derelict, originally uploaded by arcanegazebo.

There's a new section of Riverside Park South that officially opened today. It's on my usual running route, but has been fenced off, so I was pleased to see on Saturday that the fences had been taken down. In fact, it was open to pedestrians over the weekend even though it wasn't quite finished (they were doing some final landscaping yesterday morning). I was inspired to walk up the Hudson and take a few pictures, finishing up at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. I didn't actually take any pictures of the new park section itself, and concentrated more on the river.

(As an aside: I promise this blog will get less NYC-centric in the future! Most of my attention lately has been divided between exploring the city and starting my new job--and I can't blog about the latter, hence the focus on the city. But as I get more settled in I will have other topics to write about.)

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Still, it's a little silly. Of all the ways New York can kill you, falling windowpanes are in the same category as giant monster attacks: sure, they seem scary, but the chances of actually being killed by one are low. In the latest instance (of falling glass, not monsters), no one was hurt despite the window falling in Times Square, on Sunday afternoon. Really, walking under construction sites is much less dangerous than, say, crossing the street, where the cabs will speed up to encourage you to move out of their way. (This is one of the more realistic aspects of Grand Theft Auto IV.)

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(Mason Porter on Aug 19, 2008 4:59 AM) Cabs and other cars too... I'm torn between using "Walking on Broken Glass" and "Heart of Glass" for the new theme song to accompany walking in NYC. I'll have to go with the latter, as Blondie are actually from that city.

(Lemming on Aug 19, 2008 10:09 AM) When I first read the title of the post, of course I was assuming it was an electric billboard BSOD.

(Arcane Gazebo on Aug 19, 2008 4:54 PM) Lemming: Indeed, the pun was intentional--and I've already seen that happen, albeit outside of Times Square proper (but only just).

1231 ft., originally uploaded by arcanegazebo.

No pictures of New York City this week since I spent the weekend in New Hampshire... but I do have a few pictures of New Hampshire, here.

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(Mason on Aug 5, 2008 1:49 AM) New Hampshire is an element of the set of states I've never visited. P.S. I appreciate not dumping the entirety of one's camera contents onto Flickr, but I also appreciate laziness and the fact that many people wouldn't share their photos at all if they had to cull them first.

(Arcane Gazebo on Aug 5, 2008 5:23 AM) Laziness runs both ways--I'm much less likely to click through an update if it's 200 photos, of which approximately every five are identical.

(Mason Porter on Aug 5, 2008 9:21 AM) Yes, but would you rather have people just not share their photos? It's nice for people to share their photos, so I don't want to be too picky about how they do it. It's certainly fine to vote with one's feet and not see them if there's too much noise. In practice, it seems that for most people the choice is core-dumped photos or no photos, and as long as they're not e-mailing me the lot of them, I'll choose the former (and I can either sift through them or not). Anyway, I just think you're expecting too much. (Likewise, they're expecting too much if they think most people are going to go through a bunch of noise.)

(Arcane Gazebo on Aug 5, 2008 3:32 PM) I think you're setting up a false dilemma. Even a token effort to take out duplicate pictures would be better than spamming my Flickr contacts feed with everything, and it wouldn't take very much time or energy. The various Flickr uploader tools make it very easy to drag and drop selections from Picasa or iPhoto or whatever; all you need to do is skim through the set once and drag the good stuff over. If someone doesn't do this, what they are saying to me is that they don't think their photos are worth looking at, since they themselves didn't bother to do it. Besides, it makes you look like a better photographer if you only upload your best photos. (Actually, scratch the "look like": post-shoot photo selection is as much a part of the creative process as selection of lighting or composition.)

(Katie on Aug 5, 2008 7:09 PM) Nice photos. As for the unidentified man, he is the one who came up to us and announced that Nick and Abe must be computer programmers.

bridge waterfall, originally uploaded by arcanegazebo.

There's a public art piece on display here in New York City in which artificial waterfalls have been constructed at four points along the East River, including one on the Brooklyn Bridge. On Sunday I dropped by the area and took some pictures. My favorites are here. (Best views were of the bridge and Pier 35 waterfalls; I didn't get very close to the other two.)

Also, the sidebar now shows the latest photo in the New York City photoset, rather than the Project 365 photoset. I considered just pointing it to the main photostream but I felt some thematic consistency would be good. I'm hoping to post to this set frequently (ideally once per week) but I won't be enforcing an update schedule like I did with Project 365.

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• Given that all these photos are basically the same, do they actually go to the floor and take new ones each time or just post from a collection of stock photos?
  
• And isn't it likely that floor traders always look like this, not just when something newsworthy happens?
  
