Bidatzi writes here

We do this now. Either he’s very smart, the bilingual stuff is...

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 11:53:58 +0200

We do this now. Either he’s very smart, the bilingual stuff is trivial or we’re doing something right here.

Easy steps to a better life

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 14:04:06 +0200

This is the best self-help drivel you’re going to read this week. Short, to the point, doable:

Drink more water than you do now. Drink less of all other stuff.
Eat more nuts. Eat more fatty veggies. Eat fruits with strong colors. Eat less of all other stuff.
Walk more. A lot more. Seat less. Do some push-ups. Do pull-ups if you can. Lift kids.
Listen to more podcasts. Read more books. Watch less TV. Waste your time with games that involve math. Write.
Sleep more. Feel temperature extremes from time to time.
Cook. Have sex.
Try not to be an asshole, the world will notice. Help someone you didn’t have to. At least once a day.
Be thankful and forgiving.
Be emptily bored at least a few minutes everyday.
Have a coffe; away from meals. Have a glass of wine; close to friends.

(You want footnotes and references and links? You read tip #7, didn’t you?)

Funny English mistakes Sam makes

Thu, 15 May 2014 12:26:00 +0200

As most of you know, I’m raising two bilingual kids, ages 1 and 3. English is not my native tongue, but I try my best to fake it.

I have never spoken a single word in Spanish (my native tongue) to either of my two sons since they were born.

Those goose bump-inducing first whispers upon holding them for the first time in their lives? Yup, English. Comfort words after they get hurt or throw a temper tantrum for some (preposterous) reason? Yeah, English. A snap warning shout when they are at risk of falling or hitting something? You get the idea.

We sing, play, argue, fight, learn, cuddle, explore and discover in English. I do, at least.

Sam, the older one, the one who already talks, understands English very, very well. He also knows how to speak it, but generally chooses not to do so, unless he’s been alone with me for a while. He’s small but he’s not stupid: one of the two languages is obviously more useful in his (current) world than the other one and he adjusts his preferences accordingly.

So, for the most part, he responds to my English in Spanish, translates (very precisely) what I say to explain it to others, etc.

He’s tried (unsuccessfully) to get me to switch to Spanish. I’ve more or less convinced him that I am actually unable to do it and so he’s taken upon himself the task of teaching me Spanish (Progress report: I already know how to say invierno, mosca, bañera and rana).

Sometimes he makes mistakes (or is it me?) when listening and the feedback I get from him in Spanish is hilarious. I’ve compiled a few examples here, mostly to have them written down somewhere before I forget them.

Playing games with him and a toy (a small stuffed camel) we used to make him eat faster, I said “Sam, the hungry camel is getting close!”. Sam turns his face towards me with a very confused expression and replies “Daddy, ¿cómo se cierra un camello??”
Another day he was running carelessly in a Burger King where there was one of those yellow wet-floor signs. I told him “Sam, be careful here because the floor is wet and you can slip”. Again, that puzzled look: “Pero daddy, ¿cómo me voy a dormir aquí en el suelo?”
We have a framed picture of the two brothers taken just three hours after Ike was born. Sam is holding him in his arms. We were both looking at that picture and Sam asked “Daddy, ¿por qué está tan rojo el bebé?”. I explained “because he had just been born”. “¡¡¿¿EL BEBÉ SE QUEMÓ!!??”
He always races me from home to the car and from the car to home. He usually wins. “Oh Sam! You beat me again!”. “¿Eh? ¡Daddy, yo no te he mordido!”

I’m loving every minute of this.

PS: and don’t you dare say “EspideRman” or “beicOn” in front of him, he will immediately correct you with perfectly-pronounced American English. As he’s grown, popcorn has evolved from paco to, well, popcorn. He could sell it at a ballpark without issues now.

English in the playground

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 21:41:22 +0100

Last Friday afternoon we took Sam & Ike to a nearby playground in the town center. As usual, the place was crowded. I was playing with Sam, daring him to get into the scarier plays, the ones for bigger kids. “C'mon big boy, you can easily climb that! Go on, don’t be afraid! What a strong little man you are!” Etc.

Then something funny happened: kids started coming towards us all excited. “Hello!”, “¿Habláis en inglés?”, “¡Yo también sé inglés!”, “How are you?”, “What is your name?”, “I am five years old!”.

