Anthropomorphication is one of my favorite things. If I could hug it, as an idea, I would. I love doing improv scenes as, e.g. a towel, any inanimate object. I often build mental models of ideas and interactions between concepts as conversations. The efficient market theory says all this will work out, but in practice, greedy Wall Street is like “ummm, no.” See there, I made an idea say something and turned an aggregate individual into a valley girl.

I enjoy this trick so much because it simplifies relating to complex ideas. Schroëdinger’s cat is a great example of a relatable antropomorphication that I didn’t invent. Quantum mechanics is tricky, but if you boil it down to a cat in a box that is alive and dead, you can reason about it and, even better, joke about it.

Maybe joking about it is the crux of the biscuit. Once you’ve related to something, you have a pattern in your head, a stimulus that will lead you from one thought to the next. Once that’s etched into your brain, boom, you can make a joke by subverting it.

Complex ideas into cute or quirky things into jokes. That’s how I want to understand the complexities of the world and illuminate it for others.

The price of oil in a financial meltdown

A lot has been written about the financial meltdown’s contribution to the previous recession, but here’s an idea that oil prices play into it as well. Oil and the end of globalization:

There are many ways in which oil shocks create global recessions. First, the transfer of income. When oil went from $30 barrel, to about $147 barrel, over $1 trillion of income was transferred from the industrialized oil consuming world to OPEC. Now, that was not neutral for the economy, because the savings rates from which money was coming from, like the United States, was virtually 0%, meaning that consumers spent everything they made. And where the money was going to, places like Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, or the United Arab Emirates, had savings rates of almost as high as 50%, so it certainly was not demand neutral.

High price also create recessions by crowding out non-energy expenditures. Two years ago, when gasoline cost us $4 gallon, low-income Americans were paying more to fill their tanks than they were to fill their stomachs.

So everyone’s paying more for staples (there’s a measure for this called core inflation). But further, low interest rates conspire with “financialization” to encourage Wall Street to create trading products that are riskier (despite what the rating agencies report) so that those who are saving, i.e. OPEC, can leverage their money. Run those products long enough, and the cards come down.

Ed. Rant about the “finance” utility of Wall Street omitted.

Chatting with rocket scientists

“A tall tail” by Charlie Stross of rocket science and cold war intrigue:

“First, there’s an oxidizing agent that’s even nastier than chlorine trifluoride.” Dr Hansen grinned. “It’s called FOOF, dioxygen difluoride. You make it by reacting liquid fluorine and liquid oxygen in a cryogenic steel reaction vessel under X-ray bombardment. I say ‘you’ make it because I’m not stupid enough to go anywhere near the stuff myself. I hear they cancel your life insurance if they catch wind that you’re working with it. FOOF is unstable and tends to explode if you let it get much warmer than the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, or if you look at it funny. It’s mostly used in producing uranium hexafluoride from—” he coughed. “Well, anyway, it’s a great oxidizing agent!”

The ending conclusion may or may not a fun, but crackpot explanation for a major industrial accident you have probably heard of.

Always auditioning

The excruciatingly sad story of a percussionist auditioning for the prestigious Boston Symphony Orchestra. Years of school, working several jobs to make an average wage, and then two years of grueling practice leading to a live audition. In classical music, there is no bell curve. The mediocre are weeded out. You’re either great and you do OK in life, or you’re fantastic and you do a little better than OK.

Deciding to change my major from music performance is one of the most practical things I’ve ever done.

You may have missed it

Teamwork is made of empathy. Getting past logical nerd rage and caremad is challenging but yields the best work.

Know a feedback loop. Feedback loops: handy in programming, but really they’re useful for making anything that isn’t based solely on the short-term.

Thanks for reading, folks. As always, I’d love to hear from you about what you liked, disliked, or want to hear more about.

~akk