• What will the journalists do when the exchange floor closes entirely as a result of the shift towards electronic trading? (Probably just keep using the stock photos.)
  
• If only there were a more informative graphic they could fill the space with... if there were an "index" reflecting recent market movement that could be plotted as a function of time. Someone should invent something like that.
  
• Instead of complaining about lame photos in the NYT, shouldn't I just subscribe to the Wall Street Journal like everyone else in the industry?
  
• Or has Rupert Murdoch already turned it into the financial equivalent of the New York Post or Fox News?

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(Andy on Jul 14, 2008 6:19 PM) Actually, you should subscribe to the Financial Times.

(Kaleberg on Jul 14, 2008 8:44 PM) I remember visiting the NYSE a number of times when the visitors' gallery was still open. You could toss a note to one of the traders on the floor. If I remember correctly, particular trades took place at particular stations. Parts of the floor were pretty quiet, but here and there clusters of traders, often centered around a specialist were frantic. In contrast, the bond trading annex was a mausoleum reflecting the relative lack of liquidity in corporate bonds. It wouldn't be too hard to build a map of the trading floor, either based on the existing trading layout, or just making up a thematic layout. Then, you could track the ticker and have little avatars or SIMs clustering around areas of higher volume. You might even have some indicator for upticks against downticks. I suppose such a chart might even be useful if you had the stations reflect industry sectors, or perhaps market eigenvectors if you wanted to generalize. As for the Wall Street Journal, it is changing, as judged by the online edition. It is still fairly useful, and its market coverage is still good, but it is accruing more and more lifestyle stuff and related fluff. The editorial section is almost hilariously, or perhaps pathetically, out of touch with reality. Do they even read their own paper? The FT is probably a better choice. Yes, I think it is a good idea to be concerned with lame market floor stock photos. When an industry starts making a fetish its past, it deals poorly with the present and has lots its path to the future. Look at Detroit and its muscle car fetish. Look at all those fake home and farm pictures on food products. Watch Goodbye Lenin, and see if you get the same uncomfortable feeling. I remember the 1960s when the back rooms were the problem. It started to take more than a day just to process the paperwork for all the trading. They actually cut exchange hours on high volume days. Then, the back rooms computerized. Now the exchange itself is computerized. I don't even know how much of the NYSE volume even comes to the floor. Like the TSA, the NYSE is more concerned with symbolism than with what it actually does. Of course, I do miss the old brokerage houses that my dad used to hang out at. They had the tickers crawling across the wall, certain indices and high volume stocks clacked their updates electromagnetically and the news wires were purple ink crawls on inset projection screens. If you wanted a quote, you could wait for a trade, and hope you caught it as it slid by. Otherwise, you could ask one of the brokers who might ask one of the other brokers who was following that stock. There was usually a handful of regulars, mainly men, who sat watching the show, kibbutzing and kvetching as if they were at a ball game. When the first Quotron units came out, even I as a kid could sense that something was changing. JP Morgan, they say, experienced the Civil War from the Wall Street end of a telegraph line. The technology changes, but don't let that confuse you. The game of the bulls and bears is not all that different than it was in the 17th century.

(Mason on Jul 15, 2008 2:33 AM) You should definitely watch Goodbye Lenin if you haven't already. It's an excellent film. With what operator do these eigenvectors go? (I have seen economists use eigenvector centrality before, though for an entirely different application.)

(Kaleberg on Jul 20, 2008 8:51 PM) I used to hang around with a bunch of guys who used eigenvectors as a cheap way to extract a "meaningful" subspace. They'd typically compute or track a correlation matrix and extract its eigenvectors to try to group the correlations. For example, if you have a hyperspectral dataset (an image with a full spectrum for each pixel) you'd find a lot of cross wavelength correlation. If you took the eigenvectors of the correlation matrix you could discard the eigenvectors with the smallest eigenvalues and build a smaller subspace image with, supposedly, fewer values per pixel, but more meaning per value. Sometimes it even worked. In finance, you might correlate stock trades over a period of time and do a similar reduction. Again, it might provide more meaning.

In today's New York Times there's a piece about the decreasing relevance of the bohemian lifestyle depicted in the musical Rent to actual New York City culture. I don't have anything to say on that issue, but I wanted to flag this paragraph:

THERE are those who still hold onto the dream of danger, but their numbers are shrinking. Skinny young ex-suburbanites who would swoon at the sight of a pea shooter walk around Williamsburg wearing T-shirts emblazoned with a silhouette of a Kalashnikov and the words “Defend Brooklyn” (from everyone who came after, one assumes). Residents of Hell’s Kitchen adamantly refuse to adopt the name Clinton, an old label for the area that real estate brokers tried to bring back at a time when the Hell’s Kitchen description actually applied.

