Why Investing is Hard

There are many times when I tell people that do-it-myself financial planning is really easy. In fact, as far as the math goes, it's not even as close as learning to solve differential equations, doing linear algebra, or learning to program in C++. So if the intellectual challenge behind investing just isn't that hard, why do smart, hardworking people consistently fail at it? Why did Nobel prize winner Myron Scholes sit on the board of directors of not one, but two massive hedge fund failures? (LTCM and Platinum Grove)

The answer, I think, is that the challenges that investing pose are not intellectual, but emotional. I'll provide a personal example. Last year in November when Google sat at $700 or so a share, I polled people I knew to see if they were selling. When every one said No, I knew it was time to sell. So I sold. And the stock went up to $712. So I sold some more. And then it went to $723, and I sold some more. And then it went up some more, and I sold. At this point, my hands were shaking as I pressed the sell button with my mouse. I kid you not. Despite everything I knew telling me that this was the right thing to do, it was emotionally very difficult to do it when everybody else (including the stock market) was telling me differently. My mind started constructing scenarios under which Google could be worth $1500 per share in 5 years. I started noticing articles (like this one by Henry Blodget) that were quite optimistic.

Truly, when it comes to investing, your worst enemy is yourself (well, ok, a crooked financial advisor would be even worse). Smart, hardworking people like to do stuff. Society rewards that. Your typical day job rewards that. Yet investing is precisely the opposite. Even as illustrious an investor as Warren Buffet wrote in his 1998 newsletter The portfolio actions I took in 1998 actually decreased our gain for the year. In particular, my decision to sell McDonald's was a very big mistake. Overall, you would have been better off last year if I had regularly snuck off to the movies during market hours. I remember hearing once that 95% of all positions sold to buy another stock (or mutual fund) actually decreases the performance of a portfolio, so typically, sitting on your ass is the right thing to do, but that goes against the grain of everything else society values.

Experience also teaches people that if something works, do more of it. Smart people, in particular learn that really quickly. But that's also the wrong thing to do in investing. When stocks do particularly well for a period, they tend to regress to the mean later. Which means that when your stock portfolio starts doing really well, it's really time to sell it and buy bonds. The asset allocation approach is to periodically re-balance this portfolio and that's what enforces this discipline. But usually when the time comes to re-balance, most people find it really difficult to sell their winners and buy their losers. So that works against you too.

Finally, Financial Planning success is measured in decades, which is completely counter to the way human planning scales want to work. For instance, global warming, which is a multi-decade problem falls into this category, and we have made essentially no progress in that area for the last 10 years or so, nor do I expect the human race to do so until it's too late. Fortunately, unlike international politics and policy, we as individuals can affect our destiny, but again, our evolutionary history works against us.

Financial blogs, books, etc., can help you with the intellectual underpinnings beneath financial planning and investing, but what I've found is that nobody can help you with the emotional part of investing. Heck, over the next few years there are going to be some major buying opportunities that will show up. In fact, some of them are probably already there today. But I expect that when the time comes, it's going to be just as hard for me to push the buy button as it was for me to push the sell button last year.

Review: Archform: Beauty

Archform Beauty (Kindle Edition) is best described as a thriller. While there's suspense, there's not really any mystery --- we learn who the villain is early on, and even get scenes devote to his machinations.

The story is set in the prehistory of Adiamante, around the same era as Flash, but with a narrative set around four people rather than one. They are Professor Cornett, a music professor and singer at the University of Denver, a Trend Analyst from the local police department Eugene Chiang, the Senator from Colorado Mr. Cannon, and a local news researcher Mr. Parsfal. The four narratives revolve around their individual lives and intersect only peripherally until near the end of the story where everything comes together.

Unfortunately, while the jigsaw puzzles do line up and are themselves interesting, this technique robs the overall story of its narrative power. Only midway through the novel do you realize that this seemingly irrelevant piece of news was actually relevant, and even then you never really get a good feel for the political involvements because you never quite feel included in the world, with all this skipping around character by character. The net result is that when the characters are in danger, you're also not really too excited either.

The characters are well-written and well-formed, though Senator Cannon seems a little unrealistic --- he's clearly a womanizer, but doesn't act on his obvious attraction to members of the opposite sex, because he knows he'll get caught. Wait. That doesn't describe any politician I can think of.

I borrowed this book from the library, and while it's not a waste of time, I can't quite recommend it either. Incidentally, this being one of the first paper novels I read since I acquired the Kindle, I did find it annoying to read a dead tree compared to the electronic device --- the book is heavy, won't stay opened or lay flat, and I can't change the font-size. Who would have thought that 7 months of exclusively reading on the Kindle would have made me think that paper books are obsolete?

