Back Home Again

Obviously I have returned!

I usually go to the Bahamas in late April and I would say the weather then is a bit more settled. The mornings while we were there had quite a bit of rain and clouds. By 10am things cleared up for the day but a slow start most mornings. As always I love the Bahamas! I had a great time and got plenty of rest.

When I go on vacation I do not bring anything with me. No computer, no cell phone (which would have worked, Verizon is online down there now), and I do not watch TV. OK, I did catch the last 5 minutes of the wild Patriots vs. Chargers game and saw the San Diego field goal attempt clang off the upright! Go Patriots! This way I get plenty of distance from the usual stuff and I can relax and chill out. We forgot to take any pictures as well! We are not big picture people anyway, but we both totally forgot, what can you do.

Anyways, I am back and the yard here is showing that fall is in full effect. It is going to be a LONG weekend of yard work this weekend for sure, yuck.

Just a few light items tonight, I need to get back into things and it may take a few days.

Robots Learn to Break First Rule of Robotics
The first rule of robotics (via Asimov) was that a robot cannot harm a human or allow it's actions to harm a human. No worries, scientists now are already teaching the robots to either hurt human or just torture them:

Robot arm punches human to obey Asimov's rules
ISAAC ASIMOV would probably have been horrified at the experiments under way in a robotics lab in Slovenia. There, a powerful robot has been hitting people over and over again in a bid to induce anything from mild to unbearable pain - in apparent defiance of the late sci-fi sage's famed first law of robotics, which states that "a robot may not injure a human being".

But the robo-battering is all in a good cause, insists Borut Povše, who has ethical approval for the work from the University of Ljubljana, where he conducted the research. He has persuaded six male colleagues to let a powerful industrial robot repeatedly strike them on the arm, to assess human-robot pain thresholds.

It's not because he thinks the first law of robotics is too constraining to be of any practical use, but rather to help future robots adhere to the rule. "Even robots designed to Asimov's laws can collide with people. We are trying to make sure that when they do, the collision is not too powerful," Povše says. "We are taking the first steps to defining the limits of the speed and acceleration of robots, and the ideal size and shape of the tools they use, so they can safely interact with humans."

Famous last words if I ever heard them!

Not to be outdone, now when you are chatting up that smoking hot young lady online and think you are making moves like a true player, it may just be a computer program stringing you along:

Meet Suzette, The Chat Program that Convinced an Expert She was Human
Have you met Suzette? If you have, you might not know it — because Suzette has passed the Turing Test. This chatbot convinced a judge that she was a human.

The Loebner Prize is given out every year for the machine that can fool a judge they're talking to a person for the space of a conversation. The judge chats to both a human and a machine about a few subjects - such as "What is a hammer for?" - and at the end of the time period, the judge has to pick which is the bot. After a twenty-five minute conversation with Suzette, a judge picked wrong.

Again, you have been warned.

Book Review for "The Force Unleashed II"
Warning Star Wars content coming up!

As a hard core Star Wars fan I can stay silent no longer!

Understand that I do not play computer/video games in any format. No XBox, no Wii, nothing. What I do is read Star Wars material. Any and all of it in the expanded universe. What has been going on as of late is disgusting and I can only hope the Star Wars community gets their head on straight soon.

I let the original "The Force Unleashed" novel go by because I understood that they were trying to tie in a game they wanted to sell. Fine, whatever. There were so many things wrong with the book it would take way to long to cover, but a few issues:
-In the book/game Galen Marek is found as a boy by Darth Vader and taken as a "secret" apprentice. In some way his training by the sith lord allows him to be about 4 times as powerful as Vader!? How does that work? He can use force lightning, but Vader cannot, so who taught him that? His name becomes "Starkiller" (how dumb) and he can tear entire Star Destroyers out of the sky which seems funny because Vader could not stop the Millennium Falcon from leaving Hoth. A total mess. Ad to this by the end Starkiller fights BOTH Vader and Darth Sidious and about kills them both. So this guy was the most powerful force user ever it seems? What a joke.

Anyways, I let it go even though I thought the entire crap show should not be true Star Wars canon.

