“Papelbon entregando a rapadura… eu vou dar muita risada quando nao renovarem o contrato desse filho da puta arrogante.”

I don’t know what it means, and yet I’m fairly sure I agree.

Dear Baby Alexander,

We are writing on behalf of our client, your father, Jonathan Birge. This is in followup to, and clarification of, the ad hoc verbal contract entered into by you and Dr. Birge during negotiations of the bedtime taking place on the evening of September 12th, 2009. To wit:

You (heretofore LITTLE BABY) agree to make a goodfaith effort to “hush,” including, but not limited to, not saying a word. In return, your father (henceforth ‘DADDY’) has authorized us to release into your possession one (1) live mockingbird.

In the unlikely event said mockingbird should fail to sing, as determined by a third-party arbitration panel, DADDY will purchase, for you, a diamond ring of commensurate retail value.

Should the diamond ring be found of fraudulent origin, limited to composition by brass alloy, a looking glass will be provided. Herein, “looking glass” is understood to be a term of art, not to imply construction of any particular material. Specifically, molded polymer magnifying optics of any kind will be acceptable under the terms of this contract.

If the looking glass should become “broke” due to faulty materials or workmanship, excluding acts of god and/or negligence on your part, you agree to accept from DADDY one (1) billy goat as full payment in-kind.

If the billy goat fails to perform under previously agreed upon provisions terms in the  standard goat labor contract, (see “Pulling” in the attached rider), DADDY agrees to provide you with a cart and bull of equal or greater value, as determined by commodity prices published in the prior day’s Wall Street Journal.

No guarantee is provided as to the cart and/or bull’s suitability for any implied or express purpose. Only in the event that the cart and bull should, as a unit, “turn over” (as per the accepted legal definition of a rotation of no less than 90 degrees around the cart-bull axis) will the warrantee terms of this agreement be in effect, and renumeration provided in the form of a dog, to referred to as “Rover” by both parties for the duration of the contract.

In the event the dog named “Rover” is unable, or refuses, to bark audibly, both parties agree to final compensation in the form of a horse and cart, under identical liability terms to the previously mentioned cart and bull. Should the cart and horse fail to maintain appropriate orientation, as defined in the adjoining diagram, the “FALL DOWN” clause of the horse and cart contract will be in effect: DADDY agrees to stipulate for the record that you are “the best baby in town,” with both parties enjoined from further comment on the matter for a period of thirty (30) days.

By falling asleep, you give your full consent and agreement to this contract, and agree to waive all future legal action against your father as it pertains to this or any prior informal mockingbird for sleep agreements.

This Contract shall be interpreted under the laws of the State of Nevada.

This Constract is executed in the City of Cambridge, County of Middlesex, Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Signed,
Steven Greenblatt, Esq.

So, what’s the truth? I ran a few quick benchmarks to find out. To isolate the effects of the kernel from the benchmark software itself, I used a 32 bit benchmark program, XBench, so that the only thing that would be changing between the two runs was the kernel. (My understanding of Mac internals is not great, so I hope I wasn’t making a poor assumption here.) The results were interesting. As one might expect, neither side is entirely right or wrong.

The biggest difference was in memory allocation, where the difference was almost a factor of two. The next biggest difference was in the thread benchmarks, where the 64-bit kernel had a roughly 30% improvement in time. Finally, the 64-bit kernel had over a 10% improvement in large block disk transfer speed. These results seem plausible, as all involve tasks where the kernel plays a relatively large role. The rest of the benchmarks, mainly graphics and computation, had little or no improvement, as one would also expect.

So, it seems that while it’s true Apple isn’t doing a terrible thing by defaulting to the 32-bit kernel, it’s certainly also the case that you’re leaving some speed on the table. This is especially true for the disk transfer benchmarks, which can have a real effect on the perceived responsiveness of the computer.

The complete results for my are below. The test computer was a 2.53 GHz Mid-2009 MacBook Pro.

64-bit Kernel

Results	127.31
CPU Test	180.05
  GCD Loop	285.50	15.05 Mops/sec
  Floating Point Basic	145.63	3.46 Gflop/sec
  vecLib FFT	120.72	3.98 Gflop/sec
  Floating Point Library	280.68	48.88 Mops/sec
Thread Test	331.22
  Computation	500.00	10.13 Mops/sec, 4 threads
  Lock Contention	247.63	10.65 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test	200.62
 System	255.76
  Allocate	618.01	2.27 Malloc/sec
  Fill	185.89	9038.61 MB/sec
Copy	211.31	4364.56 MB/sec
 Stream	165.04
  Copy	157.53	3253.68 MB/sec
  Scale	155.20	3206.42 MB/sec
  Add	175.03	3728.48 MB/sec
  Triad	174.48	3732.49 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test	190.82
OpenGL Graphics Test	86.25
User Interface Test	245.26
Disk Test	48.75
 Sequential	101.56
  Uncached Write	120.97	74.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write	119.43	67.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read	64.63	18.91 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	137.50	69.11 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 Random	32.07
  Uncached Write	11.66	1.23 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write	77.18	24.71 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read	59.85	0.42 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read	107.70	19.98 MB/sec [256K blocks]

32-bit Kernel

Results	122.67
CPU Test	179.50
  GCD Loop	295.89	15.60 Mops/sec
  Floating Point Basic	141.66	3.37 Gflop/sec
  vecLib FFT	120.19	3.97 Gflop/sec
  Floating Point Library	283.69	49.40 Mops/sec
Thread Test	260.69
  Computation	396.28	8.03 Mops/sec, 4 threads
  Lock Contention	194.23	8.36 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test	190.01
 System	234.38
  Allocate	369.54	1.36 Malloc/sec
  Fill	186.29	9057.73 MB/sec
  Copy	211.60	4370.52 MB/sec
 Stream	159.77
  Copy	153.34	3167.08 MB/sec
  Scale	150.01	3099.22 MB/sec
  Add	169.51	3610.92 MB/sec
  Triad	168.11	3596.34 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test	187.39
OpenGL Graphics Test	87.04
User Interface Test	237.42
Disk Test	46.82
Sequential	90.51
Uncached Write	118.31	72.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	79.22	44.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	60.05	17.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	154.69	77.75 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random	31.58
Uncached Write	11.29	1.20 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	76.69	24.55 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	60.83	0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	116.08	21.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Introducing Twitless: Twitter for Men. “140 Characters. A month.”

