2014 — 27 May: Tuesday
Less than a month to go until midsummer.1 The nights will be drawing in before I know it!
Some attention...
... to the sparse state of Mother Hubbard's cupboard will be needed today. Again. And there's a funeral to attend tomorrow, too; such good fun, not. Less fun than teasing a chum about the sparse state his latest online PC game (Elder Scrolls) reduces his 16GB system to — a mere 53MB or so of unallocated RAM that nearly started it paging.
The recent...
... suggestion, in essence, that some American college courses should carry "trigger warnings" that their content may be disturbing to, erm, sensitive students has produced scorn and derision. It's also produced some fine satire, including this set of cautionary notes to an "Introduction to United States History". Source and snippet:
XV. Obama and Beyond: To those who imagined that utopia was just around the corner: Sorry! And for people who still think the president was born in Indonesia, this class will make you even more bat-crazy than you already are. At least you were warned.
The recent...
... suggestion, in essence, that there have been growing inequalities between the haves and the have-nots has been (not very surprisingly) questioned by the Financial Times (with whom I refuse to register, so I can't read their plutocratic gripes first-hand) :-)
There is an obvious reason for this: since time immemorial the rich have been averse to declaring their wealth. But after 1979 capitalism was restructured to promote wealth accumulation...
Unlike income, which has been vigorously taxed since the mid-19th century and therefore recorded, personal wealth was, after 1979, the subject of a half-hearted cat-and-mouse game in which
the cat and the mouse were wont to share yachting trips to the Aegean on a regular basis.
The guvmint's last feeble attempt in 2005 (data here) contains some huge fudge2 factors. Or perhaps the FT simply doesn't consider £1.7 trillion that big a chunk (of "assumed" wealth missing from the £3.4 trillion Brenda's goons had managed to count) to be worth making any fuss about?
The Rich are indeed different from us. And seem to live on an entirely different planet, too. [Pause] I found it no easier to wrap my head round such large sums last time I was reading about them five and a half years ago. That was when the banking assets in the UK exceeded our GDP by a factor of four. (Hah! Those were the days, heh?)
I've been sitting here...
... starting to think "Is it time for my 'lemonses' snack yet?" only to discover that it's already after 13:30. No wonder I'm hungry.
Many a true word...
... and all that. Source and snippet, from a mere quarter of a century ago:
In a recent television commercial for a computer company, a young student stated that she was morally opposed to dissecting a frog in her high school class and suggested that an equally good
alternative to such animal experiments was a computer program...
Even if the pedagogical problem is solved by computers, there is the annoying problem of getting the Food and Drug Administration approval of new drugs. There seems to be some silly
congressional requirements mandating animal testing in order to show whether chemicals are carcinogenic or teratogenic. Replacement of costly and time-consuming animal experiments by
computer programs is likely to be greeted with great enthusiasm by industry. If the FDA should take the stodgy position that research is required on animals, the FDA itself could be replaced
by appropriate computers, and any computer expert who could not devise a better software program than the U.S. Congress would be fired on the spot.
I wonder which computer company was being featured in that commercial back in the 1987 time-frame? Just askin', is all.
It being now...
... three years, to the day, since my previous attempt to order the updated edition of "Sailing into Solitude" by Valentine Howells, I've just downloaded the 2011 Kindle edition.
It's been even longer since I first started feeling scorn for "Quants"... Now, I'm somewhat familiar with the idea of exponential growth and consumption curves. Guess what? It turned out that a bright bunch of "Quants" misunderestimated (as George W Bush would probably have put it) by quite a margin:
Four years ago I was talking to a group of super quants, mostly PhDs in mathematics, about finance and the environment. I used the growth rate of the global economy back then — 4.5%
for two years, back to back — and I argued that it was the growth rate to which we now aspired. To point to the ludicrous unsustainability of this compound growth I suggested that
we imagine the Ancient Egyptians (an example I had offered in my July 2008 Letter) whose gods, pharaohs, language, and general culture lasted for well over 3,000 years.
Starting with only a cubic meter of physical possessions (to make calculations easy), I asked how much physical wealth they would have had 3,000 years later at 4.5% compounded growth. Now,
these were trained mathematicians, so I teased them: "Come on, make a guess. Internalize the general idea. You know it's a very big number." And the answers came back: "Miles deep around
the planet," "No, it's much bigger than that, from here to the moon." Big quantities to be sure, but no one came close. In fact, not one of these potential experts came within one
billionth of 1% of the actual number, which is approximately 1057, a number so vast that it could not be squeezed into a billion of our Solar Systems.
A fabulous essay that it is already far too late for us to benefit from. Just like the grains of rice on the chessboard, I guess.