Cost of Dollar

Recently, I have been noticing that it is becoming cheaper every year to pay back my US college debt since the dollar is now at some 14-year low compared to both EUR and GBP. So from my college loan perspective it is good that I actually waited a bit.

And then noticed this web site called Cost of War set up out of Boston.

Actually, when you come to think of it, this is only the piece financed through taxation, so this doesn't cover the piece financed by Treasury bonds since apparently the actual cost is around
$2 Trillion.

Now, I wonder what is driving down the dollar? Could it be that you have to buy goods to finance the war in dollars and then whoever is selling you the goods needs to (eventually) sell the dollars again in the FX market?

Interestingly enough, it also turns out that the last time the dollar was this low was when we had the 1992 Gulf War.

I don't see many currency pundits making the link though, so I guess I need to start my own hedge fund soon.

Perfect Repair Systems

What is the source of our aging? Are we similar to inanimate objects around which age via "wear and tear"?

It turns out not. People, like all living things and their cells are self-repairing systems, cars are not. Any molecular biology textbook will describe several repair systems for both DNA and cytoplastic components. Another way of saying this is that cells and people use the energy of the environment (food) for not only movement (as cars do), but also to maintain, with the help of repair systems among
other things, something called cellular homeostasis, or cellular equilibrium roughly speaking. If the repair systems were perfect, which they are not unfortunately, if all the damage and "wear and tear" were repaired perfectly, we could go on living much longer. We are also able to - as anyone could tell you - regenerate parts of our cells in case of wounds. Some lizards can, in fact, generate entire parts of their bodies.

A natural question then arises: "If evolution has developed everything imaginable, why hasn't it developed perfect repair cellular systems?"

To answer the question, consider the following thought experiment. Suppose that several million years ago there was a species of, say, fish that developed a perfect repair systems and as a result couls achieve a lifespan that extended to several hundred or even thousands of years.

If so, why don't we see the species today? Where did it disappear? The answer is that by attaining perfect repair system, the species lost the capacity for mutation and variation and consequently for evolution. It was soon outcompeted by a species which, though mortal on the individual level, carried superior mutations as a species. Evolution presumes variance, selection and mortality. Aging is the cost we pay for evolution and vice versa - extending aging would slow down evolution, and complete immortality the end of evolution.

So if human species developed perfect repair systems, not through evolution, but artificially in a lab (as we have done so much else) would it mean the end of species? Maybe in the long run, say in few thousands years, when we would be outcompeted by apes with superior mutations, but that's not my top concern right now as our clocks are ticking minutes and hours, not in thousands of years.

Why Games Matter: Entropia Universe

The technical term for the next generation web is MMORPG: massively-multi user online role-play games.


Online Real Estate

In virtual realities, such as Entropia Universe in the same
way people invest properties in a distant country. Interestingly, one can do online
marketing there and retrieve PED monetary units (Project Entropia
Dollars) directly with a debit card from real ATM at a convertible exchange
rate, just as you can retrieve money from an ATM abroad.

Furthemore, there are online department stores where you can order stuff to arrive
at your real door steps, as well as online auctions.

The funny thing is that people are not taking it seriously because it's
classified as 'gaming' but I think it will turn out to be much more powerful
than the web/might be the next level of your virtual lives

The only difference with the web is that the experience is much more real
and the graphics are beyond anything you have seen on the web.

Sure, you don't have some of the upsides of our world (taste of wine,
basically all other senses), but also many of the downsides (physical pain,
sickness etc). But given that we process 90% of our information visually the lack of
other senses might not be a big downside for many people.

Some participants opening night clubs, buying land with the ability to tax. One guy is allegedly making off his virtual night club $15,000 a month.


Part of me is not taking it very seriously, and the other part of me is thinking: You can't dismiss virtual reality, just as you cannot dismiss music playing from a CD being inferior to live music. For, if people are enjoying it and willing to pay for it, it is just as real.

Wear and Tear
Moreover, everything in this virtual reality is programmed to depreciate and
wear away, just as the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropia) has programmed much of
our world to depreciate and wear away. Your car breaks down, the apartment
needs repairs. The only difference is that characters in that world called - unlike
in ours - are immortal. Ie, they are the only things programmed not to
depreciate, or die off so ventures in that world are in some way less
dangerous. For instance, it's very hard to die in an online car accident.

Also, it possibly provides a venue to play out business ideas before jumping
into them in the real world. You can see what are the perils/dangers in
investing in real estate or owning a property, you learn how to sell things
to people, how to advertise etc...I think that alone would be beneficial for
many would-be enterpreneurs.

Also, it has the same illusion as all immigrants arriving to a new country, or students starting their first year for that matter: "Here I can start from all over, from the scratch. And I'll work my way up"

Recently, when talking to a woman who is part of this game she confessed why she was attracted to this particular world over many others. She gave two reasons:

(i) This game is not violent, or at least the violence is not the gist of the game as in many others;
(ii) If you screw up, you are not punished severly, you can always try again;

Not sure what you think of this but I have a suspicion it's really going be
the next level of the web and e-commerce. So if you want to be an early
adaptor, check it out. It just requires downloading a special browser and
off you go - there is no joining fee.

When joining, you can design of your character the way you want (for
free) - so if you don't like your real world body, you can choose better
looks in this world. You can make yourself skinnier without spending a
single penny on diets or going through the trouble of exercising. You can
only guess how women in that world look like.

Invisibility Premium

Below is a short explanation why software and financial service firms seem to have outperformed the other industrial sectors over time and might be, on average, better investments than some other sectors.

It is based on the observation that both sectors produce invisible products in the sense that they only produce, store and move information which has no physical shape in itself. With some reflection on the matter, one can convince oneself that the costs associated with storing and moving information are much lower than those associated with storing and moving "real world" objects. For instance, sending an email seems to be much cheaper than sending anything - be it a letter or candies - by mail.

Now, the common sense will also tell us that if a sector has much lower costs compared to others, its profits are bound to be higher in the long run since profits are revenues minus costs.

This is exactly the story that the numbers tell us. To quantify this effect, look at the Price-to-Book (P/B), Price-to-Earnings (P/E), and Net Profit Margins of the financial services companies vis-a-vis to other industries (see References below). Interestingly, Financial Services seem to have the lowest P/B and P/E ratios (indicating that they are relatively undervalued) while also having the highest net profit margins compared to other sectors.

Also, notice that the financial services industry has the highest combined market cap of all sectors (see References below), indicating they have exhibited the highest growth rates over history, for to grow to be the largest, they must have. Mind you that, money and banks as such were relatively late invention in human history compared to some other activities such as agriculture. And if you think banking - the business of trading trust in a standardised manner - is not novel, you must agree that innovations such as financial securities and derivative instruments are little newer than many of the other everyday activities we perform.

The story with software companies is not as clear since they have a higher failure rate and higher sales costs, espcially in the enterprise software market, but they do share one thing in common with financial services firms - they only produce, move and store information, and no physical objects.

What is the significance of this finding? In short, it is that if you invest in the stock market, you are better off holding more rather than less stock in the financial services companies.

But why would people, on average, still prefer to invest more in non-financial - or what can be "brick-and-mortar" - companies despite the relatively low earnings compared to the stock prices of these companies, as indicated by high P/E and P/B ratios? Because such companies produce "visible" products, or "household-name brands", and we are psychologically more inclined to invest in companies that produce things that we see, understand and can easily identify with. Such things include cars, energy, and retail goods that are constantly visible in our everyday experience. In contrast, fewer people understand what, say, investment banks do, nor can a retail investor from the street easily identify with what they "produce". As a result, one could argue the stock price performance of such companies tends to have an "invisibility premium" over time.

