Time to move out of Baltimore.

Real life is overrated if you ask me.

It's time to move to Baltimore.

Time to begin "real life".

First off, if you haven't already done so read The Last Road Trip Blog for a partial account of my summer.

However that isn't what moves me to write to you today. As many of you may know I have long been a fan of Joss Whedon and all of his brainchildren (ie. Buffy, Angel, & Firefly). Therefore, on the off chance you've managed to miss this information elsewhere on the interweb, but happened to read this blog (a possibility my hit counter assures me is depressingly dismal), I implore you to visit Dr. Horrible. I'm aware that for most of you this will come to late for access to the free content, which is ok because I think that this is the kind of thing worth buying.

In fact if you view it without purchase shame on you. It's easy friends - just find it on iTunes.

War is...

I was reading the Freakonomics NYTimes blog and I came across this article detailing what 12 West Point cadets had to say about what war is in a line or two. Well it seems fairly obvious to me what war is:

War is the tragic consequence of the prisoner's dilemma.

To be avoided if at all possible, but, logically, unavoidable.

(You could probably spin out a long article applying Tit for Tat to the problems of the world. Too bad it would be bunk.)

A friend of mine asked me:

i just found out my womb is the breeding grounds for twins. isn't that freaky?! can you tell me the likelihood that i'll bear twins? it's on both sides of my family... my biodad was a twin!!
TWINS CREEP ME OUT. help me..... you're good at math and stuff. helppppp meeeeeeee. is there any way to figure out my chances?

Eloquently put.

I conducted an hour or so of fruitful research and was able to craft the following response:

First off, some statistics:
11 in 1000 births in the US are fraternal twins
3.5 in 1000 births in the US are identical twins
.02 in 1000 births in the US are conjoined twins (let’s not worry about this)

Now, identical twins are completely random so you’re stuck with a 0.35% chance of those. It’s the 1.1% chance of fraternal twins we’ll worry about.

Are the twins in your family fraternal? Fraternal twins may be the result of a gene that predisposes you to hyperovulation (releasing more than one egg when ovulating). If the twins in your family are fraternal there is a chance that it is the result of just such a gene (though I’m not actually sure how common that gene is or the proportion of twins that are ascribable to it).

Assuming for the moment the twins in your family were the result of the hyperovulation gene, that there is a single gene involved, that the gene is uncommon in the general population, and that the gene is dominant (I don’t know any of these things) then you’d have a ~25% likelihood of inheriting the hyperovulation gene from your dad.

On your mom’s side are do you have grandparent twins, aunt/uncle/mom twins, or cousin twins?

Grandparents: Odds are ~12.5%, overall with dad ~34.375%
Aunt/uncle/mom: Odds are ~25%, overall with dad ~43.75%
Cousins: Odds are ~12.5%, overall with dad ~34.375%

Of course having the hyperovulation gene doesn’t guarantee twins, it just makes it more than 1.1% likely (I’d guess >5%, based on the 4x rise in probability conditional on already having had a set of twins, but that’s a very rough figure).

Since the gene doesn't by any means guarantee you'll have twins, you should pay attention to all the other factors:

Don't gain a lot of weight unless you plan on growing taller. Having a BMI over 30 significantly increases your chances of having fraternal twins.

Don't age. Or, at least have the kids before you're old. By the time you're 45 you have a 17% chance popping out twins.

Stay away from dairy. And Cassava (a type of Yam in West Africa). But seriously, vegans who stay away from dairy are five times less likely to have twins

Apparently the more kids you have, the more likely you are to have them the next time around. So stop having babies at some point in your life. Also, once you’ve had (fraternal) twins the odds quadruple since you’ve shown a propensity for twins.

Don't take fertility drugs. I know this might be a tough habit to break, but I have faith in you.

Don't have babies when you shouldn't be able to. People who conceive while on birth control (the 0.1% exception to the rule) or while lactating (also a form of birth control) have more twins. So, you know, don’t do that. (Also, apparently the first month after discontinuing the drugs though I don’t have any numbers on it).

Well it turns out identical twins are the terrible scourge she feared, and she faces the same 0.35% the rest of us do.

These figures are only valid for European-Americans by the way; the statistics varied by race and location.

