01-17-2011

So the moon right? Crazy.

What's even crazier is that we've been to the moon.

Think about this for a minute. We landed on the moon in 1969. With this:

Which is insane. Here's something I didn't know, the computer they used, was one of the first to use an Integrated Circuit. The computer itself was named the AGC, but its interface was called DSKY (pronounced dis-key for some reason, I prefer DESKY, as if it were some sort of lovable desk). Anyway as it turns out DSKY was actually really polite. Here look at its list of commands:

Isn't that awesome? Here let's try out some ancient computer speak. 5123. Which means "Please mark docking angles" Incidentally this is not a successful pick-up line, although I encourage everyone reading this to try it out at least once. You can go either route, just saying the numbers out loud, or saying their encoded message. Oh also in case you want to purchase this historic piece of technology that cost the US govt $200,000.00 (1969 dollars) to produce (I believe per unit), and basically launched America's love affair with the computer, you only need to spend $60,000.00, as of 2009.

So this is AGC and DSKY :

and together they allowed these three guys:

To pilot this:

To the moon so they could do this. Sorry to post that same link again, I just think it is crazy that they did that. Anyway. I promised to talk about Lunar Bases.

1. Why don't we have them?
• There are a couple of factors.
• Primarily there is no need for them as of yet. We simply don't do enough business that far out in space. Oh sure we've got a lot of satellites and and there's talks about going to Mars about every seven years, and we're constantly repairing or upgrading the Hubble Telescope. But really we don't have any need as of yet to be doing things on the moon. 
• Which brings me to the movie Moon. The premise of the movie that there is some sort of magical fuel on the far side of the moon, turns out to be true. 
• It is called Tritium. And it turns out to be crazy useful. And apparently we've all known about it for a really long time. Like for instance, because of the way it decays (it is an isotope and isotopes decay) it reacts with a "phosphor" to produce a crazily stable (for hydrogen) glow. 
• Apparently people use this mysterious gas from beyond the moon for such things as: Fishing lures. Gun sights. and other manly things. But while we're on it. Click on that link for the Gun Sights. Because this company is calling itself United Scientific Instruments, and they seem to only sell guns and things that help people use guns more effectively. I'm not a scientist, in fact I'm not even a science blogger, but I'm not sure that a gun constitutes a Scientific Instrument, except when held by Ted Nugent:

So there's your answer. Ted Nugent. And by the Nuge, I mean Reagan.

No but really we don't have Lunar Bases because they are impractical, and we don't have a pressing need for Tritium because its main use was in nuclear weapons, and what with the S.T.A.R.T. treaty and other such hippie left-wing non-proliferation nuclear policies enacted by this President:

We don't have a need for Tritium. Also it turns out that we can make it in nuclear reactors, and we've made about 170 lbs of it so far, and that's quite a bit when you consider the fact that it is a gas.


I never really addressed the topic of Lunar Bases in this post did I?

Oh well.

New Year New Post New Things To Learn

This week I'm learning about the moon, and it is awesome.

The moon is pretty darn cool, average temperature at night is -387˚ F.

Here are some cool quick-facts about the moon:

1.  It is the fifth largest satellite in the solar system and the largest relative to the body it orbits.
2.  The moon causes the ocean to have tides, and it also causes the earth to wobble.
1.  This is why your horoscope is wrong, I'm not sure if you know, but this was in the news cycle recently.
3. Americans are the only people who have been to the moon.
1. And when we got there we threw a bunch of junk around and stole some rocks. 
2. Over 380kg of lunar rocks, which is about 840 lbs of moon rocks.
4. We Don't Really Know Where The Moon Came From! 
1. you're probably thinking that this isn't true. 
2. But it is! 
3. The current accepted theory as to where the moon came from is called the Giant Impact Hypothesis , but we're not really certain if this theory is correct.
1. incidentally this is the name of a new band I'm forming, so nobody steal it. 
2. The Giant Impact Hypothesis explains the mechanics of the origin of the moon pretty well but it doesn't explain a couple of key points, 
3. Namely why isn't the earth covered in a Giant Magma Ocean (which is going to be the name of our first album) 
1. If the Earth was hit by a Mars sized object (as described in the above theory) the result would have been crazy to see. Imagine something coming from the sky and smacking into the Earth and bouncing off, and taking a huge chunk of the the planet with it! Things would be lifting off the ground INTO SPACE! 
2. That's crazy. Of course you'd be dead because at that time we think that the Earth's atmosphere was mostly straight up poison. Poison. 
4.   Tom Hanks never went to the moon, but the guy he played in Apollo 13 did.

1. Jim Lovell is one of the 24 people who have been to the moon. 
2. and he's one of three people who have been there twice. 
3. Look at that grin, that is the grin of a man who gets to one up every vacation story you will ever tell.

That's all I learned about the moon for now.

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.