Open Hatch

Improbable Research, a university organization devoted to highlighting the absurd in real-life scientific research and development, is today radio broadcasting their annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony, which awards this farcical prize for the most improbable scientific work of the year.

This short YouTube video from a series the organization assembles is a fine example of some of their hilarious findings.

This is their page about the broadcast today, linking to the NPR listing of local carrier schedules of the broadcast and Science Friday’s web broadcast page.

For my area I’m tuning into KUER-FM 90.1 from noon to 2 for the broadcast.

- trading on the latest recommendation from Stansberry Research’s The Short Report. Another trade recommendation I played appears to be going well so far. It will probably return 150% in a short time.

What that first translates to is that the amount I invested doubled in three days, and I cashed in the trade. And 150% means that other trade will probably triple the investment.

The man who writes The Short Report is Jeff Clark. He called the recent turn from bull to bear market several days before it turned and while it was still a bull market. The trade that returned 100% played on this, using The Direxion Small Cap Triple Bear ETF (NYSE: TZA), which is a fund designed to return triple the inverse of the Russell 2000 Index of small-cap stocks. What this means is that for every move down of the Russel index, the Triple Bear moves up three times as much – and when the Russel moves up, the Triple Bear moves down three times as much.

Every trading day, Mr. Clark finds a trade that will return 1 percent, enters the trade, and then he exits the same day (or in only a few days). If you do that every trading day for a year, you can turn $7,600 into $100,000. Here is the math (Open Office required). He doesn’t post specific recommends on those trades daily – but he does provide a page that details the strategies that lead to his trade decisions. To trade this way – returning 1% each day – this can be learned.

In the specific trade recommendations he does give, he warns his readers exactly what is at stake on every trade. They are option trades, which carry greater loss potential (he recommends investing relatively lower amounts). He also generally places trades only when the potential gain is twice what you could lose.

What I’ve read of his track record seems very solid. What I have personally witnessed of it unquestionably is. This isn’t a guarantee – investing is risk. However, in this case, it is very well calculated risk.

I’ve been overhearing one of the audiobook recordings of A Series of Unfortunate Events, as my wife listens through it with our children, and she paused it and talked to them about it:

They’re laughing at the circus freaks because they think they’re better than them. But is that right? .. No, it isn’t, is it?

And this just got me thinking: We’re all freaks.

Which leads to:

All we like freaks have run away; we have run every one and joined our Circus; …

I’ve been playing through an old favorite of mine, the game EARTHBOUND, with my very young son, reading everything to him (and he likes the game very much). As I’ve been playing I’ve grabbed screen shots of what reminds me why I love the game. This is a gallery of those screen grabs.

What I love about the game:

• It is the story of four children who conquer Giygas, the Cosmic Destroyer.
• Japanese wackiness. As you can see from the gallery, it is full of good-natured, daffy characters.
• It is incredibly musically versatile, prolific, expressive, and in my opinion, beautiful. Here is the track for your home.

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• The ultimate, world-saving weapon in the game is prayer. This is combined with the work of knocking back into their senses anyone or anything that has gone wild or insane (such as a Rowdy Mouse or Insane Cultist). Or, if they are a mortal enemy (such as a lil’ UFO, Spinning Robo, or Starman), destroying them.

I’m posting this awesome tune from a commodore 64 game I never played. But I’m listening to it. This is by the renowned 64 composer Rob Hubbard.

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(Download MP3, ~4.5MB)

From the Financial Post:

If we really want to make future financial storms less severe, we should be doing the opposite of what is happening now. We should remove the safeguards and untie the safety nets. We should abolish bailout plans and deposit insurance, so that banks would be forced to think about what risks they can really bear and how much capital they need to cover those risks. We should deprive the credit-rating agencies of their official role, so that investors would have to think for themselves about where to put their money. We should systematically put an end to the protections and guarantees that government authorities give to investors and savers, to leave room for their own common sense and their own responsibility. Those who do not trust themselves should not go anywhere near the riskiest markets.

