I sat down to a taco salad last night. Then I jumped and looked behind me because there was a giant shadow of a snake on the floor. Unfortunately the snake jumped, too. And started to dissipate. And was only in one eye. "What does it mean when your eye fills with blood?" I asked my wife. "I don't know," she said, "let's call the consulting nurse line." Which came back with "yep, that's an ER visit, which one are you going to" which we answered with "well that depends, which one is in network" which they responded with "let me connect you with someone who can answer that" and that person responded with "bitch, this is the dispatch line, do you need a cabulance" because this is America. If you're going to go to the ER in America I recommend Tuesday night, ideally in an up-and-coming commuter neighborhood at some remove from downtown. I was triaged before I could take a seat, had blood drawn within ten minutes, had an ultrasound and a CT scan within an hour and a prognosis within two: not a stroke, not a brain hemorrhage, not a detached retina, visit this ophthalmologist ASAP because.... maybe multiple sclerosis? During the entire 2 1/2 hr adventure my eye filled with Dementors three more times. The 9am call to the ophthalmologist landed us a 10am appointment which landed us a 10:30 diagnosis of retinal tear ("they always under-diagnose retinal stuff") and a 10:35 optical surgery. Unfortunately I'd had another geyser while I was sleeping and it clotted so I have a persistent black jellyfish in one eye. My vision is also yellower. I've been told this will dissipate. The guy who told me was Obama's ophthalmologist so he has my trust. I will follow up in a week. I bring this up because apparently lots of people go "huh, my vision is full of blood, I'm sure that will pass" which means your retina detaches and you aren't looking at two minutes with a surprise laser you're looking at an operating room and a week of lying on your face recovering. So don't sleep on eye shit. 'cuz i guess as you become an old fart your eye jelly cuts loose and starts rolling around and most people never notice but for a lucky few it rips your retina on the way out and that shit won't necessarily heal itself.
glad y’all took that seriously and hope you have a quick recovery with minimal lasting consequences. that sounds scary in the moment and i don’t know how the majority of people who don’t live in a city with a major, major healthcare network like we do manage these things. id imagine they don’t.
Yeah, that thought occurred to me in the waiting room of the ER. "Man, I sure am glad I'm not on a sailboat pointed at Vanuatu right now." I had to wait two hours for an ultrasound tech to drive up from Albuquerque when I was a kid. And while a fresh medical student at the University of Washington diagnosed the eczema in my fingernails before I'd sat down, three years previously I'd been made to sit as an exhibit while every third dermatologist in the Mountain West wandered through, asked me to hold up my hands, stroked their chins and left. The consensus was leprosy, until they learned that I'd been cultured for leprosy and it came back negative.
My sabbatical was accepted, I'm taking a year to push hard towards habilitation. Success or not, I'm leaving. Also, gonna use that year to learn some data science tools beyond "Python and some R, I guess?" and... euch, actually learn and understand, <vomits mid-sleep>, some finance <dry heaves>. God, I still think this is too mature of me. kb (and others too!), what do you recommend? Is there something that's conceptually For Dummies but isn't afraid of maths? 'cause in my experience it's either "here's de Vries equation describing <white noise in fluent garbage>" or "money can be exchanged for goods and services, here's a five-page description of a fucking supply-demand graph."
