Things That Fell Out of My Head

0. decide the outcome you want, truth be damned
1. get someone else to rationalize it for you
2. tell as few other people as possible about any of it
2a. when you do, pretend you are talking about something else

(repeat steps 0-2 as needed)

Report Offers New Details On Bush Spy Program
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17264468/Unclassified-Report-on-the-PSP

(via NPR news)


P.S. - I wrote that reaction based on skimming the report myself, before I read any commentary such as this: http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/wh_counsel_gonzo_to_doj_when_we_said_we_cared_about.php?ref=m1

I found this briefly fascinating:
http://www.mikearauz.com/2009/04/part-2-spectrum-of-online-friendship.html

There's a lot of human effort out there that goes into making predictions about the immediate directions the numbers will make next, and many bets are placed on same.

Some of these theories are quite popular in their often narrowly-focused and specific niches, and many manual and automatic trades are guided by them.

But technically speaking, the market is made of trades. Other things may (or may not) motivate the trades, but each trade also has an effect on the market in and of itself. In the very short term, I would suspect that short-term formula-based trading has more effects on market direction than other factors do.

Therefore, perhaps what these short-term technical-analysis magic formulas are really analyzing is... each other?

If that's true, then the behavior I would expect is as follows: a "magic theory" produces steady, small net trading profits for an arbitrary (and convincing!) period of time, after which there is a sudden, drastic failure (either a reversal, or chaotic behavior) of the model.

I presume this idea is testable by taking some set of these theories and comparing their predictions over a given, sufficiently large period of historical time.

I'll also jump ahead of myself a bit and predict that the same behavior would apply to any set of metatheories.


Disclaimer: Just playing with ideas out loud, and I do not currently trade in any (real) markets.

[2009-03-13 22:42:28] Lambert Samuel says:
hello? am samuel lambert by the name a branch managing director of a bank here in ghana, do you care to chat on business?the reason am contacting you over this business is because it is meant to be done with a foreigner and rite now i dont have any foreign friend so i decided to see if we can work this out together.

[2009-03-13 22:50:00] Triple Entendre says:
are there many Nigerian "businessmen" in Ghana?

[2009-03-13 22:50:35] Lambert Samuel says:
what do you mean?

[2009-03-13 22:52:54] Triple Entendre says:
The "urgently needing to transfer large sums of money discreetly" market is quite oversaturated. I suggest a career change.

In related news, like many (okay, some) people, I use OS X and various flavors of Microsoft Windows on the same machine at the same time, with all of the applications-or-documents intermingled.[1] This is called "Seamless mode", which is both fitting and somewhat ironic. VMWare has some handy configurations for smoothing out the input differences between the OSes, but for performance reasons I often use VirtualBox, which does not have this luxury. I am a heavy user of the "clipboard", in every OS. Therefore, my poor fingers and brain have to adjust muscle memory to type the proper combinations *depending on which OS happens to belong to the window has the focus*. Lately, the OS X keystrokes have been winning this battle for mindshare.

I am quite pleased with myself for the success of the following AutoHotkey script:
#a::^a
#z::^z
#x::^x
#c::^c
#v::^v

which by sheer brute force of will converts the OS X flavor of select/undo/cut/copy/paste keyboard signals to the Windows flavor, only for them what needs it.


Trip


P.S. - sorry for not hotlinking at all in this post, but you have the Google.


[1] At the moment, I'm also using a separate Windows XP box as a Synergy host, with the OS X laptop as client, to control my external mouse and keyboard across all my machines. That box's display is also showing me another virtual machine, also running Windows XP, but hosted on my Linux server and being shown in a window over the network via RDP. But that's neither here nor there....

I was reading this article http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2009/01/dock-and-windows-7-taskbar.ars

OK, so windows on OS X represent "documents"; windows on Microsoft Windows represent "applications". Both of these metaphors annoy me. I think of them as "those things I want to look at, that the computer is hiding from me."

My attention is a resource to be conserved, and each of these abstractions/metaphors are an extra step between me and whatever it is that I want to get to, and each of them causes a variety of failures between user intention and action. Maybe I need to add another layer of abstraction on top of them.... maybe a QuickSilver plugin for PersonalBrain... or vice versa....

So, earlier today I had the pants startled on me when websurfing across http://www.neilgaiman.com/oracle/ ... I held a question in my mind as directed before shaking the crystal ball: "okay, should I go pick up my prescription from the doctor's office?"
The oracle replied: "Medical supplies are go!"

And indeed they are. I return now triumphant from the festival of the Running of the Errands.