I counted six different kids, three handsome African-Spanish ones (I’d say 3-6 years old), a 5-year old Spanish girl with some sort of speech disorder (in Spanish, but surprisingly not in English), two Spanish boys and a Russian mother with a little 1-year old girl. They all wanted to speak English with us.

It felt just natural and heartwarming.

Who knows, maybe there’s still hope for this godforsaken barren land of ours.

"As the market efficiency ideas took shape, it dawned on me that the reason the trading rules..."

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 08:44:08 +0100

““As the market efficiency ideas took shape, it dawned on me that the reason the trading rules I’d developed earlier didn’t work out of sample was because price changes were random, which at that point was what people thought an efficient market meant. We know now it doesn’t. Market efficiency means that deviations from equilibrium expected returns are unpredictable based on currently available information. But equilibrium expected returns can vary through time in a predictable way, which means price changes need not be entirely random””

- Eugene Fama (CFA Interview)

"Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here..."

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:32:01 +0200

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

- Mark Twain

"You must not use the Service or Content with any products, systems, or applications for or in..."

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:49:00 +0200

“

You must not use the Service or Content with any products, systems, or applications for or in connection with any of the following:

(i) real time navigation or route guidance, including but not limited to turn-by-turn route guidance that is synchronized to the position of a user’s sensor-enabled device.

”

- Google Maps API Terms of Service https://developers.google.com/maps/terms

That’s pretty much why Apple needed its own solution. And it is inevitable that it is a crappy one in the beginning. It can only improve if it exists in the users devices to begin with. If they didn’t take the jump the gap with GMaps would only grow and grow.

Engineers are cool. The company that made this video, Arup from...

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 13:45:00 +0200

Engineers are cool. The company that made this video, Arup from the UK, is one of the best engineering firms in the world. All the featured structures and buildings in the video have been designed/calculated by them. Ever heard of the Sidney Opera House or the George Pompidou center? Yup, that’s Arup too.

RIP

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

RIP

A trillion frames per second

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 17:57:09 +0200

Reason number 2348762837468 why MIT rocks: a camera so fast that you can actually see light as it propagates through space. No, really!

In the time it takes this thing to capture a frame light advances just 0.6 millimeters.

And while you’re at it you can also make the femto-camera “see” around corners by carefully doing time-of-flight analysis and rendering of rebounded/scattered laser pulses.

Ramesh Raskar is one seriously awesome nerd.

The Spanish bailout

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 11:48:00 +0200

Spain is finally getting a bailout and, naturally, we’re already busy at playing our depressing small-minded games about how to call it, who can we point the fingers at, etc. How productive. Sigh. The Prime Minister is going to be ridiculed for a few weeks for his refusal to call a spade a spade. Rightfully so.

Of course it is a bailout, a rescue. It is also enormously different from the previous European bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. These other countries are embarked in what the EFSF terminology calls “macro-economic adjustment programmes”. Their bailouts include funding of the general government financing needs and, in exchange, set wide-ranging conditions that the bailed-out country needs to adhere to. These include budgetary measures, structural reforms (pensions, labor, competitiveness, etc.) size of the public sector, etc. The Spanish bailout is different.

The details known so far (which are few) follow, to the letter, what was public information since July 2011 in the form of this EFSF Document: Guideline on Recapitalisation of Financial Institutions (FIs) via loans to non-programme countries.

This document clearly states:

The objective of the new instrument is to provide financing to Member States in order to specifically support financial institutions against appropriate conditionality, i.e. not necessarily in the context of a macro-economic adjustment programme but under another more focused form of conditionality.

[…]

The focus of the EFSF funded support should be on financial sector repair, with planned restructuring/resolution of financial institutions as the sine qua non condition for EFSF assistance for recapitalisation.

There are essentially two sets of conditions:

EU-related institution-specific conditionality: Basically, this means that all EU existing regulations about state-aid have to be followed. There’s also a provision that foresees including additional conditionality stemming from an eventual European-level banking resolution regulation/authority.
Horizontal conditionality (financial sector reform): Financial supervision, corporate governance and domestic laws relating to restructuring/resolution (also inline with upcoming regulations at the European level).

Well, so far so good. This financial assistance programme does not include broad-spectrum macro-economic conditionality. Is the Spanish government “no strings attached” spin true? Not completely, alas.

