Michael Alan Miller

The most interesting science paper I’ve read today.

If the atmospheric oxygen content were still 35%+, we’d have bugs as large as they were 300 million years ago. No one wants that. Centipedes a meter long? I really don’t like carrying grenades. They’re heavy and they can explode at just the worst times, but in a world like that, grenades would be merely a good start. I might need a star destroyer.

If you’ve seen the new King Kong, where Naomi Watts is confronted with a centipede a meter long crawling on her, you probably thought that was Hollywood exaggeration. Nope, those really existed. See here for confirmation.

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When I was a kid, it was still considered acceptable for children to walk or bike places — such as to school, or to the convenience store down the road, or wherever else the kid might have needed to go.

That wasn’t all that long ago, but now kids mostly aren’t allowed to stray more than a hundred feet from the front steps. I’m not here to rant about that, though.

Writing to a friend caused me to recall this crazy old lady whose house I used to walk by in Lake City, Florida. She lived a few blocks down from us, and I first became aware of her after my sister had ambled by her house on her way to somewhere else and for whatever reason, this charming woman sprayed my sibling with a waterhose. My sister hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d just walked by on the road (there were no sidewalks, and few cars) on the way to somewhere else.

I wasn’t protective of my sister at all (to say the least), but I did like stirring up trouble (still do), so that day I made it my mission to walk by that old biddy’s house making as many strange faces and obscene gestures that I could think of. I even put on my bathing suit beforehand, and got a free spray-down for my trouble. It was a hot day, after all.

I’m surprised she didn’t call the cops on us, but I think she realized that even they wouldn’t have had much sympathy for some unbalanced harridan spraying any kid who happened to walk by.

I have no idea what happened to the old lady. Eventually, my sister and I got bored with these japes and stopped walking by her house. I have no idea what inspired her bitterness or aggression, but now that I’m older I wonder what perceived slight brought on her lunacy.

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Why I will never, under any circumstances, live anywhere with a homeowner’s association.

Another HOA story. A family friend of my ex-girlfriend got fined because they left towels from swimming out on their balcony to dry.

I’d be setting people’s cars on fire for something like that.

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This is sad for Pandora, but it hastens the fall of an oligopolistic “industry” that is intent on destroying itself — and I say let it.

I never used Pandora (as true to my perceived music snob nature, almost all their recommendations I’d already heard), but it seemed like a decent service that was responsible, at least, for many thousands of sales. The record industry is under some sort of illusion that they can put the Internet genie back in the bottle, because most of the industry is run by senile old men who wouldn’t know the internet from a croquet mallet.

Sometimes, things truly change only when the old guard dies off. Those senile old men will eventually die, and things will change. Until then, we’re stuck with brazen stupidity the likes of which even our president would feel right at home with.

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In the financial markets, mathematical models are frequently used to predict the future. That is the hope, at least.

But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed, there is no accounting for black swan events, and these events seem to occur with greater frequency than most realize.

Also, as many have observed, a mathematical model is only as good as the initial conditions and assumptions you provide it with. If your assumption implicit in your model is that housing prices will rise in perpetuity, then you and your investors are fucked.

Unfortunately, many of the mathematical models so meticulously designed by all those egghead Harvard whizzes did include insane assumptions like this, and we are seeing the results now.

My purpose is not to denigrate mathematical models. I think they are extremely valuable, even in the financial world. My purpose is to shake my fist at those who, when someone tells them that the obvious is about to happen, denigrate the conclusions because their pet mathematical model doesn’t tell them that when a graph goes straight up, supported by no fundamentals, that a crash is bound to occur.

This is insanity, but some of the smartest people in the country are prone to this insanity. I wonder why?

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The idea, commonly held in feminist and other left-leaning milieus, that evolutionary psychology is in every way wrong is puzzling to me.

Evolutionary psychology, at its core, is nothing but the assertion that events that occurred in the human past served to shape how we think and behave now.