References

Yahoo Sector Browser

Pronouncability Arbitrage

Three studies investigated the impact of the psychological principle of fluency -- that people tend to prefer easily processed information -- on short term share price movements. In both a laboratory study and an analysis of naturalistic real world stock market data, fluently named stocks robustly outperformed stocks with disfluent names in the short term. For example, in one study, an initial investment of $1000 yielded a profit of $112 more after one day of trading for a basket of fluently named shares than for a basket of disfluently named shares. These results imply that simple, cognitive approaches to modeling human behavior sometimes outperform more typical, complex alternatives.

The ease of pronouncing the name of a company and its stock ticker symbol influences how well that stock performs in the days immediately after its initial public offering, two Princeton University psychologists have found.

A new study of initial public offerings (IPOs) on two major American stock exchanges shows that people are more likely to purchase newly offered stocks that have easily pronounced names than those that do not, according to Princeton's Adam Alter and Danny Oppenheimer. The effect extends to the ease with which the stock's ticker code, generally a few letters long, can be pronounced -- indicating that, all else being equal, a stock with the symbol BAL should outperform one with the symbol BDL in the first few days of trading.

"This research shows that people take mental shortcuts, even when it comes to their investments, when it would seem that they would want to be most rational," said Oppenheimer, an assistant professor of psychology. "These findings contribute to the notion that psychology has a great deal to contribute to economic theory"

Oppenheimer and Alter, a graduate student in Oppenheimer's lab and the study's lead author, will publish their work in the May 30 issue of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The two researchers were initially looking for a different effect when they stumbled upon the relationship between ease of pronounceability and performance. They asked a group of students to estimate how well a series of fabricated stocks would perform based only on the stocks' names.

"We gave them the list of company names and essentially asked, 'How well do you think the stock would perform?'" Oppenheimer said. "At the time, we were primarily interested in studying whether we could manipulate how people interpret the feeling that information is easy to process. We weren't trying to study markets or companies initially; stocks were just an interesting domain of inquiry."

However, the relationship was very strong -- regardless of Alter and Oppenheimer's attempts to manipulate students' interpretations, the students still believed that the easily pronounceable stocks would perform best.

When they noticed how strongly name pronounceability influenced predictions of performance, the researchers moved beyond the lab and investigated the relationship between the variables in two large US stock markets--the New York Stock Exchange and the American Exchange. The effect held in the real world: the more "fluent" a stock's name or symbol, the more likely the stock was to perform well initially.

"We looked at intervals of a day, a week, six months and a year after IPO," Alter said. "The effect was strongest shortly after IPO. For example, if you started with $1,000 and invested it in companies with the 10 most fluent names, you would earn $333 more than you would have had you invested in the 10 with the least fluent."

Alter said the pair of scientists had been careful to address the possibility that other factors were at play in the study.

"We thought it was possible that larger companies might both adopt more fluent names and attract greater investment than smaller companies," he said. "But the effect held regardless of company size. We also showed that the effect held when we controlled for the influence of industry, country of origin, and other factors."

Oppenheimer cautioned that while the findings might seem highly significant to the investing public, they do not tell the whole story about how a stock might perform after its IPO, nor are they reliable indicators of its performance in the long run.

"Despite the implications of these findings, investors as a group tend to correct themselves in the presence of new information about how the markets operate," he said. "You shouldn't make changes to your stock portfolio based on our findings. The primary contribution of this paper is to add a piece to the jigsaw of understanding how markets operate."

What the findings did offer, Oppenheimer said, was another piece of evidence that markets -- and therefore the large groups of people who invest in them -- are not the rationally-functioning entities that some experts believe them to be.

"This is not the only factor that plays a role in stock performance," he said. "A number of other economic and psychological factors undoubtedly play a role as well. This study does not argue that psychology is more important than economics, but rather that one cannot ignore psychological variables when constructing models of stock performance."

References

Predicting Short-Term Stock Fluctuations by Using Processing Fluency

Surreal Estate

The other day my younger brother called me and said:

- "We should buy a house. Anywhere. The real estate market is going up. It is going and going. And it is going up - ariba, ariba, papah!"

I could picture my brother climbing up on his desk in the middle of the trading floor where he works - overlooking the dramatic Manhattan skyline - and making silent house music movements with his entire body, imititating the elevating flight of an eagle to express his excitement.

I was now getting slightly agitated myself as well, and decided to inquire further.

- "Really, it's going up? How do we know?"
- "People say it is going up"
- "People who?"
- "People, you know"
- "But how do the people know? Is there is a real estate index we can take a look at? Because, you see, when we say that the stock market is going up, we really mean that an index on the market is going up."
- "An index?"
- "Yes, an index is a a complex mathematical formula called the average. You take the stock prices and calculate their average, but you call it an index instead, and now everybody will look at it and talk about it. And they'll say the S&P 500, or the Dow Jones is going up, for instance."
- "Mmh. No, there is no index in real estate market that most people would know of. And I really do not know why. But trust me on this - it's going up anyway"

Why Would it Not?

I hung up, thought about it for a moment, and I could think of at least three reasons why real estate should never go up, and why owning a flat or house is a liability, rather than an asset. Here are the reasons:

1. Life wears away - so does the house we live in. In fact, the real price of the house will depreciate every year since it needs constant repairs

2. The bank wants its money - most houses are bought with mortgages, and you have to pay interest on the mortgage which is what any reasonable person would tell you an extra cost

3. The government wants its money - on any property, you will have to pay property taxes

Given all this, it is hard for me to see how the value of any property would increase, but I guess people know the best

References

Homeowners' Dreams

Precious Nothing

While walking by a Big Bank in new york the other day I could not help noticing a sign on the bank's window: "Come and open a savings account with us!"

I looked at the sign, and asked myself how it is possible that people save money. I realised that in fact i had never seen money. No one has. That is, we have seen some of its carriers - dollar bills, credit cards, travel checks, coins. These physical objects carry money, but are not money itself, if you really think about it.

For, when we send money overseas via moneygram or in any other similar manner, for example, the fact is that something else altogether must move. No bills, no credit cards, no physical objects as such. So money must be that thing that they all have in common, something we cannot see.

Bills that most people consider money, are actual carriers of an abtract, invisible concept the same way a newspaper is the carrier of news, but not the news itself. things that we see are merely metaphors for money, but not the thing itself.

Periodic Table

Later at home, I dug out my high school inorganic chemistry book and checked the Mendelev's periodic table to see if money was there. For if it were really to exist, it should have some physical shape, smell or form. It should also be in a gaseous, liquid or solid state. When i looked at the table, I realised that i had remembered correctly - money was not in the periodic table.

Precious Nothing

So how can we save something that does not have shape, smell, or does not even consist of atoms? Beats me.

I do not know any vessels that could capture something that is not in the periodic table. something that is not liquid, gaseous or solid. But the bank said they have something like that.

Diet Barter

I then asked two of my friends the question 'what is money?', and i got two kinds of answers. The first artist said money is 'diet barter'. an interesting view, but the other answer was even more thoughtful.

Velocity of Trust

It turns out that the true nature of money is that is not bulk concept, but instead it seems to exist only through its velocity. That is, money itself as a storable concept does not exist, but only the idea of exchanging its carrier exists. The person who came up with the word currency knew that. in fact, the very word currency comes from the latin root of the word curire which means to run.

That is, the person who named money or its other variant currency meant that the money only manifests itself only in its velocity, or movement. Other than that, I am afraid it does not exist.

This explains - among many other things - why countries like the united states or finland can run larger and larger current account deficits. indefinitely. That is, we can owe more money for ever as long as we can increase its velocity. More velocity, more money. Because money is velocity - velocity of trust.

