09.26.08
Posted in Personal, Polymathy at 9:38 pm by Michael
Now that it’s time to develop workable strategies to institute a university, the trustees of the foundation, who were selected primarily on the basis of their ideas, are showing their worth. The strategy we’re developing is a masterwork. This is by far the most competent group I’ve ever seen – it’s the first time I’ve actually seen “synergy” in action. Thanks, everyone!
Four INTJs, taking on the world for something they believe is Right. The world doesn’t stand a chance 
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Posted in General at 10:52 am by Michael
When there’s a general spirit of panic, the markets tend to fall by punctuated equilibrium. They’ll remain steady over months and then suddenly drop a great deal over a short period of time without warning.
It happened during the depression, and it’s also happening now. The decline has been fairly steady, but there have been days recently where the DJIA dropped 400+ points.
Still nothing on the scale of Black Tuesday. It would have to lose 20% of its value in a single day to exceed that.
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09.25.08
Posted in Ideas, Personal, Philosophy at 9:37 pm by Michael
Half of my success is willingness to see things as they are. The other half is refusal to accept them that way.
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09.24.08
Posted in Ideas, Programming at 2:48 pm by Michael
This is probably obvious to some of you already. For the others, perhaps this is informative and/or neat.
I was tinkering with my cellphone’s Bluetooth connectivity today and found out that you can map serial ports to the phone. Curious, I opened up PuTTY and typed in “ATDT <my phone number>”…
And it began to dial.
Quite a bit of nostalgia… and it technically means you can make fax and data calls out with the phone too. Sort of like having a modem + phone all in one.
Unfortunately, this being 2008 and not 1995, there isn’t much use for that anymore
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09.22.08
Posted in Ideas, Psychology at 3:09 pm by Michael
Here’s an interesting thought:
Why are developmental crises necessary for positive disintegration to occur? Is it intrinsic to the abandonment of stability; of securely-held and long-reinforced beliefs?
In a supportive enough environment, would it be possible to abandon such beliefs and ease into those created on one’s own with little to no conflict? Or must the whole process be fraught with internal anguish?
I wonder…
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09.21.08
Posted in Personal, Philosophy at 7:10 pm by Michael
Mathematics really is a product of intuition: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/science/16angi.html?_r=1
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09.19.08
Posted in Programming at 2:32 pm by Michael
You are not capable of developing a networked application if you do not know what a socket is. Most custom-written server applications DO NOT integrate a web server, and most of us doing the server-side development have no desire to create one for you because you can’t figure out what the connect(), send(), and recv() functions do.
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Posted in Sociology at 7:50 am by Michael
The trend these days is to set up free trade and deregulated capitalism as the cause of our present economic woes. Regulation is important in some contexts, such as in the environmental impact of industrial byproducts, but let me make something clear:
The financial firms are not capitalist.
The premise that makes capitalism work is that something of value is produced and the people who created it are rewarded with capital (i.e., the ability to leverage the value others provide) based on the assessment of that value against that of competing products or services. The best one, in theory, wins.
The financial industry is producing nothing of value. Its primary goal is to acquire more capital by what essentially amounts to arbitrage: purchase an asset when the price is low, sell it when the price increases. The word create does not factor into this at any point; the creation is being done by the companies that they are buying and selling.
Because they have divorced money from its meaning, it is no surprise that it looks all the same to them whether they use their own or someone else’s – so they’ve been using someone else’s and lending to others in turn.
The problem is that when you use someone else’s money, they can come calling at any time… and when you lend someone else yours, you always have to take into account that they may not be able to pay you back. What happened in the financial sector was that everyone had their hands in each other’s pockets and no one had produced any sort of actual value.
So stop calling it capitalism run amok. It isn’t capitalism to begin with.
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09.18.08
Posted in General at 8:18 pm by Michael
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a stock analysis and prediction application called Quantile for a freelance client. It is now finished. The numeric analysis tools are, anyway. Statistical predictors are going to be in v2.0, because teaching has left me too busy to continue work on it at the moment.
This is a bad market to train it on thanks to all of the nonsense going on in the financial industry and rippling through the market, but when/if the market stabilizes (and when I have more time), I am going to begin training it and performing dry runs. It’s a nifty little tool, and if the quantitative trading firms (all of which are foundering in the market right now, which I am getting a kick out of) thought I didn’t have the experience to do this when they contacted me several months ago, they were sadly mistaken. I’ve studied these sorts of algorithms extensively, and the mathematics that they consider difficult do not impress or faze me.
They wanted my work without compensating me for it – but my mind isn’t theirs to control or tap. It is my own, and it is time that people began to realize what that means. It is the asset that will preserve me through any market, for it can never lose its value and it is the source of all the wealth I possess. I could lose it all and build it right back up again, so long as I can think. I can apply this power to anyone I wish – but only in a fair agreement of mutual consent.
This is how capitalism should work. All the financial companies have demonstrated to me recently is how it should not.
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09.15.08
Posted in General at 9:33 pm by Michael
I’ve been playing the space stage of Spore recently and one of my planets, which I had been in the process of terraforming, decided to randomly warm up (even though the planet was “stable”), brining the planet from “T2″ to “T1″, and eventually to “T0″.
This had the effect of causing everything on the planet to go extinct and destroying all but one of the colonies I had placed there.
After the initial frustration subsided, I realized that this could be used as an excellent offensive weapon against heavily fortified enemy homeworlds. One good turn deserved another, and if the game was going to enforce funny physical rules, it had better enforce them consistently.
It was pretty simple: I bought the cloud vacuum, although any persistent terraforming tool would work. I went to an enemy homeworld, invariably a “T3″ planet with 6 or 7 cities.
They attacked me, but my ship was faster. I simply kept flying around their planet and no one could catch me. I probably could not have reduced that planet by military means.
And while they chased me around their planet, I literally sucked the atmosphere out of it. It dropped from T3, to T2, to T1… and when it reached T0, every city but one blew up at once.
This isn’t a strategy if you want to take the planet intact. “Reverse terraforming” a world like that not only destroyed enemy colonies, but also caused all life on the planet to go extinct. Yes, with a cloud vacuum and a little bit of energy, I brought an apocalypse on an enemy world.
Now, I could use the cloud seeder tool to restore the atmosphere (one of the nice things about using one tool to do this is that you only need to use the opposite tool to reverse the effects), but then I’d need to repopulate all of the life on the planet before I could do that.
I thought it was an interesting strategy to use, however. Interesting enough to post about, in any case.
The game isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds. The space stage is probably the most fun (when you’re not fighting entire empires in your one ship or running all over the place trying to prevent your colonies from falling apart on their own), but the rest of the game is an epic fail. As in “supersized creature named fail”.
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