For instance, an obvious one that is equally in the realm of evolutionary psychology as it is basic physiology. When humans are out in the hot sun, we tend to seek out shade quite quickly. No, this behavior isn’t coded in our genes anywhere. There is no “seek shade” gene. However, due to the way humans evolved (lack of hair, high body temperature, etc), we, as do many other animals, have an evolutionarily-based imperative to seek shade when it’s hot. Hard to deny that, and that’s evolutionary psychology just as much as the more controversial ideas in the field.

Sure, there is plenty of bad science in the ev psych arena, just as there is in every other single science out there. But if Idi Amin says the sun will rise tomorrow, that doesn’t make it wrong. The sun will still rise. By the same token, if distasteful people pervert every ev psych conclusion, that doesn’t make the entire field worthless.

I think the largest reason it’s so detested is that it occassionaly gets at truths that people don’t want to hear. No, I won’t go into these, as they have nothing to do with my argument, but I will mention the one overarching verity that is the source of all the bile.

This idea, so abhorrent to many, is that we humans are biological creatures. The revulsion towards ev psych is mostly, I believe, a reaction to that truth.

We’re messy, we often have nearly-uncontrollable urges, we die, we fuck, we’re made of dust from stars and one day we’ll be that dust again, and we’re animals just as much as a nematode, a condor, or a tamarin monkey.

People really, really don’t want to hear this, or believe it. The right, by and large, insulate themselves from this with religion, while the left typically insulates themselves from this truth by the tabula rasa myth — that is pretending biology has little (in moderate cases) to nothing (in extreme case) to do with human life and development at all.

It’s interesting to me the different tactics and methods groups and individuals take to insulate themselves from uncomfortable truths. Don’t get me wrong — I think the right-wing way is far more harmful, but that’s no reason to pretend that the left-wingers don’t do it quite often, too.

Evolutionary psyhology is one area where their insulation job really excels.

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Though I’m not a web designer, but am in IT, so this rings quite true.

Strangely, the most common software I’m asked about is Excel.

I don’t know a damn thing about Excel. I don’t want to know anything about Excel. No, I don’t know how to put an equation in that’ll let you know when Jesus is coming back. No, I don’t know how to do whatever it was you asked me to do with pivot tables and Roomba vacuum cleaners.

If you want me to install a high-performance, almost failure-free Exchange cluster, I’m your guy. If you want me to make your network faster than a cheetah in a Saturn V, I got you covered. If you want recommendations on what hardware to buy to run SQL day and night for the next 20 years, look right here.

But Excel? Fuck Excel.

It’s funny that almost all of the people who ask me about Excel probably know far more about it than I do, as I’ve used it maybe a total of four hours in my entire life.

It’s not only Excel, of course. It’s everything. Anyone in IT is expected to be an absolute expert on anything that plugs into a wall — from coffee makers, to printers, to ovens (I am not making that up), to arcana that only electrical engineers who are familiar with circuit-level diagrams of the device in question could possibly know (and maybe not even then). If you work in IT, then you are just expected to have exabytes of information in your head at all times that no one person could possibly know — and if you don’t immediately know the exact details of a piece of software you’ve never seen before, then you are viewed as a failure and incompetent.

Accountants probably have the same rant about being asked to help with people’s taxes, and I have great sympathy for that.

So, no, I won’t fix your Excel table, your oven, your copier or your cell phone. I won’t work on your ratty-ass Windows 98 machine that has roach poop in it, and I won’t “try to fix” some fax machine that was made in 1982. Nope. Won’t do it, ain’t gonna do it, call someone who gives a shit, mmmkay?

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Plants absorb energy from the sun. How much, if any, weight is gained from conversion of photons to chemical energy? If mass and energy are equivalent, even though a photon is massless, shouldn’t some weight gain due to light absorption occur?

I’ve never read anything about this, and I can only find one scientific paper from 1935 about this that seems to confirm this thought.

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The first comment here is by such a doofus that if his first name was “Doofus,” his last name would have to be “Doofus,” too, to really capture his doofosity.

