On "The Daily Show" last night they covered the epic failure of Bear Stearns, an investment bank, as well as the monstrous bad advice from some financial talking head on TV, telling somebody who wrote in that the company was fine and that a pullout from them was ill-advised. Anybody who happened to short-sell Bear Stearns over the weekend just about doubled their money, as it fell well over $50 from $60, crashing horrifically.
I didn't short-sell them. I don't do much with the market. However, I did get thinking a bit, and I do have an e-trade account. I hopped on, threw a few dollars in it this morning, and I've already made about $20 in the hour that the market has been open. I figure if it's high-risk, as they could crash completely, but even if they go from five dollars per share (my buying price, approx.) to one per share, I'm holding fifty shares and lost $200, and they've nowhere to go but up or complete failure. Also, at fifty shares, every penny upwards if $0.50 for me. What's more, they are going to do everything they can to try to get their stock up higher.
There is always the risk of the company dissolving, at which point I lose my $250, but that's why the market is a risk. Furthermore, I got in the morning after Jon Stewart told my generation that Bear Stearns is at a historic low - with any amount of luck, lots of people will be buying in later today, pushing up the price. If I'm very lucky, I could double my money in a month, maybe even more. Imagine if the stock ever recovers, back up to say, 50 - that's multiplying my money by 10! That could be within a year or so.
Basically, their failure is my bread and butter.
TRH
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Two Laws and a Coefficient
T = G * H * S * B
where...
T :: Time to becoming Myspace
G :: Growth rate in hundreds of people per month
H :: Henderson's Constant, an as yet unknown number (likely an expression of months squared)
S :: whether or not high schoolers are allowed, 1/4 if they are not, 2 if they are
B :: whether or not there is a blog function, 1/4 if there is not, 2 if there is
I said that earlier. Now I've actually done Research though!
I estimate that Facebook became Myspace when applications were first added, making it more about duping your friends into littering their profile page with crap than other stuff. This was May 24, 2007, a mere 38 months after facebooks inception and only 7 months after it allowed high-schoolers to join. Given this information, and some critical thinking about the above formula, I need to fix it a bit.
For one thing, I was wildly wrong about the growth rate. It appears that facebook now gains about 1 million new users per month, at least according to this chart:
That number off to the left is users IN MILLIONS. As of March '07 (one month before I estimate they went Myspace) they were at 15 million users, and you can clearly see the upwards jolt once they allowed the high schoolers in. I'm not sure blogging has anything to do with it now, I think it may just be about how many users, because the more people you have using an online service or utility, the more idiotic something tends to become (Henderson's First Law of The Internet). Of course, everything will eventually become idiotic (Henderson's Second Law of The Internet).
Regarding the chart, we clearly see users per month approximately double immediately after they're allowed in, from about 250,000 - 500,000 per month to better than 1 million per month (it took four months to climb from 10 million to 15 million). So high schoolers are clearly part of the equation, but really only insomuch as they influence the growth rate. At this point, It's about the growth rate simply multiplied by my constant, which is obviously no longer a constant.
In aerodynamics, every three-dimensional object moving through the air has what is called a coefficient of lift and a coefficient of drag. They are multipliers thrown into the lift and drag equations (respectively) that shape the equation for that particular object. Other factors apply, such as speed and air density, but these ones particularize it and can only be found in a wind tunnel through trial and error by actually charting the lift and reducing all the variables. In other words, it's EXTREMELY difficult to know the coefficient of lift of a wing you've only drawn or build small models of.
I postulate that it is not Henderson's Constant, but in fact Henderson's Coefficient, or the Coefficient of Myspace, which would innately factor in high schoolers, applications, music sharing, and all the quirks that social networking sites offer. This number, only calculable after the fact, indicates time to becoming Myspace. Notably, Myspace themselves hit 15 million users approximately one year after it's inception, growing intermittently up to 1 million new users per month up to and persistently at that rate after 18 months.
This is what I have so far.
