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From Fade (audio engineering):

“Neptune”, part of the orchestral suite, The Planets, by Gustav Holst, was the first piece of music to have a fade-out ending. Holst stipulates that the women’s choruses are “to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed”, and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is “to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance”. Although commonplace today, the effect bewitched audiences in the era before widespread recorded sound—after the initial 1918 run-through, Holst’s daughter Imogen (in addition to watching the charwomen dancing in the aisles during “Jupiter”) remarked that the ending was “unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women’s voices growing fainter and fainter… until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence”.

From Small penis rule:

The “small penis rule” is an informal strategy used by authors to evade libel lawsuits. It was described in a New York Times article in 1998:

“…For a fictional portrait to be actionable, it must be so accurate that a reader of the book would have no problem linking the two,” said Mr. Friedman. Thus, he continued, libel lawyers have what is known as “the small penis rule.” One way authors can protect themselves from libel suits is to say that a character has a small penis, Mr. Friedman said. “Now no male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis, ‘That’s me!’ ”

(Also: This post has up to 4 nested levels of quoting.)

From Cousin:

In 2004, genealogists discovered that U.S. Presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry shared a common ancestral couple in the 1500s. It was reported that the two men are sixteenth cousins, thrice removed. However, the two are in fact ninth cousins, twice removed. Also, in 2007, it was revealed that then-U.S. vice president Dick Cheney and then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama are eighth cousins.

That’s right folks: Obama (ie: the Black Guy) and Cheney are more closely related than Bush and Kerry (two Yalies).

From Polar Bear

[they] are nearly invisible under infrared photography.

I would go see “Polar Bear vs. Predator”.

Marco talks about the economy and asks about a policy called “Mark-to-Market“:

One of the laws that might get changed is mark-to-market accounting were you have to declare assets at the current market value. I am no expert on this–but I am told that if we allow you to declare some of these complex financial instruments at “what you think they are worth” we could get good mileage out of that because it would remove uncertainty. I am not an expert–and I don’t fully understand the value here. I’m sure someone can explain it.

I’m no expert either, but I have a very good lay understanding of the issue, so I figured I’d write up my explanation.

There’s two major factors used to value any particular debt at any given time. The first and simplest is it’s “present value“. This is the payoff amount adjusted for the interest paid. The math for this is well-understood. Example time: let’s say that you promise to pay $100K in 10 years. If I want a 5% return on my investment in you, I can run the numbers and find that this deal is worth about $60K as of today… that is, if I gave you $60K now and you gave me $100K in 10 years, I would have made 5% return on my investment.

This doesn’t take into account risk though. If you fail to come through on your promise to pay, then I lose everything. I have to take this into account when determining the value of this loan to you. If I think there’s a 50% chance you’ll stiff me entirely, then I might reduce my “expected value” of this loan by 50%: I’ll only give you $30K instead of $60K for the same $100K/10 year promise.

Determining risk is where the difficulty comes in. What’s your chance of default? I pulled 50% out of thin air; when it comes to real life the factors involved are numerous, complex, and often unknown. This is where financial magic (and potential for profit) comes in.

Let’s say that Alice knows that you’re about to inherit $1M and can easily pay off your debt. She might figure your risk of default is only 10%, compared to my 50%. Accordingly, she might value the loan at $54K instead of my $30K. She can then offer to buy the loan from me for $42K. This looks like a good deal to both of us; I get $12K over my “expected value” of the loan and get some risk off my books. Alice gets a relatively reliable deal for $12K less than she thinks it’s actually worth.

Or, you might have Bob who knows you have cancer and will need to spend your money on medical bills. He figures your chance of default is 90%. He values the loan at $6K. If I demand $30K to sell the loan, he doesn’t go near it with a 10 foot pole.

