Here’s our oft-repeated fact that you should get through your head: The average actively managed stock mutual fund returns approximately 2% less per year to its shareholders than the stock market returns in general. That means that before your dollar even gets to the fund manager to invest, his company has already taken two cents off the top.
I disagree with the Motley Fool on a fair number of things, but they’re spot-on here regarding the average fund.
The Skeptical Optimist takes a humorous look at energy policy:
Q: But to encourage entrepreneurs, scientists, and companies to get moving a lot faster towards that superbattery breakthrough, the government will need to set up some kind of new incentive, won’t it?
A: Of course; I’ve been trying to tell you all along that government energy policy needs to change in a big way.Q: How about something like an “X-prize” for a new superbattery? Maybe a few hundred million dollar prize for the first entrepreneur, or company, or group of scientists to come through with the new technology?
A: Uhhh… No, no, we couldn’t do that. Uhhh… that’s McCain’s idea… obviously just a “gimmick” (…according to these talking points they sent me…).
Arnold Kling writes on Econlog:
…like Charlie Brown getting ready to kick a football, we seem to have an infinite capacity to believe that it will be different this time. We think that the next top-down design introduced by government will work fine, it will never degrade, and we won’t find ourselves ten or twenty years down the road wondering how such a mess was created.
I was a bit surprised earlier this week to find out that Omegapaladin (who is lightyears ahead of me in l33t math skillz) hadn’t heard of the concept of the modulo before. There’s a lot of unfortunate nitty-gritty problems about mod, but it’s a very useful operation. I wrote a small program in PHP that uses mod in two interesting ways.
The script is attached to this post. First, though, here’s the image it creates:
This is Pi, sort of. The image can be “read” from left to right starting at the top and going to the bottom. Because there are ten possible digits in Pi but there are seven rainbow colors, I needed a way to figure out what to map 7, 8, and 9 to. The “correct” way to do this would to get a base-7 representation of Pi, but I wanted to talk about mod. So, for each digit of pi, I picked a color for the rectangle by taking the corresponding digit of pi and modding it by 7: “i % 7″
Now, the digits of Pi can be thought of as a one dimensional sequence, but the image above is two dimensional. Given that we’re considering the nth digit of pi, how do we translate this into an x and y position? Using mod:
for($i = 0; $i < $length_of_pi; $i++) {
$current_pixel_y = floor($i/25);
$current_pixel_x = $i % 25;
…
The first line determines what row we’re in, from the top (there are 25 pixels in each row). The next line determines the column within the row, using mod. This works because the number of pixels left after accounting for all the previous rows go into the current row.
My roommate and I were discussing pseudorandom number generators. Since I’m not particularly good at math, he stumped me for a while by asking how a sequence of numbers from a generator compares to real random numbers (like, for instance, numbers generated from radioactive decay).
It turns out that my roommate could have stumped someone with a lot more knowledge with his question: Wikipedia notes “It is an open question, and one central to the theory and practice of cryptography, whether there is any way to distinguish the output of a high-quality PRNG from a truly random sequence without knowing the algorithm(s) used and the state with which it was initialized.” Of course, some sequences of numbers generated by a less than perfect PRNG are almost certainly not random.
One of the neat things about Google: They often work to subtly improve their service, and when they do, they often integrate the improvement so seamlessly into their existing site that you can easily miss it. This is a screenshot from the other day. I’ve entered the (domain) name of a website, and Google has automatically put a search box for that site under its listing in the results. I almost entered a second query in this box and clicked the button without even noticing that this was something I hadn’t seen before!
A search for "chipublib" on Google
Now, for the explanation of the previous post.
I managed to get the buffering trick in XUL to work: it is possible to use a deck of stacks in XUL for animation. HOWEVER, doing so has a really, really high CPU cost, to the extent that just flipping back and forth between two images at 30fps shot my CPU usage up to 100%. (But note that other have done far more interesting things with the canvas tag without things being quite so disasterrific).
So, I basically decided that in-browser games are highly overrated, and I was looking for a more traditional game engine. My requirements were basically that it’s available under a BSD style liscence, a 2D focus, and has decent scripting. Somehow, I found LÖVE (Ha!). So of course, I started look at the demos, and found the Kawaii Kitten Adventure, which is a bizarre, bizarre game where you shoot eyebeams at hearts. Oh, and Caramelldansen is playing in the background while you do this. For an explanation of the title of this post, see the misheard lyrics; or maybe not, I think my eyes might be bleeding.
I’ll post the story behind this pic sometime after I wake up “tomorrow.” The short version: It’s a screenshot of a tech demo for a game engine called “Love” that I found online.
I was running Windows Update today, and found this gem in the “Important” updates:
Just to go over what I’ve highlighted in the image above: The update is just over 56 MB. It’s considered an “Important” update. And it updates the dictionary used for spellcheck – to add new words to it.
Now, I can see how a dictionary update could be important if the default dictionary is correcting words in a dangerous, humorous, or obscene manner. But all this does is remove a few squiggly red lines.
And what words does KB955020 actually add? According to Microsoft: “Friendster,” “Klum,” “Nazr,” “Obama,” and “Racicot”.
For reference, the entire ISPELL wordlist is just over 1.5MB, uncompressed.
It has been more than 70 years since the giant Hindenburg zeppelin exploded in a spectacular fireball over Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 crew members and passengers, abruptly ending an earlier age of airships. But because of new materials and sophisticated means of propulsion, a diverse cast of entrepreneurs is taking another look at the behemoths of the air.
image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace