I promptly downloaded the paper, and as I suspected it was way out of my ability to comprehend without looking things up every few seconds at least, so if I really want to dive into the proof, I’d have to devote a lot more time to it, and if I really want to understand it I will have to devote years of study to complexity theory — assuming I’m smart enough to even get there. Nevertheless, if you want to take a look at the paper, but don’t want to download it from the login-required Scribd link that everyone seems to be sharing, you can grab it here.

• Distance: 66 miles / 106 km
• Time: 4:50:51
• Average Speed: 13.6 mph / 21.9 kph
• Max speed: 39.2 mph / 63.0
• Cumulative ascent: 3820 ft / 1164 m

Two takeaways: drink more water in general, and especially at these 90-degree practices, and eat more bananas. I don’t think I’ll develop a pickle habit anytime soon.

On the way to the airport, I found out that one of my code changes yesterday was causing an issue with a unit test this morning. After making it through security, I had a few minutes at the gate, and so I got to work investigating and fixing the bug. I managed to figure it out and submit a patch, but a coworker had to commit the patch for me, as I had to get onto the plane.

The plane ride was about twice as long as I am have gotten used to — just under 4 hours in the air — but was mostly uneventful. I watched the scenery for a while (I hope air travel never gets old for me), worked my way through more of The Kite Runner, and ordered some surprisingly good food.

After making it to CVG (Named after Covington, Kentucky, but really, Cincinatti’s airport) about 30 minutes late, I sat down and checked the status of the now-fixed bug (everyone was happy), and then pretty quickly boarded the next plane, a small commuter jet. I arrived in Grand Rapids about 3 hours ago and then my brother’s entire family (Ben, Kaylee, and Cora) came to pick me up.

Now on to some Michigan adventures!

Wednesday afternoon I bought a car (more on that later, hopefully), then Scott came into town that night, I took Thursday and Friday off from work and we drove to Yosemite, went on a hike, built a bridge, got snowed on while we slept, hiked back out the way we came, visited the valley floor. Finally, we drove home, stopping only at an In-N-Out.

Saturday, we again used my NEW (to me) CAR to visit downtown Napa, and then Sunday we went on a bike ride (Page Mill Road to Gate 4 — Scott was a trooper and rode my heavy, power-sucking full-suspension bike).

Monday came the big move — a huge orchestra of things happening all at once. I had started packing about a week earlier, but Scott and I finished packing the last of my things and moving them to the garage that morning. Meanwhile, Jasmine started her move with a few friends and some hired help. Roommate Scott (not flown-in Scott) and Mike moved a few weeks ago, but they still had some things left over that some guys who were moving in to Palo Alto were picking up.

So, while cleaners worked around us, roommate Scott and Mike’s stuff was getting picked up in three van trips, Jasmine’s stuff was getting packed and put into the U-haul that I rented for the two of us (a bad idea, but I was trying to be nice), and my stuff sat in the Garage, roomate Scott and I were stressing out about the possibility of Jasmine not getting her stuff out in time (although she turned out to be a miracle worker, and got her copious amount sof stuff out and into storage as she promised she would.)

Just a 9:00pm (about 12 hours after picking up the U-Haul), the two Scotts and I started loading the U-Haul with my stuff. Former roommate Scott took off to do a slow drive back to Portland, while flown-in Scott and I drove the half mile to my new place, and then unloaded everything before midnight.

Many thanks to flown-in Scott for being so hardcore in getting the move done. We slept well that night.

On Tuesday, we ate breakfast at Facebook, then I dropped Scott off at SFO using my NEW CAR. Then it was back to work!

Overall, I had a wonderful time — I definitely need to make it back to Yosemite, and I definitely need to have more people come and hang out.

CORRELATION DEPARTMENT
Research Information Division
50 East North Temple Street
Salt Lake City, Utah 84150-0018

April 16, 2010

Dear Brother McElroy:

As the Church grows, our membership is becoming more diverse. The Research Information Division of the Correlation Department at Church headquarters has been directed to conduct the LDS CHURCH MEMBERSHIP SURVEY 2010 to help Church leaders better understand the lives of members and the challenges they face. You have been randomly selected to participate in this study. The survey will include questions about your Church and family experiences.

Please complete this online survey within the first THREE DAYS of receiving it. To begin the survey on the Internet:

1. Go to the website: http://www.lds.org/emailsurvey
2. Click the link entitled: LDS Church Membership Survey 2010
3. Your repondent key for this survey is: ________

The survey should take between 20 and 40 minutes to complete, depending on the size of your family or household. If you do not have access to the Internet or cannot complete the online survey, we will automatically send you a paper copy of the survey in about a week.

Your information is a=complete confidential and will be combined with responses from other members to create a general profile of Church members and their families. We need to hear back from YOU to make the results truly representative. Your prompt response is essential to the success of the study and will eliminate the need and cost of additional follow-up reminders.

Thank you for your help with this important study. If you have any questions or if you need help completing the survey, please call the Research Information Division at Church headquarters (1-800-453-3860, ext. _____). The telephone call is free. Thank you.