You can use your 140 characters any way you want, but if you use ‘em up early, you’ll just have to wait until next month, chatty Kathy.

Twitless. Because real men only talk when they have something to say.

So, to summarize with an example: there is a shoe salesman in Mississippi whose grandchildren will be paying taxes so that some rich guy in Boston can be rewarded for trading in his Cadillac Escalade. I take this back. As Ken points out, rich people probably don’t keep these cars until their value drops below $4500. And take note, my voting friends, that a measure introduced to limit the cash payouts to only those below a certain income level was voted down by “The Party of the People” by a margin of about 2 to 1.

The crassness of this bill is only exceeded by the utter lack of efficacy. It takes some sort of talent to waste money so quickly and yet do so so impotently. At the end of the day, all of this will only be a drop in the red ink-filled bucket that is our automotive industry. This is the problem with spending government money on bribing consumers to spend on things they don’t need, instead of investing in capital projects. Either it works once or not at all, and in the long run both are about the same.

I just have one request of the small number of you who read this. Next election cycle, I don’t mind if you continue voting for Democrats. The Republicans have become such a joke that I can’t blame you. But please do me favor and quit being so damn smug about being a member of a party that has become nothing but the very slight lesser of two very big, stinking, corrupt evils. This Democratic-controlled congress is nothing which anybody with an ounce of integrity or intelligence should be proud to have elected.

Moreover, I’d especially be wary of long term investing in an environment with nearly 10% unemployment and an economy entirely propped up by war-level deficit spending when (a) there is no war and (b) we already have more debt* than the entire private wealth of the country. The financial system crashed because we had unsustainable levels of credit being issued, pulling future demand forward in a way that had to end sometime. So, what did we do? We simply pulled demand forward by using a bigger lever, the United States Federal Government. When debt levels became untenable for individuals and corporations, we simply shifted them to the government, an entity with a higher credit rating by dint of its ability to steal with impunity to pay its bills. But that’s the end of the line, folks, and even the US government has its (credit) limits. The day of reckoning is drawing near, as the Chinese have made clear, and it won’t be pretty. I’m not predicting apocalypse, just extended tough times as we finally have to start paying the liquor bill for the long party.

So, if buy-and-hold is out, should you trade the market short term? Well, unless you’re a investment bank like Goldman Sachs, with the ability to access privileged order flow information and front run trades, you’d also have to be insane to try it. At this point, our stock markets are a farce, a rigged game for the benefit of a few elite financial firms. Spreads are huge, and people are getting scalped right and left by manipulation and high frequency computer trading games.

I’ve always looked with skepticism at the stock market. It’s a giant zero-sum game, for the most part, since dividends and stock buybacks have largely disappeared. Despite all the pumping of the market as a way to make wealth, it’s a mathematical fact that the stock market is essentially just a mechanism for transferring money between people and institutions. But lately, it’s also an empirical fact that it’s largely a way for money to be moved into Goldman Sachs’ trading accounts.

The stock market has become a Persian bazaar, and yet another example of the hubris and unchecked greed of Wall Street. It’s time the average person says “enough is enough” and quits playing. The only way Wall Street will get the message is if enough of us decide to quit being patsies, and leave the market. The truth is, your broker doesn’t care if you make money. They don’t offer their stock advice or “trading tools” because they give a damn about helping you. You’re the trading tool. They know, by definition, that their customers will lose money on average by taking their advice (it’s a negative sum game when you factor in commissions, even before considering that it’s a rigged game). They just need you to play the game, because the only way Wall Street stays alive is by skimming from the streams of money flowing through it.

If you haven’t thought about it yet, just ask yourself where money goes when it “goes into the market.” In truth it just goes from one person’s cash account into another’s. There is no such thing as money “in the market” or “on the sidelines.” It would be just as ridiculous to talk about money being tied up “in oranges” when people buy produce. Money is always going from one bank account to another. The market is just a way to transfer money and shares, and rather than money “moving in” from the sidelines it’s really more accurate to say that at any given point, dumb money is moving in or out of the market in the opposite direction of smart money. You have to wonder if you’re on the right side of this transfer, over the long run, if you decide to get into the market at this point.

I know you might miss the fun of trading stocks, but consider taking up gambling on sports, instead. At least it’s a fair game.

(*including government entitlement promises as debt)

But isn’t it true that if the stock market goes down on higher than expected volume, these same experts will call that a sign of great weakness for the equities market and a harbinger of doom?

Can somebody tell me how it is that rising volume with falling prices is terrible when it happens in the stock market but it’s an unmitigated positive when it happens in the housing market? My current guess is that they are wrong in both cases, and that you can’t glean much predictive value from volume in any market.