No regulation has had as great an effect on the risk-taking of the banking sector than the lifeguard role of central banks (and now finance ministries, as well). This has taught the major financial players to take hair-raising risks in the knowledge that they can privatize any gains and socialize any losses because they are too big to fail. The dilemma, however, is that they would never have grown so big if they had not had that safety net. Present-day capitalism is sometimes attacked for being nothing more than a “casino economy.” But I know of no casino where the head of a central bank and the finance minister accompany customers to the roulette table, kindly offering to cover any losses.

The problem is, we do not have a casino economy. To borrow a metaphor from child rearing, we have a “helicopter economy.” Helicopter parents hover over their kids, preventing them falling and hurting themselves. This means their children never grow up and learn to see dangers for themselves. And for this very reason, such children will eventually fall in more serious and dangerous contexts instead, because risk is part of the human condition. The helicopter economy works in a similar way. The government hovers over the banks and investors, making sure they do not get hurt too badly (and cleaning up any messes they leave behind.) Whenever there is an accident, the benchmark rate is lowered, the central bank extends credit and taxpayers’ money is pumped in. The players never learn to look out for risks; they just continue their reckless behaviour, and sooner or later they will fall off a ledge that they were not watching out for and pull us all down with them.

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell — it loses its ability to motivate humans to be prudent or respect their fears.

If you’re reading this today (10-14-2009) you’ve got about an hour and a half to grab this game campaign I made (while I was at Ninjabee) free – for download to the iPhone. Search for Kaloki Love. Ninjabee’s post about it is here (link). A previous post about this campaign is in my blog here (link).

I was at Buy Low in Provo this evening, looking at toilet paper. I saw what seemed like a good bargain to me, and as I started to grab a package, an old woman driving an automated cart arrived, and held up a package from her cart.

This one’s got a thicker weave, but it’s softer, it’s easier on your buns. You get six in a package for four dollars, and it’ll last you longer.

Ya gotta shop when the right folks are around to help you out.

According to this post at The Daily Crux:

The “Home Affordable Modification Program” (HAMP) has pushed foreclosures farther out in the future. That’ll mean more of them rather than less – exactly the opposite of HAMP’s intent, and exactly the kind of perverted unforeseen outcome you get when the government interferes.

According to housing and mortgage researcher Mark Hanson, the number of homes in the foreclosure pipeline has never been greater. Hanson has been expecting a wave of foreclosures. Now, he’s calling it a tsunami. Just like with a real tsunami, the ocean is swelling as HAMP acts as a foreclosure moratorium.

Three links from that page about ways you can protect yourself (but there is much more a person needs to do than this – savings and investment is only one wealth strategy – it’s better to expand income and budget, insure everything you can etc. first) – 1 – 2 – 3

It’s really too bad they didn’t call the program HEMP..

See my description and the YouTube upload here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (34.0MB)

Only a few months ago, researchers at Yale unveiled the first Electronic Quantum Processor.

It operates on two qubits, which exist in multiple states simultaneously (that’s the quantum mechanical aspect). When they add more qubits, they’ll be able to calculate multiples of multiple states in one processor cycle.

Excerpt:

Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, however, scientists can effectively place qubits in a “superposition” of multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power.

For example, imagine having four phone numbers, including one for a friend, but not knowing which number belonged to that friend. You would typically have to try two to three numbers before you dialed the right one. A quantum processor, on the other hand, can find the right number in only one try.

“Instead of having to place a phone call to one number, then another number, you use quantum mechanics to speed up the process,” Schoelkopf said. “It’s like being able to place one phone call that simultaneously tests all four numbers, but only goes through to the right one.”

What is the potential? Here’s a way to spell it out mathematically, going off Wikipedia’s article on the topic:

A classical computer has a memory made up of bits, where each bit represents either a one or a zero. A quantum computer maintains a sequence of qubits. A single qubit can represent a one, a zero, or, crucially, any quantum superposition of these; moreover, a pair of qubits can be in any quantum superposition of 4 states, and three qubits in any superposition of 8. In general a quantum computer with n qubits can be in an arbitrary superposition of up to 2n different states simultaneously (this compares to a normal computer that can only be in one of these 2n states at any one time).