Conversely, it also explains why countries with high savings rates cannot grow. Because you cannot capture velocity of something that does not exist, no matter how hard you try.

Trust Velocity

A Differential Equation for Trust

Although it is hard to know what money is - we have only seen its carriers (coins, bills, credit cards) but never money itself - one thing we do know very well is its related concept - interest rate. So

interest - i = time value of money

or in other words

r (risk free rate) + s (credit spread, reverse trust factor) = i = d(M)/dt [first derivative of money with respect to time]

Now, let's say trust u = 1/s, ie, infinite spread -> no trust

and conversely, infinite trust -> zero spread (government)

so rewriting:

r + 1/u = d(m)/dt

Next, let us look at the two possible cases:

1. r = 0 (zero real interest rates)

We now have:

1/u = d(m)/dt

integrating both sides wrs time yields:

M = integral(1/u)

That is, we observe that money is some kind of integral of trust, or 'super' trust. The real essence of money is that it is not a measure of trust, but 'super' trust, like it says on the bill - 'In God We Trust'

2. s = 0 (zero credit spread)

Only some governments have that, or rather it's the rate at which governments lend each other. What's the body in place to directly influence that? The World Bank

In World Bank We Trust

So even if there is no God, we can all rest in peace since there is always the world bank.

Flies on God's Coffee Table

A few years ago Nature - one of the most venerable and prestigious science magazines in the world - asked its readers who are primarily scientists what their attitude towards religion was and to what extent, if any, they believe in something we might call god.

based on the responses, nature then ranked the four main groups of its readers - mathematicians, physicists, chemists and biologists. the ranking was the following, from most religious to least religious:

1. mathematicians
2. physicists
3. chemists
4. biologists

the order is interesting for a couple of reasons. first, it seems to be in the reverse order of the scientists’ proximity to study of life and living things. that is, the closer you see the inner workings of life and the more you work with them every day, the less likely you are to believe in something divine.

but more interestingly, it also seems to reflect the decreasing levels of abstraction in each of the sciences. physics and chemistry were until very recently very descriptive, not highly mathematical sciences. today, they are increasing mathematical to the extent that a few years ago the chemistry nobel prize went to two mathematicians. biology has been the last stronghold of verbosity and descriptive enumeration, but even this science - luckily - is changing.

this prelude aside, it seems to be very hard to explain why some great scientist such as einstein used religious vocabulary in their thinking. Is it not anti-scientific to entertain religious thoughts? is it a sign of clear senility and fear of death that drives them there towards the end of the life?

to answer this question, I often recall a thought experiment put forth by a little-known, but fascinating swedish-finnish philosopher george henrik von wright who was a student of wittgenstein, and succeeded him at cambridge on his chair as a philosophy professor.

the von wright thought experiment went as follows. imagine sitting at a coffee table in paris (or bombay for that matter), conversing with your friend and noticing a fly hovering above your coffee table. it is quite likely that the fly has very limited, if any, understanding of the conversation you and your friend are having. it is also missing several faculties to see and understand the world the way you see and moreover, it is probably completely unaware of your existence, at least the way you experience it.

but what if we are no different from the fly with respect to some other being? what if we are simply flies on god's coffee table so to speak?

this is not to be taken very literally, but simply goes to illustrate that one way to understand consciousness of the world is that there are levels of consciousness in animal kingdom and the levels with less faculties or lower on the evolutionary food chain so to speak, cannot by definition understand levels above them.

wright suggested that it is very arrogant to always assume that you are the last level. it is an instinctive thing to feel, but not necessarily the most logical then. this experiment is the best illustration of an agnostic attitude which - in my humble opinion - is the only attitude a rational person can have towards such questions. that is, rather than negating god (a-theos) we should be admitting that we simply cannot know (a-gnos).

thus, for many scientists the question of religion reduces simply to being humble and admitting one's limits since this is in fact the best attitude for learning, researching and observing things around you. So not only the best but in fact the only attitude towards learning is to put one’s ego aside and assume for a moment that you might not know everything. because if we did why would we need science or any research. or as einstein put it: “If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

parable of train

you see things that are and ask 'why?' i dream of things that never were and ask 'why not?' - g b shaw

closet science lovers

my ex-wife who is as much of a closet science lover as myself, once came up with a wonderful metaphor for our journey as humanity across the endless night of history. the comparison highlighted the various roles that we all play on the stage of history and went roughly as follows.

if civilization were a train that is rushing forward through time, and we got a momentary glimpse of the cross section of the train, we could begin identifying the various people who are on it, or who might have a role in making the train go forward, and that would help us in turn to understand the various roles that people today play in our place and time.

engineers

firstly, we would see a group of serious engineers with clean white shirts and dark pants who designed the train, and the mechanics in blue oily overalls who put the train together in the first place based on the detailed designs of the serious engineers. the work of both groups is very respectable since it is very visible and everybody pays them some respect for a moment, maybe even clap. and then the clappers would return to the obsessions of their own private lives a moment later since the train is built and why dwell on it, right?

coal room

there are also guys working hard in the coal room to make sure that the fuel gets replenished, and while they should also deserve kudos, they usually never hear even a simple thank you, since they are hidden away from most people in the dark belly of the train and it is so much more convenient to pretend that they really do not exist.

brahmines of trust

you also see the bankers with their slick suits, cigars, hennessy glasses and arrogant bravado (if we are not the rulers of the universe, then who is? c'mon!) since they trust train makers (for now) and finance the ride. they unfortunately might have actually most power on the train since they could turn off the money flow immediately and the entire journey show would stop like a paralyzed patient whose circulation has been suddenly cut off.

bean counters and priests of torture

we will most certainly notice some lawyers and accountants who are usually full of pimples and wear kitsch retro style ties whil laboring over the books and contracts so that if things go down - and the lawyers always prefer that scenario since they always get paid better in this particular case, never mind about destroying dreams or project - they can start their hideous process of gestapo-style interrogation and torture with cheap tricks of double talk and intimation which they have been trained since the first year of law school.

we would see the lawyers asking the poor entrepreneur absurd, irrelevant questions. but it is too late - the poor entrepreneu had a dream and and took a risk to borrow money to follow this dream. since lawyers are highly glamorised in our times, they deserve a little closer look.

first, imagine the lawyers now litigating the poor entrprenur who had the crazy idea to start the train ride in the first place but something went amiss. now everyone watching this litigation ceremony of humiliation are pretending sympathy, while deep inside they feel glee that the entrepreneur being litigated failed in his quest. for, it seems to be in our nature to feel satisfaction over other peoples failures since it makes our own little less obvious.

the lawyers are very serious, and they only smiles once when they hears the verdict. they smile with a sight of relief when they hear the confirmation that this poor fellow's life is ruined for good since the bank will be grabbing the house and the wife and kids will be leaving him, and once the house is sold, the lawyers will be finally getting their fee. for them, it is also personal matter since all the lawyers really annoyed that no matter how hard they work, they never seems to make as much money as the entrepreneurs.
parrots of journalism

the entire show is closedly watched by the media, the ultimate parrots of mimicry and repetition. without really understanding what is unraveling in front of them, or what is the meaning of it all, the little bitter journalists are busily typing away, taking pictures and re-telling the story adding their own little gruesome and acerbic remarks. to their defence, the journalists could not possibly understand most of the things that they cover since they lack proper education apart from mediocre writing skills, so best they can do is to already repeat what everyone knows anyway.

and after the show, perhaps only some other entrepreneurs the gates, the dell and the jobs of that train world would seem visibly irritated and the would immediately agree to spend some spare change of one billion dollars so his friends would get through a week or so.