A few weeks ago, Apple quietly released a firmware upgrade that enabled SATA 2 on the new MBPs. Unfortunately, something is wrong with the hardware, because now people with SATA 2 drives are having problems right and left. Apparently, the SATA bus on the MBP is unable to handle 3.0 Gb/s, and large numbers of transfer errors are occurring. SATA is designed to catch these errors, but since they’re not supposed to happen in the first place the result is not pretty. The system hangs for several seconds as the operating system deals with the errors and the data is reread. This causes the infamous Apple “spinning beach ball,” especially if a lot of processes are competing for disk access.

If I were to speculate (and what fun is a blog if you can’t do that?) I’d say that Apple’s hardware engineers used a cable that isn’t capable of reliably supporting the higher bit rate. Having opened up my MBP to upgrade the hard drive, I’m not surprised that the cable they used would have problems. It’s an unshielded ribbon cable that runs right along the case of the hard drive. It probably has all sorts of parasitic capacitances. I’m guessing their engineers tested it at 1.5 Mb/s and saw no problems, and then somebody rushed the firmware out without adequately testing it.

To make matters worse, this bit of poor hardware engineering triggers an even more egregious bit of software engineering: the ’spindump’ process. This little piece of Mac OS X kicks on automatically whenever a process hangs, and writes a ridiculous amount of information to the disk so that Apple can diagnose the problem. Of course, if you’re already having a hang because of hard drive problems, the last thing you need is for the system to respond by spewing massive amounts of data at the disk. It’s often enough to take a minor problem and make it a major one that requires a hard shutdown of the computer. Brilliant, Apple. This is my first Apple computer since abandoning Apple in 1997 during the dark years of System 8. So far I’m regretting the decision to come back…

How to tell if you’ve got a problem: If you have a stock MBP configuration, you probably don’t have a problem. However, if you have an upgraded drive (especially one of the 7200 RPM, or solid state drives) and you’ve been having system hangs, this may be the problem. If you’re nerdy enough, you can install smartmon tools and check to see if UDMA_CRC_Error_Count is more than zero.

How to fix: Until Apple gets it’s act together and issues a firmware update (if that’s even possible) to bring it’s “pro” level computers technologically inline with last years low-end models, you’re just going to have to disable SATA 2 on your drive. Whether or not this is possible, and how to do it, will vary by manufacturer. On Seagate Momentus drives, you can short two jumper pins to force the drive to use SATA 1 speeds. Details can be found in the user guide of your specific drive.

The salary for a junior regional first officer is around $30-$40 a year, working the worst hours the FAA will allow and doing the hardest flying he or she will ever see in their career. The salary for a senior captain pushing buttons on a fully automated 747 is over $200k a year.

Apparently the unions have decided that flying should be done at a level of ability that is proportional to the number of seats. I’m sure that’s a comforting thought if you’re in seat 1A of a 747, but perhaps not so much if you’re in seat 1A of a Saab 340. In truth, the smaller airplanes are the hardest to fly, and spend more of their time in the weather.

What’s funny is that this huge skew is exactly what a free labor market would probably arrive at, too, given its mercenary monetization of human life. The only difference between the unions and the free market is that the unions also make sure the pilot’s competence never comes into play at any level.

No matter the skepticism with which I regard free market capitalism, the results of alternative systems rarely fail to disappoint more.

One phenomenon (of many) about modern culture that really confuses me is the success of budget airlines. Of all the things on which one might want to skimp, I’d assume air travel is not one of them. Hasn’t the thought ever occurred to somebody, as they sit in a lightweight aluminum tube traveling 80% of the speed of sound through the upper atmosphere, “Maybe this should be costing me more than $39 if I know what’s good for me?” Do you really want the people responsible for launching your kids into the stratosphere to be running cash flow negative?

Why isn’t there one airline in the country that charges 50% more to get you there, but which actually does their damn job correctly? They could have decent customer service, and could afford to price their product based on what it takes to fly safely, not decide on price first and then see what they can do with that money.

As a case in point, there have been several regional airline crashes in the past several years that can be traced (at least partly) to poor pilot training and long work schedules. I’d be fine paying extra to fly on a commuter but get a pilot who was as well trained, rested, and paid as one who would normally fly a 747. After all, flying isn’t easier just because there are fewer seats. I can’t imagine I’m alone in this. I also can’t imagine I’m alone in thinking I’d rather get there late than have to have the living shit scared out of me (or worse) by flying through a storm. However, airlines will generally fly right through anything less than a thunderstorm because it saves them the fuel costs of having to divert around (assuming they even have the spare fuel given that they all generally fly with close to the minimum required by FAA regulations). And, of course, sometimes they end up flying through more than they bargained.

So, if an airline started up and came out with ads saying “At Birge Airlines, we put safety above all else, and it shows in our prices. We’ll fly around storms even if it doubles our flight time, we carry more fuel than legally required, and if the weather isn’t good anywhere along your route, there’s a good chance you’ll be staying at a hotel on our dime. We’ll get your there late and lighter in the wallet, but we guarantee we’ll get you there safely.”

Wouldn’t you book your next flight with them?

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Falling energy prices offset another big jump in cigarette prices in April, leaving the U.S. consumer price index flat for the month, the Labor Department reported Friday.

With energy prices down 20% since April 2008, the CPI has fallen 0.7% in the past 12 months, the largest decline since 1955. The decline in the consumer price index has sparked concerns at the Federal Reserve and among economists about deflation taking hold in the United States.

However, core inflation – which excludes volatile food and energy prices – has not declined and in fact has accelerated in the past four months, rising 0.3% in April, the biggest increase since July.

The core CPI was boosted in April by a 9.3% increase in tobacco prices as a new federal excise tax to pay for children’s health care kicked in.

Excluding tobacco, the CPI fell 0.1% in April and the core CPI rose 0.1%.

“Inflation is behaving very nicely,” said Bill Hampel, chief economist for the Credit Union National Association. The report was “further evidence that deflation is not going to happen.”

