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[ March 2010 ] | |
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 The late Mr. Fish D. Watt, rested on by his friend, resting for ever more Well, the mottled hamster's gone too, in the wee hours of Friday, of the same diarrhea/respiratory issue that Mr. Ham J. Burger had. He spent his last hours on his side, breathing heavily while making a clicking sound, and was too far gone to even suck on a damp paper towel. Pity, he was perhaps the most active one I've had so far. This might be a good time to summarize the hams I've had the pleasure to know so far:
 (Source: Redcafe.net) In other business, the big United vs. Liverpool game last week appeared to have thrown up a particularly striking example of karma in action, when Torres supposedly slipped up at the very same spot that he scuffed in a fit of petulance earlier on; it's unlikely to be the exact place, but why spoil a good story? Anyway, they probably will do the job against Sunderland at Anfield, so... (currently $2199.50/$2400): $100 on Liverpool to beat Sunderland (at 1.25)
- + hamsters - ...is a darn useful thing. What I had thought incomprehensible, ended up laughably simple, unless my understanding went awry. Which is perhaps why two-way interaction with a real, live person is so useful in learning, and why teacher-student ratios are tabulated. I also have got to put far more emphasis on remembering names - drawing on past experience, I would put my average probability of recalling any individual name at about max[N/(5*(ln G + 1)),0.95], where N is the number of discrete meetups, and G is the group size; if this were not bad enough in itself, I have a tendency to draw a blank when directly asked to put a name to a face, and obviously it's awkward to ask directly when everyone assumes that you remember. Maybe I'll never be a get-to-know-others sort of person (you know, the kind who, after a week or less in school, can identify just about everybody in his year by name), since I frankly never cared, but it should be good to consider putting in more effort in this respect. For instance, when I was waiting for my printouts at the community printer, a fellow student alerted me (out of a group of about six or seven) when my username appeared, and I didn't know whether he actually knew me, or was just guessing. That was bad. The late Mr. Ham J. Burger, rested on his friend, resting for ever more On to more sad news. Mr. Ham J. Burger has kicked his tiny bucket, barely a month after his arrival, and just a week after eating out of my hand. He was the sweetest little thing, but simply couldn't put on weight, and in the end succumbed, probably to diarrhea, at 8:30 p.m. on Thursday. Watching him lying on his side and struggling to breathe was heartrending, but mercifully it was over quickly. He has, at least, been inducted into the blog staff - watch out for his posts someday! Not content to be a one-hamster guy again, I went out and held auditions for the next to bear the name of Mr. Ham, and recruited Mr. Ham J. D. Burger (火腿三世). Instead of running the risk of raising another runt, I picked a large and stout fellow, who was also amenable to handling, this time. Then I got home, discovered that he had bitten his way through his paper bag on the way, and realised that his huge eyes, which had seemed so cuteee back at the shop, now appeared slightly... aggressive. No matter, I prepared a neutral meet-the-new-hamster session in a basin, taking pains to squirt both participants with the supposedly smell-masking animal deodorant. Slightly drenched, they took one look at each other, and stood on their hind paws with front paws raised. After a few seconds of posturing, Mr. Fish backed down a bit, and it progressed to vicious ham-to-ham combat as the new Mr. Ham fell upon him. It was clear that peace, if it was ever to come, would be a distant prospect. Faced with civil war, the only plausible solution, short of getting a new cage, was to divide the existing one - a move which was not without precedent. As the warring factions were segregated amidst cries of "Partition! Partition!", a human council deliberated, and decreed that a wall of green bathroom anti-slip flooring be used to split the hamster territories.  Two-nation theory revisited (Plan view) To Mr. Fish was given the left side of the cage, which has a new running wheel (which regrettably blocks the view into the cage), a new water bottle, and a new metal food dish, and in addition to that, sole right of access to the second level and the two running balls and cooling plate therein. Then, to Mr. Ham was given the right side, with the existing running wheel, water bottle, and yellow food dish (fixed to its intended corner). In addition, it contains the only sand bath, and more ground territory, to compensate for not having an outlet to the top.  Dividing wall on left The actual hamgineering fell to my uncle, who cut the plastic flooring to size and reinforced it with disposable wooden chopsticks in a jiffy. The flooring happens to have holes that are just about large enough to poke a muzzle through, making actual bites an impossibility unless one of the hamsters is silly enough to stick a whole limb across the border.  