T = (G * CM)
T :: Time to becoming Myspace
G :: Average growth rate of the past six months, expressing hundreds of thousands (ie: 100,000 per month is 1/1 month)
CM :: Coefficient of Myspace, an as yet unknown number, likely an expression of months squared thus matching out all the units.
Given that myspace rose up that quickly, I'll estimate that CM is somewhere around .1 for most sites, so that when growth rate consistently achieves 1 million per month time to becoming myspace is extremely short.
I have not yet studied growth rates for many other social networking sites or growth rates after idiocy is established.
TRH
where...
T :: Time to becoming Myspace
G :: Growth rate in hundreds of people per month
H :: Henderson's Constant, an as yet unknown number (likely an expression of months squared)
S :: whether or not high schoolers are allowed, 1/4 if they are not, 2 if they are
B :: whether or not there is a blog function, 1/4 if there is not, 2 if there is
I said that earlier. Now I've actually done Research though!
I estimate that Facebook became Myspace when applications were first added, making it more about duping your friends into littering their profile page with crap than other stuff. This was May 24, 2007, a mere 38 months after facebooks inception and only 7 months after it allowed high-schoolers to join. Given this information, and some critical thinking about the above formula, I need to fix it a bit.
For one thing, I was wildly wrong about the growth rate. It appears that facebook now gains about 1 million new users per month, at least according to this chart:
That number off to the left is users IN MILLIONS. As of March '07 (one month before I estimate they went Myspace) they were at 15 million users, and you can clearly see the upwards jolt once they allowed the high schoolers in. I'm not sure blogging has anything to do with it now, I think it may just be about how many users, because the more people you have using an online service or utility, the more idiotic something tends to become (Henderson's First Law of The Internet). Of course, everything will eventually become idiotic (Henderson's Second Law of The Internet).
Regarding the chart, we clearly see users per month approximately double immediately after they're allowed in, from about 250,000 - 500,000 per month to better than 1 million per month (it took four months to climb from 10 million to 15 million). So high schoolers are clearly part of the equation, but really only insomuch as they influence the growth rate. At this point, It's about the growth rate simply multiplied by my constant, which is obviously no longer a constant.
In aerodynamics, every three-dimensional object moving through the air has what is called a coefficient of lift and a coefficient of drag. They are multipliers thrown into the lift and drag equations (respectively) that shape the equation for that particular object. Other factors apply, such as speed and air density, but these ones particularize it and can only be found in a wind tunnel through trial and error by actually charting the lift and reducing all the variables. In other words, it's EXTREMELY difficult to know the coefficient of lift of a wing you've only drawn or build small models of.
I postulate that it is not Henderson's Constant, but in fact Henderson's Coefficient, or the Coefficient of Myspace, which would innately factor in high schoolers, applications, music sharing, and all the quirks that social networking sites offer. This number, only calculable after the fact, indicates time to becoming Myspace. Notably, Myspace themselves hit 15 million users approximately one year after it's inception, growing intermittently up to 1 million new users per month up to and persistently at that rate after 18 months.
This is what I have so far.
T = (G * CM)
T :: Time to becoming Myspace
G :: Average growth rate of the past six months, expressing hundreds of thousands (ie: 100,000 per month is 1/1 month)
CM :: Coefficient of Myspace, an as yet unknown number, likely an expression of months squared thus matching out all the units.
Given that myspace rose up that quickly, I'll estimate that CM is somewhere around .1 for most sites, so that when growth rate consistently achieves 1 million per month time to becoming myspace is extremely short.
I have not yet studied growth rates for many other social networking sites or growth rates after idiocy is established.
TRH
Friday, February 15, 2008
For Your Reading Pleasure
Simon of Space, a novel originally posted on a blog by (somewhat famous) internet author Cheeseburger Brown, is now being sold in stores! If you were there from day one, read it through and see what the editing processing has changed, and if you weren't, I cannot recommend this story highly enough. It's worth reading for CBB's rich language alone, and the well-woven story and wonderful characters only add to the whole feel.