Sincerely,

(signed)

Bruce D. Porter
Executive Director
Correlation Department

The survey took me about 30 minutes to complete, and I saved all the questions they asked along the way, for your enjoyment.

Interesting Questions: How many people did this get sent to? What will the response rate be? What would you do with this data?

Without further ado, the questions.

This is the one line I added to my blog’s template, in single.php:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?show_faces=1&amp;href=<?php
the_permalink() ?>" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" height="61"></iframe>

I was a big fan of Amazon MP3, and this price hike greatly saddened me. It also changed my music consumption habits, or rather reverted them. I’ll still buy a $0.99 song from Amazon, but if the offering isn’t available at that price point, I will break the law and download the song — often the entire album, because that’s just as easy — for free.

The music industry continues to slowly dig it’s own grave.

After the Keynotes, I synced up with other Facebookers at our expo hall booth, and then I went to Domas Mituzas’ talk on “High Concurrency MySQL”. The ballroom couldn’t hold all the people who wanted to watch — there was actually a line outside the door of people listening in on his talk! Although I wouldn’t suggest Domas give up his day job to write slides full-time, he had a great presentation overall that kept the audience interested and engaged.

Next, I attended a presentation on Sqoop by my two-time TA at the UW and now Cloudera co-founder and presenter extraordinaire, Aaron Kimball. Sqoop is a SQL-to-Hadoop translation layer that automates many of the steps of shuttling data from OLTP stores to HDFS for analytics. It is open source and Aaron is it’s primary developer. You can check out the code on github, or use it as part of Cloudera’s Hadoop Distribution.

After lunch, I went to a presentation by Lars Thalmann on new MySQL replication features in 5.1 and 5.5. Lead replication developer Mats Kindall was also there to answer questions. It’s good to see that MySQL is making progress on replication, but it is still woefully limited in a number of ways: not crashproof, single-threaded, and difficulty in replicating to non-MySQL data stores are all weak points of MySQL’s replication system today. These are all on the roadmap, but from the answers to my questions, I got the impression that these ideas are still mostly bullet points on a slide rather than almost-features in MySQL.

Make no mistake, these features are hard to add — I’ve dabbled around in the area myself — and it took Mark a concerted effort to port rpl_transaction_enabled from our 5.0 patch to Facebook’s 5.1 patch. Still, I hope MySQL takes the rpl_transaction_enabled patch and  into 5.1 or 5.5 officially, because in any large deployment, it is incredibly useful to not manually intervene when a slave crashes.

After the replication talk, I went back to the expo hall to talk with people, then I hacked on MySQL in the afternoon. Could there possibly be a better venue for this? Two (small) diffs later, and I was back into the expo hall socializing/recruiting for Facebook. The night ended well with a trip to In-and-Out.

On Tuesday, the Database Performance Team will be presenting on “High Concurrency MySQL.” Domas is an interesting, animated fellow, and I imagine that his talk will be quite entertaining as well as informative.

On Wednesday, the Database Operations Team will be speaking about Database Operations at Scale. Our DB Ops guys are some of the best in the business; they keep our database tiers, which are often under enormous pressure from growth and changing requirements, running remarkably well.

On Thursday, Mark Callaghan, Ryan Mack, and I will be presenting our talk on High-throughput MySQL (we claim that Domas stole our title rather than the other way around). Mark Callaghan is one of the leading advocates for MySQL at Facebook and in the MySQL community. Working with him and the original Ryan (as I call Ryan Mack, who preceded me on this team) has been nothing short of an extraordinary opportunity for me to learn from the best.

@RyanMcE You need to add more words if you intend your tweets to be communicative.

And he is absolutely correct. In this case, there is nothing private about the tweet in question (“Dubious indeed”). The story was that my friend Maria and I pulled an April Fools prank on Facebook by becoming engaged. Enough people fell for it that it was fun, but one of my friends called the timing of the announcement “dubious,” since it did come of the first of April. The tweet was in reference to this comment; probably only those who happen to follow me on Facebook would have had any idea what I was talking about.

So, if there is a tweet you don’t understand, know this: not all my tweets are meant to be communicative to all audiences.  Just like with some of my blog posts, some of my tweets are really just markers in time for my future reference. I wrote about something like this before, in a  post called Why I Blog, and before twitter, I would occasionally post a one-liner to this blog. Now those one-liners have simply migrated to Twitter.

The Democrats have an overt philosophy of collectivism — but you’ve at least got to respect the fact that they are consistent about it. The Republicans don’t really have any philosophy at all, unless you could call saying, ‘We won’t go as far as the Democrats’ a philosophy — so, although they’re arguably less evil, they have to be totally disrespected as spineless hypocrites.

– Doug Casey

Since re-reading Excession, I have purchased and read several more Culture books:

• Use of Weapons (Finished in Australia)
• The Player of Games (just finished)
• Consider Phlebas (about to start)

All of the ones I have read I have very much enjoyed. I would suggest the series to anyone who enjoys Sci-Fi. I’m happy to share the books I’ve finished with friends, as long as I eventually get them back.