Mark-to-market means that I, as the lender, have to value a loan at what everyone else will pay for it, regardless of what I think the real expected value/risk is. If Alice and Bob both make bids on my loan for $42K and $6K, I can record a $12K increase in the value of my asset even if I decide not to sell it. I could then use this as extra collateral if I wanted to take out a loan of my own.

However, in 2008, Alice went away, leaving only Bob. Bob bids $6K for my loan asset. I still don’t want to sell it (especially at that price), but the law says I have to use his bid as the expected value. All of a sudden, my books show a $24K hole. (I’m in even bigger trouble if I got a loan based on your asset that I thought was worth $42K).

None of this (directly) effects whether or not you’ll be paying me $100K in 10 years; that probability hasn’t changed. If my initial risk assumption was right, there’s still a 50/50 chance you’ll pay, and the real value of the loan is still $30K. But I have to treat it as if it’s worth $6K, simply because the only people wanting to buy it (Bob) thinks its worth that much.

The proposed solution is to use something other than Bob’s bid to set the value of the asset; that’s where “what you think it’s worth” comes into play. The big problem with this is that we don’t have any measuring tool better than market prices to value risk. Risk assessment is so complex that usually we say “screw it” and let the wisdom-of-crowds do the work for us. Unfortunately, the crowds aren’t always wise / rational, and so mark-to-market might be hurting us now above and beyond the real problems in the economy.

The other trouble with non-market-based approaches to value is that they’re easier to manipulate. If I think that the chance of default is really 50% but I say it’s 25%, I can artificially boost the value of my asset and use it as collateral. In this case, the person lending me money has made a riskier investment than he thought. Alternately, I could exaggerate the risk of default, claim a loss on the value of the asset, and use it to avoid some of my taxes. Mark-to-market is useful because, even though it was imperfect, it was at least transparent; you couldn’t get away with too much.

An ideal solution would have both the transparency and objectivity of mark-to-market but not rely on the occasionally-irrational markets for its valuation. So far, I don’t know of any system that would provide this. However, necessity is the mother of invention; we might just see a better system emerge as a result of the crisis we’re in. We may even get stronger because of our illness.

Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago today. I guess I should be taking today off of work.

From Sandwich:

In the United States, the ruling in the case of Panera Bread Co. v. Qdoba Mexican Grill established that a sandwich must legally include at least two slices of bread.

I got five interesting books for Christmas this year (four of which were on my Amazon wish list). I’m turning to you, dear LazyWeb, to help me decide in what order to read them.

They are:

• Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini.
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
• The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss.
• What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith.
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip & Dan Heath.

I also have Startups That Work on loan from the library. I grabbed it off the shelf prior to my long car ride in a pre-Christmas book lull.

I could also have Fable 2, so I could put off this decision entirely.

Self-reference is great, but it’s a shame that I haven’t posted anything this month.

With the latest blog meme of reposting the first sentence of the first blog of each month (courtesy Marco), I can satisfy both points at the same time!

• JAN: My sister-in-law’s friend is over for a visit, and she got a spam for penis-enlargement pills.
• FEB: Alberta Premiere Ed Stelmach has called a provincial election for March 3.
• MAR: I’ve been looking to buy a replacement DVD drive for my Xbox (the original one is effectively dead, a common problem).
• APR: There’s a fair amount of evidence and for the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which states that it’s impossible to achieve better-than-market returns (when adjusted for risk) on a regular, repeatable basis.
• MAY: From the Political Compass FAQ:
• JUN: Goddard College invents Masters in Consciousness degree to study eastern religious traditions.
• JLY: The actual article is full of common-sense reasoning, but it was this part that caused me to post:
• AUG: While in Costa Rica, I had a brief discussion (with a poker website employee) about the likelihood that a computer will eventually be able to beat any human player.
• SEP: Magicians are entertainers who manipulate the human mind; some take that art too far.
• OCT: Barbara Ann Parodies:
• NOV: I’ve finally figured out a use for Twitter Now.
• DEC: Self-reference is great, but it’s a shame that I haven’t posted anything this month.