More of Mr. Brown's work may be found at his story blog, and a complete list of his stories may be found at his website, cheeseburgerbrown.com. There's also a donation box, as he is a struggling new author with a family to feed, as well as links to other self-published works of his and merchandise. It's really quite the quintessential internet experience.
TRH
More of Mr. Brown's work may be found at his story blog, and a complete list of his stories may be found at his website, cheeseburgerbrown.com. There's also a donation box, as he is a struggling new author with a family to feed, as well as links to other self-published works of his and merchandise. It's really quite the quintessential internet experience.
TRH
Monday, February 11, 2008
An Exercize in Futility
I have tried this before. I am trying it again. Nothing I can do works.
I'm trying to get a car loan on my own in college.
I don't talk to my father for personal reasons, and my mother flat-out refuses to cosign because it "wouldn't do any good". It would, but she just doesn't want to drag her post-divorce credit score through any more dirt. I do wish she'd be honest with me and just say that though. That's a rant for another post.
It is impossible. I tried once before, with a car about three or four thousand dollars, to get a loan. Nothing worked. This time, I'm putting a $3000 down payment on a $7000 car (before tax, title, registration, f*cking warranty sold to me by a guy who was to nice for me to say no to, etc). Nothing will grease the wheels of commerce enough for me to get a loan, however small, through the dealership's banks. I'll try my own bank, of course, but I don't expect much.
If nothing else, I'll do the same thing I did to pay for my first semester of college - scrounge every drop of savings and credit I have anywhere. I've tallied, and it should come up to just enough if I scratch the warranty, which I kind of want to do anyways. I might need a bit of cash, but with any luck I can scrounge a few hundred dollars up here or there.
The biggest thing is, though, it's impossible for me to get even a modest car loan. My credit score is in the bottom end of 700, so it's not abysmal, and I've got a pretty good history of paying everything off, maybe one or two missed payments here and there on my credit cards. Other than that, I try to have them as close to completely square by the end of the month.
I just can't get a loan for a decent car, which is something I need to be able to do my job as a pizza deliverer. I don't know why the system is set up like this, but it seems that the world is financially against me just because I'm in college. Yes, it is a financially turbulent time in my life, and yes, I don't have much of a history other than a credit card with my bank and a series of student loans not yet in repayment, but that doesn't mean I'm automatically bad news. The banks assume that because I don't have much experience, I don't know what I'm doing, which means that I can't get a strong credit history.
The system is, like so many other systems, inherently flawed and useful only in educating ourselves not to be. It is also the best system we've come up with yet. A Nobel Prize in Economics (which, interestingly, is not a real Nobel Prize) to the person who comes up with a better judge of who will repay loans. Maybe we just need to institute Microloans here and have them count towards our credit history.
TRH
I'm trying to get a car loan on my own in college.
I don't talk to my father for personal reasons, and my mother flat-out refuses to cosign because it "wouldn't do any good". It would, but she just doesn't want to drag her post-divorce credit score through any more dirt. I do wish she'd be honest with me and just say that though. That's a rant for another post.
It is impossible. I tried once before, with a car about three or four thousand dollars, to get a loan. Nothing worked. This time, I'm putting a $3000 down payment on a $7000 car (before tax, title, registration, f*cking warranty sold to me by a guy who was to nice for me to say no to, etc). Nothing will grease the wheels of commerce enough for me to get a loan, however small, through the dealership's banks. I'll try my own bank, of course, but I don't expect much.
If nothing else, I'll do the same thing I did to pay for my first semester of college - scrounge every drop of savings and credit I have anywhere. I've tallied, and it should come up to just enough if I scratch the warranty, which I kind of want to do anyways. I might need a bit of cash, but with any luck I can scrounge a few hundred dollars up here or there.