haute cuisine

to continue our observation of the train, we would all agree that we also need the chefs to prepare wonderful meals of your choice as we sit back in the restaurant carts, converse and observe the latest fashions around us, men furtively watching the astonishing-looking waitresses (this is the first class, not the coach, if you wish) who glide from table to table and seem to even walk more beautifully than most women could dance.

both men and women are making mental notes of the market value of the jewelry which is at conspicuous display of consumption on many necks, ears and hands, with slight confusion in their mind why they are spending most of their hard-earned money on metal trinklets. but it must be fine after all, since everyone is doing it.

sirens of mimicry

furthermore, we would see the musicians, artists, writers and actors to entertain us with their dramatic exaggerations and the commentary on this human train condition so that the ride would be bearable. Since can all recognize some traces of ourselves in these actors, and we can all laugh at our absurd situation and feel temporary relief from the slightly uneasy fact that we have no idea where the train is heading.

dreamers

finally, while all this is happening, you can spot one more group of people at the head of the train to tell where the train is going in the first place. they usually are not dressed in any remarkable way but invariably they seem very happy, as in a constant trance, with a slight smile on their face looking out of the window. these are the scientists. they look forward out of the train completely oblivious to the quotidian frolic unraveling behind their backs, completely enthralled by the landscape ahead and reading the signs of the landscape so they would know where to go next.

once in a while, they turn around, with agitated smiles on their faces, and as everybody is quieting down, they try to explain us what they are seeing or thinking waving their hands out of the excitement, and write a brief paper so the future generation would also have a record of their insights which change the world in a very deep and permanent way, usually for infinitely better, and will be studied for centuries to come.

when they deliver their message of the new and the unseen, part of the audience loses interest immediately and return to applying lipstick, admiring their new imitation wrist watches and start speculating whether there is desert and if so, if it is their favorite type. But there are some people who listen to the scientists and those have, will have gotten a glimpse of the future, the exciting unknown.

epilogue

'the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery even if mixed with fear that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man' - alebert einstein, the world as i see it (1931)

gold rush tutorial

i wrote this tutorial to help out a couple of people close to me - it was too painful to watch. given that we have another web gold fever about to explode my friends and family showed up at the gold rush with no shovels.

only four simple rules

1. place your fingers on the keyboard as follows so that each finger has a coverage area assigned to it. no more, no less.

2. look at the screen, not the keyboard - should be obvious but let us re-iterate it for the agnostics.

3. after typing a key, always return the finger to its base position (perhaps most important rule). because if the poor finger did not return to its base, it would be lost and you would have to remove your eyes from the screen to re-direct it to its base position.

4. use the shift key from the opposite hand when reaching out to keys requiring shift, such as the special characters above the numerics

it's show time

now that you know the incredibly complicated proper technique for typing, re-type the following simple sentence 20 times and time yourself:


a quick fox jumped over the lazy cow


the sentence should cover the entire keyboard in its basic form. when you are done with those twenty, give me forty more, and then give me some forty like i did in the military and in prison. and then you are giving me forty more, till your fingers do not know which side is up and you cannot feel them anymore. whoo-haa! be sporty, papah!

time yourself!

do this a couple of hours a day till you see some progress. if there is no progress, do not tell anyone. you are beyond help. but it is not your fault you were born in the wrong century, is it now?

on the othe hand, if you do learn type because of this tutorial, chances are that you keep a fond memory of this tutorial with you till the rest of the of the life.

related


alternative tutorial

bubble index

the people who follow the stock market are the same peoople who follow the weather forecast - john maynard keynes, british economist

if you ever want to compare two investements, all you need to know is the bubble ratio, aka the hype factor, or aka price-to-earning ratio:

bubble ratio = p/e where

p - price
e - earnings per share

that is, it is the number of dollars you have to put up to get one dollar back on your investment

so what?

let us a look at the two examples. at the time of writing this, google has a bubble ratio of about 95 and microsoft of about 23

it has a couple implications including:

1. you invest in google today, you have to wait for 95 years to get your investment back (since for every 95 dollars you put up, you get an expected one dollar back each year). it is a long-time to wait, assuming that you are not from greek mythology (ie, a greek god).

2. today google, for example, is a worse investment than micrsoft

3. the best investments are the companies with low p/e ratios. at least this is what the market thinks. and market is all we know

references

yahoo sector browser

google and erdos

what do the greatest mathematician of the 20th century paul erdos and the google search engine have in common? it turns out that quite a bit, and the way google ranks its searches is based on an age-old concept that we all actually encounter every day - that it is better to be talked about by a few smart people, than to be talked about many by mediocre people - but the genius of the founders of google was in that they applied this concept in a completely new context.

i set out to explore what was behind the dramatic rise of google to the dominance of what at the time seemed an already crowded search engine market in the mid-1990s while making the two stanford graduate student dropouts billionaires overnight. in addition, we learn about the interesting role the fathers of the two founders might have played in the conception of this astonishing search engine, which has profoundly changed the way we work and saved us countless hours of labor.

it is well known that the two of google founders sergey brin and larry page are today billionaires, $12 billion each to be exact at the age of 31 and 32 respectively at the time of the writing this article, and it is also well known that their company is not just a pipe dream since it brings in over $1 billion in real cash every year and adds fundamentally important value to our information society (which in turn justifies the over $80bn valuation of the company).

but what is less talked about is the simple yet elegant concept that Google’s search algorithm is based on and where they got the idea for it. To understand the full story, we need to step back and look at the search engine market in the mid 1990s when Sergey and Larry were sitting in the Gates computer science building at Stanford and were some of the few people who were unhappy with search engines and decided to come up with an elegant solution. It is also the story of Paul Erdos, the legendary Jewish Hungarian mathematician who Time Magazine nominated as the most important person of the 20th century in mathematics (and the vast majority of top mathematicians today would easily agree with this).

search engines before google

The search engine market seemed quite saturated with AltaVista, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft complacently basking in the warm sunlight of the rising dotcom fever. It was completely inconceivable that another search engine could add anything of value on the internet, and most slick venture capitalists from Silicon Valley to New York would tell you that anyone launching such a business would be destined to a miserable failure.

There was only one problem with these engines. The searches were quite poor since the search algorithm was very primitive and simplistic and produced a lot of irrelevant searches. So, in fact, although they said ‘search’ on the web pages, they were no search engines at all. You still had to manually sieve through dozens and often hundreds of results to find what you really needed. The problem was that these engines based their results only on the number of occurrences of the key word either in the text body of the page and in what is known as meta-tags - the hidden part of the web page which is invisible to users, but contains the description that the web page author entered at the time of the creation of the page.

Thus, for instance, when I would enter ‘John Lennon’ into AltaVista most of the top results might have well been messy pages containing absolutely no relevant information on the famous member of “The Beatles”. This was likely since more often than not, the authors of the pages that came up as results were well-meaning fans like Tommy the Teenager from Ohio and Grace the Groupie from the UK who both simply wrote 1000 times “I love John Lennon” on their colorful teenager home pages. In other words, searches were painful and time consuming.

erdos number

Clearly, a completely novel, revolutionary mechanism for making searches relevant was needed, some mechanism that would create a hierarchy or organization on this web of unstructured information. Even though subconsciously many people understood this, it was very hard to make this hierarchy somehow concrete or rigorous. This is where Paul Erdos and an informal prestige ranking system used among mathematicians known as the Erdos Number gave a surprising solution to search problem.

Now let us just make it clear that unless you were a mathematician yourself or deeply embedded into the sub-culture of mathematicians for some reason, it would be very unlikely that you would have even heard of this Erdos number (the only reason the author of this article happens to know about it is because he shared a college dorm room with a young Romanian mathematician who told him about it).

fathers and sons

But interestingly enough, both Sergey and Larry had a very close source in mathematics: it turns out that both of their fathers were mathematics professors so it does not take a leap of imagination to figure out that the fathers were probably very instrumental to making the connection.

