Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Adventures of Polly Nomial



Once upon a time (1/t), pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singularly large matrix.

Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the grounds that it was insufficient and made her way in amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, three branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point she tripped over a square root which was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself, apparently alone, in a non-euclidean space.

She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate improperly at once.

Hearing a vulgar function behind her, Polly turned round and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once, by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms, that he was bent on no good.

"Eureka" she gasped.

"Ho, ho," he said. "What a symmetric little Polynomial you are. I can see you're bubbling over with secs".

"O Sir," she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got my brackets on."

"Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator, "your fears are purely imaginary "

"i, i," she thought, "perhaps he's homogenous then?".

"What order are you," the brute demanded.

"Seventeen," replied Polly.

Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet?" he asked.

"Of course not", Polly cried indignantly. "I'm absolutely convergent."

"Come, come," said Curly. "Let's off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit."

"Never," gasped Polly.

"Exchlf," he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places and began to smooth her points of inflexion. Poor Polly. All was up. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever.

There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. What an indignity. To be multiply connected on her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that evening, her mother noticed that she had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly increased monotonically. Finally she generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place until she was driven to distraction.

The moral of this sad story is this: If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Windows is like that

The Japanese are replacing error messages [eg "This program has performed an illegal function and will now shut down."] with Haiku poems.


The web site you seek
Cannot be located,
but Countless more exist

Chaos reigns within
Reflect, repent and reboot
Order shall return

Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Three things are certain:
Death, Taxes and Lost Data.
Guess which has occurred.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Where is the printer?
The printer can not be found
Though it is next to me

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Inflation Adjusted Gasoline Prices


$5000 gold

Global pension assets are estimated to be – drum roll, please – $31.1 trillion. No, that is not a misprint. It is more than twice the size of last year’s GDP in the U.S. ($14.7 trillion).
.. the typical pension fund holds about 0.15% of its assets in gold. He estimates another 0.15% is devoted to gold mining stocks, giving us a total of 0.30% – that is, less than one third of one percent of assets committed to the gold sector.
Let’s say fund managers as a group realize that bonds, equities, and real estate have become poor or risky investments and so decide to increase their allocation to the gold market. If they doubled their exposure to gold and gold stocks – which would still represent only 0.6% of their total assets – it would amount to $93.3 billion in new purchases.
How much is that? The assets of GLD total $55.2 billion, so this amount of money is 1.7 times bigger than the largest gold ETF. SLV, the largest silver ETF, has net assets of $9.3 billion, a mere one-tenth of that extra allocation.
Insurance companies have about $18.7 trillion in assets. Hedge funds manage approximately $1.7 trillion. Sovereign wealth funds control $3.8 trillion. Then there are mutual funds, ETFs, private equity funds, and private wealth funds. Throw in millions of retail investors like you and me and Joe Sixpack and Jiao Sixpack, and we’re looking in the rear view mirror at $100 trillion.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Cat boarding

Why leave your cat in a small cage when you can have a Cat Chalet condo? All of our accommodations are condos that have enough room for one person to go in, close the full-size door, and sit down. Each condo has a clean litter box, food and water, and 2 shelves with curtains to protect their privacy.


$18/day.



Monday, March 07, 2011

Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) Plan


Advantages of a SEP plan

  • Easy to set up. A SEP plan is like a “corporate IRA” established by an employer for the benefit of each employee. There are no requirements for a separate employer trust account, because each employee establishes his or her own SEP IRA.
  • Tax advantages. SEP contributions are tax deductible to the employer, and all earnings are tax-deferred for the employee.
  • Minimal administrative costs. Employers sponsoring SEP plans are not required to file annual plan returns like those sponsoring qualified pension or profit sharing plans.
  • Contribution flexibility. An employer can make a discretionary contribution each year of up to 25% of each eligible employee’s compensation.
  • Tax planning flexibility. The employer can establish a SEP plan up until the tax filing deadline (including extensions), unlike qualified pension or profit sharing plans which must be in place no later than the last day of the plan year.
  • Investment flexibility. Since the employees can choose where the accounts are established, they may have a wide range of investments from which to choose.
  • Limited liability. The employer’s fiduciary duty is reduced because participants in a SEP choose their own investments after establishing their SEP IRA accounts.

Sunday, March 06, 2011

Motorcycle Seat Cushions

for a longer, more comfortable ride. Memory foam can’t do it. Gel seats can’t do it. Only genuine AIRHAWK can do it.


BMW R1200 RT

It’s cold outside. On the Vespa I would have several layers under my cold weather riding jacket, electric gloves, and overpants. At 70mph on a 40 degree morning a person would get pretty cold without protection from the wind. But here I am with a sweater and t-shirt under my mesh summer riding jacket, summer gloves, jeans and boots. The power windshield and cowling keeps me out of the windblast. The heated grips keep my hands toasty and the heated seat, well, let’s just say it’s nice. By the time the thermometer reaches 55 I have shed the sweater. I could see riding this motorcycle until the snow flies.
Did I mention the R1200 RT has cruise control?
The BMW does a bit of deception when it comes to speed. The wind protection, power, and smooth ride give the impression that you aren’t traveling as fast as your actually are. On a stretch of US 15 I glanced at the speedometer and saw 80mph. I would have sworn to the State Police that I was going 60. No wonder I was passing everyone.
With the bike sitting in the driveway I imagined the kinds of rides I could make. Long day rides, weekend rides, or extended tours. The BMW R1200 RT would be ready for any of them. 

Brammo Enertia


4 hours recharge time, 42 miles range, 60 mph top speed, 324 lbs, 40 cents/charge, 1 cent/mile.

California

All Brammo Electric Motorcycles are eligible for a 10 percent Federal tax credit on electric motorcycles. On a $9995 purchase, that's a saving of almost $1,000.
In California the final cost for an Enertia is $5994 after state and federal incentives.


Stuff White People Like - The Ted Conference


The TED Conference is an invite-only affair that brings together the smartest minds from around the world to share their knowledge and wisdom with the attendees. Additionally all of the talks are made available online and as podcasts so that white people are able to watch or listen to them at work or during their commute.

These talks are like college lectures, except that they are free to listen, shorter, and white people aren’t hung over and pretending to listen.

Due to the broad audience watching the talks, TED speakers generally take very complex ideas and boil them down into a simple engaging presentation. So when a white person finds out that you have a PhD and visits and attempts to engage you in a conversation about String Theory, you should know that all of their understanding comes from a twenty-minute talk they listened to while running on a treadmill. You should also be aware that the average white person considers their knowledge on the subject to be on par or superior to yours.Sadly, TED Talks are not all roses and NPR approved comedians. For many white people, TED Conferences are actually a source of sadness and depression. This comes from their dreams to attend a future TED Conference in person. But with a price tag of $6000 and an invite-only policy, many white people are simply unable to attend. This is a new concept for white people as they have successfully been creating and joining expensive exclusive clubs for over one thousand years. Popular examples include: private schools, politics, and ice hockey.

Note: It is not advised to try to use sarcasm when trying to console a white person about their lack of an invitation to the TED conference.

“It must hard for you not being able to get into an expensive, invitation only club. As a non-white person, lets just say I have some experience in that field.”

“You didn’t get into MENSA either huh?”