Friday, March 29, 2013
More Placebo effect
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Massively Incomplete Markets
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Sounds like me - wide awake at night
Left to my own devices without a set schedule I find I'm very capable of getting completely off kilter with the normal day/night schedule. From a young age I often felt like my clock was set to 25 or 26 hour days - it's always been easy to stay up late - and generally a struggle to get going in the morning. I kind of felt like something was wrong with me because of Ben Franklin's quote about "early to bed, early to rise..."
Anyhow, I noticed this effect drastically the other day when I was draggy much of the day after about 3-4 hours of sleep. I found myself wanting to take a nap even about 12 hours after I woke up. But then I hit a certain point and it's like everything in me lights up at full go and I'm easily good for another 6-8 hours - very clear headed and motivated - and I have to force myself to go to bed just because I know I need to remembering how draggy I was during the day.
So I did a web search to investigate what may be going on. This interesting article popped up: Tired in the Morning and Awake at Night?
It says there's a thing called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome that is characteristic of this - and it's essentially due to biological clocks being out of whack. The fancy term is Circadian rhythm sleep disorder. Now I don't think what I have is very severe, because I can still force myself to wake up whenever I need to - but again - left to my own devices I do think my body may run on abnormally long days - and I've always had groggy mornings for as long as I can remember. Apparently there's a thing called light therapy that I could try if I wanted to test things - it'd involve sitting in front of very bright lights right after waking up each day to shock my clock back into time. (I think this idea has been shown to work for overcoming jet lag also). Maybe put a flood light staring me in the face while I ride my exercise bike?
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Pump and Dump
Friday, March 8, 2013
Bees like caffeine too
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Rand Paul filibuster
I'd thought about this for a while - especially as it regards to terrorism and post 9-11 realities. I was particularly concerned about things like wire-taping, holding suspects indefinitely without charges, enhanced interrogation techniques / torture, and just the general framework of how you adapt to real and dangerous asymmetrical threats while still maintaining a free and open society.
I believe it was Newt Gingrich who I saw speaking about this quite a while back - and he proposed a dual law enforcement system with a "wall" between it and the normal law enforcement system. I could be misattributing to Gingrich, but I liked the model proposed where certain asymmetric threats like terrorism are prosecuted under a different set of laws - outside of the normal judicial system. Additionally, if increased surveilence is needed - it should be very clearly and restrictively defined as to how any data collected can be used so that this type of surveilance does not turn into "fishing" expeditions for other agendas. For example: with drones it would probably be easy for law enforcement to track any of us 24 hours a day for our entire lives, and use NSA data to sneak into all of our phone conversations, and probably eventually at some point have so many microphones set up that even just basic conversations we have everyday are captured somewhere. Facial recognition technology is being employed in places already to identify people, and as technology gets better anonymity in public is going to be greatly reduced.
When I've talked to friends about this, worrying about computerized monitoring of phone calls (is it so crazy to be concerned given the ability of computers to mass translate speech now?), they say "well, if you're not doing anything wrong what are you worried about?". The thing is that the people in power running those systems don't always use them the way they're supposed to. For example, Martin Luther King had has reportedly had a 17,000 page FBI file and had running wiretaps on him from 1958 until his death. Any chance info uncovered was used improperly to intimidate and put leverage on him? Or, Richard Nixon and staff utilized wiretaps to find information on political enemies and this ultimately led to his resignation. So the question to me isn't whether we should be concerned about privacy - I think it's pretty clear we should assume that those in power have a tough time respecting privacy when it's inconvenient to do so. As a result it makes sense to me to say that if this power to invade privacy is going to exist, very clear rules about how this power is used need to be designed.
If this requires a constitutional amendment, the so be it (it'd probably be a good national debate to have) but we've seen cases such as the Rico statute where the law is modified to see a pattern of behavior as constitution a criminal enterprise - and this in particular was used to target mafia crime families. It addressed how do you prosecute an enterprise that exists, but those running the enterprise only give orders - but never carry out the crime themselves? This sounds alot like the the asymmetrical aspects of terrorism where you have certain leaders who incite or command dangerous activity, but don't carry out the activity themselves. To me it would seem cleaner if we would have a constitutional amendment clarifying how we deal with these types of situations where it seems some basic rights like Rand Paul mentions are potentially being infringed - especially the right to privacy. I don't think there's any way to stop what technology is going to be able to do in the future, but we can carve out how that technology can and cannot be used and how it relates to civil rights.
edit: Gail Collins had a good op-ed in the NYTimes about this filibuster also.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Superbugs and Antibiotic resistance
Friday, March 1, 2013
Harmonic Series Guitar
The harmonic series mathematically is the series (a sum) like this: 1+1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4+1/5 +.... +1/n up to infinity. In nature there are natural resonances in vibrating objects (like a guitar string, or organ pipe) that are these ratios of the string or pipe's length, so there's thinking these resonances may be related to why musical scales sound good to us.
From the "A Mind For Madness" Blog, this blogger (that ties the harmonic series to musical overtones and discusses the idea that perhaps the musical scales used have their "musical-ness" due to their relationship to this natural resonant properties that's expressed in the harmonic series. I first read about this idea on his blog, so I'll give credit there, although it's entirely possible this idea may be out there elsewhere.
Vocalist showing the harmonic overtone capabilities in his voice - kindof freaky right?
Now obviously, from the above video you can tell that the resonances don't tie directly the current dominant equal tempered musical scale that we have, but there are many resonances that happen right on the musical scale where we have musical notes. The 7 note in this video (click link) really stands out as being foreign to our current musical scale, but most of other note positions are familiar.
Hear the harmonic scale in action. Here's guitarist Dante Rosati who's composed a piece of music using the harmonic scale. It's definitely different, but something foreign it's still quite cohesive and even a bit hypnotic if you ask me. Pretty cool stuff.