Guarding the status quo The wall pivots about the back of the cage, and can be rotated to allow access to either half. As explained above, its default position is towards Fishstate for the sake of equity, and this is achieved using a reworked paperclip to hold the line. The two appeared to get by swimmingly, if one discounts Mr. Ham sticking his face into the wall and staring menacingly at an oblivious Mr. Fish every so often. This arrangement was even held to be an ideal long-term solution, since it promised to eliminate any chance of physical conflict, which has so far been inevitable, and yet also provides a modicum of companionship through the dividing wall; it was hoped that some rotation of fiefs would set the stage for prosperous coexistence. That lasted for all of half a day, before a series of very loud squeals at five a.m. served notice that Mr. Fish had somehow led an incursion into Hamstate in a ill-fated Six-Second War. The invader had however bitten off far more than he could chew, and ended up on the receiving end of a royal smackdown by the rather more massive Mr. Ham. It was only thanks to human-itarian intervention that Mr. Fish escaped with just a bloody lip, and deservedly spent the rest of the morning literally scared shitless as a refugee in a basin, while we strained to figure out where the hamgineering went wrong.  Left: Mr. Fish in his new sand bath Right: Mr. Ham's smaller sand bath cum hideout The wall was fixed up by plugging up the most minute of gaps with additional chopsticks, and it was further decided to furnish Mr. Fish with his own mostly-useless expanse of sand to forestall further surgical strikes; to save space, a bird-feeder was chosen, which Mr. Fish took to quite quickly. Mr. Ham was likewise mollified with more space, as his sand bath was replaced with a rather more compact ceramic one. Immediately, both hamsters began shovelling out their once bitterly-contested sand in spades, which simply goes to show that men and hams both don't know what they want (which might, however, be safer than actually knowing and acting on that). This week (now $1984.50/$2300): $50 on Everton (-1.5) vs. Bolton (at 2.20) $50 on Sunderland to beat Birmingham (2.10)
- changelog - changelog v1.15c --------------- * Random quotes in page title now added by Javascript, to prevent messy titles in search engines. Those that don't actually render the page, anyway. Not all that much going on, after one takes out United's four-nil thrashing of AC Milan, which very ironically happened at the same time as the half-a-billion-dollar Galacticos of Real Madrid were booted out before the quarter-finals... again. As career moves go, Ronaldo hasn't made the smartest one. Rooney won't be complaining too much, as he somehow bagged his seventh headed goal in a row, and ninth in ten matches. He would be a shoo-in for Best Player of the Year if he performs in the World Cup, having already tied down the Golden Forehead Award, no thanks to dodgy adverts. Nike doesn't make them like they used to, with Pepsi doing better - or even the mouse at Old Trafford. Shifting the topic, I recently realised that a number of people have asked me for my opinions on money management, directly or otherwise, and without offering the customary penny, over the last year or so; why me, I have no idea, and I somehow sense a slight disappointment at my candid revelation that I'm not doing too much in this respect.  A penny, worth 4.75 pennies? Here, I would recommend Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets as an introductory peek into the world of stocks, for the novice. It may be tilted heavily towards algorithmic trading, but it does cover many of the basics, is written in extremely accessible language, and has a lot of pictures (not to mention word clouds). It begins with the "first big technological solution" - the roof, which allowed trading on the New York Stock Exchange to carry on through rain and snow - and continues through hand signals, chalk boards, semaphore flags, the telegraph, ticker tapes, telephone, and finally (for now) the computer, and includes the well-worn anecdote of how Rothschild used pigeons to get a jump on the market (nowadays, the advantage is measured in milliseconds, and serious traders rent space directly next to the market center servers to minimize latency, since "OMG LAGZ!1!" can mean huge losses) I will skip a host of very interesting ruminations on various forms of artificial intelligence used (e.g. data mining, genetic algorithms) and summarize the situation thus: To make money, one may either actively play the market, or passively put money in and wait. The active method is perhaps what many have in mind when they think of "investing" - buy lots of a stock, watch it go up in a matter of weeks, days or even hours, sell for a large profit, rinse and repeat. Doubtless there have been some who have made their fortunes this way, and there are certainly no shortage of experts willing to teach others to do so (though in these cases, one might wonder why they would be willing to give away their tricks for a relative pittance, instead of simply practising what they preach, an opportunity not available to teachers in more conventional fields) In reality, active funds generally don't outperform passive funds by much, if at all, and their returns are not helped by the fat slices paid to the managers. Of course, the best active funds can yield ridiculous profits, but the problem is that past performance is no indicator of future success, and in any case active fund managers have an array of methods to make their funds seem more successful than they actually are (for a rundown, see the above link). The moral then is to indulge in active trading only if one knows what one is