Planetary Delights

"She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn't help solve them, but she hasn't really found an alternative yet."

-- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Labels: quotes

"By mid-2003, as the drumbeat of criticism--and a string of investigations--intensified, there were some hints of remorse. At its annual meeting in May, J.P. Morgan Chase issued a statement saying, "We have seen far more than the usual number of serious accidents at the intersection of Wall Street and Main. And our financial institutions, including J.P. Morgan Chase, must take their share of responsibility for that." Two months later, J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup agreed to pay a combined $286 million for "helping to commit a fraud" on Enron's shareholders as SEC enforcement chief Stephen Cutler told reporters. The two banks also agreed to ensure that their clients who used complex financial structures account for them in ways that investors could readily understand. Investors will have to wait until the next bull market to gauge whether anything has really changed."

(The emphasis is mine.)

Reading "The Smartest Guys In The Room" this weekend was amazing. To imagine that such a business existing boggles the mind, and seems like a better warning of the current financial difficulties than the LTCM crisis was previously.

Labels: finance

As I was heading out to the suburbs today, I stopped at the RAM in Rosemont to fill up a growler for our family's holiday meal. I decided to try the Hazelnut Porter, which sounds likes a cheesy coffee flavor, but is actually a pretty decent beer.

The best part? It's only $5 to refill a growler on Fridays and Saturdays. That's less than a crappy six-pack of Miller Lite--and it will be available every day in January. So I'm definitely heading back to the RAM in January.

Labels: beer

A beautiful still life (well still for a cat) taken earlier today.

"Why did these people care so much about what came out of their computers and so little about what came out of their factories? Why were they so intent on breaking up instead of building up? And last: what did this all have to do with doing business?"

Barbarians at the Gate was quite good--it read more like a novel than a business book. I'd recommend it.

Labels: books

I see the world in terms of words because whenever I have a quiet moment, I fill it with reading. (via Rands in Repose.)

As someone who has almost been mown down by taxis while walking and reading, and often takes a path through the alley at night because the light is better to finish the next page of the book, I agree.

Labels: quotes

This is our cat that we buried in blankets during the weekend. He's a photogenic beast, though I like the blend of color from this picture.

(A friend recently asked me for baking tips after she got a new Dutch oven. Since I bake a lot, I thought I'd pass along my experiences.)


Yes, I do bake a lot -- probably 2x a week. We've cut down how much bread
we buy because I tend to make a couple of loaves. The no-knead is how I
make all of my bread -- it makes it taste a lot better and also makes
baking a lot less work.

Here's my basic recipe. It's taken from the Mark Bittman book "How To
Cook Everything". I'm sure the library has it if you want lots and lots
of details.

3 1/2 c. flour (bread flour is better, but not necessary)
1 1/2 c. water - 2 c. water
salt
yeast - usually about 1 tsp. See below.

12 - 18 hour version
I mix the yeast, flour, and then a bunch of salt together. I then add the
water in 1/2 c. batches into the flour and just stir it all together. Use
extra water and less yeast.

Once you have a wet gooey mess (don't worry if it is gloppy, the yeast
will take care of it), set it aside in the mixing bowl to rise. It works
better if you put plastic wrap on top, but it's not required.

Let it rise for 12 hours, then punch down. Let rise again for 4 hours,
then transfer the loaf into the dutch oven and bake at 450 for 45 minutes.

4 hour version
Mix the yeast into warm water (about the temperature of bathtub water) and
give it a little boost by adding anything sugary you have handy -- jam,
maple syrup, a little molasses. No more than a teaspoon. Let it
percolate for about 5-10 mins--it will start to foam and that is good.
Use a healthy teaspoon of yeast, maybe a bit more if you are
time-constrained.

Mix the flour and salt together, then mix in the fluid. Make sure it's
gooey.

Let it rise for 2-3 hours, then punch down. Let it rise again, and then
bake at 450F in a dutch oven until it's done.

Important Tips & Tricks

- Preheat the over 20-30 mins to 450 before baking. It takes awhile for
most ovens to get decently hot.