Maybe I’m too cynical, but when the difference between inflation and deflation is a government tax, you have to wonder about the timing of that tax and if there weren’t ancillary motivations behind it.

Architecture reimagines how humans inhabit the earth — how they organize themselves spatially and shape their everyday lives. If architecture is viewed as the material alteration of the earth’s surface, it has astronomical consequences: it can alter the very shape of a planet. Come see one way designs develop, through a demonstration of laser cutting in our fablab.

That last sentence is a bit of a let down, isn’t it? I had no idea the rest of MIT was underachieving so much with their lasers! We really need to step things up. I know there’s folks at MIT using lasers to do mundane things like creating attosecond bursts of X-rays, quantum entangled photons for cryptography, and 3D high resolution medical imaging, but I don’t think any of us are really coming close to the astronomical-planet-surface-altering bar set by the folks in the architecture department. Maybe we should start using them to cut out parts for things like this:

Some of the planet-altering work of the MIT architecture department.

(For the record, this came from the front page of the MIT architecture department’s online portfolio, a collection of the recent work of which they are apparently most proud.)

Is it me, or has the level of Bullshit in the humanities risen to a point that transcends the usual academic norm? I used to believe that every era has its valid place, and progress was always made, but I’m now starting to think that the intellectual charlatans sitting on faculties of art departments around the world may just be the present day equivalent of the Sophists. The more I listen to humanities academics, I’m increasingly convinced that future civilizations will look back on our times as a dark ages for the arts.

Let’s end this shit, ok? Let’s make next year’s April Fool’s joke be that nobody does anything that day, but secretly plans to really screw somebody in May.

In preparation for that day, I made a song with Logic that is composed entirely out of tone generating software synthesizers so that I’d be ready with the first four D’s. (Ok, I think the drum instrument may be sampled.) For example, the initial sound you hear is from an FM synthesizer, sort of what you’d get if you could hack into an old DX-7 and pull the bits directly out of it instead of recording from the analog outputs. This is just about as clean and pure a recording as you’re ever going to experience; the sound you’re hearing has never been anything but abstract information until the moment that information is used to control the most versatile musical instrument of all time: the D/A converter in your computer. (I’m certainly betraying the fact that I’m a much better nerd than musician, but that probably wasn’t ever in doubt.)

The mix still needs a little work, but I’m sick of working on it, so here it is. If anybody wants me to post the original Logic file, let me know. I’ve also included a losslessly compressed file (which is much bigger) for those with iTunes, in case you have really good ears. Please drop a comment if there are any problems with the files. It was mixed on headphones, and will sound much better on the same.

All Electric

All Electric (Lossless)

It’s hard to stay mad at YouTube for too long when you find things like this.

(For the record, I’m pleased that people are looking into objectivism, not that I think anybody actually should literally “go John Galt” in the sense of quitting their jobs. And I also don’t think objectivism is 100% of the answer, but I think it is a way of thinking we could use a little more of right now.)

However, I’m not passing judgment. I’m sure I’d do no better, even with all the training in the world. My reason for writing this is to say something about the system, not the pilot. When I was doing my instrument training, my biggest takeaway from the whole thing was that it was utter bullshit for people’s lives to depend on a pilot doing it correctly when the chips are down. It’s normally easy to fly on instruments, but it gets surprisingly difficult quickly when things go wrong, especially with the disorientation that occurs at night. I really think too much is expected of pilots flying hard IFR in any airplane that’s not fully automated. Yes, it’s manageable, but not with the kind of margin you’d like to see when lives are at stake, and especially with relatively inexperienced pilots. One’s ability to react correctly is shockingly bad when terrified, and I’m guessing the slow speed situation caught the pilots off guard and scared the shit out of them.

However, don’t we live in a world where automation and control technology has advanced to the point where the space shuttle can deorbit and land itself? Where affordable cars have anti-skid brake systems whose computational power rivals a jet fighter’s? Why, then, are we paying to fly in airplanes without something as relatively simple as autothrottles? The big jets have them, but they are not economical to have on most commuter aircraft. Why is this considered remotely acceptable? Why, in this day and age, is “drop out of the sky and kill us all” included in the set of possible control inputs on any commercial aircraft on which our loved ones are flying?

With the exception of the Hudson ditching, every major aviation accident that’s happened in the past ten years in the US could have been avoided with relatively straightforward control software, including 9/11. (Terrorism aside, why the heck should the airplane’s software allow the pilot to fly into something?) If you don’t believe me, cite one and I’ll explain how simple software would’ve avoided it.

Given that this is all utterly doable, why isn’t it done? The answer is that because of regulations and liability, you can’t add a bloody toaster to a commercial aircraft for less than $100,000 per plane. The idea of regulation and liability is that it should keep us safe, but at this point it is doing the exact opposite. The Dash 8 that killed those people would’ve had autothrottles installed had they not been so expensive, and that expense is caused largely by the regulators who make certification so onerous, and the trial lawyers who make liability insurance prohibitively expensive. The Dash 8 is exactly the kind of airplane that needs them, but it won’t get them until we find a way to regulate aviation without completely stifling technological advancement at the same time.

Because of this unintended stifling effect, we could get rid of the FAA and safety would probably increase. I know trusting souls out there gasp at this idea, but the FAA is essentially an extension of the airline industry, anyway, so what we have now is basically self-regulation with all the advantages of government efficiency. They don’t have the guts to do anything drastic, and almost never have the brains to not do harm. They’ll focus on the small stuff (remember the Boeing 727 wiring inspections a while back?) and completely drop the ball on the big problems. When the FAA found out that the Boeing 737 had a major issue whereby the rudder would hard-over on its own, a problem that occurred over 100 times and caused two major fatal crashes, did they ground the fleet? Nope. That would’ve been too financially disruptive. They simply told the airlines to fly the planes a bit faster so that pilots could have a better chance at recovery when it happened.