Review: A Splendid Exchange

A Splendid Exchange (Kindle Edition) is a history book about trade. If I had any doubt that my knowledge of world history comes largely from playing Civilization, this book dispelled it all. From the early exchanges of stone tools in the Mesapotamian region to the spice trade of the middle ages, this book covers it all. Even the legendary Chinese trader/admiral Zheng He (which Bernstein translates as Cheng Ho) is covered.

The modern era, including the rise of the multi-national trading corporations (which in the tradition of modern corporations started wars and were not at all adverse to using force to achieve their means) and the collapse and rise of the modern international trading regimes such as GATT. At this point, the narrative becomes more interesting for those who are concerned with modern politics and trade policies, with a surface coverage of Stolper-Samuelson, for instance. Bernstein himself is a free-trader, but I was very pleasantly surprised by his balanced coverage of the issues, including his castigation of the free-traders' vilification of labor concerns:
Such sentiments not only unnecessarily antagonize workers but also are unfair; American industry has in fact been much more adept than labor at getting protection, particularly in the form of non-tariff barriers: quotas, subsidies, antidumping legislation and the like. Trade economists are slowly beginning to realize that they must stop being their own worst enemies.
Bernstein goes on to quote Dani Rodrik. I wish that this section of the book was longer, but I'm guessing that Bernstein didn't really want any controversy as part of what is essentially a history book.

All in all, the book is recommended, but it's definitely long going, and you must have an interest in the history of trade, or the middle sections will send you to sleep.

Chrome 1.0 is Superfast

I've been using Chrome for a while now, and while it was OK, I didn't find it particularly compelling --- it crashes on some web pages, and while the Javascript engine was supposedly faster, it didn't seem to make a difference to me --- until last night, when I upgraded to Chrome 1.0.

My first impression was: Holy crap this is fast! To make sure that it wasn't just my impression, I told my friend Peng-Toh about it. Peng-Toh ran the Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark on his Mac, and came up with:

OS/Browser	Time
osx firefox 3.0.4	3023ms
vmware xp firefox 3.0.4	3202ms
vmware xp chrome 1.0	1271ms
osx safari 3.2.1	3118ms

That's right, even running in a VM, Chrome on the same machine beats native Safari --- by a factor of 2.5X. That's despite both rendering engines being WebKit. Ok, just to make sure that it wasn't just the geeks thinking it's fast, I asked my girlfriend to upgrade on her machine. She too noticed the speed difference.

Bottom-line: Chrome just went from being my secondary browser to being my primary browser. If you haven't been using it for a while, now's the time to try it. Kudos to the Chrome development team!

A Book Reviewers Linkup Meme

The Accidental Bard
A Dribble Of Ink
Adventures in Reading
The Agony Column
The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
Barbara Martin
Bibliophile Stalker
Bibliosnark
BillWardWriter.com
Blood of the Muse
Bookgeeks
Bookslut
Bookspotcentral
The Book Swede
Breeni Books
Cheryl's Musings
Critical Mass
Dark Wolf Fantasy Reviews
Darque Reviews
Dave Brendon's Fantasy and Sci-Fi Weblog
The Deckled Edge
Dragons, Heroes and Wizards
Dusk Before the Dawn
Enter the Octopus
Eve's Alexandria
Fantasy Book Critic
Fantasy Cafe
Fantasy Debut
Fantasy Book Reviews and News
Fantasy and Sci-fi Lovin' Blog
The Fix
The Foghorn Review
From a Sci-Fi Standpoint
The Galaxy Express
Galleycat
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Grasping for the Wind
The Green Man Review
Highlander's Book Reviews
io9
Jumpdrives and Cantrips
Literary Escapism
Michele Lee's Book Love
Monster Librarian
Mostly Harmless Books
My Favourite Books
Neth Space
NextRead
OF Blog of the Fallen
The Old Bat's Belfry
Outside of a Dog
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
Piaw's Blog
Post-Weird Thoughts
Publisher's Weekly
Reading the Leaves
Realms of Speculative Fiction
Rob's Blog o' Stuff
ScifiChick
SF Diplomat
SciFiGuy
Sci-Fi Songs [Musical Reviews]
Severian's Fantastic Worlds
SF Gospel
SF Reviews.net
SF Revu
SF Signal
SF Site
SFF World's Book Reviews
Silver Reviews
Speculative Fiction Junkie
Speculative Horizons
Sporadic Book Reviews
The Sword Review
Tangent Online
Temple Library Reviews
Tor.com [also a publisher]
The Road Not Taken
Un:Bound
Urban Fantasy Land
Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic
Variety SF
Walker of Worlds
Wands and Worlds
The Wertzone
WJ Fantasy Reviews
The World in a Satin Bag
WriteBlack