Where that describes a pair of qubits (two) in a superposition of 4 states, this means the qubits are in 4 different states at the same time. Following this, a trio of qubits (three) are in a superposition of 8, so that it follows the order of exponents or powers, which proceed like this:

• 2 qubits = 2 to the second power (2^2) = superposition of 4 simultaneous states
• 3 qubits = 2 to the third power (2^3) = superposition of 8
• 4 qubits = 2 to the fourth power (2^4) = superposition of 16
• 5 qubits = 2 to the fifth power (2^5) = superposition of 32..

With each additional qubit, the simultaneous states (or superpositions) doubles, so that:

• 8 qubits = 2 to the eighth power (2^8) = superposition of 256..
• 16 qubits = 2 to the sixteenth power (2^16) = superposition of 65,536..
• 32 qubits = 2 to the thirty-second (2^32) = superposition of 4,294,967,296..
• 64 qubits = 2 to the sixty-fourth (2^642) = superposition of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616..

What is that last extremely large number leading with an 18? That’s eighteen quintillion – going from thousands, to millions, to billions, to trillions, to quadrillions, to quintillions. More precisely, almost 18-and-a-half quintillion.

What does this all mean? Current computers operate in Gigahertz, meaning a billion calculations in one second; a computer processor with a speed of 3 Gigahertz runs around 3 billion calculations in one second.

(This is staggering, just by itself.)

When they create a sixty-four qubit quantum computer, it will be capable of running a calculation requiring around 18 and a half quintillion guesses in a few clock cycles (only a few millionths of a second).

Carl Sagan, eat your heart out.

Don’t get too excited yet. They haven’t figured out how to even build a computer around this yet. It’s only a processor.

But it’s a quantum processor. A two-bit quantum-processor, with quantum logic gates and a quantum bus.

With this kind of power, you’ll be able to find the 39-digit number which, when you run it through an image processing algorithm, will by algorithmic decompression happen to exactly match a digital image which without compression takes 1 gigabyte to store, but once you find the one out of 5 duodecillion 39-digit “fingerprint” numbers that match the image, you’ll be able to losslessly “compress” the image to only several hundred bytes. I don’t necessarily know what I’m really talking about here, but it will be something like that.

You live in a Star Trek universe.

One day, possibly in your future, this will look something like this article.

Last night we (my wife and I) watched Season 4 Episode 9, entitled THE HUB, on DVD. This episode in particular was tremendous – but the whole series is.

There has not been one single episode in four seasons that has disappointed me.

My wife came “on board” late – she was updated of goings-on by watching the (funny) “What the frak is going on?” trailer – which you can watch at that link.* She thought the whole show would be trite, based on this trailer – no, the trailer is designed to be funny, but the show has real moral complexity and depth. If you lack time, I’d just watch that trailer and jump in to season 4 – but the show is very much worth watching from season 1.

My only criticism is minor – which is that they overuse the show-invented curse “frak” (hey, guess what that means??!)- where, agreements that loosely comparable military culture may be rich with curses aside -I think invented curses and lingo rarely (if ever) work well in fiction.

Hmm.. two technical complaints. Many of the actors are with The Mumbles – you need closed captions to understand them sometimes. And a dying Cylon prayed, and cried out “Heavenly Father..” (!!) and the closed captions did not transcribe it!

*I regret to advise FireFox users that I have never gotten the video player at that link to work in FireFox – only in Internet Explorer.

Every rare once in a while I get this surprise email from Zazzle saying my product sold. And I think, “Oh yeah, I want to, uh, market those things.”

$7.72 in royalties this year! Folks, we’re raking it in

Clearly, there could be a market (see the comment there) – I just gotta find it and market to it.

I am quite certain I recently spotted this kind of bird sitting in and then launching off a tree at the mouth of Provo Canyon as I drove around the bend of the road heading to that canyon. This was several days ago in the late evening coming home from work. This bird was very large, all black except a white sort of turkey-like neck and head.

I’ve learned this is a surprising or unusual claim, but a google search shows some support for its plausibility.

WEST OF HOUSE

This screen grab is straight from the source. Well. Loaded in an emulator.

What? You don’t know what this is? Put down the x-box controller and look it up!

Every room and scene in this text adventure painted clear, vivid images in my head.

I will paint them. Starting with this.

After I do other things..