Sometimes the only difference between anarchy and government regulation is paperwork. Recognizing this is helpful. Once you lose the blind faith, you realize that your safety is in your hands. You can make decisions to limit your risk. One good one is to avoid commuter flights in bad weather.

After long and serious consideration, E*TRADE Securities has made the decision to discontinue our family of proprietary index mutual funds.

As a result, the E*TRADE S&P 500 (ETSPX), Russell 2000 (ETRUX), Technology (ETTIX), and International (ETINX) Index Funds will be liquidated on a date no later than March 27, 2009 (the “Liquidation Date”).

Of course, even though we are discontinuing these funds, as an E*TRADE customer, you have access to over 7,000 funds to help you find the right alternative.

Here are a few important points to keep in mind:

Effective as of the close of business on February 23, 2009, no purchases of the funds may be made and any applicable redemption fees or account fees charged by the funds will be waived.

If you do not redeem your shares yourself, your shares will be automatically converted to cash equal to their net asset value on the Liquidation Date. You will receive proceeds equal to the net asset value of the shares you held on the Liquidation Date after provision for all charges, expenses, and liabilities of the fund.

The redemption is treated as a taxable transaction, and you will have to pay taxes on the proceeds of the liquidation, even if your shares are automatically redeemed on the Liquidation Date.

Please be assured that this decision has nothing at all to do with the financial health of E*TRADE FINANCIAL, which has been, and continues to be, very well capitalized by every applicable regulatory standard.

I especially like the last sentence. Only a financial industry CEO could lie so effortlessly. If they are so well capitalized, why are they applying for TARP funds? Why are they liquidating their mutual funds out from under their customers, instead of just selling the business? I suspect they need the cash to cover withdrawals. There may be a run on E*TRADE going on.

Fortunately, E*TRADE’s funds don’t have a lot of money under management. Only about half a billion dollars worth of stocks will be unloaded on the market this week, by my quick estimate. However, this might be a harbinger of ill things to come, if other financial institutions start to see liquidating their proprietary mutual funds as a way to raise capital.

On the bright side, at least nobody will be forced to take a short term capital gain…

It turns out that in certain situations, tremendous speed-ups of several factors can be obtained with this facility. In fact, I’m amazed that I haven’t read more about this. In particular, when memory is being loaded “out of sequence” in a memory bandwidth-constrained loop, you can often benefit a great deal from explicit prefetch instructions. For example, I am currently working on a program which has has two inners loops in sequence. First, an array is traversed one way, and then it is traversed in reverse. The details of why this is done aren’t important (it’s an optical transfer matrix computation, if you’re interested) but the salient aspect of the code is that the computation at each iteration is not that great, and so memory bandwidth is the main issue. Here is the relevent section of code where the arrays are accessed in reverse:

/*
* Step backward through structure, calculating reverse matrices.
*/
for (dx = n-1; dx > 0; dx--)
{
Trev1[dx] = Trev1[dx+1]*Tlay1[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay2[dx]);
Trev2[dx] = Trev1[dx+1]*Tlay2[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay1[dx]);
dTrev1[dx] = dTrev1[dx+1]*Tlay1[dx] + dTrev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay2[dx]) +
Trev1[dx+1]*dTlay1[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(dTlay2[dx]);
dTrev2[dx] = dTrev1[dx+1]*Tlay2[dx] + dTrev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay1[dx]) +
Trev1[dx+1]*dTlay2[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(dTlay1[dx]);
}


Despite having exactly same number of operations in the forward and reverse loops, it turns out that the vast majority of time was being spend in this second (reverse) loop!

Why? Well, I can’t be entirely certain, but I assume that when memory is accessed, the chip loads not just the single floating point double being requested, but an entire cache line starting at that address. Thus, the data for the next couple of iterations is always loaded into L1 cache ahead of time when you’re iterating forward in address space. However, in the reverse loop, the chip isn’t smart enough to notice that I’m going backwards (nor should it be) and so it has to wait for the data to come from either L2 or main memory every single iteration. By adding a few simple prefetch statements to the second loop, however, the time spent in this section of code went way down. Here is the new code for the second loop:

/*
* Step backward through structure, calculating reverse matrices.
*/
for (dx = n-1; dx > 0; dx--)
{
Trev1[dx] = Trev1[dx+1]*Tlay1[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay2[dx]);
Trev2[dx] = Trev1[dx+1]*Tlay2[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay1[dx]);
__builtin_prefetch(Trev1+dx-1,1);
__builtin_prefetch(Trev2+dx-1,1);
__builtin_prefetch(Tlay1+dx-1);
__builtin_prefetch(Tlay2+dx-1);
dTrev1[dx] = dTrev1[dx+1]*Tlay1[dx] + dTrev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay2[dx]) +
Trev1[dx+1]*dTlay1[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(dTlay2[dx]);
dTrev2[dx] = dTrev1[dx+1]*Tlay2[dx] + dTrev2[dx+1]*conj(Tlay1[dx]) +
Trev1[dx+1]*dTlay2[dx] + Trev2[dx+1]*conj(dTlay1[dx]);
}


The prefetch instructions tell the processor to request the next loop’s data, so that the data is making its way through the memory bus while the current computation is being done in parallel. In this case, this section of code ran over three times as fast with the prefetch instructions! About the easiest optimization you’ll ever make. (The second argument given to the prefetch instruction indicates that the memory in question will be written to.)

