A really good chick book

I was going on travel but was running short on books. The wife was headed to the library. So, I asked her to pick up a couple of books for me to read on the plane.

Naturally, she picked up a bunch of chick books.

Day After Night turned out be extremely good, however. Sure ... it's about 4 young women discovering themselves. But these women have been through the Holocaust. They're discovering themselves in the British Mandate of Palestine. That novelty makes up for a lot. The book manages to continually shock.

The story is based on a historical event (I don't want to spoil it for you) and what comes through in the book is the founding myth of Israel. Founding myths are, of course, great ways to understand a nation's character. Much of American attitudes can be explained by two founding myths: immigrants fleeing Old Europe to found a city on a hill, and how the West was won.

So, read Day After Night. It's not just a chick book.

A rap song about Alexander Hamilton

I wasn't a fan of their choice of the Obamas' tastes in paintings. But their taste in poetry is impeccable. Ironic, erudite and witty:

And my favorite Founding Father too! The others were such stuffed shirts.

The $8000 Housing Credit is a Lousy Incentive

Yikes! Talk about making a bad thing worse:

The homebuyers’ credit — enacted last year, expanded this year and scheduled to expire Nov. 30 — would be extended to cover homes under contract by April 30. Also, it no longer would be limited to first-time buyers; people who have owned a home for at least five years could get a $6,500 credit on a new residence. Income limits for eligibility would be raised, making many more people qualify.

The problem with the housing crisis is lack of demand. What needs to happen is for house prices to come down so young people can afford to buy houses. A $8000 credit essentially allows sellers to keep their prices irrationally high. Buyers get the money from Uncle Sam and pay the sellers. No houses are made more affordable. Extending this credit from starter houses to the more expensive houses that second-time buyers will purchase is a horribly bad idea -- this just means that the housing market will take longer to stabilize while simultaneously depleting the US Treasury.

The housing credit is just one more thing (not as bad as the mortgage deduction, but nearly so) artificially inflating housing prices and providing an incentive for people to get houses that are larger than they need or can afford.

Making Glaurung easy enough for a 7-year old

There are more than a hundred chess engines out there and many (most?) of them play extremely well. For example, Glaurung, a free chess program, easily and consistently wipes the floor with me.

S1 (the 7-year old) is getting into chess. He loves to play checkers on my iPod, so showing him Glaurung seemed like a good idea. But I do want him to win once in a while, so I started fiddling with the settings. It turned out to be much harder than I expected. So, for other people out there, here's what you've got to do to make Glaurung play easy enough for a 7-year-old to beat once in a while:

1. Set the playing style to be "Passive". This means that the program only rarely goes on on a sacrificial attack sequence.
2. Set the playing level to 1. The levels range from 1-100 and even 1 is quite solid.
3. Turn off Permanent Thinking. By default, the program continues to think when it's your turn to play. The CPU on the iPod is fast enough that if you let it do that, it's way too good.
4. Set the Book usage to Low.
   
5. Deviate quite quickly away from the book.
   

I should probably explain setting 4 and strategy 5. There are lots and lots of opening sequences fed into the program and even at a low playing level, if the program uses the book, a child would be done for. The issue here is that the problems with not-so-good lines may have taken years to find. There's little chance that your 7-year old (or even you!) will find them at the table under time pressure. What step 4 does is to tell the program not to always choose the best opening line.

But the strategy in 5 is also something your child has to do -- he'll have to take the program along a bad tangent. At that point, settings 1-3 come in; the program plays poorly enough that it's possible for a bright kid to beat it. This strategy is no different than what you'd do when playing an over-prepared human opponent, so it's a good skill to have anyway.

Before I figured all this out, I found a blog post talking about Glaurung and asked the blogger for advice on settings. He suggested that I try A1 Chess instead. And so I did. A1 Chess is great for beginners. It's ridiculously easy -- S1 has beaten in 2 out of 3 times so far (tied the 3rd time) and it has an encouraging sound-track (with applause greeting every win). I have to wean him off it and towards Glaurung in a few months, but for now, it's good.

Investment banking profits are not that outrageous

An efficient market is one in which middlemen are non-existent or have wafer-thin margins. So, this sounds right:

Surely, one measure of that efficiency is how little is skimmed off by the financial middlemen. So the next time someone tells you that it's no concern of yours if Wall Street traders are earning a king's ransom, remind him of the story of Goldman and Morgan and the financial wizards who thought they could spin capital out of straw

Newspapers would rather print fables about kingdoms and traders than actual numbers. But the numbers are not quite so damning. Rental car companies have a net profit margin of 6.7%. Architecture firms make 7.2% and so on for pretty much every industry. They're all in the 7% range. Investment bankers? They pull in 10.4% : 50% higher than "normal", but not outrageous either.

Gross profit in investment banking is an eye-popping 99.83% but that's because interest payments -- a normal cost of business in banking -- is not factored in. Once interest payments are factored in, gross profit is about 32%, which is on par with other professional services. Even payment to top management (1.5%) is not outrageous.

Plastic kills

You may have heard about the floating garbage dump on the Pacific. It's twice the size of Texas and exists because ocean currents concentrate plastic into that location.

Birds flying over the floating island of rubbish pick up plastic, thinking it to be food, and feed it to their babies. The babies then die.

The image shows the contents of an albatross chick's belly. The photographer says nothing was moved or staged.

Barn door. Horses.

Over the weekend, the county headquarters of the Democratic Party was broken into and vandalized. So, for the past couple of days, there has been a police car parked infront of the building.

Talk about closing the barn door after the horses have fled.