An absurd yet functional answer to the problem of the default OS X mouse acceleration curve being unusable (without having to buy a Microsoft mouse or one of the several available custom OS X mouse driver software replacements):

Run Synergy2 on a Windows XP box with the Mac as the sole client, and poof! Your OS X mouse now feels exactly right.

I'm not going to try to explain it better than that. But I figure the two of you who will read this and go "oh I see what you did there" to this might find it... amusing. :)

excuse me, I believe you have my stapler?

I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't...

I *very* often use the UI pattern of toggling the active window (and my attention) back and forth between two specific apps with repeated use of a specific key combination (Alt-Tab). It's nice to be able to jump back and forth with the same keystroke... but somehow, equally as often, some other app gets in there, and I end up in not the app I expect, and I have to alt-tab-no-not-that-one alt-tab alt-tab alt-tab alt-tab alt-tab-NO dammit alt-tab-tab-shift-tab-shift-tab-tab-tab alt-tab alt-tab-THERE-we-go....


So, my request is this: give me a settable option to ignore and omit any app from the alt-tab "history" if I toggle to an app and immediately back but don't spend more than X milliseconds with it active (which can be a sign that I switched to the wrong app -- so ignore that one).


Bonus request/complaint: Windows Vista does something utterly horrible that makes this even more confusing. Sometimes, you hit alt-tab and switch away from the active window... to no effect. Nothing happens. So you alt-tab back and try it again. Repeat until the other app you are supposedly toggling to decides to actually react to getting the focus. Sometimes this can take as many as three tries. It is *extremely* confusing behavior in a situation where you are expecting it to just work; many people may be experiencing this and not even actively noticing that they just had to repeat the keystrokes to get the app to come up, because they're quite rightly focused on whatever they are actually trying to get done.

P.S. - I'm rambling, but I won't edit this post; I'd probably make it worse if I tried to formalize it.

I knew of John Cage's 4'33" (Four minutes, thirty-three seconds), but I'd never seen it performed.



I am pleased to learn (thanks, Wikipedia!) that there exists a sequel, 0'00", a.k.a. 4'33" No. 2.:

In 1962, Cage wrote 0'00", which is also referred to as 4'33" No. 2. The directions originally consisted of one sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.

The second performance added four new qualifications to the directions: "the performer should allow any interruptions of the action, the action should fulfill an obligation to others, the same action should not be used in more than one performance, and should not be the performance of a musical composition."^*

Logically, if your privacy policy and/or contractual agreement with a financial services company appends the phrase "or as permitted by law" to what would otherwise be reasonable stipulations, why even bother to write all that other stuff, or have a policy at all?

Why not just say "we'll do whatever the frack we want, so long as there's no law against it?"

Can you enter into a valid contract that says one of the parties to it *will* violate some law? What would that even mean? Okay, okay, I'll Google it myself -- no, such contracts are not enforceable. Which makes it all the more absurd to construct a contract that spends many pages listing things they will or won't do, when it also says they may do *anything* that's legally permitted.

I think that "smartphones" are less than three product generations away from becoming a commodity in the way that desktop computers did. In particular I mean that you could pick any one of them and get all or almost all of what you needed done with it, and that you don't necessarily need to buy the next model that comes out, because the one you have does just fine. (For me this did not happen with desktop computers until operating system virtualization and/or emulation became commonplace, and the same may be true for me here).

Palm's announcement of their new phone is interesting: although it was notably delayed in coming, perhaps by too much, it does look like they've been keeping up. The new phone appears to have feature parity with other such phones.

here's a decent place to see a quick summary of Palm's new device:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/09/palm_surprises_with_pre_smartphone_running_new_webos.html

For now the only available color is black. (I doubt that they'll make a bright yellow version.)

EDIT: found a better link to the article

I've set a new benchmark for living, I think: a full week went by before that first time I had to write down a date containing the new year.

I just ran the LJArchive software to update my backup, and I see that I didn't post very much last year! Like hardly at all. To the extent that we play the roles of entertainer and audience, please accept my apologies.

I miss the useful feedback that writing, especially public writing, can bring.

So I'm resolved to do more of it this year. :)

If you feel like you'll be having an account for long enough to make it worthwhile, Livejournal's offering permanent accounts at $175 through the end of the day tomorrow.

1. Have a sudden original or creative idea. ("Angst should be measured in ångströms!")
2. Google it.
3. ???
4. Angst.

I love this kind of dry visual humor, and there's a whole site of them!



I have also admired the ones Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl puts up at very small array.