Foreign Language (other than English)

Cititor SF [Romanian, but with English Translation]

Elbakin.net [French]

The Limits of Financial Planning

If you're like anyone who's invested in the stock market over the last few years, the past 12 months must have been sobering --- we're seeing drops of close to 40% over market peaks. What's worse, nothing seems to be safe --- gold is down, international markets are down (so much for decoupling), and even Berkshire Hathaway, king of all value stocks is down.

In these times of uncertainty, we should take a moment to reflect on how we know so little about what the future will hold. As Bernstein says, history has not been kind for those seeking stability --- over a 40 year period, the chances of us being caught in some kind of catastrophe is approximately 20% --- and we're talking about war, potential global warming nightmare scenarios, and other such that would cause you to think that your portfolio dropping 40% is the least of your problems. So even though all the retirement calculators might show that your portfolio will survive no matter what, there's always that 20% chance of failure no matter what.

I asked Bernstein about FireCalc and other such tools last year, and this was his response:
as you hinted at, and as paul samuelson famously said, we only have 200 years of history to go on, and the experience of the rest of the world, as well as current expected returns suggest, going by those 200 years are overly optimistic.

forget all the sophisticated methodologies: GIGO, and what goes into these black boxes is most assuredly G.

here are 2 simple ways of looking at it:

1) start with 3.5% real for stocks, and 2.5% for bonds. that's about 3% for a mixed portfolio. if you're going to retire at 50, your time horizon is for all practical purposes "forever," so you can only withdraw your real return, or about 3%. but it's worse than that, since you have to adjust for uncertainty and a bad initial draw. so figure 2%.

2) even simpler: since in the long term, to stay hedonically adjusted you don't just have to keep up merely with inflation, but with the living standard of your non retired peers, which increases at the productivity growth rate, or 2%. add in a soupcon of uncertainty and your hedonically adjusted rate of return is zero. so . . .you have to save one year's living expenses for every year you plan to live, or 50 years, "worst case," or . . .2%

2% is grim, but that's only if you want to be bullet proof. in the real world, if you need 3% or 4%, you're trading off safety for a reasonable standard of living, which is OK, as long as you understand the tradeoff.

In the mean time, I plan to enjoy myself, stick to my asset allocation strategy, and not worry too much about it --- if you or I have to work a few years longer, that's hardly the world's biggest disaster. Even now, I am much more worried about global warming causing us to have an uninhabitable Earth (for humans that is --- cockroaches will survive everything) than about a second great depression.

StreetView Trike

Streetview Trike

I was barely off the plane from Munich when Mike started talking to me about a trike and Monterey. Then Lea started asking me about pedals. Well, I was jet-lagged, and figured that I wasn't going to be productive in the office anyway, so I might as well get some sun to reset my body clock.

When Lea and Mike showed up near my apartment with a truck and a giant-sized trailer, I was impressed. I tossed my still laden with German mud single bike into the back of the truck, and we headed down to Pacific Grove, where I knew a section of road that had enough room to park the bike and the trailer.

The Street View prototype tricycle was huge, and required no less than 2 people to set up. I was quite superfluous, so could take pictures and as the person most familiar with the area, lead everyone else to the bike path, which was too narrow to take the normal Street View car through (and it really wouldn't be socially acceptable to do so either).

Riding a tricycle is nothing like riding a bicycle, not even a tandem bicycle. As Keith Code's book on performance motorcycle racing says, the most cruel trick your parents played on you was to give you a tricycle to ride when you were small, and then switch you to a bicycle and watch you crash. You can't steer a tricycle by balance, only by turning the handlebars. And if the vehicle lists because of a bump in the road or a pothole, or even just going over a rough surface, doing what your cycling instincts tell you to do is exactly the wrong thing --- counter-steering doesn't work at all! At well over 200 pounds, a 4% grade feels like a 12% grade, and I watched Lea stand up with her full body weight on the tricycle pedals and barely move it!

We rode through downtown Monterey and the Wharf as well as cannery row, drawing the occasional friendly comments and curious looks. After we exited the city limits on the far end of town, Mike decided to visit the beach, and we posed with some pictures on the trike.

I can't tell if our experiment was successful or if we collected much data, but we provided quite a bit of feedback to the mechanical engineers behind the prototype, and we'll see how things go from there!