Paul Erdos [left] himself was a quaint mathematician who most of his life did not have even an apartment or a wife, but lived out of a plastic bag as a traveling vagabond from one mathematician’s home to another. In return for the hospitality which his mathematician friends offered him, Erdos worked with the mathematicians, posing new theorems and solving old ones. In doing so, he revolutionized modern mathematics, creating most of the body of work of what today is known as number theory, combinatorics and discrete mathematics, branches of mathematics that most of modern computer science is based on.

Because of his prolific output, mathematicians created the Erdos Number as a humorous tribute to the prolific genius which had the following simple idea: Erdos was assigned an Erdos number 0; people who had a chance to work with him and co-author a paper were given an Erdos number of 1; in turn, people who collaborated with the people who had worked with Erdos received an Erdos number of 2, and so forth. Thus, Erdos number became an unofficial ranking and a status symbol in the world of mathematics. Even though Erdos died in 1996, some have estimated that 9 in 10 of the world's active mathematicians today have an Erdos number smaller than 10.

google version of erdos umber: google page rank

The flash of genius on the part of the Google boys, in the opinion of the author, was to transport the idea of the Erdos Number into the world of search engines by observing a very simple analogy. Erdos had number 0 because Erdos was an authorative source in mathematics. Why not define a core set of institutions with authority for each field of human endeavor, such as government institutions, universities, major news papers and so forth, and give their web sites an "Erdos Number" or Google Page Rank of 0? And why not give those sites that the rank 0 sites referred to a rank of 1 and so forth. The actual Page Rank is adjusted for some minor factors but the basic idea is still the Erdos Number, even though it is not explicitly stated in the Stanford paper that Sergey and Larry wrote initially about the Google algorithm.

Lo and behold, overnight the search engine terrain experienced what could only be called an earthquake. Searches by Google were extremely relevant while other search engines languished into oblivion.

google today

I once read a statistic that Google has 33% of the search market but in reality it feels like it is close to 100% since I do not know anyone who would use a search engine other than Google. So will Google's monopoly continue? Are they perhaps a threat to the lion of the high-tech jungle, the omnipotent Microsoft? Perhaps the key is really to model the company itself after the life of Erdos – a constantly evolving prolific repository of new ideas and tools, taking the user to a new levels of productivity and efficiency,while challenging old school ways of looking at the world.

laws of biology

“Study mathematics like a house on fire” - Charles Darwin

“We all stand on the shoulders of giants” - Isaac Newton

The two famous quotes by the founding fathers of biology and physics illustrate clearly the sad state of biology today. The first one was Darwin’s advice to young Francis Galton, a British polymath, geneticist and statistician, who later gave us some very useful statistical concepts such as correlation, but also some terrible ideas such as eugenics.

The second quote is by Isaac Newton refers to the fact that science should not be a circular or lateral journey but rather a cumulative progress so that each scientist would not have to re-invent the scientific toolbox and results each time they start asking new questions and finding answers to them. Instead, we hope to build on the work and discoveries of those who went before us, while also constantly abstracting, refining and reordering of that components of the scientific framework.

But the lack of mathematics and a slow progress are exactly is the characteristics of modern biology and we are trying to understand its implications below.



Biologists at University of Colorado examined a network of 1600 orthologous gene groups (orthologous genes are related by phylogenetic descent) compiled from 38 genomes, comprising 23,400 genes, for genes that are related by being in the same operon. The colors in the picture above reflect abundance. Orthologous groups that occur in two or three evolutionarily distant species are blue, those that occur in 4-7 species are yellow, those that occur in 8-15 species are orange, while those occurring in 16 or more species are red.

Back to High School

Think back to your high school education. You will probably recall that in physics there were something called Newton’s Laws of Mechanics. If you made it to electromagnetism, you will also recall Maxwell’s Laws, and if you made it to your senior year, perhaps you have a vague image of Einstein’s Laws of Relativity and something called Shroedinger’s equation in quantum physics. Similar soul-searching in chemistry will produce the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and a couple of other successful formalizations such the law kinetics and so forth. All these laws have one thing in common – they can be expressed in simple, mathematical expressions and because of their exceptional, crystal brevity will fit on a piece of napkin.

Now think back to your biology studies. You will only find broad observations, but no laws that were described in mathematics. Statements like evolution is a combination of variation and natural selection, or information flows from DNA to proteins and not vice-versa are not laws, but simply observations. Of course, hey are useful, but in a much more limited way when compared to their counterparts in physics and chemistry, not to mention the theorem-proof framework in mathematics.

The state of affairs in biology today is – for the lack of better word - catastrophic in all of its forms, including molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, genomics, proteomics, physiology and bioinformatics, to mention only a few of its innumerable (mostly irrelevant and misguided) sub-branches. There are clearly those who went before us, but for some reason they – perhaps because of excessive excitement over things that unraveled to them or because they missed mathematics classes in high school - never took time to establish a proper highly mathematical scientific framework similar to that created by Newton or Leibniz in physics.

By the way, it should be mentioned up front that the author does not criticize biology and its sub-disciplines from some sort heavily quantitative jock, high-horse attitude. or harbor puerile fascination for esoteric mathematical operator symbols for the sake of it. Nor does he try to flex his mathematical muscles and intimidate biologists who did not study, say, abstract algebra or topology. On the contrary, after completing degree requirements for molecular biology, applied mathematics, and computer science as some would argue (but this is very arguable) at a school that apparently boasts the largest number of Nobel Prize winners in the world that ever studied or taught anywhere (the school is in Boston but I will leave to the reader to guess which of the two), he spent some time in various science departments there, noticed the differences, and sadly concluded that some sciences got it right, and some got it very, very wrong.

Based on what he saw he made up his mind that biology and its graduate programs as they stand today will scare away any intelligent mind having even basic ability for abstraction or clear thought, as opposed to memorization or manual dexterity which seems to be in vogue in modern biology. And so did many of his like-minded friends.

Sadly for biology – and for all of us – those clear minds will probably end up in physics, mathematics, economics (the only social science which has managed to introduce math), or chemistry departments. By the way, many of those minds will be definitely pricing glamorized insurance contracts called derivatives in the financial services sector but that is a topic for a different essay. Let us just say, that this is a very scary thought if we imagine what we would have lost if Einstein or Crick had given in to the temptation of securitizing financial obligations and enjoying merchant yuppie salaries, instead of making fundamental scientific breakthroughs that send tsunamis and earthquakes through their disciplines and took humanities to next century but this is again is a topic for a different essay.

When comparing the genome of two different people, we will see single letter changes called single-nucleotide polymorphisms known as SNPs (pronounced "snips") every few thousand letters. It is in fact these single molecule changes in DNA that make us different. An interesting feature of SNPs is that their ordering has distinct patterns, where sets of consecutive changes are most often found together. There are many methods for looking at this data, so this piece combines several of them into a single visual display.

Biology as Science of YAABA - Yet Another Ad-Hoc Biology Acronym

To be blunt, biology seems to be collapsing under never-ending, diarrhetic data accumulation with almost no sign of abstraction or synthesis. What is worse, the longer we wait, the harder is to find a needle or anything for that matter in the hay stack since this hay stack is now completely out of control and growing to astronomical proportions.

To convince yourself, try browsing through some of the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals today in life sciences such as Nature, Cell and Science. First, you will probably notice that the biology article is many times longer, while at the same time containing less ideas or concepts (if any) than the articles of sister sciences. Also, at a closer look the article resemble at best some sort of strange hybrid between a stream-of-consciousness James Joyce travel journals, Burroughs surreal hallucinatory science fiction, or intentionally ambiguous college freshman humanities papers.