When playing around with prefetch, you just have to experiment with how much to fetch and how far in advance you need to issue the fetch. Too far in advance and you increase overhead and run the risk of having the data drop out of cache before you need it (L1 cache is very small). Too late and the data won’t have arrived on the bus by the time you need it.

Why did I not prefetch the dTrev1 and dTrev2 memory locations? Well, I tried and it didn’t help. I really have no idea why. Maybe I exceeded the memory bandwidth, and so there was no point in loading it in. I then tried loading it in even earlier (two loops ahead) and that didn’t help. Perhaps in that case the cache got overloaded. Who knows? Cache optimization is a black art. But when it works, the payoff can be significant. It’s a technique that is worth exploring whenever you are accessing memory out of order.

Tax receipts projections.

So, we have this situation where there is a huge economic entity that is about to see its income drop precipitously, as tax revenues fall off a cliff. Whether by spending cuts or inflationary printing, future real government contributions to the economy are going to have to decline. It’s easy to forget, but the government doesn’t actually make anything. Whatever money they spend either comes from the present or the future or from inflating the currency, but either way it is a hole that has to be filled sometime. Due to the large delay between the effects of a downturn and government spending, this will take a while to play out, and it’s a huge overhanging issue that has yet to completely hit the proverbial fan.

Here’s the thing that scares me about all of this: one of the tenets of control theory is that having a strong feedback loop with a large delay in any system is a good recipe for instability, and yet that’s exactly what we have when the government becomes such a large factor in the economy. Of course, an economy is not a model system, and it could never experience runaway instability like a linear circuit could. But if there are forces pushing it towards instability, I’d argue the result may not be exponentially growing oscillations, but it won’t be good. Humans don’t like unstable systems, especially when their money is involved, and rather than suffer oscillations, I suspect the economy would just fall and stay down.

Why hasn’t this happened before? Well, one likely possibility is that I’m completely out of my mind to be applying principles of control theory to the national economy. But another is that we’ve simply never tied this big of a feedback loop around our economy before. The last time we had a credit dislocation, perhaps government was small enough that these oscillations were damped. But the gain is way up, now, and I’m a little nervous to see what happens now that the system has been given a big kick.

You can be sure the special interests know what’s in it. You can be sure each Senator knows the pork coming his district’s way. But each member of our esteemed congress didn’t know 90% of what they were voting for.

Apparently, we don’t even have two days to spare? Utter bullshit. Congress is still taking breaks. They are still going home on the weekends, aren’t they? But when it comes to spending close to a trillion dollars, they just can’t wait two days?

I’m going to have to buy a lot of liquor this April to get through having to pay taxes to this government…

The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called “Hollywood Personalities,” which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars. And it continued its efforts to encourage news coverage of celebrities displaying diamond rings as symbols of romantic involvement. In 1947, the agency commissioned a series of portraits of “engaged socialites.” The idea was to create prestigious “role models” for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, “We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer’s wife and the mechanic’s sweetheart say ‘I wish I had what she has.’”

The piece also explains the great lengths to which De Beers went to ensure that diamonds, actually a relatively common rock, are kept in artificially short supply to create the illusion of rarity. Furthermore, they control the entire supply chain, keeping wholesale prices much lower than retail (the markup on diamonds is ridiculous, at least 100%) so that it’s impossible for the public to unload their diamonds on the market.

The most interesting part of this piece is the notion that people in 1946 were capable of this kind of cynical manipulation, because it removes one of the most bitter aspects of our current moral degeneracy: that idea that we’ve somehow fallen from a great height. It’s always a relief to find out the fall wasn’t that far.

My theory is that it is certainly possible for every conceivable investment to lose value, where no matter if you’re short or long you lose money. Just consider the absurd case where everybody becomes clinically depressed agoraphobics, sitting at home wasting away. Clearly, financial markets will freeze, and you’ll find out that your assumptions on value were predicated on the Wall Street showing up to work, the computers which record your trades running, and people holding out enough hope in the future to bother trading anything but cigarettes. Every asset, no matter what, has some finite counterparty risk. You may be right about everything, but the universe doesn’t owe you a bid. There probably weren’t a lot of good places to put your retirement funds during the declining Roman Empire, for example.

Granted, total collapse of financial market functioning is a rather extreme, and seemingly academic, case to consider. But as I thought about it a bit more after the discussion, I realized that this isn’t academic at all. Between fully liquid bull markets, where everybody makes money (on paper) and the macabre situation I posited above, is a continuum of completely plausible scenarios where it gets harder and harder to make money in any asset. In fact, this is already happening right now.

Bid-ask spreads on options have been widening in the past few months, which makes it harder to hedge either direction as liquidity dries up. While derivative markets are zero sum if you average out to expiration, in the short term both parties can have losses on paper due to wide spreads, and if you can’t close your short option position, you are forced to tie up cash as collateral, which could cause you to lose money. Thus, in a way both parties to an option contract can lose out if liquidity dries up.

Certain stocks are becoming impossible to short (nobody is willing to loan out any more shares). Others (such as Sears) are starting to require short holders to pay interest. It’s quite likely for somebody to go long Sears, somebody else to go short at the same time, and for both people to lose money.

Is this discussion of any practical value? I think so: if the market continues to deteriorate, even those that correctly predict it will have trouble making money from it. For example, it will become increasingly difficult to make money in inverse ETFs, no matter how brilliantly you predict the underlying stock market trends. The counterparties to the derivatives owned by the ETF will become so adverse to risk that they will insist upon prices which are less and less favorable for the ETF. This will manifest as extreme slippage in the ETF relative to the index it inversely tracks. Again, this is already happening. Consider the following plot of SKF versus the Dow Financials Index, which it is supposed to track the inverse of times two:

SKF (green) versus Dow Financials (black): How to lose money both long and short.