There used to be two schools of thought about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. The one the wonks were circling around was "we never should have let all these investment firms come up with these crazy-exotic models of money flow and investment risk because they traded models of the models of the models and the whole world blew up." The one the bros were circling around was "nobody could have seen that coming, d00d." Then Michael Lewis wrote The Big Short and the narrative became "nobody could have seen that coming - except my plucky heroes, d00d!" I lead with this because "except my plucky heroes" is basic narrative storytelling whereas "we should have leashed our wizards" is advanced narrative storytelling. Basic storytelling is necessary to get the point across to The Stupids. Advanced storytelling might actually change things. The basic storytelling allows most of the world to go "well I guess that'll never happen again, good thing they fixed it" while the advanced storytelling, unobserved by nearly everyone, made it hella harder for super-crazy-hyperexotic math to break the world. And by "super-crazy-hyperexotic math" we might be talking about diff EQ? Because the finance world sucks at math. See this thing? they gave it a Nobel Prize in Economics (which is not a Nobel and never will be) and it's literally "price over earnings times a seasonal coefficient." Which means anybody who can use an equation with an integral in it is a quant. And you don't get to go drinkin' with the boys on Tuesdays if you talk to the quants. Their job is to give us stuff to bet on. I mean sell to investors. (I'm getting there I promise) Buried hyper-deep in books that nobody recommends anymore is this very simple fact: AIG built a model that told them that the odds of housing prices in the United States dropping by an aggregate of more than five percent was a "six sigma event" and described them as such. This makes them sound like they've been reading Taleb. What Taleb meant was "six or more standard deviations away from the mean" but what Taleb really meant was "nobody could have seen that coming, d00d." Taleb starts Black Swan with the assertion that nobody could have predicted Hitler, despite both Churchill and Wilson expressly predicting Hitler at the Treaty of Versailles, in public speeches. This only matters because AIG used that model to insure the policies of Goldman Sachs, Chase, Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns and all the rest. And those policies underwrote their risk of mortgages going bad. And the riskier those mortgages were, the more of a premium those bonds paid to the bondholders. And the more the premium paid, the more money everyone made. Including AIG. Who argued, based on fuckall, that the sun was more likely to go nova in 2009 than that housing prices would dip 5%. NOW I would argue that not a single "quant" argued that a housing dip was less likely than the sun going nova. But a whole lotta quants put together position papers and equations and arguments and justifications for finance bros to blast clear through any safeguards or lending requirements. What's the Mencken quote that was actually Upton SInclair? “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Mencken gets credit because Paul Krugman credited him erroneously in 1989. Krugman went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. So the problem you will encounter is that the smarter you are, the better you are with numbers, the more easily you can manipulate them, the more likely you are to be asked to lie with them. The finance industry uses math the way RFK uses science - they cherry-pick stuff they don't understand to sell to gullible regulators who already want to believe. The actual money-making portion of the program is back-room deals and insider trading. The "mathiness" portion of this debacle began with LTCM in 1998. Timeline goes like this: - 1994: John Merriweather builds a magic new math fund around Myron Scholes' risk model - 1997: Myron Scholes wins the Nobel Prize in Economics - 1998: LTCM loses $5b for not predicting that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be economically spicy When Genius Failed is a good book about that. Fast forward ten years and everyone who made fun of LTCM (their approach was mocked as "picking up nickels in front of steamrollers") is now discovering the profits to be made if you adopt a Schroedinger's Risk model: things are very risky when making money off them, not risky at all when you're insuring against them. There are dozens of books about what happened next, just watch this instead. And yes, none of this is relevant to your actual request, which is "how do I do math stuff with finance" and that's not me changing the subject or evading, because the math stuff is all delta gamma zeta options bullshit which isn't really math, it's Advanced Gambling. The book I recommend on finance is A Random Walk Down Wall Street which is now fifty fucking years old but gets to the basics in an extremely accessible way. Here are my caveats: 1) It pretends that markets are perfectly efficient when it's thunderously obvious that they work by insider trading and informational advantage 2) It argues that you make more money by staying in the market at all times rather than admitting that knowing when to fucking bail is a more effective strategy 3) It basically says "don't" about options and exotic mathematical instruments because fucking hell in 1973 John Merriweather was a fresh MBA in the pit at Salomon Michael Lewis chose Michael Burry as his hero for The Big Short because Michael Burry, autist, went through and read the prospectii of all these credit default swaps and went "wait a minute... this shit only works if the housing market doesn't drop more than five percent!" he was also monied enough that he could go to Goldman Sachs and say "I would like to bet against you, create a credit default swap that pays out when the rest of your shit goes into default and sell it to me." He then got Goldman Sachs to grudgingly pay out after they initially ruled that they didn't have to because the only person who bought this CDO was Michael Burry. I mention this because "it's stupid to presume that the sun is more likely to go nova than for housing prices to drop five percent" isn't arcane knowledge. It's fucking obvious. But the whole "quant" universe of finance is about burying obvious truths in illegible equations so that you can sell them to pension funds. Now get back to me once you can keep down some apple sauce and oatmeal and we'll continue the purge.