The biggest thing is, though, it's impossible for me to get even a modest car loan. My credit score is in the bottom end of 700, so it's not abysmal, and I've got a pretty good history of paying everything off, maybe one or two missed payments here and there on my credit cards. Other than that, I try to have them as close to completely square by the end of the month.
I just can't get a loan for a decent car, which is something I need to be able to do my job as a pizza deliverer. I don't know why the system is set up like this, but it seems that the world is financially against me just because I'm in college. Yes, it is a financially turbulent time in my life, and yes, I don't have much of a history other than a credit card with my bank and a series of student loans not yet in repayment, but that doesn't mean I'm automatically bad news. The banks assume that because I don't have much experience, I don't know what I'm doing, which means that I can't get a strong credit history.
The system is, like so many other systems, inherently flawed and useful only in educating ourselves not to be. It is also the best system we've come up with yet. A Nobel Prize in Economics (which, interestingly, is not a real Nobel Prize) to the person who comes up with a better judge of who will repay loans. Maybe we just need to institute Microloans here and have them count towards our credit history.
TRH
Monday, February 4, 2008
Huh...
Have you ever gotten the feeling that whenever IMDB reports that "this plot synopsis is empty", they're being slightly more truthful than you expect?
On a completely unrelated note, Facebook has become the new Myspace. I theorize there exists a constant which approximates how much time any social networking site will take from initial popularity to when it becomes effectively Myspace.
T = G * H * S * B
where...
T :: Time to becoming Myspace
G :: Growth rate in hundreds of people per month
H :: Henderson's Constant, an as yet unknown number (likely an expression of months squared)
S :: whether or not high schoolers are allowed, 1/4 if they are not, 2 if they are
B :: whether or not there is a blog function, 1/4 if there is not, 2 if there is
This time is measured as soon as an appreciable growth rate of more than 100 people per month is measured consistently (across three months). I suspect that the Henderson Constant is based on other features available in the site as well, and as such could be subject to chaos theory, applicable only as a rough estimator rather than a precise measurement, similar to coefficient of lift in non-simulated environments.
TRH
On a completely unrelated note, Facebook has become the new Myspace. I theorize there exists a constant which approximates how much time any social networking site will take from initial popularity to when it becomes effectively Myspace.
T = G * H * S * B
where...
T :: Time to becoming Myspace
G :: Growth rate in hundreds of people per month
H :: Henderson's Constant, an as yet unknown number (likely an expression of months squared)
S :: whether or not high schoolers are allowed, 1/4 if they are not, 2 if they are
B :: whether or not there is a blog function, 1/4 if there is not, 2 if there is
This time is measured as soon as an appreciable growth rate of more than 100 people per month is measured consistently (across three months). I suspect that the Henderson Constant is based on other features available in the site as well, and as such could be subject to chaos theory, applicable only as a rough estimator rather than a precise measurement, similar to coefficient of lift in non-simulated environments.
TRH
Monday, December 10, 2007
Machine World
I have a new computer. Have for a while. Commissioned a buddy of mine to build it, and it's pretty sweet. Pentium Quad-Core, 2.4Ghz processor, good motherboard, 2 gig of RAM (I'll be expanding that to 8 when I have the money, naturally), NVidia GeForce 8600 Graphics card (which is sweet). So, with a fair amount of power available to my disposal, The first thing I did was kick some alien booty as Gordon Freeman in Half-Life 2: Episode 2. After crowbarring half of another universe into oblivion, I looked at my computer through the plexiglas door on the case and thought to myself, "What Now?"
All that processing power, all that memory, 500gb of storage space...it's really quite excessive. All I'm going to do with it is download movies and music, an honest waste of such a nice system. So I searched.
SETI@home is a simple program. Download the host program, called BOINC, and then run SETI@home and your computer will start downloading packages of numbers to be crunched, numbers SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) collected in one of their looks at the sky. They need to process MASSIVE amounts of data looking for patterns that could be indicative of an intelligent society. Basically, my computer is looking for an alien society's version of "I Love Lucy". Turns out a lot of overclockers do this too, or other programs you can run through BOINC because it maxes out their system and is a good way of assuring that they can run their processor at such an insane speed.