Why I love YouTube, part whatever!

I found this clip just randomly trolling YouTube...and wow. I watched it twice before realizing I absolutely loved the song. I love the beginning, "no matter who you are, no matter where you are at the point in your life, you're going to need someone to stand by you"....absolutely true..but I love how they took all the covers from the artists they enlisted and mixed them together so absolutely beautiful.

Listening to this song is a religious experience! The Grandpa Elliot portions are just so gorgeous...great voice, great passion in his singing....music folks probably don't need me to tell them this, but the layering of this song is just so beautifully delicious I can't help but get into the song....when they get to the African female chorus, I was almost to the point of tears at the sheer beauty of the song...the video just cements how great the song is....when you look at how the voices mix together, the various instruments, and how they mix each voice to be backing, lead, chorus...its just sheer perfection as far as I'm concerned..

But don't get me wrong, the video part of this song is so important...you can see the passion of each artist...the Grandpa's eyes rolling in to his head, Clarence's sheer power as he's singing...the various instrumentalists (the russian in particular is superb...so stoic, so serious, his chords so stirring!)...

The producers of this mix seem to be part of a bigger movement..Playing for Change...well, they've got a customer lined up for them once they release the DVD and soundtrack for their movie.

First movie I'm going to buy review unseen =).

Ah..the powers of YouTube..and they wonder how they're going to monetize YouTube, sometimes the answer's right in their eyes, I think.

Highly recommended video!!

Review: Canon G9 Digital Camera

The Canon G9 is an obsolete camera, having been replaced by the G10, which has more mega-pixels but a smaller zoom factor, though a nicer 28mm lens. We got our G9 refurbished through the little known Canon Customer Loyalty Program for $250, which is a fantastic deal and another reason why Canon has me as a customer for life (we traded in an 8 year old 3 mega-pixel camera!).

The Canon takes amazing pictures. The results from our Turkey Sailing Trip where we had both cameras showed that whenever we shot the same picture with both the G9 and our 3 year old SD500, the G9 won. The camera is bulky, but not so much so that I couldn't carry it in a cycling jersey pocket, though I wouldn't do that for more than a few hours. It does fit in a handlebar bag, however.

The picture quality is one thing, but the camera has a great stitch assist mode that's a pleasure to use because of the dial. The other modes are pretty good as well, giving you aperture priority, shutter priority, and even full manual mode, which is admittedly a lot less usable than a real digital SLR, but hey, it's $250! The lens is very nice though I found that 35mm is not wide enough. Then again, with stich-assist, you can make your own wide angle after the fact.

We're so impressed by this camera that we bought an underwater housing for it, despite already having one for the SD500. The downsides: the shutter lag is noticeable, and the inter-frame wait (time between shutter press intervals) is longer than I want it to be. Nevertheless, the last few trips (including the Radstadt/Salzburg Tour in Munich were all shot using the G9 --- the pictures wouldn't have looked at nice on the SD500.

All in all, however, this is the camera that substitutes for a range finder as far as I'm concerned. The zoom lens is good enough, and for $250, it's an excellent value. Recommended. If I can't get a Canon 5D Mk II in time for our trip to Australia, I will still be very happy with this camera. Recommended.

Munich Trips Index

Now that I'm back in the US and mostly over my jet-lag, I can put together a list of trips out of Munich that I did this year (also, folks at work keep asking about it, so this is a good summary page). I have a bunch of Munich-related posts all labeled, but some of them capture more than just weekend trips or visits.

• Tergensee Loop
  
• Garmisch/Bad Tolz
  
• Erding Radmarathon
  
• Holzkirchen Loop
  
• Walchensee
• Ebersberg/Salzburg/Traunstein
• The Black Forest
  
• The Romantic Road
  
• Lauterbrunnen
  
• Salzkammergut Bike Route
  
• Rosenlaui
  
• Assling/Chiemsee/Grafing
  
• Garmisch Partnach + bike ride
  
• My Fall Commute
  
• Zugspitz
  
• Hollriegelskreuth to Wolfrathausen
  
• Wolfrathausen/Stanberg/Holzkirchen
  
• Radstadt to Salzburg Tour
  
• Stanberg Loop
  
• Lofer Hike

Then there were the big trips, like the Tour Across France and sailing the Mediterranean and the Aegan Sea. So I did quite a bit of travel. The three highlights for me (outside of the two big trips of course) were the Commute (because a little bit off heaven every day adds up a lot), the Salzkammergut Bike Route, and the trip to Rosenlaui. But each one of these trips was really pretty and worth the effort of planning and the cost of executing it. I definitely enjoyed all of them, and am very glad I got the chance to live in Germany for the time I was there, but if you had limited time, Salzkammergut only takes 3-4 days, and so does Rosenlaui, and both are very much tops!