Thus, a typical sentence in a modern biological paper would sound something like the following: “We looked at this, it was green or at least greenish, mixed this and it looked like that. Or maybe not. Who knows, we need to look at again probably. What we saw, we now call it YAABA (Yet Another Ad-Hoc Biology Acronym). For further studies, we need to mix some more acronyms and peek into the microscope. We cannot formulate anything more precise since it is not the manner here, but we have to publish so we threw some stuff out anyway” and so forth.

Such articles make both Mendel and Darwin a couple of hundred years ago seem like real quantitative virtuosos or higher math heavyweights since at least these founding fathers of biology used some form of math like rudimentary additions and subtractions. In contrast, you will be lucky to find even a single rigorous abstraction in modern biology papers, strict and precise formulations which could be then plugged back into the scientific framework so someone else could build on it.

By the way, if you ever showed any of these articles to any of your physicist, chemist or mathematician friends and claimed that these are scientific papers, they would think that either your are pulling some kind of weird joke on them, are heavily medicated or cannot think straight anymore for some other strange reason.

Given that, I am also pretty sure that nobody reads any of the biology articles after the first time they published since who in this time and age has time to plow through this type incoherent, seemingly infinite verbal rambling.

These so-called ‘scientific papers’ remind me in some sense of a highly disturbing music CD that you accidentally accepted from a friend who instead of recording a brief, beautiful piece of melody of five to six minutes, set out to record several hours worth of monotonous, atonal and highly disturbing steel mill noise and who now claims that his recordings are great music (science). Whatever were the reasons of your misguided friend for his strange actions, now even your dog would not listen to this terrible CD. As for you, you would so only under oath, if threatened by gun, Russian mafia, Japanese torture techniques, or something along these lines.

key discoveries in biology made by non-biologists

biologists will not like this but the sad truth is that that many of the most important discoveries of biology in the past century were made actually by non-biologists who took interest in biology. so it seems to me that if it were not for the two physicists who discovered the DNA – Crick and Watson - and the chemist who figured out how to amplify it so it could be actually studied – Mullis – biologists would be still doing what they were doing before that – looking at liquids through a microscope and drawing up shopping lists of things they thought they saw.

I am not trying to imply that biologists would be inherently less intelligent or that this science would attract less intelligent people for some reason (it does repel many intelligent people fond of math as discussed above, however). I can only say that in college I noticed that it does attract many would-be radiologists who consider business and law schools close options to medical school, and treat the entire college career as some sort of bulimic information disorder since the medical profession is designed to teach data retrieval rather than thinking skills. The presence of the conveyer-belt memorize-orgo-go-to-med-school-make-cash types does not really provide for a good learning environment in all biology departments I have seen, but alas, we all have to spend some time with people we find annoying.

Biologists proper, on the other hand, are truly curious about nature and mystified by the unknown but they have a different problem. All biologist or biology graduate students I have met seem to harbor a strange type of artisan masochism which causes them to was pipettes for ours in the labs and invest their time in learning manual skills which will be made useless momentarily by a simple Perkin-Elmer sequencer or other similar machine.

They simply refuse to admit that there are problems and the best they could do is to stop washing pipettes and begin thinking about how to bite the bullet, draw up some decent standards so they could finally make this a proper science and leave behind this eternally entrenched painful nightmare.

sad implications

we should never forget that biology as a study of all living and therefore also our bodies, and such I would argue its discoveries are order of magnitudes more significant than the other sciences. of what value is the inter-stellar travel or better plastics if we drop dead tomorrow, and we all will as it stands now, won’t we? as for space research in particular, i never understood what we are doing in space in the first place since me or anyone i know has gained nothing from it besides science fiction movies. note that i am not saying that we should not pursue space research - these types of arguments are always very dangerous - but only that we should prioritize biology and medical research and take it very, very seriously since it is a little to late to start thinking about when we or our close ones are lying on death bed.

the unfortunate implication of the current gridlock in biology is that the opportunity cost of not straightening things out is invaluable since so many bright minds would not turn away from this intrinsically fascinating science if it had a similar language and framework as other natural sciences do.

Where Do We Go From Here? Or Rather, Where Do We Start?

Biology, biologists and those taking interest in biology – and everybody should since chances are that you, your parents, my parents and I will die of cancer if of nothing else - should start by formalizing a couple of fundamental laws and do that in a mathematical succinct manner, much in the spirit of Newton’s or Maxwell’s laws, or the Laws of Thermodynamics in chemistry. Saying that DNA codes proteins and not the other way around and calling it The Central Dogma is simply not good enough (and even this ‘law’ was formulated by a physicist, Watson). It is a long and painful progress, but at least it is a start and a step in the right direction.

Beyond the linguistic gridlock discussed here, biology has another, deeper problem of focusing on wrong questions, but hopefully that can be fixed with less effort. This more subtle topic will be discussed in a separate article in the future.

references
original article at ego magazine

mirrors of infinity

beyond infinity: cantor's diagonal proof

“a set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One" – george cantor

introduction

this is a quick overview of
cantor’s diagonal proof for all my friends who could not take real analysis in college and had to study social sciences or some other easy classes to prepare for law or business schools. it is also considered to be the mona lisa of mathematical proofs, that is, one of the most beautiful proofs in math of all times.

it illustrates in a profound manner that we can make very precise statements about infinity, and even though the world might infinite and complex, human mind will always understand so long it takes time to think about and build an appropriate image or model of it.

simple infinity and its mirror images

most of us would agree that the set of so-called natural numbers – 1, 2, 3…. – are infinite. moreover, it also seems that we can still count them the way we would anything we see in the natural numbers, for example, the way my younger brother used to count his girl friends before he goth married (though some would be argued this set was not finite and definitely not countable).

indeed mathematicians would say here that the set is countably infinite. most people are happy to accept that, even though we never actually verify that but our mind is convinced at least.

but what does come a bit of a surprise was that the ratios of various integers – the so-called rational numbers – are actually also countably infinite and actually the same size as the set of natural numbers since we can construct a one-to-one mapping or mirror image – or bijection to use the precise mathematical vocabulary - between the two sets.

but can all sets of numbers mapped to this countably infinite set of natural numbers or are there possibly sets that are greater, that are uncountably infinite?

beyond simple infinity: cantor’s diagonal proof

cantor's original proof shows that the interval of all real numbers [0,1] is uncountably infinite. We know that if we can show a one-to-one mapping of these numbers to the set of natural integers, it must be countable. We will just attempt to do that and will discover that [0,1] is actually larger and therefore uncountable, that is, even more infinite in some sense. In fact, it turns out that there are hierarchies of infinity, we can order them. the aleph numbers are a series of numbers used to represent the cardinality (or size) of infinite sets. they are named after the symbol used to denote them, the Hebrew letter aleph. thus, the set of natural numbers is called aleph-null, the set of real numbers aleph-one and so forth.

the proof itself is quite beautiful so i encourage you to follow the argument below, but those who are afraid of math or straining their can skip to the epilogue of this article, or continue to vogue.com to avoid any strenuous thought.

proof

cantor’s proof by contradiction proceeds as follows:

assume (for the sake of argument) that the interval [0,1] is countably infinite.

we may then enumerate all numbers in this interval as a sequence, ( r1, r2, r3, ... )

we already know that each of these numbers may be represented as a decimal expansion.

we arrange the numbers in a list (they do not need to be in order). in the case of numbers with two decimal expansions, like 0.499 ... = 0.500 ..., we pick the one ending in nines. assume, for example, that the decimal expansions of the beginning of the sequence are as follows:

r1 = 0 . 5 1 0 5 1 1 0 ...
r2 = 0 . 4 1 3 2 0 4 3 ...
r3 = 0 . 8 2 4 5 0 2 6 ...
r4 = 0 . 2 3 3 0 1 2 6 ...
r5 = 0 . 4 1 0 7 2 4 6 ...
r6 = 0 . 9 9 3 7 8 3 8 ...
r7 = 0 . 0 1 0 5 1 3 5 ...
...