Impractical Musings

My life is full of impractical musings - it's easy to get sidelined on a tangent of a tangent of a tangent and end up in in the proverbial Moscow or Johannesburg (ie. a continent away from where I've started). More distressingly I occasionally manage to end up in the proverbial Minnesota or South Dakota (ie. nowhere).

These tangents of tangents tend towards the ridiculous and the extreme, as every layer of abstractions further removes them from the real world (and brings them closer to the world I live in, which all of my friends will tell you has very little in common with the 'real world'). I'm not particularly serious about these things but they're fun to think about and so I'd like to take some time to explore some of these.

Therefore I'm going to post a series of "Impractical Musings" as they come up and I have time to flesh them out/don't get distracted before finishing. I know that posts promising future posts is lame, like a promise to make a promise at some point in the future; if I were serious I would just do it in one go. But I'm rarely serious for any length of time (see the beginning of this post), and I like to polish to death anything released for public consumption (this very sentence was added the day after the original post), so normally very little gets released. This blog might as well be blank next to what it might have been save for these qualities, and therefore this is a necessary intermediate step to stave off more emptiness.

Here are some topics languishing in my drafts folder:

- Possible uses for superconductors (hint: not toaster filaments)

- Applications for portable industrial water jets cutters. (Security system/Construction/James Bond Cars)

- Look into metabolism differences for guys and girls.

- Introducing a per child tax (...and the associated game theory)

Hope you hear more on these topics soon!

I'm back in Toronto (as of yesterday) after a two day drive. While I've done this drive several times before, I've never had the benefit of Jott (see post below for an explanation) to record my thoughts! Suffice to say, it didn't do a perfect job. Here they are:

12 May 2008, 6:46pm

Driving through Virginia south of DC been there several times before but never been done with college before so I suppose this is a little wierd. I guess I feel a little out of sorts about it. My whole life is effectively dumb. all of my friends have jobs and scattering to the four corners of the earth or at least to uh UM uha few of them two or three let's say um and well. I I will see him in the future it certainly not going to be the same so I just I don't know um I just connected to the gas station no no idea from going to be able to get back on the highway. Well I need to uh continuing learning continue writing and hopefully. Oh come up with something half decent.

Firstly I'd like to point out that my whole life is not "dumb". It seems that Jott suffered a Freudian slip and doesn't think much of me. Ouch. How did Jott misspell "weird"? Isn't it's job to recognize words and then spell them out of its dictionary? Apparently I also pause a lot, ie. "um". I suppose this is true, but it paints me in a somewhat, well, retarded light. Sigh.

[Note: I have no problem with using the word retarded in this fashion. No, I don't think it does a disservice to the mentally handicapped and I'm happy to explain why if you're curious.]

12 May 2008, 7:47pm

Look up James Burke, he is suppose to be a historian(?) on bank and technology about ____ who apparently either writes well or gives excellent lecture. And either way I'd like to get my tow hands on those according to Bob, you get the idea. Talk to you later. Bye.

I'm listening to "Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast" and he's talking up some historian with a radio show he likes.

That's not 'Bank' though I can't for the life of me remember what it's supposed to be - that's why I jotted it in the first place. Yes, I get the idea though I'm not about to win any prizes for eloquence.

12 May 2008, 8:10pm

____ guy, he is a really really amazing and his is coming to the project, I mean on what he has this web of connectivity ____ but it's amazing, I mean he is I wonder if Jott is gonna be able to incorporate pauses heard to read me as I talk without these pauses. He takes us through from ______figure to that one we haven't really heard of, but what is important for and how about the how about it connected to something completely different and he takes us all over the place and he thinks in terms of connections I believe and he wants to teach other people to think in terms of connections which is very cool. Of course to do so you have to have one of these brain that thinks in connections and remembers facts very well and immediately jump to pull I for the name before and in this context you know of course I don't have have that brain ideal.

It turns out this James Burke guy was actually the guest on the podcast, Dan just took his sweet time in mentioning it. Basically Burke forms interconnections between historical events, playing a version of 'six degrees of separation' (or the equally entertaining '5 clicks to Jesus'). I like the idea.