Wonderful. I'm looking into space, working to solve one of the oldest questions mankind has. Thing is, I'm not much for the philanthropic, more of the misanthropic really. So, how can this benefit me? I searched, and it turns out I could potentially get PAID for those CPU cycles I'm wasting. CPUShare is a project where I register, open a sell order, and eventually somebody connects to it and decides to pay me the amount I decided on when I opened the order per hour for a chunk of my computers. It took a little bit more know-how than simply downloading and installing the BOINC program, but it actually gives you an ISO file and you either burn that to CD and restart your machine with that as the OS or you can create a virtual machine using easily available and free software that will run the program. Problem is, there are more sell orders than there are buy orders, and even though my machine frankly rocks, nobody has connected to me yet.
Eventually, though, somebody will, and while I'll only be paid .02 euros per hour, it's more than nothing, and while I may not know what I'm computing, I'll be getting paid for it and they won't actually have access to my computer itself, only a portion of the CPU and RAM allotted to them.
So all you people who want to render a digital movie and may not have the coolest processor or the most memory? Try CPUShare! They need more buyers!
TRH
All that processing power, all that memory, 500gb of storage space...it's really quite excessive. All I'm going to do with it is download movies and music, an honest waste of such a nice system. So I searched.
SETI@home is a simple program. Download the host program, called BOINC, and then run SETI@home and your computer will start downloading packages of numbers to be crunched, numbers SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) collected in one of their looks at the sky. They need to process MASSIVE amounts of data looking for patterns that could be indicative of an intelligent society. Basically, my computer is looking for an alien society's version of "I Love Lucy". Turns out a lot of overclockers do this too, or other programs you can run through BOINC because it maxes out their system and is a good way of assuring that they can run their processor at such an insane speed.
Wonderful. I'm looking into space, working to solve one of the oldest questions mankind has. Thing is, I'm not much for the philanthropic, more of the misanthropic really. So, how can this benefit me? I searched, and it turns out I could potentially get PAID for those CPU cycles I'm wasting. CPUShare is a project where I register, open a sell order, and eventually somebody connects to it and decides to pay me the amount I decided on when I opened the order per hour for a chunk of my computers. It took a little bit more know-how than simply downloading and installing the BOINC program, but it actually gives you an ISO file and you either burn that to CD and restart your machine with that as the OS or you can create a virtual machine using easily available and free software that will run the program. Problem is, there are more sell orders than there are buy orders, and even though my machine frankly rocks, nobody has connected to me yet.
Eventually, though, somebody will, and while I'll only be paid .02 euros per hour, it's more than nothing, and while I may not know what I'm computing, I'll be getting paid for it and they won't actually have access to my computer itself, only a portion of the CPU and RAM allotted to them.
So all you people who want to render a digital movie and may not have the coolest processor or the most memory? Try CPUShare! They need more buyers!
TRH
Friday, November 30, 2007
End Run
I re-evaluated my overall class schedule for my college career. I no longer intend to graduate with multiple majors, rather I will graduate as Commercial Aviation. Because of this I am no longer graduation after the spring of 2009 - Should all go well, I will graduate six weeks into the fall semester of next year. I will be done within a year, and this is my LAST WINTER IN GRAND FORKS.
Of course, this isn't easy. I have 35 credits of classes to complete between now and then. I'll be doing 16 credits plus a one-credit Billiards class next semester, including the incredible workload involved with Certified Flights Instructor, followed by 8 credits for each of the two six-week sessions of Summer.
It'll be fun, right?
TRH
Of course, this isn't easy. I have 35 credits of classes to complete between now and then. I'll be doing 16 credits plus a one-credit Billiards class next semester, including the incredible workload involved with Certified Flights Instructor, followed by 8 credits for each of the two six-week sessions of Summer.
It'll be fun, right?
TRH
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