- Make sure your dutch oven doesn't have a plastic handle -- it can melt
or smoke at 450. (I used a metal calaphon lid and it was ok.)

- you need to oil the pan to prevent the bread from getting burned to the
bottom. I usually use canola oil because it can handle the heat. It will
taste even better if you sprinkle polenta or coarse cornmeal on top of the
oil before putting the bread in -- the bread will slide out really easy
when it's all done.

- The longer you let it rise, the better it will taste, and then use
correspondingly less yeast.

- If you want whole grain bread, replace your regular flour with up to 1
1/2 c. of different flours and it should work just fine. I often mix in 1
c. of rye flour, but have also used oatmeal, whole wheat flour, or mixed
in nuts. Using lots of fruit, blueberries, and cinnamon is an option too.

- Make sure to let it cool before eating. 5 mins. is a minimum, 30 is
better.

- Don't worry too much about the ambient temperature of where it rises.
Anything over 60 should be OK, ie you don't need to put it in the oven or
anything.

- Bread tastes better with lots of salt. Taste the dough as you're mixing
it to taste the salt.

- You don't need to knead. The yeast will take care of it.

- the mixing takes 5-10 mins, and the clean-up takes the same. All in
all, the whole thing takes about 30 minutes of your time.

Here is the original inspiration. I find this recipe too fussy though.
(Seriously, who measures 1 5/8 of anything?!?) I don't preheat the pot, I
just use it myself and think that's a reasonable trade-off.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html

Let me know how you like it!

Labels: bread, recipe

The timeline of the subprime meltdown, mostly told through Ben Bernacke's eyes. Kind of dense and boring, but includes the best explanation yet of what happened at Bear Stern's that I've seen.

Labels: finance, newyorker, subprime

They helped distract outsiders from the truly profane event: the growing misalignment of interests between the people who trafficked in financial risk and the wider culture.

The number of financial articles that make you laugh out loud are very few and far between. But the Michael Lewis piece on Subprime mortgages is fantastic, especially if you've read Liar's Poker. The interview at the end -- with Gutfruend -- had me literally on the edge of my seat.

His main point -- that most financial companies don't understand what they are peddling, and the CEOs don't understand the risks, is something to keep in mind.

Even better, it reminds you to ask again and again to get someone to explain to you what they are doing in a way you can understand. Otherwise, it's alchemy.

Labels: finance, michaelLewis

It's fascinating to me how people's first interaction with computers seems to harden their ideas of what it can do for the rest of their lives. I can't tell you how many programmers I've met who still lust after Hypercards, or wish to recreate something they did on an Amiga or Commodore64. (My generation being the first to grow up on PCs, not have to work our way through the punchcard nonsense of mainframes.)

I have my own ticks like this: I want to use the simple email program pine at work, and I have yet to find anything to replay earlier versions of stuff that "just worked" like the Mac alarm clock program or the simple "cdplayer" that used to ship with earlier versions of windows.

And for "genius" programmers, it seems it is no different. The summary of this article could be "Ray Ozzie saw the future in 1973 at U of I, and just tries to keep recreating it. (The sad part is that while Notes was ahead of its time in 1989, it's truly awful now.)

But it means an interesting pattern emerges: the first language of computing you learn is the one you feel most comfortable in. You might learn new vocabulary (nifty keyboard shortcuts, iTunes, etc.) but the first impression hardens your mind on what a computer is.

It's a thought worth exploring:
- are programmers' ideas of what's possible shaped by language? (I happen to believe their design patterns of "good code" are often shaped by the first language.)

- are users ever happy with evolutionary software, or do they prefer the revolution to learn a new language of doing things? For example, it seems possible that much computer input could be done by touchscreen in 5 years instead of the keyboard mouse/combo. What will that mean for today's toddler?

I follow Ray Ozzie because I find his work fascinating. (I thought Groove was groovy, and sort of welcome cloud computing at Microsoft because I think it will be a paradigm shift for enterprise computing.) But clearly he keeps chasing what he thought he already had.

