four years ago versus Ghana.

Countdown To World Cup 2010

2010-06-08 23:02:10 GMT

Seems like just yesterday we were counting down to World Cup 2006. Yet here we are a mere two days until World Cup 2010!

As predicted by yours truly (read link above), World Cup 2006 sucked for the US. Not because the US team sucked. But because we were placed in a terribly difficult group, and with a terribly difficult game order:
- We played Czech Republic first, who spanked us. But literal giant Jan Koller was injured and played zero minutes outside the US match, which was an indirect disaster for the US who badly needed Czech Republic to defeat Italy.
- Up next was for the US was Italy. The US tied Italy in a fantastically classic match. Italy then proceeded to win their next five matches for their fourth World Cup title.
- The third game for the US was Ghana. Claudio "Captain America" Reyna went in to retirement at halftime -- but played the second half of the match anyways -- and the US lost.

2010 shapes up much better for the US. This go round we've got just one giant in our group - England. The other two foes are minnows in the forms of Slovenia and Algeria. I will not temper my enthusiasm and I openly predict a US advancement in to the elimination stage.

Round 1:
England 3, USA 2
Algeria 0, Slovenia 0 (I really have no clue.)

Round 2:
Slovenia 0, USA 1
England 3, Algeria 0 (England advance)

Round 3:
Slovenia 1, England 1 (England plays their scrubs.)
Algeria 1, USA 2 (USA advance)

I hope my brother will interject with his touchdown and field goal predictions for each match.

The first round of the elimination stage will most likely have us playing Germany, and I assign us a fair chance to defeat them.

The games this year are played at 4:30am, 7am, and 11:30am Pacific time. Quite nice for me. As was the case in 2006, I can catch one game before work and one game during lunch. The early game will wait on my DVR for my return home from work.

Venus Fly Trap In Full Bloom

2010-05-12 20:53:01 GMT

After a winter flush with juicy flies.