Another Kindle Mystery Solved

My brother complained that while he was in Greece, his Kindle suddenly stopped being able to sort by "Most recent". Then the same thing happened to me in Turkey. There are very few software bugs that are location aware, so I just chalked it up to a freak coincidence. Then it happened to me again yesterday!

But this time, I figured out what happened. All these incidences happened during an internal battery change while overseas! When you take out the battery and put in a new one, what happens is that the Kindle's internal clock resets to time 0 Unix time, which is Jan 1st, 1970. Well, that means that the last modified date on the files that you touch (i.e., books that you read) get set to somewhere around 1970, which leads to odd sorting behavior.

This isn't an issue when you're in the USA, because all you have to do is to turn on wireless and the clock will get reset by the cellular phone network that the Kindle uses (no, there's no way for you to set the clock manually on the Kindle). The lesson here is that if you want to get extra reading between recharges while overseas while not losing the sort functionality, use the Gomadic Battery Extender. Or lobby Amazon.com to let us set the date and time on the Kindle in the future.

Review: The Buried Pyramid

The Buried Pyramid (Free Kindle download) was Jane Lindskold's first publshed novel. It's not very good.

The story, which could have used an editor, revolves around a Victorian era exploration/discovery of a hitherto unknown King and undiscovered tomb. Captain Neville Hawthorne accompanied a German man on a previous unsuccessful excursion to find such the Tomb, but was driven away, only to return many years later to make a second and third attempt.

The book is full of stereotypes --- you've got the white man gone native, you've got the American niece toting revolvers and sticking up for women's rights everywhere, you've got the eccentric scholar dragging his books of lore all over the deserts, and the native kid who keeps a monkey pet but and turns out to be surprisingly smart. Not to mention the rival archaeologists who will stop at nothing to get access to the new finds before anyone else does. Hawthorne et al get warnings of a mysterious nature from someone who appears to know all about them, but keeps himself hidden.

With such a hackneyed set of characters, it's not too surprising that the plot is hackneyed as well. In fact, I guessed (correctly) about the identity of the mysterious note-writer, and Lindskold uses the ancient (and silly) cryptographic rot-13 cipher to show off her understanding of cryptography.

The last third of the book ventures into the fantastic, with encounters with long-dead mythologies, and would have been welcomed if the first two-thirds of the book wasn't so inane. As it was, I kept praying for the characters to show some originality, and choose an unconventional ending, but alas, this was not to be. It was a chore to keep my eyes open on the flight with this book. I ventured into reading other books on my Kindle and returned to this only out of a feeling of obligation (and in case something interesting happened in the novel). Well, nothing did, so save yourself some time.

Review: Adiamante

I'm wondering why it took me this long to discover L. E. Modesitt. I find myself enjoying his under-stated writing style, the situations and the setup --- this is science fiction at its best, character driven, with the science fiction used to emphasize the essentials of the human condition.

Adiamante (kindle edition) explores one of the late Arthur C. Clarke's quips --- that someone who wants to run for presidency should by definition be disqualified from the job.

How then, would you organize a society around this? Well, you would draft your president of course, since by definition he wouldn't want to do the job, but how would you make it distasteful enough that he wouldn't want to cling to power for as long as he can? The society in Adiamante answers that question in an interesting fashion, which is that the exercise of power has a cost, which must be paid off through labor when the term is up.

The setting is Old Earth, after many struggles between various factions of humanities (one of which was forcibly shipped off to the stars) and where the remnants of humanity have learned to live with a fragile ecosystem. When one of the fragments of humanities returns to Earth to redress old wrongs, the people of the Earth elect Ector as the Coordinator to lead them through this crisis. (Ector was elected because he recently lost his wife, which meant that in this very dangerous position he had less to lose than many)

Old Earth's society is portrayed as a strange Utopia, one in which material goods are rare and expensive, but high technology in the form of an information net is incredibly advanced. The interaction between the invaders and Ector as Coordinator is constrained, as Old Earth's social Construct does not permit pre-emptive strikes:
We are sending you home to Gates, and we're providing a ship as a symbol of trust. That is because the key to the universe, the key to survival, is trust. Trust is acting in good faith when you have no reason so to act. Trust is refraining from attacking an enemy first, no matter what the cost. Why is that wise? Because once any person or society strikes first, that action sows the seeds of corruption. Logic, even pure cyb logic, is formidable enough that it can justify any action, no matter how base or corrupt, as necessary to survival. Physical survival is not enough, not for either a person or a society. A society's principles must also survive, and if you betray your principles for physical survival, then you have doomed your offspring and your society. Principles can be improved, and we have
slowly changed ours for what we believe to be the better, but they should never be changed or discarded for short-term expediency. No matter what the price, we must do what is right, and part of what is right is trust. (Kindle Loc. 3115)

From the above passage you might think that this book might have been written in response to the invasion of Iraq, and you would be wrong --- this book was published in 1996, long before the events of September 11th, 2001. That it has even more relevance today than when it was published I think speaks well of the themes and approach that Modesitt took.