we shall now construct a real number x in [0,1] by considering the kth digit after the decimal point of the decimal expansion of rk. the digits we will consider are underlined and in bold face, illustrating why this is called the diagonal proof.

r1 = 0 . 5 1 0 5 1 1 0 ...
r2 = 0 . 4 1 3 2 0 4 3 ...
r3 = 0 . 8 2 4 5 0 2 6 ...
r4 = 0 . 2 3 3 0 1 2 6 ...
r5 = 0 . 4 1 0 7 2 4 6 ...
r6 = 0 . 9 9 3 7 8 3 8 ...
r7 = 0 . 0 1 0 5 1 3 5 ...
...


from these digits we define the digits of x as follows.

if the kth digit of rk is 5 then the kth digit of x is 4

if the kth digit of rk is not 5 then the kth digit of x is 5

the number x is clearly a real number (since all decimal expansions represent real numbers) in [0,1]. For the above sequence, for example, we obtain the following decimal expansion:

x = 0 . 4 5 5 5 5 5 4 ...

hence we must have rn = x for some n, since we have assumed that ( r1, r2, r3, ... ) enumerates all real numbers in [0, 1].

however, because of the way we have chosen 4's and 5's as digits in step (6), x differs in the nth decimal place from rn, so x is not in the sequence ( r1, r2, r3, ... ).

this sequence is therefore not an enumeration of the set of all reals in the interval [0,1]. this is a contradiction, which is what was to be shown.

hence the assumption (1) that the interval [0,1] is countably infinite must be false.

epilogue

george cantor is remembered today as a monumental figure in mathematics, the principal author of set theory. since this is now used as the universal language in all parts of mathematics, he can arguably viewed as one of the founding fathers of this discipline.

towards the end of his life he begin writing about literature, attempting to prove that francis bacon was the true author of shakespeare's works, and religion in which he developed his concept of the 'absolute infinite' which he equated with god. he was impoverished during World War I and died in a mental hospital in halle, germany.

solow model

if you are in college studying economics, contemplating a phd programn in economics, ever want to take international development economics, or want to buy and read the british journal the economist, please don't. the following will save you time.

the solow growth model is all you need to know about development economics or any kind of growth economics for that matter, and it goes as follows:

in math:

d2k/dt2 = ck where c < 0 where

k - capital, as measure by GDP
t - time
c - some constant, here less than zero

it says that the acceleration of capital growth (d2k/dt2) is negatively correlated (c < 0) with the level of capital (k)

in english:

countries with low average incomes grow faster than countries high incomes

so what?

it explains - amongh many other things - why afganistan was the fastest growing country last year (28% GDP growth), why china now or the us 50 years ago grew at 9% (all low levels of capital), and why the us, japan and all of western europe have grown at 2% a year for past 20 years

reference

robert solow, nobel prize archive

web etiquette

ten rules while in the matrix

i wrote these mostly for myself but decided to publish them in case someone else might benefit from them as well.

1. publish - push less, be pulled

minimize emailing, it is a clear push. if you are in marketing, forget about email campaigns. instead, read Steve Jurvetson’s and Tim Draper's story on Hotmail and viral marketing. also, remember that Google Page Rank is based on how many people talk about you, not the other way around.

in the real world, emailing many times a day to your friends would be considered posting them hundreds of paper envelopes via postal office each day. if you do not do that in the real world, do not do it in the Matrix either.

2. publish selectively and enhance

if you put the word cell in Google, you will notice that there are over 400 million references to this word while it was only a couple when i studied cell biology in college not too long ago. Perhaps less than hundred links or so can be interesting to even cellular biologists - the other 400 million must be just echoes. imitation is okay – the very fact of learning is imitation – as long as it is followed by novelty.

3. chat less

do not go overboard with chatting on an instant messenger unless (1) you absolutely cannot speak (that would be at work for most people), (2) you are sending a link to web resource which would be hard to do over the phone, (3) you are a building instant messenger software, and are evaluating competitors various power features.

chatting is one-to-one communication, publishing is one-to-many if at least two people read your writing

in real world, excessive chatting amounts to spending three to four hours doing just that - chatting let's say at a cafe as though you were caught in a infinite proussian moment of time, or had the schedule of mediaval nobility – while various people come by, interrupt your work, or your eating lunch.

4. send fewer files via email

publish them and send references, unless they are very private. that is the whole idea of hypertext to begin with as far as i understand it. if you think your files are too private for publishing, then do not send them via email either because if you think email is private, you are kidding yourself. seriously.

5. use other entry points to web

using Google to enter the web each time is equivalent always getting on the same highway regardless of where you are heading. be different, variety is a spice of life. You might learn something by walking through an old part of the town, taking some back roads once in a while, or visiting the internet in other countries. you will be surprised at what you find. i certainly was.

6. learn to type with ten fingers

it still hurts me to see that many people using computers are typing with two fingers which is equivalent to walking fifty miles a day everywhere instead of driving, or showing up to the Gold Rush with no shovel.

if you feel guilty of the crime, i recommend reading the tutorial on typing with all ten fingers

7. dress down

most popular sites on web - or houses in the matrix if you will - are very simple. if you could see real world analogies of Google and Yahoo, they would probably wear jeans and T-Shirt. flash and other flashy technologies are equivalent to dressing your house in haute couture. there is a reason there is one text box and only a few links on Google's home page (apart from the fact that including links on your web page dilutes your page rank).

8. study programming like a house on fire

this is a modified quote from Darwin’s words to young Galton who advised the latter to study mathematics like a house on fire. a shorter version would be "Learn More Java, and Less French". I love French, but things are a bit out of balance now by looking at the number of students going into computer science. the number of computer science major keeps going down while the web and information technology is becoming increasingly more prominent, interesting isn't it? each new generation entering college thinks it's the right thing to do but it is just too hard. and it is. studying computer science at stanford - which as you know produced many hard-core software firms including yahoo and google - is the closest thing you can get to being violated by a division one football team for four years in a row, my brother used to say

french on the other hand, o-la-la, what an exploration of culture, what a delight of poetry. baudelaire, derrida, baudrillard, cannes, christian dior, c'est adorable! who wants to think about compilers when you can kill time and entertain self-referential thoughts in a black purple net somewhere in monmartre with some other friends who have lost touch with reality.

in the real world, a web designer would be an interior decorator, but it takes a little more than that to build cities. The most efficient and most expressive programming language is Java. You can pick your own just us many people learn French and Chinese, too. there is value in knowing other languages, just ask what it is you are trying to accomplish.

9. take a peek at real world

Internet is a mental state, a form of communication and archiving. the real world consists of individuals, other species and the inanimate world.

