10-25-2010

Of course this happened. I bet all of you were like all surprised that I didn't learn over the weekend. That's because I unlearned things. I unlearned lots of things, but not enough, because next weekend I'm going to unlearn even harder.

But today I started to learned about spirit gum.

Spirit Gum is actually the stuff you use to stick things to your face. Like when you don't have a mustache but want one for an evening out on the town.

But then I found out that it's made of booze (ethyl alcohol or "ethanol") and a more different alcohol called ethyl acetate.

So then I looked up stuff about ethanol, cool stuff. Like how much it takes to kill a rat: 7060 mg/kg, which if you're like me and you don't know what that means, it means ppm or parts per million.

So how much booze is that?

Well according to Yahoo answers the average adult male rat should weigh somewhere between 500-700 grams.  If we assume a 600 gram rat, then it takes only 4.236 grams of pure booze to kill it. Let's assume you don't have pure ethanol on hand, then you should use Everclear, and how much?
Everclear is 95% alcohol, so you'd need 4.4589 grams. Let's call it 4.5 grams for good measure.

So like that's a lot of booze for a rat. I guess? I'm not really sure that my math is all that solid, but the numbers seem nice to me.

But then I found this crazy article about a woman in Minnesota who got pulled over, apparently she blew a .706. That's insane. Do you know what that means? That means 70% of her blood was alcohol. Impossible, but whatever Minnesotan women:

 are ridiculously hard to kill.


Do yourself a favor and at least click the second link. Because it is insane. This lady fought winter, and won. Not even Napolean could do that.

Any way, that's what I learned today.

10-20-2010

Today I learned several things...

To begin with:

I learned that

THIRTY PERCENT OF ALL NUMBERS START WITH 1!

No, seriously. This is true, and it is called Benford's Law.




Here, have some math about it:




I guess this thing only works when you have lots of numbers distributed over orders of magnitude, but it works with everything that has a large enough set, and it doesn't care about unit conversion. The applications of this rule are crazy. You can go to prison because of it.



By that I mean, Benford's Law is used in Forensic Accounting. They use it to find numbers that people make up, which generally don't fit the curve generated by Benford's Law. This evidence is admissible in criminal cases.


What's even more nuts, is the way it was discovered. This one guy, Simon Newcomb, noticed that all the pages of his logarithm books starting with the number one were way more worn and weathered than the other ones.


That's nuts.

Another thing I learned is how to use the logarithm button on a graphing calculator, and why, but that's not really very interesting to anyone but me who just learned it so late in life, but that lead to me learning that our senses operate on a logarithmic scale, which I guess just means movement of orders of magnitude.

In general the greater the difference between two numbers the easier it is for people to perceive a change between them, but that seems simple until you think about the size of number's being talked about when people mention orders of magnitude.

Big numbers usually.

Also I learned that Budweiser isn't necessarily an Annheuser-Busch product. Back in the day lots of people brewed Budweiser:




Weird.


I was going to talk about hedges today. But I'm too tired.

10-21-2010

Today I learned several things...

I learned that the making of the movie TOP GUN was pretty ridiculous, like at one point the director paid the captain of the aircraft carrier they were filming on $25,000 (for fuel) to change directions so that he could film for ten more minutes.

You're dangerous Tony Scott. You're gonna get somebody killed someday.


Also my friend, who is a lawyer-type in St Louis, told me this:

"The core of the sun spins slightly slower thant the sun, it has a 33 day period for its rotations

and they've found that it corresponds to accelerations and decelerations in carbbon decay

minor minor velocity changes but when velocity changed spike, they can accurateley predict solar flares 33 days before they happen making space considerably safer

for travel...

also this could be the first viable theory for why neutrinos exist"

But the thing that I learned today that ties in with the thing I was talking about yesterday is Speculating.


Mark Twain was a big fan of speculation.



OCTOBER: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The other are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar




Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab


What Mark Twain is referring to when he says speculating is something different than what I'm referring to. Speculating the way I'm talking about means that you are trying to make money by deciding what the market, or really the price of something in the market, is going to do in the future.

Really it is an easy thing to do. Because the prices can really only do three things.

A Price can go up, down or stay the same.