In reality, we prefer "Hell's Kitchen" because it's a much better name than "Clinton". It's colorful and evocative. And it's perfectly legitimate to reference the neighborhood's history even if its character has changed. Meanwhile, "Clinton" is bland and generic, with a tenuous connection to the area (via the not-that-impressive DeWitt Clinton Park). And contrary to the writer's suggestion, "Hell's Kitchen" is actually a much older name for the area.

So, don't brand us a bunch of posers just because we want our neighborhood to keep its awesome name.

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(Chris L-S on Jul 13, 2008 4:32 PM) Yeah, I'd much rather live in a place called "Hell's Kitchen" than "Clinton", but that could be for very different reasons... I read a little of the story you linked to, as well as another NYT piece talking about how financial services people were having a very hard time counting their bonuses as part of their income due to the financial crisis. Good stuff.

(Katie on Jul 13, 2008 5:28 PM) Could it be that your preference reflects your preference in politians as much as anything? I assume googling anti-Clinton rant will produce writing on a different topic.

(Arcane Gazebo on Jul 13, 2008 7:36 PM) Katie: Although the play on "Clinton" in the post title was intentional, I actually have a high opinion of Bill Clinton's presidency, and even though I supported Obama, Hillary has her moments (like the recent vote on the FISA bill). So I don't think that's to blame in my case...

(Chris L-S on Jul 14, 2008 7:24 AM) It is for me! *8P

(JSpur on Jul 14, 2008 8:52 AM) This time of year all of Texas is Hell's Kitchen. This is perhaps slightly off topic, but what I find odd is the tendency of cities- Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta come to mind- to try to brand areas as "midtown" or "uptown" when they have no such discernible relationship to each other or to "downtown," i.e., the central business district. Midtown and uptown I can find in New York. But how is the Galleria district in any sense of the word the "uptown" of Houston?

(shellock on Jul 14, 2008 10:29 AM) Katie beat me to the comment. so i will go with the lame joke instead... Would you prefer "The area formly known as hells kithcen?"

(Anon on Jul 14, 2008 2:20 PM) Do your homework. The area was known as Clinton long before being known as Hell's Kitchen. You may not like DeWitt Clinton Park, but much of the area was owned by the Clinton family and Clinton's elder was VP of the US. Clinton is not a recent name as suggested by many news articles too lazy to do the research. Sure, HK evokes all sorts of things, and it's great for a nickname, but don't discount the truth about Clinton.

(Josh on Jul 14, 2008 4:00 PM) Anon, Yes, Dewitt Clinton lived in the time before Hell's Kitchen allegedly acquired its nickname, but DeWitt Clinton Park didn't open until 1905. The origins of both nicknames are generally agreed to be in the following times: Hell's Kitchen - the last quarter of the 19th century Clinton - the late 1950s! Yes, you're right that it's not named after present day Clintons, but just because it's named after DeWitt doesn't mean it was named that while he was alive. If that was the universal rule, we'd have a lot less things named after MLK today. /hates it when people open their arguments with "do your homework". It's the easiest way to tell that they're about to say something wrong, and they start off as pompously as possible.

(Arcane Gazebo on Jul 14, 2008 4:21 PM) JSpur: I can understand "uptown" if it refers to a wealthy residential or high-end commercial district, either by association with "upper-class"/"upscale" or through the Billy Joel hit "Uptown Girl". Otherwise, yeah, some geographical logic is needed. Anon: Perhaps I should formally state this blog's Policy on Fact-Checking and Corrections: 1. A typical post here is not meant to be at the standard of a research paper or even a news article. The maximum fact-checking I typically do consists of a Wikipedia search (as was the case for this post). 2. Corrections are welcome, and if an error is brought to my attention I will post the correction in an update. 3. However, unsourced claims from anonymous blog commenters are not considered more authoritative than Wikipedia. 4. Finally, if you're not a regular commenter here and are dropping in just to make a correction, keep in mind that you are joining an ongoing community discussion. Therefore, be polite.

(Kaleberg on Jul 14, 2008 8:50 PM) Stick to your guns. It's Hell's Kitchen. It has "hell" in it, so it's a much better name. We used to cross Hell's Gate on the Triborough Bridge to get to my grandparents in the South Bronx when I was a kid. I loved it. I got to say "hell" without catching hell. (Despite its renaissance, the name South Bronx is still more terrifying than than Hell's Anything. I really hope they don't change it).

(Mason on Jul 15, 2008 2:37 AM) I remember an interesting argument with one of my elementary school teachers of why 'Hell' was not a swear word at all because I was just stating a mythological location. (Unsurprisingly, this didn't work. Though I did get amused that she tried to have the argument without ever actually using the word 'Hell'. The awkward work-arounds she tried to use in her half of the discussion made the whole thing worth it.)