doing (and if one has to ask, I would guess that he doesn't, though in general people are more confident of their own judgment/ability than they ought to be), and only if one can bear the risks. Otherwise, it would probably be quicker to just visit a casino. This leaves passive investing, or dumping one's money into (usually blue-chip) stocks for the long term. This is the standard logic espoused by the more prudent students of economics, and has its merits. The basic argument is that the stock market has generally risen faster than inflation over the long term, and there are plenty of stories about elderly folk who bequeathed millions, thanks to a modest initial investment in Coca-Cola or the like, compounded over many years and stock splits. Now, the problems. Firstly, what many people want is to be much richer now, or at least in the near future; passive investment cannot satisfy this need, bar a supremely-unlikely short term spike in stock prices (and one might even argue that it would not be passive investing by definition then).  Up in the very long term only (Source: stockcharts.com) Continuing on this point, the long term can be, like, very long. Refer to the historical data for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. While it is true that the average has historically risen, there have been long periods where it has stayed stagnant, for example the seventeen years from 1966 to 1983, where it hovered about 1000. Pity then the poor sensible investor who bought in in 1966, and saw his holdings eaten away by inflation (to put things in perspective, things cost about three times as much in 1983 as they did in 1966) Of course, the next seventeen years would bring superb returns (vindicating modern-day Josephs) as the average broke 10000 - even accounting for inflation, the investor would have easily quadrupled his investment, and even if the gains were diluted over the full 34 years, the returns are still attractive. However, the problem is that the investor may be forced to sell at a loss midway through, if he needs the cash. The market is not a particularly forgiving creature. One might then wonder, why not invest long-term in just the best stocks, and not the market as a whole? The answer is, yes, one would be a happy camper if one picked Google at its IPO, but not if one held on to General Motors (around US$50 a share as far back as 1980, but pennies today), or any of a host of promising-but-now-bust Internet startups. And one final observation: While passive investing (almost always) delivers in the long (enough) term, its potential is of course limited by the investor's available funds - a couple hundred dollars a month is better than nothing, and if things go well, could translate into an "annuity" of a thousand dollars a month (in real purchasing power) by retirement. Not very little, but not all that much either. In other words, if one starts with a molehill, don't expect any remotely safe investment strategy to transform it into a mountain, even given decades. To make significantly more, one has to either have very good information and analysis (which it appears that many are happy to think they have, but few actually do), or be willing to gamble on risky calls. Pick your poison, then.  What a buddy is for The hamster update: Mr. Fish has gotten smarter, and waiting for him to settle on the food dish, so he can be grabbed, no longer works. Additionally, he will now scratch himself preemptively, before racing to take cover behind a rather more static Mr. Ham, who makes for a passable sandbag, and who allows himself to be wedged in the unlikeliest of corners. Mr. Ham is a significantly friendlier character, who has begun to let himself be hand-fed, after overcoming a worrying spot of balding, which has happily fixed itself. It should be noted that if one observes hamsters for long enough, one might chance upon them executing some truly impressive feats; few believe me when I insist that the first Mr. Ham waved a sunflower seed around in one paw (it might have got caught on his claw or something), and now, I wonder how many will accept that the second Mr. Ham kicked a crumb of food out of the cage, which is seriously harder than it sounds. It must also be mentioned that their combined productivity has been exemplary: together, they have achieved 43275 revolutions of the running ball on the right, and 31199 on the left, or a total of 74474, and that's not even including the far more popular running wheel on the base level of the cage; if this does not seem like much, consider that it is the best part of 27km, or well over a kilometre a day so far. Jack Neo's indiscretions are likewise hard to ignore, having saturated the local media for a couple of weeks. Martial infidelity is the in-thing among public figures nowadays, and having a case crop up in Singapore is only to be expected, but Jack Neo of all people? I would have expected a dashing young star, if anybody, to get himself mired in this, but on reflection, famous directors tend to have their share of muses. What might be lost here is that monogamy as the ideal seems to be a relatively recent concept, with the vast majority of societies abetting polygamy to some extent (see also this). Perhaps even more surprising is that the major religions generally aren't against it either, at least if they are honest and keep to their ancient writings rather than re-interpreting willy-nilly (though Mark Twain did hold up "No man can serve two masters" as an injunction