12 May 2008, 8:12pm

___ I don't think ____ plan of activity in the same way that someone along the line that this James Burk guy does, and I'm pretty much capable of developing some sense of it as I'm sure I would have been if I had been aware, it probably would have been cool although in the end of the day, I don't believe but that's how I think. From suited to dealing with individual task thoroughly and logically and without too much recourse to general knowledge, because frankly I just don't have it although I'm working on that, but it's kind of, as the, you know forcing a square peg in a round hole. But, I guess that's how I learned to read. Anyway, I will now go back to it, but this is an interesting drive for Jott. Adios.

Here I make the point that my shitty memory can't manage to hold onto the name of Hawaii, let alone all of those connections. Seriously, I forget struggle for the word Hawaii more often than you'd think, along with names of good friends, the name 'ninja turtles' [note: the name of the show, not the individual turtles] and most recently the name of Belgium on several occasions - hey I remembered it! You just don't notice because when I forget words I talk around them. "Those American islands in the mid Pacific are pretty sunny, eh?" *Wink for comedic effect, insinuating my use of American islands is a joke and not because of my idiocy*

Fun sidenote: I wrote "mid Atlantic" at first! Good for me.

12 May 2008, 8:12pm

For I just had to add this one thing. At the end of the Jott I've doing on the road today, there was a bureau one reminder quest at the end of ____ to e-mail me and tell me that I've Jott it which it had done automatically and I have to say no because I figured I would remember. But just with the hell of this, last time I said yes and it actually was a feature to remind me,and the feature said window with a reminder. I tried tomorrow coz I suppose I could have set a day or a date

Jott has added a reminder feature...

12 May 2008, 8:13pm

Well, it's not perfect, just cut me off, but I said to Morrow that Janet asked me what time, I said 3, then got it a.m. or p.m. I said p.m. He said great. I will send you a reminder on Tuesday, the 13th of May, I mean, I am not getting the order right at 3 p.m. Is that correct, I said yes and then said thank you and just saw a ridiculous or files are right away. These words are condition stuff is very useful. Anyways, thank you and adieus on tell the next time my John.

... and it's cool because it understands me. 'Janet' = 'then it'.

Proving less useful than I had thought it would be.

12 May 2008, 8:26pm

Some laughing disturbed, I just--that was a great quote. We're running a Ferrari with the buggy web. Yeah, the guy is basically saying that our brains can handle the shift from tribal living to this urban living and is incredible. It has when ____ transitional period right now. It's seems that we're very optimistic about where we're going. But his argument is basically that we're not transition, transitional period right now and that it's not that were not biologically adopted, but they were not institutionally adopted at this point in time or evolved. But to that coming and that resumes(?) with me, so. Anyway...adios.

Well at least it picked up on the laughing though it is once again taking some creative license in labling it 'disturbed'. The quote is "We're running a Ferrari with a buggy whip".

13 May 2008, 9:06am

Well, leaving the hotel, 9:07 AM. Same hotel, actually ended up staying in I think the last 2 times. I guess it's the first motel once you hit Pennsylvania which tends to be my cut off point. Didn't take me as long today as it has in years back even with the rain. So, that's been kind of nice. So I am anticipating another eight hours on the road. Anyway,s I was looking to go to podcastalley.com. That it's podcastalley.com. Let's see how well Jott picks up on that. This Jotting has been a lot of fun and I'm enjoying my trip and I'm already getting to a point where the trees are not all perfectly leave

13 May 2008, 9:28am

Reading through my history, through my writing compiled to try and keep my memory intact. It's important not to get a skewed(?) view of man(?) to going to these historical figures and watching historians draw conclusions off of their writing ____ you gotta realize that someone writes because their's a reason to write because he's in a mood to write, because he thinks their's an important purpose behind writing and that your going to give an overly dramatic, or overly complex or introspective view of the person and the first humans area susceptible to over generalization so in doing so your ending history your creating this...

Basically I only write when I'm feeling dramatic and/or creative, therefore this isn't me. It's creative-drama me.

Well that's all for the trip. I'll leave you with a few more random links:

Awwww - I hope the poor nerd gets his date; his delivery screams timid like a bunny which makes you root for him.

Inmate Classifieds - Ever see the Lower Expectations bit on Mad TV?