That same document, when describing the eligibility requirements for a country to be able to access the programme, explains:

Countries under excessive deficit procedure would still be eligible for this recapitalisation loan, provided they fully abide by the various Council decisions and recommendations aiming at ensuring a smooth and accelerated correction of their excessive deficit.

Spain is, indeed, under an excessive deficit procedure. This means that getting into this bailout turns what were before mere “recommendations” into hard requirements. Now, were we going to follow on those recommendations regardless of being bailed out or not? Quite possibly, but we will now be mandated to do so.

And what are those recommendations? Well, there will be more in the future, to be sure, but as of now, these have already been published by the European Council after analyzing Spain’s Stability Programme Update 2012-2015:

Deliver an annual average structural fiscal effort of above 1.5% of GDP over the period 2010-13 (…) Establish an independent fiscal institution to provide analysis, advice and monitor fiscal policy, as well as to estimate the budgetary impact of proposed legislation.
Accelerate the increase in the statutory retirement age and the introduction of the sustainability factor foreseen in the recent pension reform (…)
(…) address the low VAT revenue ratio by broadening the tax base for VAT. Ensure less tax-induced bias towards indebtedness and home-ownership
(…) addressing the situation of remaining weak institutions, (…) comprehensive strategy to deal effectively with the legacy assets (…) and define a clear stance on the funding and use of backstop facilities.
(…) take additional measures to increase the effectiveness of active labour market policies.
Review spending priorities and reallocate funds to support (…) SMEs, research, innovation and young people. Implement the Youth Action Plan.
Take specific measures to counter poverty, by making child support more effective and improving the employability of vulnerable groups.
Take additional measures to open up professional services (…), reduce delays in obtaining business licences and eliminate barriers to doing business. Complete the electricity and gas interconnections with neighbouring countries and address the electricity tariff deficit in a comprehensive way (…)

All these things we must now implement. Most of the items on the list are measures we were going to be cajoled into doing anyway. If this looks like comprehensive macro-economic conditionality to you, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. You just need to look at the reactions of our neighbors in Portugal and Ireland to see if they believe we’ve gotten a similarly conditioned bailout as theirs.

There are still a lot of missing details, of course. In fact, Spain hasn’t even requested the bailout yet. Last Saturday’s Eurogroup meeting consisted in Spain announcing that it will formally request the bailout soon and the rest of the members stating that they’re willing to grant it:

The Eurogroup has been informed that the Spanish authorities will present a formal request shortly and is willing to respond favourably to such a request.

Anyway, they’ve also put a nice big round figure on the sticker to add some strength into this anticipated statement: €100 billion. Keep in mind that this is just a limit on the total amount that the different European rescue facilities could make available. Spain most probably won’t be asking for that much money. I’d be frankly surprised if we end up tapping more than €55-60bn out of the credit line.

Another important issue is that of seniority. An unwelcome effect of these bailouts is that when there’re many preferred creditors, non-preferred investors tend to be crowded out. The situation is this:

IMF loans are super-senior to anything else. Thankfully, IMF won’t be contributing funds to the Spanish rescue. (IMF direct involvement would also trigger troika visits and all that men-in-black juicy stuff)
EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility) loans are pari passu (equal to others) respect to existing senior debt.
ESM (European Stability Mechanism, to become operational on July 1st 2012) loans are senior to all others except FMI loans.

What has been reported in the news is that Spain will probably be getting funds from both EFSF and ESM. This would mean that part of the loans (those coming from ESM) are, in fact, senior to outstanding public debt. But there’s an important catch. The treaty establishing ESM states:

In the event of ESM financial assistance in the form of ESM loans following a European financial assistance programme existing at the time of the signature of this Treaty, the ESM will enjoy the same seniority as all other loans and obligations of the beneficiary ESM Member, with the exception of the IMF loans.

As you can see, it is extremely important that Spain taps at least some funds from EFSF before requesting any loans from ESM if Spain is to maintain direct access to debt markets. There’s no guarantee we will retain access to the markets even in that case though, but it will be easier.