The details of the Construct as well as the Cyb invaders are revealed slowly, and we learn the challenges and the price that Ector and his society will have to pay for the purposes of long-term stability. If you're looking for cheap fast thrills, or a science fiction that you know and love, look elsewhere (Richard Morgan's books are great for that). This is science fiction told in a stately pace, with lots to think about. My only criticism is that the Kindle edition was formatted with several glitches, and I never got to like any of the characters as much as I enjoyed the exploration of a very interesting and well-thought out society and social contract. Nevertheless, the book is recommended, and I'm going to have to read more Modesitt in the future.

My signed Krugman book

Way back in December last year, before he won the Nobel prize, Paul Krugman dropped by Google to give a talk:

After the talk, there was a private session with him where some of us got to ask him question, and he was a great person to ask questions of (especially about the upcoming elections, and policy --- I'll admit to out-sourcing my policy research to him whenever I can).

While I was not smart enough to bring a camera so that I could have a picture with him, but I did manage to get my copy of The Conscience of A Liberal signed:

After Krugman won the Nobel, I remembered that I had the autograph and got my brother to scan it for me to share.

Review: Talent is Over-Rated

Talent is Overrated (Kindle Edition) is a short, quick read with but one thesis: there is no such thing as talent. While there are certain physical and mental pre-requisites, the difference in performance at a high level can all be attributed to but one thing: the quantity of deliberate practice one is able to achieve.

Deliberate practice isn't just doing what you're good at, but a program aimed at expanding your comfort zone --- the challenge has to be tough enough that it improves your abilities, but not so challenging that you're discouraged --- it requires your full attention. In fact, at the start, most beginners require a teacher or some guided program to tell you how to practice, and in certain fields such as sports (golf, or horseback riding, for instance), a coach is essential even for the best athletes, for the same reason that if you can't see what you're doing, you don't know what you're doing wrong.

Colvin expands on several examples, including an interesting case of a Hungarian couple (who weren't great chess players themselves) deliberately setting out to train three daughters to become eminent chess players. When I think about it, this is how I became a decent programmer --- when I started school, outside class, I would work on my own programs. Each successive project would be more and more complex as my abilities grew. The amount of work I did became obsessive, even to the point where I paid no attention to members of the opposite sex during this period of obsession. One of the reason why there's this stereotype of absent-minded professors or computer-obsessed geeks is because it's real. Colvin even remarks on this:
We often see the price people pay in their rise to the top of any field; even if their marriages or other relationships survive, their interests outside their field typically cannot. Howard Gardner, after studying his seven exceptional achievers, noted that "usually, as a means of being able to continue work, the creator sacrificed normal relationships in the personal sphere." Such people are "committed obsessively to their work. Social life or hobbies are almost immaterial." That may sound like admirable self-sacrifice and direction of purpose, but it often goes much
further, and it can be ugly. As Gardner notes, "the self-confidence merges with egotism, egocentrism, and narcissism: each of the creators seems highly self-absorbed, not only wholly involved in his or her own projects, but likely to pursue them at the cost of other individuals." The story of the great achiever who leaves a wake of anger and betrayal is a common one.(Kindle loc 3266)
This is indeed the price of success, and everywhere I've spoken with folks about famous successful people, it's usually accompanied with whispers about the price paid. (Not that there aren't well-adjusted successful people, I've met some of them and they exist)

One thought comes to mind, in Unlocking the Clubhouse, Margolis and Fisher claim that even though the women in their computer science program came to computers and programming late, they caught up to the men by the end of the four year program. By contrast, this is what Colvin says:
In any field where people can start early, starting late may put one in an eternal and possibly hopeless quest to catch up. For example, when those top-ranked violinists turn professional, they don't stop practicing. On the contrary, they practice even more, averaging more than thirty hours a week, accumulating more than fifteen hundred hours a year. (Kindle loc: 2745)
I was wondering how to reconcile what both books were saying when it struck me --- even at CMU, the computer science program is tracking the mean (or the average) student. The average CS major isn't obsessively writing programs to make himself better every day of the week (unlike the obsessed wizard-wanna-be). Tracking the peak performers probably makes more sense, and there you would expect to see the men and women who were exposed to computers as kids and who grew up programming to far out-strip the average. And in fact, whenever I encounter such men and women, their abilities really shine --- they truly are what others called talented, but I think this book does explain where such apparent talent comes from.