The underlying index went down about 25%, but so did the ETF (there were no distributions from SKF in this time frame). Everybody lost money, long or short! Some slippage is inevitable as a “cost” of leverage and shorting, but my point is that the slippage is getting worse. Six months ago SKF was tracking much closer to its target. It might be useful to consider an index of inverse ETF slippage as an indicator of the health of the financial markets, or at the very least a index of how crazy you’d have to be to remain in the market. So, the ETF slippage, the option spreads, tight short supply: they might all be subtle hints from the market that the market is no place to be right now, long or short.

NIH funding generally falls into two categories: on the one hand you have very long term research on grand problems, such as understanding cognition or the ability to regenerate nerves via stem cells, and on the other, short term research which is essentially medical in nature. The former has essentially zero short term benefits, other than “ah, that’s nice” articles in Nature, in which we find out something vague about the way the human memory works (”something to do with this here chemical, plus a few thousand others we don’t know yet!”). These large scale efforts will eventually, we hope, yield true revolutions in the way we perform medicine, and might be have huge economic returns. But they are decades away. The latter category, on the other hand, provide immediate health benefits, but generally in the form of linear improvements in care which come at exponential increases in cost. For example, new cancer drugs may extend the lives of a fraction of patients, but they cost $60,000 or more.

Given that any advances born of NIH funding turn into private profits funded by health care consumers, I’d argue NIH funding generally has a negative short term return on investment; instead of adding to our productivity as a country, it results in products which we are forced to buy (via givernment regulated insurance) no matter how marginal their improvement. If a pill works 5% better than the previous one, but costs 10 times more, no politician has the guts to say it’s not worth it. In this environment of completely uncontrolled cost management, for every dollar we spend on the NIH, the “return” is that we have to spend far more on the marginally effective technologies produced. This is completely different from most engineering and science research, where the products are, at worst, pointless amusements (e.g. most Media Lab research), and at best make society more efficient (e.g. networking, industrial robotics, digital imaging).

I don’t know what the Senate is thinking, but if their idea of stimulus spending is throwing money at healthcare research, we’re in trouble. You don’t grow a productive nation by spending a quarter of your GDP on visits to the doctor, but that’s where we’re headed in the next decade. I’m not a blind cheerleader for the NSF, either, but at least the research it funds has a net positive return on investment, even if it’s close to zero. Things like better computers, artificially intelligent robots, telepresence, etc. would all be much more beneficial to our economy than another $1000 a month pill we’ll be forced to buy for people who will die anyway. And if you’re apalled at my mercenary separation of morality from economics, ask yourself this: Is it in our long term moral interests to bankrupt the country? Healthcare quality tends to go down in collapsing economies…

~/.mozilla/plugins
/usr/lib/firefox/plugins

and make sure you delete any file with the name nprhapengine.so. Then, in Synaptic (or whatever package manager you like) make sure you’re running the actual official Adobe version of Flash 10. Ubuntu, being produced by ideologues (didn’t think I’d be able to write about linux without taking a shot, did you?), makes it hard to install software built by evil monolithic companies. So, if you have Flash installed, it’s probably a buggy “free-as-in-doesn’t-work” version. Do a search for “adobe flash” in Synaptic and uninstall any currently installed free versions. Then, install the flashplugin-nonfree package. (If you don’t find that package, leave a comment and I’ll help you make it available to Synaptic.)

After that, restart Firefox. Rhapsody should now work using their excellent Flash-based client.

(By the way, I was able to get the full Rhapsody client running in WINE, and was even able to play 30 second clips. However, it wouldn’t let me login, saying that cookies were being blocked. If anybody has been able to overcome that, I’d love to hear about it.)

It’s also a bit scary. The California government is apparently so bankrupt that it has to resort to stealing money from its citizens to push back paying the bills for 30 days. What then? In a few months to a year, the Federal government may have to bail them out. Either that, or California will have to raise taxes on the wealthy to astronomical levels. It will be interesting to see how high taxes will have to get before Alec Baldwin becomes a Republican.

Pretty big bug, huh? You’d think it would be rather embarrassing when your latest operating system release breaks the internet for a large proportion of your users. You’d assume this would be high priority, right? Nope. Until recently, the bug was considered only Medium priority since there were workarounds, even though they were completely nonintuitive and nothing a basic user could ever figure out by themselves. Worse, Ubuntu 8.10 has been out for months now, and this still hasn’t been fixed, and probably won’t be for a long time. (In fact, it will end up being fixed in the next version of Ubuntu before they backport the solution to 8.10.)

This bug exposes a fundamental flaw in the Linux distribution development model, wherein the people releasing the operating system don’t actually write, or even understand, the various components they are packaging. If this bug came up in Vista, Microsoft could have it fixed in less than a week, because the guy that wrote their network manager actually works there. Of course, Microsoft tests their products before sending them out the door, so it wouldn’t have happened to begin with.

A lot of the people using Ubuntu 8.10 are going to turn tail and run back to Daddy Gates when they encounter this bug. They aren’t going to check bug tracking sites to figure out what’s going wrong, or look into work-arounds. So, you can ratchet the Linux market share down just a little bit more. At this point, the idea that Linux will take over the computing world is actually becoming downright laughable from the perspective of anybody who hasn’t been drinking a lot of kool-aid.

I’ve asked this question before, but why spend so much time developing Linux only to not bother to actually put out a quality product? If these folks are so inclined to spend time programming a mediocre operating system for free, why not just volunteer at Microsoft? At least that might actually help people.