Although I don’t have much real by way of reliable comparisons, I think I attended a pretty decent science program in high school. Our teacher was actually involved in the scientific community (instead of being a teacher who has science thrust upon him) and made an effort to introduce real scientific principles into the classroom. (He also shares a name with a very famous writer so he’s completely un-Googleable.) From what I’ve read, most other students are not so lucky.

Eventually, he taught us about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Of course, he taught that it was the fact that you can’t know both the position and the momentum (speed) of a particle at any given time. He explained this in terms of trying to measure electrons; to do so, you needed to bounce photons off of them, and this changed both their position and momentum. This fundamental fact meant that particles didn’t really have a precise position in the classical sense, and so we had to think of particles as being somewhat random/probabilistic at quantum levels.

To me, this particular argument made sense, but it didn’t seem to explain why this was an all-encompassing principle of physics. Was there really no other way to measure electrons? What about other particles? Isn’t this just a problem with our technology & process? Why does it have to be a fundamental property of particles? Surely they have both a definite position & momentum, even if we can’t measure it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t ask these questions at the time. Looking back on it, Mr. Adams probably wouldn’t have been able to provide satisfactory answers anyway. None of the other students raised similar questions, and I have to assume that most of them didn’t consider them in the first place. Over the years, I’ve seen similar explanations from a wide variety of sources.

Then, on one of my random walks down Wikipedia, I happened to come across an description for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that not explained its fundamentality but also explained why the common answer I’d been told was completely incorrect.

In quantum mechanics, the particle is described by a wave. The position is where the wave is concentrated and the momentum, a measure of the velocity, is the wavelength…. The only kind of wave with a definite position is concentrated at one point, and such a wave has an indefinite wavelength. Conversely, the only kind of wave with a definite wavelength is an infinite regular periodic oscillation over all space, which has no definite position. So in quantum mechanics, there are no states which describe a particle with both a definite position and a definite momentum. The narrower the probability distribution is for the position, the wider it is in momentum.

To understand the HUP, you first need to ditch the idea that particles are discrete balls of stuff, and instead think of a wave in motion. Think back to the Slinky wave experiments you may have done in school (if you haven’t, this YouTube clip is a good substitute). What’s important is the change in distance between the coils (which make up the abstract entity known as the “wave”), not the coils themselves. You can’t point to the wave as being “at” any particular position in the slinky; you have to measure it over a given distance. You can start with the entire length of slinky, and reduce that down to smaller and smaller (ie: more “precise”) chunks, but there’s no discrete part where you can say “here is where the wave is”. The wave is defined by its wavelength, which in turn is directly related to its momentum (speed). But you can only measure momentum by measuring over a distance. Thus, as you gain a more precise measure of momentum, your measure of position necessarily has to be less precise.

This is not the same thing as saying “measuring one value will necessarily change the other.” This is better described as “the description of either quantity on its own is meaningless; are really two opposing aspects of the same property”. In fact, the common explanation of the HUP is really an explanation of a completely separate issue: the Observer Effect. Both Wikipedia articles on the HUP and the observer effect talk about how the two are often conflated in the minds of the layperson (including those who instruct others). Furthermore, the Observer Effect article explains how it’s not a fact specific to weird quantum particles (which is another explanation I see on a regular basis) but in fact is a class of issues that applies to many separate circumstances.

The misexplanation surrounding the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect is one of many examples of how laypeople and popular culture can get the wrong idea about natural / scientific issue. Another common one is lift: the force that keeps airplanes in the air. More than likely you’ve seen an explanation of how lift works that involves the air over a wing flowing faster than the air under it. This is wrong. There’s lots of other examples too.

Most people won’t ever need to know the details of how these principles work. But that then raises the question: why are we spending time teaching them in the first place? If it’s important to have a base of not-immediately-useful knowledge, then why do we accept incorrect knowledge to fill that void?