If this is true, then if we want more women and minorities in Computer Science, then we have to dig deeper than at the university level. We'll have reach students at the elementary or high school level, and engender enthusiasm there. I suspect that our current approaches are too little, too late, at least, to produce the kind of advances that software engineers in top performing companies are expected to do.

The flaws of the book show up in the last few chapters, when Colvin tries to think about how deliberate practice might be applied to business management, and how things might work there. I think it's a stretch. Personally, I think that when you look at successful technology companies, for instance, they almost always succeed when you have a founder (or two) who is steeped in the technology leading the company --- it's not clear that they are great businessmen, but their technical knowledge of the domain their firms work in is impeccable, so other firms that are more marketing-driven or financially-driven eventually cannot compete as long as the field requires constant technical innovation (once the field matures, though, history suggests that all bets are off).

All in all, this is a book worth reading, and gave me plenty of think about. Recommended. If you're too cheap to buy the book, read the article in the New York Times instead.

Review: Valiant

Valiant(Kindle Edition) is the fourth book in the Lost Fleet series featuring Captain John "Blackjack" Geary, who was rescued from an escape pod from 100 years ago to lead a fleet back into Alliance space. The series is mostly brain candy, good for airplane reading or between heavy reads.

Once again, we have relativistic set-pieces of battles in space, but this time, the focus is on relationships --- both fleet level politics, and the romantic kind. As you can imagine from Campbell's past, the romantic relationships are handled extremely badly, with characters behaving for the sake of plot, rather than as human beings would. Fleet level politics is handled a little better, and John Geary learns to finally delegate. It is perhaps a truism that naval novels are mostly morality plays about leadership, a theme dating back to the Hornblow novels, so this isn't a surprise.

There's also a background plot that's been playing along throughout the novel series, and I won't spoil it here, but rest assured that it moves along as well. Unfortunately, with so little space, we basically finish the novel feeling as though not much happened. Only recommended if you're a fan of the series.

Miyuki Nakajima

People who hang out with my brothers and I know that we are musically omnivorous --- one example of that is that I enjoy Japanese music, despite not knowing enough Japanese to get out of trouble (thanks to a year of Berkeley's language lab, though, my Japanese accent is good enough that even Japanese folks think I know more than I do). Now, you might think that I got to like Japanese music in Japanese class, and you'd be wrong. Or perhaps I picked it up in Singapore, and you'd be wrong too --- we didn't get access to a lot of Japanese music until we got to the US.

What did happen once we did get access to Japanese pop music, though was that we realized how much of the Chinese pop music we heard in Singapore owed its origins to music produced by some Japanese artist. It was very disconcerting to realize that the same music (with translated lyrics, even) was being heard in multiple languages around the same time in Asia, thanks to the hegemony of music companies such as EMI.

One of the results of this mixed-mode musical sharing is that (as in this example video) music videos in Asia tend to be subtitled --- in the language that they are sung in! This is very helpful if you're trying to learn the language, but for someone who knows both Chinese and a little bit of Japanese, it's also fascinating. For instance, in this video at 2:01 (and other times --- it's part of the chorus), she sings, "私は大丈夫", meaning "I'm OK." Now, most folks know that 私 means "I" (female form) in Japanese. But in Chinese, the same character means "private" --- you can see how "private" evolves to "I". 大丈夫, however, is typically only used in Chinese in the context 男子汉大丈夫, which translates (roughly) to "A manly man." I'm always entertained by these almost, but not quite matches between Japanese and Chinese. (The last two characters by themselves, 丈夫, means husband in Chinese)

In any case, as you can tell from this song, "Maybe", the Japanese aren't shy about mixing English in, just so you can get a little triple-language action there. I'm a fan of Miyuki Nakajima, and this video shows why. She's not particularly pretty, but she's very expressive, and at the very least, her songs tell a story and she tries to tell it visually (though again in classically exaggerated Japanese fashion). Enjoy! (My favorite song of hers has an English title, "With", but I can't find a good enough video to post)

Snow in Munich

Munich Snow

It was cold, but I had to go to town for supplies and do some other random activities anyway. When I came out of the S-Bahn in town it was sunny, and on the spur of the moment I decided to climb the stairs to the top of the tower on Peters Kirche. The top here is much better looking than from Frauen Kirche, because you're exposed out in the open, and have a great 360 degree view. It can get crowded, however, since the staircases were narrow, and so was the top of the tower. Fortunately, I hit a quiet period:

From Munich Snow

Then I had to find the toy museum. Turned out to be not at all where I expected it --- I had ridden my bike and walked past it countless times without registering what it was! It's a tiny museum, but had a nice collection of stuffed animals and even a Barbie collection.