Not only does the job market suck right now, but jobs that are hiring are only ever temporary/limited term and/or Salaries are dropping fast. I can't seem to find anything that's more than a 2 year contract of sorts. We're buying a house and my partner is starting her PhD please give me a hint of stability that pays enough. Leaving for Japan on Friday for 2 weeks. Super excited and ready not think about work for that time.
Update on the settlement and move. It went well. Which is to say, it was conducted successfully. Barring unexpected massive windfalls, I am unlikely to welcome having to repeat the process at any point in the next few years. Place is still replete with boxes. I find little in the way of time or inclination to finish the unpacking. Claude (our felid) refuses to talk to me. And the previous owners took the dishwasher as well as the shed (the shed! - out of the backyard) when they left. Now is the time as the tension begins to unwind that I begin to notice the things I never spotted during the inspections before auction. Why does the floor on this corner feel strangely spongy and hollow under the boards? Why does this tile in the kitchen rock slightly when stepped upon? Why is there a gap between the earth and the wall of the house in the backyard? For now, I aim to pursue none of these concerns.
I have no clue what's supposed to be important right now. No idea what should have my attention as priority. I can try to keep to a schedule but just trying to do that seems to cause conflict. I just go to physical therapy, drink too much caffeine, play world of Warcraft and sleep. Not satisfying. Started Blood Meridian. Enjoying the prose, mostly. Cormac feels preachy in some weird way. Hard to describe at present. I wonder who else finished it eventually.
I’m not trying to be preachy or be an armchair shrink, but it might be good to try and not game for a while if you’re feeling aimless. Games are very good at satiating your desire for community, challenge, accomplishment and autonomy, without actually giving you the real fulfillment that propels you forward in life. It’s like taking artificial sweeteners when you actually need the real deal. You have the motivation in you to do something else, but right now it sounds to me like part of the problem is that your motivation is hijacked by playing so much WoW.
I loved Blood Meridian. Loved it. There's about 80 pages where the Kid diminishes into the background and the gang become the main protagonist, where it becomes a bit of a slog, but as far as prose style goes, McCarthy has very few peers.
Not a simple block like the original Geometry Dash, Geometry Dash Wave turns you into a flexible entity, winding through thorny mazes, teleportation portals, and unexpected traps.
I mean, clearly aleina thinks you need to become a flexible entity. I can speak only for myself, but I could use a teleportation portal. Not so much with the thorny mazes and god knows I have enough unexpected traps but you win some you lose some, don'tcha know? I fucking hate Cormac McCarthy and everything he touched and I've learned to honor that in myself. John Gardner made the point that most "classics" are chosen by educators and that they choose not because the books are good but because they allow educators to make easy, simple points. You have to exercise the self-care to honor your own perspectives and needs - the phrase "I can try to keep to a schedule but just trying to do that seems to cause conflict" tells me that sticking up for yourself is something those around you aren't expecting. What's important is what you value. If you're not sure what you value, try a few things on for size. When my life upended in 2007 and I found myself transitioning from "I have two projects headlining the NYT business section" to "I am about to go to producing school" to "I am a worthless bum" to "I just mixed live for double the population of New Zealand" in six weeks, I discovered an important inner truth: I love pineapple. And while I had no idea what to expect on a day-to-day basis, I knew that seeking pineapple gave me a concrete thing that generally inched my needle an iota or two towards comfort and pleasure. The other nice thing about pineapple is it's a concrete thing. there's nothing abstract about "pineapple." "I can try to keep to a schedule" is a long goddamn border to defend, d00d. "I listen to 20 minutes of music before bedtime because it helps me relax" is concrete. If you defend that every goddamn day everyone around you will leave it alone because it's easier for them. They'll push on it initially because what they're doing is testing your resolve but if you reveal your resolve to be stronger than their own they'll give over. That gives you a defensible border - you can expand from "20 minutes of music before bedtime" to "I go to bed at 11, you're welcome to join me". I'd start with the physical therapy and branch out. Anything you're paying for can have the blame shifted. Also I just started Dragon Age:Veilguard and I'm not sure I like it as much as :Origins but it's fun enough.