(In case you found this page looking for a solution to the problem, instead of a pointless rant about it, I offer the following two solutions, in order of decreasing utility. The most obvious solution, assuming you value your time at something north of minimum wage, is to simply install a usable OS built by professionals who actually have something to lose were they to release an operating system with such an astoundingly egregious bug. If you’re too cheap for that, or suffer from Linux Masochistic Personality Disorder and absolutely must get this working, you can always edit your network settings by hand.)

Kookery about planetary alignment aside, might the environment of the child’s first experiences shape their thinking? I can’t imagine any baby whose first impressions of the world consist of pool parties and people in hot pants turning out to be a person of substance. But maybe my observations were just due to the fact that people simply have less babies in the Summer for some wierd social reason?

As a control I then did birthday checks of the worst human beings I could think of: Pamela Anderson, Jessica Simpson, Tom Cruise, Kanye West, Courtney Love, George Bush, and the worst person to walk the planet since Hitler: Linsday Lohan. Their birth months? June, June, July, June, June, July and July. Incidentally, George Bush is the only world leader I could find who was born in either June or July.

This isn’t scientific, but nor did I have to cherry pick. This shit is real. Gestate faster, Michele!

Update: I’m relieved to find out that a few good friends were born in June. So, astrology is rebunked. But July is still highly suspect…

Thanks to Dikipedia.org for help with the research for this article.

Unsold cars pile up in a British lot.

If the manager gives you any trouble, just quietly pull out this photo, and maybe a few others from the Guardian’s piece, and leave them on his desk. Stand up, point to them and say “Maybe somebody will make me a good deal on one of these.” Then slowly walk away. If he doesn’t stop you, fine. Just leave the picture with him and come back next week. After he’s stared at that picture for a week, he’ll soften up.

In all seriousness, if you are in the market for a car, wait until the 2010 models come out. You will probably be able to buy a 2009 model for an unbelievable price if you hold out for it. The automotive industry is so screwed, it’s hardly believable. They just keep churning out cars, and nobody is buying. I’m thinking of picking up a new Hummer at the end of the year and using it as an apartment.

A few nights ago I dreamt we were allowed, by some new medical advance, to have our baby taken out early so that we could have a little meet and greet, and then he’d have to be put back in to be born normally a few weeks later. When we got to hold him, he looked like a regular baby, with his eyes tightly closed and his face scrunched up.

Then, he started to relax, and opened one eye, then he cautiousy opened the other and looked around. My wife was holding him so that he faced me, and we both got excited that he was already looking around, way ahead of schedule. He then locked eyes with me and said ”Hi, Jonathan!”

“You know my name?!?” I exclaimed.

“Yes, you told it to me earlier, you’re my dad,” he replied, as if it was obvious. He then
started to try to move around and crawl, but was too weak.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “your brain has been getting good exercise with us talking to you in your mom’s belly, but your muscles haven’t been able to, what with you all squeezed in there. Speaking of that, how do you like being stuck in there all curled up in a ball?”

The baby shrugged stoicly, as if to say, “What can you do?”

“How do you feel about the fact that you gotta go back in there in a little bit?” I then asked. He shot me a wide-eyed “Say what, now?” look. The dream ended.

Additional detail: the baby had red hair and a receding hairline with a widow’s peak. He looked sort of like a miniature David Caruso. What the hell does that mean?

I’ve written before on the failure of Linux on the desktop, and my feeling being that it is a hopeless to shoehorn an ancient server OS into something your average person might want to use to check e-mail (at least not without the resources of somebody like Apple). Market data has been showing desktop linux adoption slowing, and now recent testing has shown Ubuntu itself is actually getting slower. We will have to mark down 2008 as yet another Year of Desktop Linux that turned out not to be. Will 2009 be the year? Not by my experience trying to upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10.

As I sat watching the upgrade work its way through the packages, at some point the computer became unresonsive to mouse clicks. I ended up having to do a hot shutdown in the middle. As you might imagine, this completely,and utterly, hosed my Linux partition.

You might wonder why I keep banging my head against the wall of Linux, despite my rantings about it. So did I. As I sat starting at the kernel panic message, I realized something:

As much as I complained, part of me enjoyed putting up with this stupid operating system, even though it long ago exausted its utility by causing me to spend so much of my time that it was no longer worth any amount of free software. As an engineer, I like to tinker and fix things, and Linux gave me the opportunity (rather, forced me) to delve into the workings of the OS in order to manage it. Thus, it provided me with the illusion of feeling useful and productive on a regular basis as it required me to put my knowledge to work fixing the never ending litany of problems.

But as I sat looking at a hosed partition, I had the embarassed, hollow feeling that I’d really wasted an extraordinary amount of time focused on my computer as an object of inherent interest, as opposed to an expedient for actual useful work. My linux machine had become a reflexive endevour, largely existing for its own purpose, like a little bonsai garden that I tended to with wearing patience.

And now what do I have for it? I have some profoundly uninteresting knowledge of the particulars of one operating system, and a munged disk that’s about as practically useful as a bonsai tree. (Yes, my actuall work is backed up, but it’s never trivial getting everything exactly the way you had it with a new system install, no matter how much you backed up.)

This was all good, though, because it ripped from my hands something I didn’t have the good sense to throw away. Rather than huddle down with an install CD and try to fix my little Linux partition, I just let it go and started to get back to work, actual work in the outside world, using Windows.*

It felt good. I’m done with operating systems as a hobby, tired of indulging technology for its own sake. One must not get too attached to things.

*I’m not trying to insult OS X, which I think is probably better than Windows. I just don’t have a Mac at work. (I can only fight one holy war at a time.)