BR, do you really hope otherwise? At the risk of triggering indignation, it’s pretty clear that the MAJORITY of people who populate this blog would absolutely LOVE a steady stream of stagflationary developments that send the markets much lower. I mean, c’mon, this blog has a lot of gold, canned preserves and ammo storing types of people on it. And that’s fine. But it’s hard to believe someone who is positioned bearishly is not hoping for bearish news.

I’m positioned for reality. When reality is bearish, that’s what I am — just like Barry Ritholtz. With inflation at levels not seen for a few decades, Wall Street populated by kleptocrats enabling and enabled by the Washington feedback loop of kakocracy, real wages falling like a dollop of mercury in alcohol, and jobs being lost like an aging ‘roid user loses his temper, being bearish matches reality.

The guy — Mr. Doofus — is talking about positioning for market conditions (mostly), of course, but he is also airing out his philosophy, and the personal philosophy of dumbasses everywhere who assert that if you express negativity through word or deed about anything, then you wanted that negative thing to happen — and, in fact, you may have even caused that thing to happen.

Almost no one wants the economy to be in the shape it’s in, nor do they want their homes to be underwater, their friends and even themselves to have to watch their wages fall, their jobs disappear, and their politicians lie to them as the infrastructure of the country crumbles while the rich steal everything that’s not nailed down — but that’s where we’re at. When reality is bearish, the correct response is to be bearish.

That’s ok, though. It’s people like Barry who deservedly end up with people like Mr. Doofus’s money. Sometimes, the market truly is efficient.

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I’ve noticed in interviews with Southern people, reporters never correct the grammar of the speakers, while in almost every other case, it’s standard practice to do so. For confirmation, watch an interview and read a reporter’s transcription of it — the mistakes will be fixed. This is standard for most news outlets, including CNN.

From the story, here’s an example.

“My son, he’s a little bicycle mechanic. He’s always in the backyard, and he don’t recall ever seeing nobody over here,” said Savage, 29, who also has a 4-year-old daughter.

There is much cause to be prejudiced against the South. I know. I lived there for almost 30 years. However, the irrational prejudice that exists in other parts of the country I had no idea about until I left the South. People in Washington state, for instance, stop just short of believing that absolutely all Southerners burn crosses in their front yards, carry three Bibles at all times, and haven’t heard of telephones, computers, or cars.

No conclusions, just an observation.

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The gist of this article is right on — that homeowners are far, far too optimistic about what their homes are worth — but then it goes on to make a rather large factual error as well as quote NAR shill and liar Lawrence Yun.

The factual error is a doozy, though. It’s this: “Until recently, national home prices had never fallen year-over-year….”

Totally, woefully incorrect.

Heard of this little thing called the Great Depression? Home prices fell 30% then. In addition, home prices fell year-over-year nationwide during the ’90s recession.

And these are the people who call themselves “journalists.” Fucking 30 seconds of Google to find that info, too.

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I know nothing about the study involved. I didn’t even read it, nor do I care about it.

But it is interesting and amusing watching many people who know zilch about science “debate” about science-related ideas.

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Prediction just for fun: The first time the nation as a whole notches more than six months of housing price increases in real dollar terms (inflation-adjusted) will be in August of 2015.

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Perhaps the pendulum will swing the other way, but with the eventual decline of the PC, cultural freedom as we’ve known it since we had a shared culture to worry about will be gone.

The PC was the last bastion the corporatists, by happy accident, weren’t able to wrest complete control of from its rightful hands, and with the rise of iPhones and other such multitude of locked devices, the corporatist demimondes are getting what they’ve always wanted.

And if you think writing about this sort of thing makes this a tech blog, wake the fuck up. The world is changing, and even if I don’t change anyone’s mind about the nature of it, at least recognize that technology has so insinuated itself into the modern lifestyle that not writing about it would be more anomalous than doing so.

And yes, I do enjoy berating some of my readers, but only the ones who need it. Because I receive no ad income, I can be a true thorn in the side, in my own small way, of anyone that I wish.

I was an ornery old man by the time I was 11, so not much has changed in that respect.

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I’m glad there is a social stigma against renters.

I rent, and don’t want to interact with most people, anyway. If renting is like a tard repellent, then that’s a good thing.

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