(Josh on Jul 15, 2008 12:45 PM) H-E-double-hockey-sticks!

For the uninitiated: emacs and vi are the two most common text editors in Unix environments. They're meant for editing unformatted text such as computer programs. I'm doing a lot of Unix programming these days (in Perl and C++) so a good text editor is essential. The two have fairly different philosophies: emacs does more or less what you would expect, in that you can type words and they appear on the screen, but it also has a ton of extra functions (such as programming with butterflies). Unfortunately even simple ones like, say, "save" have to be accessed by typing a sequence of obscure key commands, usually while holding down the control key.

On the other hand, if you open up a file with vi and start typing, words will not appear on the screen. If you're lucky it'll just beep at you repeatedly; it might also start deleting portions of your file apparently at random. Fortunately you'll never figure out the command to save, so your original file will be unharmed; unfortunately you'll never figure out how to quit either, and be stuck there forever (or until you open up Google and look it up).

At least, that was my first experience with vi, and having concluded that it was designed by alien intelligences I quickly became a convert to emacs. However, I recently began to question that decision, for a number of reasons:

• Peer pressure. Almost everyone in my department uses vi. In fact, when I was assigned to a newly assembled Unix box and complained to the sysadmin that emacs wouldn't run there, his response was "Well, most people use vim." (He did set up emacs for me despite his disdain for it.)
• It reminds me of playing nethack. At some point in the past I had to learn to play nethack on a laptop keyboard (i.e. without the number pad), and only later found out that I had thus inadvertently learned how to move the cursor in vi³. This was actually the biggest part of the learning curve. There are other similarities to nethack, such as the primitive-looking interface, the obscure extended commands, and the fact that a typo at the wrong time can kill you.
• I got tired of holding down Control every time I wanted to do anything. (But hitting escape to get out of insert mode is almost as bad. Maybe I should remap it to some other key.)

Anyway, I went home one night and went through the vim tutorial, and discovered that it's not as hard as I thought, and ended up switching entirely.

Rather than actually make this an editor wars thread, consider this a place to suggest your favorite Unix programs for software development (or whatever else).

¹ Actually, vim².
² Well, technically gvim.
³ Except that the diagonal movement keys do other, more drastic things in vi, which can cause trouble when I forget I'm not playing nethack.

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(JSpur on Jun 25, 2008 7:53 PM) Let me be the first to say, "HUH?"

(Chris L-S on Jun 25, 2008 9:03 PM) I still fail to see why emacs and vi are the major text editors out there for Unix - why hasn't something more user friendly ever been created? Of course, I guess I could just boggle at the fact that anyone is still using Unix instead of Linux. And at my own knowledge of such things - just enough to be dangerous.

(Wren on Jun 26, 2008 12:12 AM) Chris, there are other more user-friendly options. I use pico (nano), and have been soundly mocked by everyone for years for my choice. Granted, there are things that are faster and easier to do in vim, but for entering text into a file, pico gets the job done.

(Lemming on Jun 26, 2008 12:28 AM) Dude! I use emacs because it's familiar. I do not have a particularly high opinion of it. I have far more respect for vi -- I just find it's activation energy a bit higher. I do occasionally use it, when it's thrust upon me, but I don't know how to do much. Heck, I use nano sometimes too -- mainly because it's become the lightweight editor of choice that gets installed as part of the barebones setup on several linux distros. Back to vi... my impression is that a lot of other programs (like Nethack, lol about the diagonal movement) modeled their keys after it. It's light, it's efficient, it's good, I think highly of it. You know what I think is worst of all, though? People who try and force you to use one or the other.

(shellock on Jun 26, 2008 3:45 AM) alas i have been reduce to windows and java programer on elciple and visual studio. but back at school vi was annoying so i used emacs. And sharon still used EMACs for her job

(Mason on Jun 26, 2008 8:12 AM) AG: I don't know you anymore. :P Anyway, I use emacs because I found vi to be completely confounding, but to me this is always a matter of personal choice.* * Except when it comes to things like students sending me .doc files instead of latex files for our scientific papers. That causes me to blow a gasket.