I try to use a password generated by my “standard model” — ie, a standard prefix depending on the nature of the site and some salt determined by the website itself. However, some sites have stupid rules on their password requirements. In real life, I have encountered a wide variety of password requirements:

• A requirement of an exactly 6-character password
• A prohibition on “special characters” like any of !@#$%^&*()+=></?{}[]|\/.
• A requirement for a special character that happens to be one of !@#$%^&*()
• A requirement for numbers, uppercase, and lower case in the password
• A requirement for two sets of letters and numbers in the password — ie, fit the regex /([a-zA-Z]+[0-9]+){2}/

When my standard model password doesn’t fit into one of the more esoteric requirements, I have to modify it to fit. Fortunately, I find that on this subject at least, I tend to think the same way over time, so, given the standard model and a set of constraints, I will usually come up with the same password. However, it is uncommon for websites to list their password constraints on the log-in page. Therefore, I will usually try the standard model password first, and only when that fails twice (in case I mistyped the first time), and I’m down to one more try, do I realize that this website might be “special.”

Then I have to go to the trouble to find out what the password requirements are. This is not difficult — usually it involves clicking the “sign up button” and reading a little bit — but it does take some time and it is very annoying. Listing the password requirements at the login screen would make for a much better user experience (since it is so easy to find this information, not displaying it on the login screen can’t be interpreted as a security measure either).

Of course, the real solution is for websites to get rid of their inane password requirements, so I never have to deviate from the standard model.

{ // Safety agains reopen

I think I understand what it’s supposed to mean — the writer is pointing out that the code is checking again, to be double sure that the log is still open (although, if it can close between this call and the last call to is_open(), I’d be worried about it closing after this call too… note that both checks are after LOCK_log has been acquired).

What I’m more interested in is what the comment, as written, actually means? The grammar is very odd. I’m open to suggestions.

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

This is easy. Nothing is ever too big to fail. That is a term invented by bankers and politicians to justify taxpayers supporting banks. Taleb is on to something about hidden risks, though.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

Nothing actually ever has to be bailed out, or nationalized, but I suppose nationalization would be preferable to the current trend of just giving bad companies money.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

No arguments here. It is interesting that the government, the media, and probably most people still view the ones who created this mess “financial experts”.

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

I think this is sound advice to financial companies. I see no need to legislate this opinion, however. Rather, get rid of the corporate safety net, and companies will shape up or fail and die, and the problem will fix itself.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

Seems to be sound advice again, for me and for you. Again, I don’t see any need to mandate this sound advice in law. But some people see the need to outlaw salt, so probably not everyone agrees with me.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

The world somehow survived 4 billion years without banning complex financial derivatives. I know that many people think regulation solves everything (it doesn’t), but I really think the world will survive this too. Let those who learned from this go on without blowing themselves up. Again, I see no need to open the door to unintended consequences by trying to set up rules (that will be circumnavigated) to prevent a one-time occurrence from happening again.

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

Many banks were robust in the face of these rumors. They are the ones not receiving any money from the government (That’s why I “love” the bailout(s)). Most of the economy is still fine and has proven to be robust in the face of tempestuous times.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

I agree. Many people seem to be under the impression that the legal and economic system we currently have — progressively more regulations outlawing progressively more things and creating progressively more perverse incentives — makes sense, and that it only fails occasionally. Well, it doesn’t make sense, and it is always going to fail.

Of course, many people disagree with me about what constitutes a fix. So I say to them, go ahead and try out your ideas, just don’t force me to be a part of your fix. Then we can both be happy.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

This is very bad advice. Citizens should make this choice themselves, depending on how much risk they are willing to take on. I think it is generally good to have people invested in a market economy — it is one of the best financial engines ever developed.

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.

I like the voluntary part. Market capitalism itself has never been broken. It is the continuous political patching of perceived flaws in the that has created the many perverse incentives of our current wonderful system, somewhere in the murkiness between fascism and capitalism and socialism and stupidity.

Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.

In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.

Humans have used their intelligence to out-compete the rest of the natural world. I don’t see why we should model one of the best wealth production mechanisms we have developed yet — the market-based capitalist economy — on a biological world that will continue to become less relevant as technology progresses. This is just useless sentimentalism.

The writer is a veteran trader, a distinguished professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The writer calls himself a “veteran trader” — ie, a “financial expert”, and wonders if maybe we should take the part of  advice where he says we shouldn’t take the advice of financial experts. As a fellow beneficiary of a relatively free, relatively stable, capitalist market economy, I would urge you to not make the situation any worse.

I have five or so unfinished drafts. Some of them have really good titles:

• Time Horizon
• Tags
• Is Antitrust Regulation Harmful to Consumers?
• (no title), but the content seems to be a fairly well thought-out post about the “black swan effect”

Maybe I should try finishing these articles.