MUTO by BLU - Tycho of PA fame put it best: "Holy F-ing S. Don't ask what: just click, and be enriched."

The Internet? Bah! - It will never catch on... (Circa 1995)

Ciao

It hit me this morning.

For the last week or so (and more broadly the last semester) people have been asking how it feels to be done, ie. 'graduated'. Whenever you come to expect a general question often enough (this is especially true for younger folk - Do you know where you want to go to college? What do you want to do in college/after college/for dinner?) it pays to have a go to answer or witticism. My form answer was something along the lines of:
"Well I keep expecting the bolt of lightning to strike me from on high so that I feel like I'm done but it hasn't happened yet! Haha."

It struck this morning. Not literally of course (seeing as how I'm able to type up this oh so informative post), but when my eyes opened at 7am it sunk in. I was done. This was my last day. No more school.

Wow.

Now you've all been there at some point, for some life changing event, and nothing in this is new or shocking but all the same it matters to me and really, I write this blog for myself not you (sorry to disappoint you - please keep reading it!).

I suppose I'm an adult now. After all I've got the B.S. in Economics and the Job to prove it, right?
Well, I'm sure that will come...

[Sidenote: Barbara Kingsolver included a sarcastic line very similar to that on the importance of big houses and lucrative careers to perceptions of success in the 30 minute tirade she delivered as commencement speaker. Now it was cold, pouring rain and her speech was a rambling, poorly delivered unapologetic anti-capitalist lecture that I'm sure would not in the best of circumstances endear her to any but a handful of Duke students. We know money doesn't buy happiness - you're not telling us anything new. Kingsolver ends today with 2000 new, well educated enemies.]

Anyways lacking a theme or message I'm going to end here. If you'd like to know more about the miserable commencement please feel free to drop any Duke student (2008) a line.

My Senior Honors Thesis

As many (or most, if you're visiting this blog) of you know by now I submitted my honors thesis An Empirical Analysis of Fundamental Indexation on the 15th. Over the course of the last seven months I've poured days and nights (though as always, fewer than I should have) into this and learned many valuable things along the way:

1. Most people have no idea what the S&P 500 is.

2. That while financial professionals are concise, often amusing writers, their conclusions are ultimately infinitely less useful because they don't share data. I'd like to give Fama-French a shout out for publishing and updating the factors that drive their model.

3. That for every hour spent brainstorming, researching, running regressions, and writing there will be at least three spent manipulating data.

4. Fuck tables. (See #3)

While I doubt you're inclined to read a 20+ page finance paper, you can none the less access a working version here. The final version (containing all new data and never before seen regressions!) will be submitted to the Duke Journal of Economics this summer and should be made available at that time.

The PDF generator did a bit of a chop job on the formatting; if you'd like a prettier version ask for it and I'll print one out for you myself.

Disclaimer stuff: Do not reproduce, distribute, transmit or alter without the permission of the author.


Finally, following in the footsteps of my last post I'd like to leave you with some random links:

Water Balloon in Slow Motion - Ever wonder what happened when you popped a water balloon? Me neither, it's a dumb question. But it turns out it's pretty cool.

The 10 Lies Pornographers Tell - Don't ask me how I ran across this. Just. Don't.

My New Web Addiction: RSS Feeds

So as my semester has been winding down I've allowed the news junkie in me to come out once again - and he's come out in full force.

It began innocently enough; I finally learned how to write batch files so that instead of using "Open all in tabs" on Firefox, I could just double click on the batch file from my desktop. And while I'm at it why not add Facebook, the New York Times, iGoogle, Thunderbird, AIM and MSN messenger for good measure? At least that way I won't miss anything right?

So now I'm reading 30-40+ articles a day (my iGoogle page has 22 news feeds), and downloading a good chunk of those "just in case" I need them later (do you see how my twisted brain works?). With all of these articles, plus the BBC Firefox feed, plus Hulu, plus my all encompassing Economist addiction, I barely have enough time for my social life and my courses are most definitely suffering.

I clearly need to find a way to save time. But i find all I can do is look for more, and, lo and behold, some of my friends/acquaintances/ex-professors have blogs. Now I'm tracking these on top of everything else, and annoyingly I find that though I'm considerate enough to visit their blogs several times every day (via that handy batch file) they are apparently unable to feed my need by posting between every visit. Selfish bastards.