(Justin on Jun 26, 2008 1:25 PM) What took you so long? I learned vi back in high school, and it's all I ever used... :-) I like that it has the same syntax as sed, so search and replace operations are incredibly trivial. Favorite unix software - vi, awk, and sed are pretty much all I need. My former officemate is quite the perl guru, and xkcd has told us of the wonders of Python. I know nothing of such things myself, though. Chris - AFAIK, the word "unix" can be considered a catchall term for old-school unix, Linux, and Mac OSX. Around here at least the latter has become overwhelmingly dominant, since basically all software (other than games, of course) can run on the same machine without rebooting. Seems to me that Apple has largely undercut the rationale for Linux, for those of us who don't care about open source ideology. Mason - how do you feel about .doc for documents other than papers? Last week I submitted a proposal I wrote in Word. :-)

(Nick on Jun 26, 2008 3:12 PM) I really rather like Visual Studio — I don't have to think too hard to work out how to do something. Mind, there's one feature that I desperately miss from the Dr. Scheme editor that I've not seen elsewhere, a 'bird's eye view'. You could have a view open that showed the code with one pixel per character, syntax highlighted, with the normal view's area background-highlighted. It's absolutely fantastic if you're a visual thinker — it makes navigating code immensely easy for me. There's one thing that I'd like to see implemented in an editor that I've never come across. I've been calling it 'artificial synesthesia'. I want to have a syntax highlighting that can be quickly and easily adjusted for a special purposes. For example, a search mode where the terms you are looking for get a colored glow and everything else goes to grayscale. Maybe another view to assist flow-control debugging where branches & branching variables get visual emphasis while the body of the code fades to grays. Some day, if I'm doing graduate work on user interface design, I'd like to put both of those in an editor.

(Lemming on Jun 26, 2008 3:17 PM) Nick: That be straight dope, yo. (I've had similar ideas, not quite as fanciful tho) Funny about hitting esc. I can't be arsed to remember all of the key combinations in emacs. In addition, I've gotten used to using emacs over poorly-supported terminals. The net result is that, for a large number of emacs commands, I start by hitting esc.

(Arcane Gazebo on Jun 26, 2008 5:45 PM) JSpur: You can actually experience this firsthand: on your MacBook, go to Applications->Utilities and open Terminal. Then type "emacs" or "vim" and hit enter. On Unix flavors: at work this means primarily Solaris. (We have some Linux boxes but I haven't used them much.) At home it's Mac OS X and Ubuntu. Certainly all modern operating systems. Visual Studio: I will be using this sooner or later at work as well, but haven't had any experience with it yet. Other stuff: I learned the basics of awk pretty recently too, but haven't used sed. We have some huge data files that I'll process in perl but only after passing them through gawk. I actually like perl--being able to just throw something together without thinking about the details too much is appealing. I haven't tried python yet but given the rave reviews it gets from some quarters, I'll probably check it out eventually.

(Mason on Jun 27, 2008 7:12 AM) Justin: I have occasionally been forced to use .doc files for various applications. I get annoyed when I have to do that. :) I do use MS Word for my CV, although I only send the saved .pdf files.

(Lemming on Jun 27, 2008 10:27 AM) The usual Perl/Python comparison is apt: Perl is like a swiss army knife, and Python is like a well-organized toolbox. For a most simple scripting tasks, you can throw together a Perl script in less time (and less text). On the other hand... I hate Perl. It's one of the few languages that having "Linguistics (Computer)" as a class skill doesn't implicitly give me the ability to read. It's aggressively and intentionally dense, to the point of making it (to easily) a write-only language. Every time I've gone back and read an old piece of Python code, I've had no trouble understanding what I did. It all just scans.

]]> http://www.arcanegazebo.net/2008/06/comment_previewing_fixed_proba.html http://www.arcanegazebo.net/2008/06/comment_previewing_fixed_proba.html Website Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:33:06 -0800 Tomorrow I take the Series 7 exam, which is the standardized licensing exam for stockbrokers. Even though I work in a proprietary trading group, and don't go anywhere near any brokering-related activities, this is apparently one of the certifications I need if I'm going to be involved with the details of trading.

I think the last time I studied for a standardized test was when I was preparing for the physics GRE; needless to say this is a very different experience. I'm used to tests where I reason out the answers from a few basic rules, but the Series 7 mainly tests knowledge of the regulations concerning brokerage firms, so it's almost all memorization and nothing more. There's some logic to the general boundaries of these regulations but almost all of the specifics are arbitrary: there's no way to derive the Regulation T margin requirement from first principles.

So I'll get a question like, "How many additional shares may an underwriter sell under the green shoe option?", and unless I can remember the one line in the phone-book-sized study guide that referred to this, and not get the percentage mixed up with the countless other similar numbers in other regulations, I'll be stuck. And it doesn't help that "green shoe option" only makes me think of this:

If only securities laws were as easy to remember as Mario trivia...