While the weather was nice, I decided to take a quick walk in the English garden, where I found crepuscular beams coming through a hole in the clouds:

From Munich Snow

But it was still so cold that after just half an hour of walking I had to turn and head towards the U-Bahn, where my fingers could at least get warm (yes, I was wearing gloves!).

Snow!

That's right. The night brought snow to my part of Munich. Flurries are still falling. I guess that's it, no more hanging up clothing on the balcony to dry.

Review: The Audacity of Hope

I will admit that I voted for Hilary Clinton during the Democratic primary in California, largely on the basis of her policy on Healthcare Mandates, which makes much more economic sense than not having mandates. Interestingly enough, it looks like the plans circulating in the senate recently do push for mandates (and I think it will have to be part of the compromise).

In any case, Obama has won the election (there was no question in my mind who I was going to vote for in the general election), and the result is that I found myself reading The Audacity of Hope (dead tree edition) to see the kind of person who could get elected while just a junior senator. (There's a theory that if we know too much about someone we have a tendency not to vote for them, so it might be that being a junior senator is a good thing --- you have name recognition, but no history)

On to the book proper. First of all, it's not ghost written. That's incredibly rare. Even Robert Rubin's In an Uncertain World had to involve a ghost writer. Now, Krugman characterized Obama as the most establishment-type candidate of the Democrats running for president, so I didn't know what to expect. I definitely had heard fragments of his speech on the radio (the media never got tired of There's no Red America, there's no Blue America, there's only the United States of America), and knew that many considered him eloquent, but I was unprepared for how well he writes. For instance, Brad Delong often complains about the press corps, but here's Obama putting forward the same complaint:
This element of convenience also helps explain why, even among the most scrupulous reporters, objectivity often means publishing the talking points of different sides of a debate without any perspective on which side might actually be right. A typical story might begin: “The White House today reported that despite the latest round of tax cuts, the deficit is projected to be cut in half by the year
2010.” This lead will then be followed by a quote from a liberal analyst attacking the White House numbers and a conservative analyst defending the White House numbers. Is one analyst more credible than the other? Is there an independent analyst somewhere who might walk us through the numbers? Who knows? Rarely does the reporter have time for such details; the story is not really about the merits of the tax cut or the dangers of the deficit but rather about the dispute between the parties. After a few paragraphs, the reader can conclude that Republicans and Democrats are just bickering again and turn to the sports page, where the story line is less predictable and the box score tells you who won. (Kindle Loc 1865)

Obama has assuaged my fears, especially when he does say the things that those of us who've been unabashed liberals all along, though with much more diplomatic words that I could summon --- the Republicans have failed to govern, and cannot be trusted with governance. The conservative values seem to see Gay Marriage as much more important than helping the poor, and that is certainly not Christian. As much as any of us, he is also concerned with the increasing inequality in the country:
But over the long term, doing nothing probably means an America very different from the one most of us grew up in. It will mean a nation even more stratified economically and socially than it currently is: one in which an increasingly prosperous knowledge class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to purchase whatever they want on the marketplace—private schools, private health care, private security, and private jets—while a growing number of their fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service jobs, vulnerable to dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an underfunded, overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care, their retirement, and their children’s educations. It will mean an America in which we continue to mortgage our assets to foreign lenders and expose ourselves to the whims of oil producers; an America in which we underinvest in the basic scientific research and workforce training that will determine our long-term economic prospects and neglect potential environmental crises. It will mean an America that’s more politically polarized and more politically unstable, as economic frustration boils over and leads people to turn on each other. Worst of all, it will mean fewer opportunities for younger Americans, a decline in the upward mobility that’s been at the heart of this country’s promise since its founding. (Kindle Loc: 2196)

The rest of the book covers more personal details, such as how he met his wife, what her family's struggle means to him, and why he chose to become a politician. It's all worth reading, and you get quite a lot of his thoughts for $4.39. Certainly, after all this, I'm proud of the party I belong to: it is quite clear that Obama could only have come out of the Democratic party. Highly recommended.