If only there was a way to only track when they posted... Enter the RSS feed. Now, without paying much attention to it I'd already been utilizing this tool in the form of the BBC menu built into Firefox, but the Firefox RSS menus required you to go through the painful intermediate step of clicking on them individually. Luckily I'd been tinkering with Thunderbird to consolidate my Duke and Hotmail accounts in one place (thus removing the need for the Hotmail line in the batch file - see how efficient I've become?). Here was a single page where I could not only check both of my email accounts (my Gmail account doesn't count - it just backs up the other two), but also see precisely how many unread blog posts were up!

I quickly moved my friends' blogs into an account labeled "Blogs". Brilliant. And, while I'm at it I might as well create a "News" account for the BBC feed, and maybe one or two of those other feeds on iGoogle... Wait - most of the comics I follow are also RSS feeds! No more opening them all every day to check only the 30% that happen to update on Tuesday, or 10% on Sunday! My batch file is shrinking quickly as the "Comics" account balloons. But it makes the "Blogs" and "News" accounts look so small in comparison, and now that I've freed up all this time, well, I should find a few more to fill out each of those categories.

Now Thunderbird never closes.

The final tally?

13 in "Comics"
22 in "Blogs"
7 in "News"

Keeping up is impossible. Right now I have 475 unread posts.

I found myself walking out the door to go to my car this morning (after starting this post, along with two others - my first three posts in five months) with my usual economist issues (yes, plural) in my backpack just in case I had some downtime. But for some reason I wasn't content - I was wishing that instead I had some form of mobile RSS feed reader... now if only those existed I could-.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

Oh dear god. Oh dear Mary and Joseph. Sweet Jesus. Additional Blasphemy.

I'm one of them now. The ones with full keyboards on their $300 phones. The ones who need net access so very, very, badly that they prefer reading about their friends' activities, or better yet strangers', that they spend more time looking down at little screens than up at the world.

Of course I couldn't lose this thought so I took out my phone, speed dialed '2' and Jotted it back to my inbox:

So I'm walking out the door this morning after having taken the extra time I had not to study for my two exams tomorrow but to look at more RSS feeds and more web posts articles and the like and I realize that what I want more than anything else more an a coffee would be a economist or a book to read on the way over is a small portable device to read on so I can keep up with this things and for the first time I understood why people pay ____ amounts for phones that have e-mail capability and it shocked me. I was wondering how to record this cause I wanted to start blogging again because of all of these and then I remembered jott. So here I am. Alright. Adios.

O brave new world...



Here are just a few of the things I've come across over the last few days:

Jott - A service that you call into which converts voice into text and emails it to you, a friend or even posts it directly onto your blog.

Twitter - Blogging on crack. Limit of 140 words to post randomly throughout the day updating anyone that cares (no one does) about the inanities of your day.

The "Last Lecture" - This is a must see. Must See. Randy Pausch is an incredibly charismatic 40-something professor of virtual reality at Carnegie Mellon. Oh and he's terminally ill. This is his last lecture, and it's a doozy.

Indexed - Little humorous graphs and diagrams on index cards. Lots of fun.

Me Too - Ever feel like the only one with problems here is you? This will cast the campus in a whole new light, and perhaps help you relate a little better to your fellow students even if you don't know which ones.

Letters from Johns & Working Girls - A project by Susannah Breslin, aka "The Reverse Cowgirl", publishing letters sent in by 'Johns' (people paying for sex) and 'Working Girls' (people paid for sex, or other erotic services).

Give Away of the Day - Free software for seemingly no good reason! Does life get better than this? Well, yes, probably it does.

Dynamic Periodic Table of Elements - Educational and pretty.

Delaycast - What are the chances you'll be stranded overnight in Bismarck, North Dakota? Find out.

How to pick up and carry your iMac G5 - I've actually known about this for years. I still think it is hilarious.

This doesn't even begin to cover all of the random, wonderful, awful, useful, and bizarre things I've found, but it's a taste. Now, if you're anything like the monster I've become, you'll have tabbed every one of those links, will subscribe/download at least half, and click through onto 75% of the things they link.

God Speed.