(Actually, there's a mnemonic here: the Kuribo's shoe only appeared in world 5-3 of Super Mario Bros. 3, and 5x3 is 15, exactly the percentage allowed in the green shoe option. Having discovered this, I'm unlikely to miss a similar question on the actual exam. This suggests that if I can just create a mapping between my Mario knowledge and the Series 7 material, I'll do very well (and then I can write the Super Mario Guide to the Series 7 Exam). However, I expect to pass the test as is and higher scores are frowned upon in my group, as they indicate too much time spent studying rather than doing something more productive.)

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(Chris L-S on Jun 22, 2008 7:57 PM) Heh, it's kind of funny that the people who got the highest scores on the Series 7 and 66 when I was at UBS also tended to be the ones who didn't do so hot when it came to actually succeeding in the business. IIRC, the test has a lot more to do with the basics of the knowledge than the absolute minutiae of the book. I think I got a 93% or something like that and I didn't spend a heck of a lot of time studying. For example, I had no friggin idea what the green shoe option was.

(Arcane Gazebo on Jun 22, 2008 8:07 PM) The study materials I have are definitely big on minutiae; I've been hoping this isn't true of the real exam. :) I don't have to take 66 but I do have to take 63 and 55, the latter of which I'm told is the worst of the set.

(shellock on Jun 23, 2008 5:49 PM) good luck

(Mason on Jun 25, 2008 4:12 AM) I hope you write that study guide. That would be awesome.

(Chris L-S on Jun 25, 2008 3:41 PM) So how did the test go? Are you getting mocked for getting too high a score?

(Arcane Gazebo on Jun 25, 2008 6:30 PM) It went quite well, actually: as you said, it was more concerned with basics, which made it a lot easier than the practice tests. And I am being thoroughly mocked for my score (which was 92%). And, my 45-day window for the Series 55 (equity trader's exam) opened today, so I've got that to study for. It seems like less overall material but more details-oriented.

(JSpur on Jun 25, 2008 6:49 PM) Strategy for next time- answer correctly the 71% you have down cold and take a dive on the rest of the questions.

(Chris L-S on Jun 25, 2008 9:09 PM) LOL - that's awesome. Well, I have no words of insight into the 55 or 63 - the 66 is financial planning, which is pure retail side as opposed to trading. I do remember that several people who passed the 7 with flying colors then failed the 66. I don't remember my score - I passed, though. And I'm not sure how it is in Travis' group, but where I worked if you failed a NASD exam you were fired, so you want to leave a little more margin for error than 71%. Try 75. *8P

(Mason on Jun 26, 2008 8:15 AM) Why do these exams have numbers in their names? Damn financial people.* * Not that I should talk... I am working with a couple of people on network analysis of time-dependent currency correlation networks (we've improved on some of the black box methods that are in common use), and I will be coadvising a new Ph.D. project on that in Fall 09 that HSBC will be funding.

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My primary goal was to acquire a signed copy of the Dinosaur Comics book, and I was not disappointed in the outcome:

I also got a copy of the new annotated Wondermark book, because it looked nice and also because Wondermark is fantastic. Randall Munroe (of xkcd) was doing free sketches, but I foolishly didn't have anything for people to sketch on. He and David Malki ! (who does Wondermark) were next to each other, and each had a sign offering to punch the other for $1. (I even saw it happen while I was standing there.)

Outside of webcomics I knew almost none of the exhibitors (it was very much an independent, small press show), although there was obviously a lot of talent on display. I made sure to walk around and look at everything, but it's hard to know just by looking at covers what's good. I did see Bryan Lee O'Malley, the author of Scott Pilgrim which has recently become my new favorite print comic. (It's kind of a hipster Ranma 1/2 with copious references to classic NES games. Anyone here who reads comics should absolutely check it out.)

Normally when I think of comics shows I think of something like the San Diego Comic Con² with everyone in ridiculous costumes and big lines at the popular booths. This wasn't at all like that: very low-key, no costumes and you never had to wait in line to talk to anybody (unless it was Randall Munroe, or Michel Gondry who turned up for a signing). Overall it was a fun outing and I need to keep an eye out for more stuff like this going on in the city.

Meanwhile, some of my coworkers are going to the actual Nerd Prom and I am tempted to join them... of course, I'll need a costume.

¹ Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art
² A.k.a. "Nerd Prom"

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(Mason on Jun 9, 2008 10:47 AM) Actually, I think seeing all the people in costumes is one of the highlights of those Cons! I think many of them are actually quite good. I, of course, just go as myself (now there's a ridiculous costume!), but I think it's great to see the results of hard work and occasional cleverness! And, yes, NYC is definitely good for the abundance of cool events like that...