But deciding what you think the market is going to do is crazy because it can change the whole game. If you're well known enough everyone follows your decisions and then the market will do whatever you thought it was going to do, and of course everyone thinks this means you knew what you were talking about. Which is ridiculous, because all you were saying is basically that you thought everyone would agree that the relationship between two things would do one of three things, but you'll never get everyone to agree and not everyone understands the relationship between things, which is a good time for us to talk about currency.

Currency is unit of wealth. It can be anything in my example the other day we used bananas, which makes sense in some regards, and doesn't in others.

But the crazy part about currency, is that it is a constantly shifting shared belief, like most social constructs. The U.S. dollar isn't backed by gold, or silver. The government promises that it is worth something, but it isn't equated to anything specifically. It stopped being directly related to things in the U.S. during the Great Depression.

But even if the U.S. dollar was based on a commodity it would still be based on a fluctuating shared belief. And that's all that value is.


Tomorrow (hopefully) we'll get to how speculating can make or lose money for you.

But now a short rant about taxes.

Taxes are great! If I could I would pay more of them. Do you know what taxes are directly responsible for? America, in so many ways. We are the exercise in big government. Remember the Revolutionary War? Yeah we won that because people collected taxes, even though we really fought it because the British had a tax on their books that they really never got around to collecting. Also we fought it because of impressment, which is when a bunch of British sailors would go around and just grab dudes and make them go work on British ships, which you know means that the dudes that got grabbed became British sailors. It was kind of like the Borg from Star Trek.


Anyway, taxes are good. If you like roads, and schools and the troops, and America, and the Moon then you should like taxes. Also you should like taxes if you like not being from the following list of countries:
The United Kingdom,
Canada,
Mexico,
Spain,
France,
The Republic of Texas,
The Republic of California,
Russia,
or the fact that the following list of countries doesn't exist:
NAZI GERMANY (do I need to go on?)
The Republic of Texas (such a dumb plan by the way.)
Hawaii (aren't you glad it is a part of America?)

Because American taxes made sure that everyone of those countries did not exist in America, or even more extreme they wiped them out.

Tomorrow,

hedges?
Maybe some things about the moon?

10-19-2010

Today I learned several things...

I learned that according to the 2007 US Census there were still 158,991 people who spoke Yiddish at home in America. Other cool ones are French Creole (629,019) and Navajo (170,717)



In the news I learned that there is a new type of Political Action Committee that doesn't have to disclose who funds them. I don't think that this should be allowed because it is always dangerous to allow people with lots of money to do things secretly and with no accountability.

Today I learned about markets. Markets are where people buy and sell things, but if you talk about markets with business people they will really only be talking about the sort of things set up in Exchanges. Exchanges are like the purest forms of markets, in that there are constant transactions. Every minute people are buying and selling, and in most transactions you'll never know who bought what you just sold or who sold what you just bought.

The thing most people talk about with markets is price. Price means what people think something is worth at a moment in time. It can vary greatly, and it is usually expressed in currency.

For the following example I will use bananas as currency.

In most markets the price isn't fixed, sometimes the market will set a range for the price. For example I'm selling a balloon, and at the start of the day balloons are valued at twenty bananas, and the market sets the limit on balloons at 5, it means that balloons can be sold for as high as 25 bananas and as little as 15. It varies from day to day and it is usually based on the cost of balloons at the end of the previous day.

How does the cost of balloons change you might ask? Apparently invisible hands have something to do with it.



But I guess invisible hands are really people offering more or less for a product based on what they think it is worth, which is usually tied to how rare the item is. A lot of people call this concept supply and demand.

Say you have a balloon, and I'm hanging out with your mom and your best friend. It happens that all three of us really want a balloon. When you walk over I say "hey, I'll give you a banana for that balloon." But your mom says "I'll give you two bananas for it." Because she wants it more than me.

This is an example of price moving up.



And that's when most people sell something.


The thing I really learned today, and that will come into play tomorrow when I move onto futures contracts, is that in every single transaction there is a buyer and a seller. Both of them have to be present, otherwise the transaction wouldn't happen.

Before today I sort of thought of Exchanges as a vending machine. I thought you just walked up to it and pressed the button and put in however much money. I assumed that the anonymous nature of the transaction meant that there was nobody on the other side.
I suppose I thought that the market bought or sold it, or something... I'm not sure I'd ever really thought about it to be honest.

Also I learned that this:







plus this:






can replace your broken headphone jack on most iPods, and it only costs $16.00 or so.

Now I will be happy at work forever.