A very lucid account of why Prop 8 failed in California. I love Hendrik Hertzberg and hope some of his better columns about the Bush administration come out as a book (that I will gladly buy).

What's particularly engaging is his use of very very long sentence. Short sentence. Like this:

You might think that an organization that for most of the first of its not yet two centuries of existence was the world’s most notorious proponent of startlingly unconventional forms of wedded bliss would be a little reticent about issuing orders to the rest of humanity specifying exactly who should be legally entitled to marry whom. But no.

I try to use this style as often as possible when writing email -- the long-short style, I think, catches your attention and is very useful for non-fiction writing.

Labels: email, newyorker, Prop8

Wow, that was quite a week.

Here's a picture of the view 1-2 doors down from my house looking towards Foster. It was all completely closed off and flooded. The rain came and went, and the river just flooded and flowed everywhere.

The city's response was poor. We never knew what was going on, and despite dozens of men standing around, sometimes moving sandbags, sometimes not, we never knew what was going on.

All of the houses in this picture had many feet of water in their basements. We seemed to be dry, which was nice.

The power went out at about 4am on Sunday morning, and they shut the gas off on my neighbors. As we left at about 4pm, the word among the neighbors was that we were all supposed to get out and they were to going to turn the gas off to prevent a leak.

I found Roger Lowenstein's essay on the history of LTCM crisis and how it was a fire-drill for the wreck that has come after it in the markets. There were so many delightful quotes in this one, I figured I'd pull a few.

AS striking as the parallel is to Bear, Long-Term Capital’s echo is far more profound. Its strategy was grounded in the notion that markets could be modeled. Thus, in August 1998, the hedge fund calculated that its daily “value at risk” — meaning the total it could lose — was only $35 million. Later that month, it dropped $550 million in a day.

How could the fund have been so far off? Such "risk management" calculations were and are a central tenet of modern finance. "Risk" is said to be a function of potential market movement, based on historical market data. But this conceit is false, since history is at best an imprecise guide.

Risk — say, in a card game — can be quantified, but financial markets are subject to uncertainty, which is far less precise. We can calculate that the odds of drawing the queen of spades are 1 in 52, because we know that each deck offers 52 choices. But the number of historical possibilities keeps changing.

I think about this a lot. It's the difference between believing the world is 2D vs 3D, the conceit that you can know all of something vs the hope that you've captured enough to do well. As I get older, I am simultaneously intrigued (seduced?) by the idea of what numbers can model at the same time I fear that all of it is wrong.

Modern finance is an antiseptic discipline; it eschews anecdotes and examples, which are messy and possibly misleading — but nonetheless real. It favors abstraction, which is perfect but theoretical. Rather than evaluate financial assets case by case, financial models rely on the notion of randomness, which has huge implications for diversification. It means two investments are safer than one, three safer than two.

The theory of option pricing, the Black-Scholes formula, is the cornerstone of modern finance and was devised by two Long-Term Capital partners, Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes, along with one other scholar. It is based on the idea that each new price is random, like a coin flip.

Long-Term Capital’s partners were shocked that their trades, spanning multiple asset classes, crashed in unison. But markets aren’t so random. In times of stress, the correlations rise. People in a panic sell stocks — all stocks. Lenders who are under pressure tighten credit to all.

A further wrinkle that complicates thinking. The first quote implies that life is random, and no model will ever incorporate all of the variables. The second: life isn't random, and people often move in herds. The hard part to keep in mind: both statements are true.

Investors, meanwhile, could help themselves by preparing for the next 100-year flood. Rest assured, it will arrive before then.

It's so so hard as a human to remember that a "100 year flood" doesn't mean it will happen every 100 years. It could happen a lot more often and then not at all for awhile, or it could not happen for 200 years. That's really hard to keep in the back of your head when you think about it: a hundred-year flood could happen tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next day. And then two days in a row. It's all very very random.

Ultimately, it's the challenge of believing that two contradictory facts are both true. The divisions we too often create to make sense of the world: right vs wrong, either or don't express well enough the world around us. Everything is pleasant shade of colorful gray.