The papers emphasize that this is the "biggest jump ever" for oil, but this seems a bit misleading: "ever" only goes back to 1983 (when oil futures started trading on NYMEX, apparently), which means it doesn't include the last big oil crisis in the 70's. It may still be the case that $10.75 is the biggest absolute price increase, but the starting price is also higher than it's ever been—usually the more relevant measure is fractional, so the real question is whether an 8% jump is record-setting. (It might be but it's not clear from the articles I read.)

Next we have the question of whether or not there's a bubble going on and oil is really overvalued at this point. According to the Times,

One view gaining ground is that the commodity market is caught in a speculative bubble akin to the recent housing bubble or the technology bubble of the late 1990s. That theory was raised by politicians in Washington and by OPEC producers, who blame speculators for the staggering oil rally.

If I had to guess I'd say this is not a bubble, and if anything oil is probably still undervalued right now. I can think of a number of factors that plausibly contribute to the price of oil being as high as it is. Some of them are being mentioned in the press: the weak dollar, the concerns over possible war in Iran, the increased demand from Asia. On top of these things I think the long-term trends are going to cause oil prices to rise indefinitely. I'm not stocking canned goods in anticipation of a peak oil apocalypse, but the fact remains that oil is a limited resource and eventually the supply will start to decrease. We're already seeing the growth of oil supply flatten out at the same time as demand from developing countries is ramping up rapidly, so it's no surprise that prices would rise. (Had I the funds a few years ago I would have bet on this.)

Meanwhile, high gas prices in America will hopefully have good side effects, leading to energy conservation and spurring investment in alternative energy. Unfortunately, it'll also bring economic hardship for a lot of people and push the economy further into recession, so I can't really applaud it. However, I can at least be happy that I picked a good time to sell my car.

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(JSpur on Jun 7, 2008 10:18 AM) The per capita income deflated cost of oil in 1980 was $160/barrel in today's dollars, according to a study done by Lionstone's economists, so we're still below that level. I was a lawyer to the oil patch in those days and I can't get past the memories of how it went from that level to about 20% of that in four years' time. I have the sense that right now oil is overbought and will in the next couple of years return to its average since 1974 (again, per capita income deflated) of about $60/bbl. And I picked a good time to trade up to one of the new fuel-efficiency-enhanced Mini Coopers.

(Mason on Jun 7, 2008 10:47 AM) AG, you also picked a good city in which not to have a car. :) For that matter, so did I. For some reason, I'm missing the milkshake reference with respect to the actual blog entry, though I suspect I am not supposed to be missing it.

(Josh on Jun 7, 2008 12:34 PM) A very well titled blog-entry. Back in Berkeley I remember I said something about the bubble bursting, which I imagine was a misnomer as I'm not too good at the economical jargon. My guess in the realm of the current trends is that the speedy increase in prices in the past few years is a bubble, because I visually relate a bubble to something that rises quickly due to any number of causes. In this case: demand, the topping off of oil in big production countries like Siberia, and simply America's having it for so good for so long. My misnomer is in the "bursting", as I don't think it will burst so much as level off, and it will take a while for it to find its equilibrium point. We're catching up to a whole bunch of countries that have it a lot harder than us, and when you live in my town where every night you see at least three stretched Hummer limos, you realize maybe we should be having it a lot harder. The sad thing is that won't affect the insanely wealthy that can afford that sort of waste, just the people on the bottom will suffer for it. Anyway, I think there may be a bit of a backlash to the severe price rising, since a lot of people seem to think we're entering into Mad Max territory. Prices may drop back down but will in the end steadily increase as time goes on. We're just running out with an ever-weakening dollar. I hope alternative energy resources are explored, because I don't think we're doing enough. Hybrids aren't where they should be yet, and the battery electricity doesn't come from magic in the environmental footprint map of the world. I'm looking forward to seeing what the hydrogen cars, and those cars in India that run on compressed air, will do when they hit America. Because air and hydrogen are limitless resources, right? Right? *sigh* P.S. Also, here's a link to a "news story" from Florida about a Jesus freak who claims to have replaced his fuel injection system with a mason jar of water and now gets 100 miles to the OUNCE. I find this interesting because an actual news station took the time to report this as if this was a possible story. And if you see the video, it looks like the reporters actually believe this happened. If I could imbed a facepalm picture now, I would.

(shellock on Jun 9, 2008 11:26 AM) That florida new clip is truely painful to watch. I am glad i swaped in my old car for a prius last year I did not know at the time how good a choise that was.

