Cisco decided to stop paying for my cell phone, so I FINALLY went out and bought an iPhone yesterday.  (Short review:  I love love love love love love love it.)  Have been waiting for this thing for like two years now, but it rocks.

My car, which runs a version of Windows CE (the stereo head unit, to be exact), has been perfectly content playing music from my iPod.  However it does not like my iPhone because of the iPhone 3.0 software, and it turns out that I have to patch my stereo in order to control my iPhone with it.

I was struck by the fact that I had just experienced a version compatibility issue between my phone and my car.  How crazy is that.

A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job. 

The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What does two plus two equal?"   The mathematician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?"  The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."

The interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What does two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."

Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What does two plus two equal?"

The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you need it to equal?"

...

And that little economist grew up to be Lawrence Summers.  (Kidding.  Kind of.)

A real gem found here:

What's more, I think I know his secret identity!

Good thing we passed Obama's stimulus plan, he says it's working very well:

(BTW the Treasury used 8.9% unemployment as it's "worst case scenario" number for all of 2009 in those bank stress tests.  Glad we have experts on the job.)  Paying for this powerful medicine is hammering the bond market, doing great things for mortgage rates:

This is going to be fantastic for real estate, especially since we are about to get a wave of mortgage resets.

Hope everyone locked their rates while the getting was good.

To those of you who are looking at buying a "bargain" house right now, let me just say that catching falling knives is best left to circus performers.

Needless to say, I believe we are at or near a top for the year in the equity markets, soon to punch through the year's low of 666 on the S&P 500.  Just wanted to go on the record with this since everyone is so unbelievably optimistic right now.  Those green shoots are weeds.

I've really been enjoying my recent study of predictive analytics and data mining.  It's provoked me to think about the nature of value, how much of it there is lying around waiting to be uncovered, and what it takes to uncover it. 

It has also caused me to gain a much deeper appreciation for people who both have expertise in an area of business and the desire and drive to learn the skill set they can use to turn that experience into something extraordinary.

These banks are out of control.  Goldman is finding fraud less profitable these days and has decided to pursue a new revenue stream from trying to squeeze money from critical bloggers.

I'm reading a fascinating book on the fall of the Roman empire, a topic I've had an interest in for a long time.  It amazes me that such a mighty and expansive civilization could collapse, and makes me wonder about any parallels to our country/empire.

I'm only about about half way through the book, but so far it seems that everything can be neatly summed up by saying that the expenses of the empire ramped continuously into the fourth century AD to completely unsustainable levels, primarily due to military spending and welfare.  Eventually the tax burden became so great that working classes became destitute and devolved into destitution and lawlessness.

In other news, US tax revenues are down 28% year over year in March, and Obama and crew plan to spend record amounts of money while saying they're going to cut the deficit.  Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the United States Treasury is running on fumes.

In all fairness, though, the Roman Empire didn't have a fractional reserve monetary system which means that they were unable to borrow to pay expenses.  Balanced budget all the time.  However, this means that our eventual implosion will be much quicker and more dramatic when it arrives as almost all funding will be cut instantaneously when we default.  It could literally happen in the course of a year or two.

Great bit from Blog For Our Future:

Young Chuck, moved to Texas and bought a donkey from a farmer for $100.

The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day. The next day he drove up and said, "Sorry son, but I have some bad news. The donkey died."

Chuck replied, "Well, then just give me my money back."

The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."

Chuck said, "Ok, then, just bring me the dead donkey."

The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?"

Chuck said, "I'm going to raffle him off."

The farmer said, "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"

Chuck said, "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he's dead."

A month later, the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, "What happened with that dead donkey?"

Chuck said, "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and made a profit of $898.00."

The farmer said, "Didn't anyone complain?"

Chuck said, "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back."

Chuck now works for Morgan Stanley in their OTC Default Derivative Department.

 There is something magical about creating something.  It makes your soul grow, and life richer.
Snatching an idea out of the ether, letting it percolate in your brain for a bit, and then giving it form is extremely gratifying.  You're turning something ethereal into something physical and substantive.

I think this is why I like programming--the ability to take an idea and make it real has always appealed to me.  It's the same reason why I love to paint, make music, and write.  I find that many programmers are the same way, just inherently creative people.  Many programmers I know also play musical instruments.  I assume designing a house, building a car, or paving a road give the same kind of satisfaction, but I'm just guessing there.

Somehow the very act of creating expands your mind and opens up new possibilities.  Whenever I'm doing something creative it attracts new ideas and gives me more energy than two pots of coffee spiked with Red Bull.  I get more new and random ideas while I'm creating something--writing, painting, programming--than at any other time, along with the energy to work on them.

On the flip side, doing things that are not at all creative seems to sap my energy.  This is why I hate debugging and administrivia.  It sucks the life out of me.  I feel like a button-pushing zombie.

Of course I guess that would make people that don't create anything but simply leach off of productive value created by others soulless monsters.  People like the financial engineers who repackaged and obfuscated risk and poisoned our economy--leaches.  The lobbyists spending their days and nights working hard on conning our tax money out of Washington--soulless.  I think that sounds about right.

I would never get my genes sequenced--not because I'm scared of what I might find, but because of the possibility of changing them.  I've never actually heard anybody talk about this aspect of DNA sequencing before, but it was the first thing that popped into my mind when I first heard about it.

In case you're not familiar with it, the observer effect is a completely bizarre but effect in quantum physics that says observing an outcome collapses the probability wave into a single outcome.  In other words, the simple act of observing something causes a single outcome to become reality.

For gene sequencing, this means that as long as your DNA remains unobserved it is still a cloud of potential.  As soon as you observe it, though, you're locked into a specific outcome--a specific gene sequence.  This means that sequencing your genes might actually affect them.  For example, if alzheimers in my genes is a possibility, sequencing my DNA might actually make it real.  Why would I take that risk?

For a nice easy-to-understand explanation of the quantum observer effect, check out the following video.  I highly recommend taking a look if you're not familiar with it.