against polygamy) Friedman and Sailer's argument that polygamy actually benefits women more than men appeared implausible until the logic was presented, along with the completely politically-incorrect assertion that polygamy would improve a population as a whole (which makes sense if one accepts that certain gifts are at least partially heritable). Of course, having a mass of angry young men with no realistic prospects of finding a mate milling around isn't the best recipe for social stability... Back to the original issue, all this does not absolve Mr. Neo of failing to live up to his social contract, but even accounting for the fact that he is a public figure, I feel that too much has been made of the issue - his wife was certainly the biggest victim here, and if she has forgiven him, there really isn't that much more to be said. The pretend punting tally's now at $1984.50/$2200 after United laboured to dispatch Wolves (a few days before they absolutely destroyed the mighty Milan, go figure). For today: $100 on Manchester City to beat Sunderland (at 2.00)
Minor update on the last couple of months of some-exercise and sort-of-dieting: a total loss of about four kilograms (disregarding fluctuations), or about a pound a week, without too much discomfort. On track then to make about 65kg - which is about as light as I've been since Basic Military Training - by the end of the month, and once I get there... we'll see what's next. Felt less beaten up than usual after futsal yesterday already. And on BMT, my younger brother enlisted today, which just so happens to be his birthday, and just one day after the release of the A Level results. By the way, it seems an A* grade has been added atop the old highest grade of A, and A** grades proposed, because too many students were scoring As for top universities to distinguish between them. Well, if they don't manage this properly, we might have the grades of A*****, A****, A***, A** and A* as the passing grades in half a century, with A meaning "Almost Passed".  AT ATTEN-SHUN, SUR! Back to dear old Tekong. It would be the first time that I returned as a non-recruit, or certainly as a non-NSF, and my impression was that it hasn't changed much. Not that time has left the island untouched - for one, an extra pair of steps have been installed at the end of the balancing logs, perhaps to reduce the probability of getting a nasty knee/ankle injury from the standard dismount (see 0:03 of the clip here for an example), which by right ends with both feet hitting the ground at the same time, but by left, sometimes doesn't? Oh, and from the NS website above, the SOC now consists of just a 50m dash followed by the obstacles and finally a 600m run, a rather large discount from the 700m initial rundown (which I would say makes a big difference) when I first encountered it seven years ago; of course, this is already far easier than in my father's generation, which I'm told was fifteen kilometres with a bloody fullpack and not just Standard Battle Order, uphill both ways, or something. Maybe it'll eventually be reduced to controlling drones with the Wii, and maybe that is indeed the future - why spend years doing thousands of push-ups and marching hundreds of clicks, if an overweight gamerboy somewhere can simply wiggle his controller and put a load of lead into those muscles? And if this doesn't sound realistic, I have a lot of dead Afghanis who want a word with you. Well, other changes include the combat uniform, from the classic camo print (which IMHO lookes better) to a newfangled digital one, in addition to shifting the rank patch from the shoulders/sleeves to the chest, which I guess is a godsend especially for short recruits, who will no longer need to salute everything in sight. The tour of the barracks soon concluded, and other than some improvements to the SBO and duffel bags, the change of the PT T-shirt colour from grey to brown, and the introduction of garrison sandals, the seldom-used recreation rooms and bunks were more or less the same from my time. A combined briefing by the commanding officer in an auditorium then followed, and amusingly the first three questions fielded were on the issue of attending the local universities' open houses (NUS will be holding its in a week, for one), to each which the good Lieutenant Colonel spent minutes endeavouring to say "cannot" without actually saying the word outright. To be fair, they are willing enough to allow recruits to attend interviews, from experience. The parents finally got the hint, and the commanding officer mollified them somewhat by making his new recruits promise to call their parents before their girlfriends; this got the kind of technically-correct but less-than-convincing "Yes, sir!" that soldiers swiftly learn to give the first time round, so he had to ask the lads again. After the oath-taking, lunch followed, and I was reminded that cookhouse food seriously isn't all that bad, if one is hungry and keeps an open mind. No Western dishes, to my disappointment, but the large chicken wing was very edible. I saved the orange for later, and added it to the bottle of mineral water, three-pack of Oreos, packet of tissue paper (to reserve seats in the cookhouse?) and ballpoint pen that SAF kindly gave to visitors.  SAF ORANGE REPORTING, SUR! The draw came through last week, so it's $1984.50/$2100 now on pretend punting. Today: $100 on Manchester United (-1.5) vs. Wolverhampton Wanderers (at 1.90)
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