There has also been a lot of discussion (and a lot of dumb statements) about who is the actual recipient of the funds, who guarantees that the loans will be paid back, who provides the money, etc. Here’s a small FAQ on all that:

Who gets the money? The Spanish Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB), which is a government agency with the full backing of the Spanish Treasury as a guarantee.
Who guarantees that the loans will be paid back? The Kingdom of Spain. Not the banks.
Who provides the funds? In the case of EFSF Willing investors. Not “the Dutch taxpayer”. What our fantastic neighboring taxpayers provide here are guarantees, not funds. ESM will have a mix of paid-in capital (“taxpayer money”) and issuance capacity (getting funds from investors).
So banks do get the money for free? Not exactly. FROB won’t be gifting money to the banks. It will become an owner of them (total or partial). Hopefully, this is a position that FROB will unwind sometime in the future and get back the money that was injected into the banks (or at the very least a good chunk of it). Part of the recapitalization for banks will come in the form of direct equity and part will come in the form of contingent convertibles (CoCos). This is already the way FROB works.

About the funding mechanism, theory indicates that EFSF/ESM issue debt in the markets and transfer the funds to the bailed-out country. However, there’s also the possibility, regarded by the stuffy chaps at the Financial Times as “highly unorthodox” when Spain itself floated the idea a few days ago, of directly providing the recipient with EFSF/ESM bonds. At the end of the day, capital is capital. The fact that many people who should know better mistake capital and liquidity all the time doesn’t change reality. For liquidity assistance you can go to ECB or other liquidity providing facilities (repo markets, etc.).

A big unknown, let’s keep in mind that Spain has still not formally asked for the rescue, is what will the interest rate be and the maturity profile of the loans. We’ll see, but my guess is that they will be significantly lower than what Spain pays now in the markets. Which leads me to the last point I want to address: Impact on the deficit. Everybody in Spain asks about this. Even to our disastrously clueless Prime Minister. “Does this ~~rescue~~ ~~bailout~~ convenient line of credit affect the public deficit figure?”

Yes, it does. Naturally, the principal amount of the loans won’t be included in the deficit figures (as long as it is clearly justified that these are purely financial transactions as required by ESA95 III.2.1). But the interest payments on the loans are, of course, public spending and thus have an impact on deficit figures. About whether the impact is positive or negative, it depends on what reference you take for the comparison: no bailout and no bank rescue? impact is indeed negative; no bailout and bank rescue anyway? impact is in this case positive because the funds (and interest payments) are much cheaper. The specific details on how the capital will be injected into the banks play a role here. CoCos pay a coupon to FROB that detracts from deficit (in 2011 FROB got more than €700 million in payments from outstanding convertible bonds). There are rumors that the loan could have a 3% rate and 15 years maturity with no payments in the first 5 years. Mr Almunia has stated that banks receiving CoCos will pay an 8.5% coupon. If this is finally the case, the measure could be significantly positive for the public deficit figure (i.e. reduce it).

In any case, this is all still very preliminary. We are in for some interesting weeks.

The Linguistic Genius of Babies: States essentially the same as...

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 09:46:00 +0100

The Linguistic Genius of Babies: States essentially the same as Barbara Zurer’s “Raising a Bilingual Child”, which has been of immense help for me, but it’s cool to see it well presented in a video.

Crazy-shaped gears. The math behind those is beautiful

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:49:04 +0100

Crazy-shaped gears. The math behind those is beautiful

On energy, its sources, storage and uses

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 19:14:00 +0100

This is a conversation that I have a lot. Usually with smart, curious people that are interested in our eternal “energy dilemma”. There are A LOT of fundamental misconceptions in our public energy debate, most of them perpetuated by interested parties.

One glaring example is the promise of the so-called hydrogen economy. Let’s cut to the chase. One very easy and convenient way of obtaining usable energy is to just burn stuff. It can be oil, coal, wood, natural gas, hydrogen. A lot of stuff burns nicely. You can convert that energy into mechanical movement and use it directly, or transform that movement into electricity.

We need energy in many different places and for different purposes. In some cases, it’s more convenient to transport the stuff-to-burn and in other cases it’s better to transport the electricity.

This duality is a source of confusion: yes, electricity and chemical fuels are form of transporting energy. BUT chemical (fossil) fuels are also a source of energy. To transport electricity we first need to turn some other form of energy into electricity. To transport oil we just need to pump it from the ground.

So, what about hydrogen again? It’s an abundant element, it burns nicely (producing water and heat as outputs). But there’s a (fatal) catch. The form of hydrogen we need is molecular hydrogen (H2) and there’s NONE of it floating around. Hydrogen is easily captured by other elements and most of what we have is in water, hydrocarbons, etc.