10. using lowercase is okay

you have probably noticed that i do not use capitalization in my writing. apart from the fact that i admit to the crime of laziness, i think that no capitalization is okay since we use periods, exlamation and question marks to denote the end of sentences so capitalization is a frozen accident like many things in our language and will be soon a thing of the past in my humble opinion. i could be wrong though so do it at your own risk. and i do use capitalization for emphasis in other parts of the writing (where it could not be derived from the context).

why i wrote this:

we all learn the real world rules at very early age when pumping into objects and hurting ourselves. and that is okay, since as Einstein said, people who claim they have never made mistakes, have not tried anything new. since no one gave us advice on how to move around in this new medium, i decided to come up with an initial set of rules to avoid another dot com crash type of events (think children stepping out of the window thinking they could fly).

four dividors

the sky is the limit!

this is what they told me when i first arrived in the promised land. everything seemed possible at the time - the land was limitless, as were the sky and my puerile curiosity.

many years later, i still believe in that. or rather, i actually believe that good things will happen here sooner or later here for people who do not give up. it is an incredibly fair country as far as countries go, the fairest of all the five i have lived in.

it is true, it is not the only place to reach for the sky but it is a pretty good one as far as they go.

the world is flatter now, and thanks to internet we do not have physical distances separating the way they used to separate us and we do not have library walls and borders separating, say, a young kid from a small romanian village from studying biology or mathematics.

but we still have four separators that we all need to work on. one down, four more to go, in any order:

(i) race - enough said, the wounds heel slowly and not being from this country, i cannot claim to understand the historical dynamics of the repetitive, seemingly endless racial debate. i do know, however, that i usually hope to see a person's mind - not their skin color, or the angles in their face - when talking to them, and what i see in most people are beautiful, intelligent thoughts. i feel bad for those who do not have those kinds of thoughts, since there is no skin cure or plastic surgergy for an empty soul


(ii) sexual orientation - the subtle or not-so sublte bigotry for 10% of minorities based on their sexual preferences

(iii) language - the greatest separator in my opinion

(iv) death - this separates me from my grand mother, and three of my friends who the time took away from me in my twenties

life is short, but not so short that each of us could not work on some aspects of all these dividors so they would cause less inhuman pain and suffering that no one deserves. write a book, shoot a movie. give a speech, but do not just go through life in an endless, unconscious motion of imitations as many of us do.

so, i hope that one day you get a chance to work on the timeless and the essential, and will not completely be suffocated under the inescapable, quotidian burden of the inessential and the transient. rush forward like a fearless surfer! call me an idealist, but the goal is nothing less than to scratch the face of the oblivion and the endless night of history itself!

rule of metaphor

metaphor (greek, from metapherein to transfer, from meta- + pherein - to bear
- a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them

prelude

because of a project i have been involved in past few months, i have been spending quite a bit of time rolling up my sleeves and getting down and dirty into computational linguistics and machine translation, or rather as i like to call it, machine-assited translation.

whenever i bring up this topic, people usually ask some or all of the following questions: 'where are the limits of translation? and what is it taking you guys so damn long?' interestingly, answers to all these question lie in the concepts of referentiality and metaphor.

self-referentiality

as it turns out that the more abstract - and thus imore self-referential in some sense i would argue - a body of text is, the easier it is for computer to understand and to translate.

this applies in other areas of human thought as well. for instance, computers have obviously beaten humans is chess and numerical computation, but for some reason we still do not seem to make progress in machine translation

what is going on? are we just complacently waiting and hoping that everybody is switching over to english or is the task simply insurmontable to the great human mind which can discover cures for complex disease and travel in space?

clearly, chess for one is completely a self-referential system with no connection to reality despite some of my grandmaster friends' attempt to argue otherwise. but how is our language different? where do the self-referential aspects of the language that make it translatable and understood by computers end and when does that something else, the intractable begin?

metaphor over machine

perhaps surprisingly, one part of our language that will always beyond reach of computers is metaphor, or any kind of figurative language in general for that matter

to convince yourself, imagine sitting at a cafe with a friend of yours, looking out of the window, noticing a big bus passing by and quipping: 'that slowly-moving, packed bus reminds me of my fat neighbor who also has a top speed of one mile an hour'

chances are that you and your companion understand the metaphor, perhaps even laugh at it, but when you think about it, a computer never will. for it will never have the faculties right there and then to perceive the bus and form the image between the bus and your neighbor.

and even if it had vision, it would run in trouble sooner or later with another metaphor based on the smell of coffee, and so forth. the best it can do is to translate the metaphor word by word, which as you might guess can be a risky business. thus, perhaps surprisingly, it is metaphor in particular and figurative speech in general that defines the limits of machine translation.

on the other hand, we can now also see that a repetitive, abstract and mechanical text such as technical or legal literature should be very easily translated. once you review computational linguistic research, this turns out be exactly the case.

origins of metaphor

metaphor is in fact a very fundamental concept extending even beyond our language. for no creature, however primitive, can survive very long unless it can deal with issues such as: 'is this the kind of situation where I eat this, escape from it, mate with it, look after it, or ignore it?'

since most situations in life do not come with neat labels that say 'eat me!' or 'escape from me!', this implies some kind of pattern recognition, and hence some kind of comparison: 'is this new situation that is emerging just now more like an 'edible' situation, or like a 'dangerous' situation'

for simple organisms, this kind of categorization may be little more than the ability to respond to a few chemical or physical triggers, but more complex organisms can make much 'cleverer' categorisations. for instance, the part of a frog's brain that analyses vision is organised in several layers. One responds to fixed patterns of light and shade – e.g. the fixed features of the frog's pond. Another responds to small, fast-moving, patterns of light and shade – e.g. flies that the frog eats.

another responds to large, slow-moving, patterns – e.g. larger animals that eat frogs. So frogs can 'compare' their views of a situation in terms of these three kinds of analysis specially evolved to meet the frog's key needs. as you go up the evolutionary tree, the pattern-handling gets cleverer and cleverer. another kind of 'comparison' that begins to appear in more complex animals is mimicry - e.g. young animals learn by mimicking older animals

these kinds of pre-human pattern recognition, categorization, comparison, mimicry, and such like are not 'metaphor' or 'analogy' in the human sense. so it is not far-fetched to suggest that human use of metaphor and analogy has evolved from pre-human capacities such as these, much transformed by being mediated through language

there is growing evidence of brain mechanisms specifically concerned with 'mirroring' what others are doing. we do so on in the first grade when the teacher draws the first characters on the white board and most people seem to keep the habit till they die. it has also been called 'keeping up with the jones'. or as oscar wilde put it:

'most people are other people. their thoughts someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions and quotation' - oscar wilde, de profundis

metaphor, oration and power

being able to invoke powerful metaphors has usually been considered a valuable and powerful skill because a language rich in imagery tends to affect people emotionally. this on the other hand has served a clear purpose in both politics and literature. so it is now also clear to me how we could have reagan as president or, for instance, why i like al pacino movies.

to illustrate highly metaphorical language for a moment, take, for example, a poem by the great french poet charles baudelaire below:


even as she walks

even when she walks she seems to dance!
her garments writhe and glisten like long snakes
obedient to the rhythm of the wands
by which a fakir wakens them to grace

like both the desert and the desert sky
insensible to human suffering,
and the ocean's endless labyrinth
she shows her body with indifference

precious minerals from her polished eyes,
and in her strange symbolic nature where
angel and sphinx unite, where diamond,

gold, and steel dissolve into one light,
shines forever, useless as a star,
the sterile woman's icy majesty

charles baudelaire, even as she walks, les fleurs du mal


you probably notice at least a few metaphors, or if you majored in english in college, you will probably uncover a plethora from each stanza

epilogue

as it turns out, even though the potential number of metaphors is limitless, very few of us actually have a poet in us. moreover, since we like to be in the business of imitating each other, it should be fairly easy to come up with at least a basic catalogue of core metaphors. in fact, many people have done just that and captured many of the richness of our metaphorical imagery in idiom and aforism dictionaries. thus, if one ever hopes to facilitate the translation of any kind of human language - including metaphorical - that is where we should look for final answers

"there is nothing in our experience from the world at very small - the quantum world - or from the world at very large - the cosmic distances where relativity theory applies - that would help us to build metaphors for understanding those worlds beyond purely mathematical terms"
- albert einstein, when asked why physicists do not find most results in modern physics rewarding although they are mathematically absolutely correct