The new game/novel, The Force Unleashed II goes even further in it's stupidity and silliness. In this one it is not clear if the original Starkiller was cloned or what and it does not matter. Now in addition to being the most powerful force user ever, get a load of all this stuff:
-Force powers that can disintegrate people by the crowd size
-Starkiller can enter the atmosphere of a planet on the outside hull of a starship and not get burned up due to his "force bubble"
-During the story Starkiller goes to Dagobah and sees Yoda, yet this makes no sense in any way as Yoda never speaks of it
-Again, Starkiller is so powerful he beats Vader easily and then even imprisons him for transport to Dantooine?? What a freaking joke as in the novel Princess Leia knows about this but it never comes up anywhere else

I could go on and on but the story remains the same:
In the expanded universe the move has been to show both Darth Vader and Darth Sidiuos as total lunatic idiots incapable of much of anything. Both are inept and weak and only luck allows them to remain in power. This makes them both silly looking and flies in the face of all other work in Star Wars.

There I said it. Can Darth Sidious, the master that took over the Republic, hid himself in front of the jedi using sith sorcery, killed jedi by the score and outlasted Grandmaster Yoda in a fight be practically a buffoon? I hate this stuff so much.

Get your heads on straight Lucas Arts, you are killing a great story with this pandering to game sales and liberal invention of force powers never before seen. What a joke.

Sorry for the side track, back at the regular stuff soon!

Have a good night.

What I Want to Know

Tonight may be my last post until next Tuesday as I have a bunch of stuff to get ready for the trip on Friday morning. I think this is perfectly timed as the wild market gyrations and the equally wild speculation by writers everywhere is getting a bit on the extreme end of the pool. Maybe we should all take a few days off?

What I Want to Know
Over the next few days I will be taking time to put my mind "offline" and funny enough this is usually when I figure things out! Sometimes a step back is all you need. As a scientist I often find things economic annoying and frustrating because of two main sticking points which will forever keep economics from being a real science:
-Psychology
-Incomplete Information

The psychology part I am sure you all understand, but the incomplete information part may not be what you think I mean.

Take guidance and analysts estimates for example. There is no reason for either, not really. Are you going to argue that Apple Inc (AAPL) the monster tech firm that makes I-stuff cannot post sales and shipping records every single day from their corporate IPad? Of course they could. All you would need to do is have a running spreadsheet to track it and there is your revenue "estimate". This is not what happens and throw in a bunch of crazy accounting tricks and you never know what a company may post for earnings. This is incomplete information. I will not even get into the banks and their games.

When I return I would like to do more trading type things, not daily stuff, but work on positions I can run with for a couple of weeks that look attractive. On the other hand I do want to write more about macro issues and larger picture thinking as well. Should be interesting.

Anyways, here are some things I would like to know so if you know go ahead and leave it in the comments if not I will cogitate on it on New Providence Island:

-I think Karl Denninger should take this weekend off, but as he is on the job how come it is not knowable right now (like this very second!) whether mortgage securities were sold multiple times? I think this is impossible but again, why am I even wondering?

-When and how did the stock market become a proxy for the Forex market? I can tell you with 100% confidence that no small timer or 401k contributor at and around my level even knows that the dollar fluctuates in value so they are damn sure not trading the buck up and down via stocks.

-This post at The Housing Time Bomb kind of scared me a little. Why did it make me so uncomfortable?

-Why does momentum trading piss me off so much?

-If we all agree (we do not!) that any nation that has it's own currency needs not collect taxes to spend and can never go broke, how come $100,000 has not been deposited in every single Americans bank account to end this recession? Why not tonight at midnight? If the above line of thinking is true there is no excuse for not taking this action. Money where your mind (and mouth) is time boys.

-When the automobile caused a serious "output gap" in the horse cart manufacturing industry how come they did not target that gap with cheaper money? Think of all the oil we could have avoided using all this time!

-Related: What if the consumption and output level of right now is actually steady state equilibrium? Makes all being done look pretty stupid, yes?

-Related 2: When you get in your car do you immediately gun it to 100 mph to re-capture your highest speed ever output? Why not?

-I have been disappointed with the FED (you think?) but I cannot help but wonder if behind close doors the members are not screaming about a US CONgress that will not do anything on their own but rely 100% on the FED for action? (Note: I don't favor the Congress getting to crazy either)

-That said, should some kind of ban on massive spending bills be enacted before the week prior to Christmas? I think there could be some serious gifts on the way by an outgoing CONgress.

-So the Republicans will win in November and all this will change right? Hee hee.

-If Barney Frank loses his seat here in Massachusetts will I be arrested for playing this tune too loud?

Have a good night.