(stateselectgaswaterheaterSi on Aug 19, 2008 3:43 PM) Your site- www.arcanegazebo.net is excellent site, good job, webmaster. But look at this [url=http://carolinecs.150m.com/state_electric_hot_water_heaters.html] state electric hot water heaters [/url]

NYPD: I do not suppose you could speed things up?
Robert: If you're in such a hurry, you could lower a rope, or a tree branch, or find something useful to do.
NYPD: I could do that. In fact, I've got some rope up here. But I do not think that you will accept my help, since I am only waiting around to arrest you.
Robert: That does put a damper on our relationship.

Meanwhile, some dude from Brooklyn thought this was sufficiently awesome that he went out and climbed it himself hours later. Pretty soon there'll be guided tours up the side of the Times building...

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(Josh on Jun 5, 2008 11:43 PM) I think of this brooklyn copycat as the Venom to Alain Robert's Spider-Man. (Although don't get me wrong. Venom does rock. More than he did in the movie by far.)

(JSpur on Jun 6, 2008 5:46 AM) For your dialogue to have verisimilitude, your cops need to cuss more.

(Mason on Jun 6, 2008 5:52 AM) What would be really awesome is if the cops climbed up there faster than he did and then arrested him when he got there. :) It would make for a better chase scene than their reaching the top another way.

(shellock on Jun 9, 2008 9:45 AM) do you think Alain Robert's has six fingers on his right hand?

This rings especially true since my lab in grad school needed a fume hood only occasionally, and therefore had only one which sat mostly neglected in the fabrication lab. This made it a fantastic storage closet for unknown chemicals until somebody actually needed to use it for science, at which point hazmat teams would need to be called. (Note to Berkeley EH&S: joking!)

In contrast, the most hazardous chemical at my new job is the curry from Teriyaki Boy, a.k.a. "The Yak". (Angelenos: Picture the Japanese-food equivalent to Tommy's chili.)

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(Mason on Jun 2, 2008 2:24 PM) Oh dear... I ought to make a version of this comic strip about the random stuff one can find lying around the Oxford Colleges---such as the firecrackers in the drawer my friend and I once found and a book from the 19th century which covered the random shit this guy saw while walking along the street (purveyors of various things, an amusing incident with a bum, etc.) One could apparently publish anything in those days... By the way, when I read "bugs" I inadvertently thought about the living kind. That's probably because there was a conversation at dinner tonight about the enormous number of rats in the walls at a 14th century cottage a friend of someone at dinner recently bought. (Note: I actually refrained from bringing up Lovecraft, though I probably shouldn't have.)

(Lemming on Jun 2, 2008 4:43 PM) Heh. The "two chemicals that should never be this close to each other" reminds me of a certain cardboard box of jugs and jars that was under my sink for a while...

(Kaleberg on Jun 14, 2008 8:31 PM) My favorite story involves a laboratory which worked on molds and fungi. According to Science, they built a proper laboratory to confine all the noxious biologicals, and the offices were all isolated. All went well except one poor bastard (a term not used in the article) was afflicted with horrible allergic reactions. Everyone was sympathetic. They got him an office air cleaner. He took antihistamines. Then, someone actually figured out where all the air circulating from their containment facility was going. Somehow, everything was venting through his office in duct. No one was sure how they managed this screw up, and it was fixed ASAP, but that comic brought this tale to mind.

(Kaleberg on Jun 14, 2008 8:31 PM) My favorite story involves a laboratory which worked on molds and fungi. According to Science, they built a proper laboratory to confine all the noxious biologicals, and the offices were all isolated. All went well except one poor bastard (a term not used in the article) was afflicted with horrible allergic reactions. Everyone was sympathetic. They got him an office air cleaner. He took antihistamines. Then, someone actually figured out where all the air circulating from their containment facility was going. Somehow, everything was venting through his office in duct. No one was sure how they managed this screw up, and it was fixed ASAP, but that comic brought this tale to mind.

(Kaleberg on Jun 14, 2008 8:32 PM) My favorite story involves a laboratory which worked on molds and fungi. According to Science, they built a proper laboratory to confine all the noxious biologicals, and the offices were all isolated. All went well except one poor bastard (a term not used in the article) was afflicted with horrible allergic reactions. Everyone was sympathetic. They got him an office air cleaner. He took antihistamines. Then, someone actually figured out where all the air circulating from their containment facility was going. Somehow, everything was venting through his office in duct. No one was sure how they managed this screw up, and it was fixed ASAP, but that comic brought this tale to mind.

Portions of my Movable Type install (which is the software behind the blog) mysteriously broke during the recent inactivity, and rather than just reinstall I took the opportunity to upgrade to the newest version, MT 4.1. This is pretty much guaranteed to break more stuff (in fact, this has already happened), so here's a thread for posting comments if you notice something not working.

Once I get this sorted out I might get around to blogging about how the move to New York went...

UPDATE: The search box is still broken, but for a different reason.

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