Wait a second, isn’t that actually a good thing? We take water, take the hydrogen out of it, use it for our energy needs (burning it) and we get water again! It’s a closed, endless process! Alas, no. For that sad negative we have to thank the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the greatest killjoy in all of science. Really, if there is a God somewhere*, I will never forgive him for imposing the 2nd law of thermodynamics on us. What this law means, in lay terms, is that you can not get back to the starting point without losing some energy in the process. So the hydrogen scheme looks like this, more or less:

You have a solar panel and produce electricity with it. Efficiency (I’ll be generous): 20% (You could use some other more efficient energy than solar, but I want to be hipster-eco-conscious here)

You take the electricity and use it to breakdown water and produce Hydrogen. Efficiency: 40%

Now you can do two things:

a) Store it in tanks (which is VERY difficult) so that you can use it wherever you want (like in a car, ship, etc.). You will burn it in your car. Efficiency: 40%.

b) You transport it (with pipes) so that it can be used in other places by burning it in, let’s say, a modern turbine or fuel cell. Efficiency: 55%.

Total process efficiency with either alternative is depressingly low (4%). And in the end, we’re using the hydrogen ONLY as a way of transporting energy that we already had converted into electricity. What is the freaking point of that!?

Transporting electricity is not a very efficient process (line loses are about 20%) but transporting hydrogen is HELL. Hydrogen molecules are very small and tend to diffuse into almost all metal alloys. So you lay a crazy expensive pipe network for transporting H2 and you have to scrap the whole infrastructure in less than a decade because all the pipes have become brittle from the hydrogen diffusion. You DO NOT want brittle pipes transporting an extremely flammable gas.

I understand the search: we want to be able to use primary energy sources other than fossil fuels but we lack the convenience that fossil fuels provide for storing energy. Fossil fuels are easy to move, have very high energy densities and burn nicely.

We have many good ideas for replacing these fuels with other sources (like the Sun, the wind, nukes, geothermal, tides, whatever…) but we don’t have many good ones for the role of fossil fuels as easily manipulated energy storage.

Hydrogen could conceivably be one such storage&transport medium. But it is NOT one today. There are huge engineering problems to be solved. And it will always be a process that requires huge over-capacity in generation because producing H2 is just stupidly costly (in energy terms).

Other alternative is using hydrocarbons but only as a storage medium, not as a primary source: bio-fuels. With bio-fuels, the theory goes, we have a renewable source (the sun will make the grass/soy/corn/sugar cane grow again) and we’re using the methanol/ethanol only as an energy storage medium. OF COURSE this produces CO2 (it doesn’t matter much if you simply burn the fuels or if you feed them to a fancy fuel cell, you will get CO2 as an output), but supposedly the same CO2 will be captured by the plants when they grow up again.

One last point about the misinformation: Regarding fuel cells, if they use anything different than pure H2, like methanol, ethanol, natural gas, gasoline, etc. they DO produce CO2. It’s just a little less than burning because they are (usually) more efficient, but they’re based in an oxidation of the fuel and there’s no way to do that without producing CO2. In the case of natural gas, modern turbines can be as efficient as any fuel cell on the market. They’re just less fashionable (and cheaper).

* There isn’t.

Claudio CC

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 13:02:56 +0100

Claudio CC:

If you want to read interesting stuff written by a very smart, no-nonsense, shouting nerd, go ahead: click.

Christmas lights, billionaire style

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 23:54:00 +0100

Does it snow in Minneapolis? Yes, it does. A lot.

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 21:19:34 +0100

Does it snow in Minneapolis? Yes, it does. A lot.

This guy built a functional version of the mind-blowing...

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 19:03:28 +0100

This guy built a functional version of the mind-blowing Antikythera mechanism with Lego!. I’ve always been fascinated by the Antikythera. You mix that with stuff like the Aeolipile steam engine and I would say that the ancient Greeks had a good shot at producing the industrial revolution 18 centuries in advance.

How the first transistor worked. Wonderful explanation by the...

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:54:00 +0100

How the first transistor worked.

Wonderful explanation by the always amusing Engineer Guy.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 15:33:55 +0100

Happy Thanksgiving to all!