monsterHash

Fukuwatashi Senbei knockoff recipe

Demian Perry — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:47:28 +0000

This weekend, my wife and I decided to replicate Fukuwatashi Senbei cookies, those delightful specialty cookies that you can buy at Minamoto Kitchoan. Here’s the recipe we used: Ingredients: 1 1/2 cups butter, softened 1 1/4 cups white sugar 4 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 5 cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon [...]

Serendipity Day at NPR

Demian Perry — Sat, 28 May 2011 14:47:26 +0000

Last week the entire Digital Media department spent a day working on individual projects of our own design. Some highlights: My project was to dig into several mashups with the Twitter Search API. I built a twitter seismograph by mashing up with the highcharts library, as well as a google maps mashup, a simple sentiment [...]

5 Greatest One-Shot Music Videos of Our Time

Demian Perry — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:27:47 +0000

We were chatting in the locker room this morning about one-shot music videos, and it occurred to me that this might be an emerging trend in performance art. As it turns out, you can find some great examples going way back. Remember Weezer’s “The Sweater Song”? But the larger point, I suppose, is that great [...]

How do I create an efficient PHP ingest script?

Demian Perry — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:52:37 +0000

‘Efficient’ is the key word here. In the case below, I’m grabbing form 4 data from the SEC (insider trading disclosures) and saving them locally on my server. 12345678910111213141516<?php $file = file_get_contents('http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent&type=4&company=&dateb=&owner=include&start=0&count=100&output=atom'); $xml = simplexml_load_string($file); $accessionNumberArray[] = ''; //instantiates the array we'll use to keep out dupes from this pull. $accessionNumberArrayLastLog[] = ''; [...]

How to think like a hedge fund manager

Demian Perry — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:04:50 +0000

I’ve been on an investing book kick lately, and I recently read Joel Greenblatt’s classic (from the 90s), You Can Be A Stock Market Genius. Michael Lewis mentioned the book more than once in The Big Short, indicating that it was the manual for the handful of financial whizzes who predicted the near-collapse of capitalism [...]

Data trading for value investors

Demian Perry — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:13:41 +0000

For all the badgering that the Chicago School has taken in the months following the market collapse, the efficient market theorists got one thing right: markets react fast to new information. There’s a lovely scene in “Fun with Dick and Jane” that illustrates this perfectly: The markets really do react this quickly! I remember an [...]

Publish dynamic charts to wordpress

Demian Perry — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:46:38 +0000

Last year, I wrote a piece on how to chart financial data with php. That was before I discovered the flexibility of google docs. A pure php / mysql solution with a web proxy and jquery is more flexible, but it requires server access and the ability to set up a remote database. If you [...]

Risk: an unconventional approach

Demian Perry — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 16:24:27 +0000

The comedian Robert “Bobcat” Goldthwaite had a routine about bad ideas, like the day someone decided to cook with an open flame on the Hindenburg. Or, in all seriousness, someone decided that it was a good idea to board an airship attached to a giant ball of flammable gas. What drives humans to make such [...]

Why do wages rise in a recession?

Demian Perry — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:08:10 +0000

This morning, Rutgers University released its Labor Scorecard, which confirmed the high unemployment figures published by the Labor Department earlier this week. Someone in the PR department at Rutgers caught this report on its way out the door and added a little spice to the press release, noting that “though unemployment has risen in 2009 [...]

How is a stock like an equity bond?

Demian Perry — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:01:52 +0000

Warren Buffett described his philosophy of viewing stocks as ‘equity bonds’ in a 1977 Forbes magazine article and subsequently in a speech at Columbia Business School. In her book, Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements, Mary Buffett attributes the concept to Buffett, which is interesting considering that the title of her book is [...]