ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Pictures from top: 1. The Confederate flag 2.Manatees: Malabar, Central Florida 3. My good friend Steve Thorpe with NASCAR racer. 4. Welcome to Georgia signboard 5. A Sunday aftertoon blue grass jam. 6. Carwash girl Melbourne, Florida 7. The Desert Inn at Yeehaw Junction near Kissimmee 8. Deep-fried duck with black-eyed peas and collard greens 9.Menu at the Marsh Landing restaurant, Fellmere, Florida 10. Barbecue joint in Mount Doro, Florida I moved to Princeton, New Jersey recently, after a year's stay in Melbourne, Florida. Melbourne is on the east coast of the Florida peninsula, right in the center between Jacksonville in the North and Miami in the south. Florida north of Fort Lauderdale is pretty much Southern USA. Not the caribbean culture of Miami and The Keys. Central Florida is more like Georgia and the Carolinas, though with some differences due to it's geographical features and climate. The land of alligators and swamps, cattle ranchers and cowboys called crackers, ci...

Sea change, a fundamental, profound change, a regime-switch in modeling terms, not a gradual process as in Shakespeare's The Tempest where Ariel sang: Full fathom five thy father lies Of his bones are coral made Those are pearls that were his eyes Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Your Sunny Day and Rainy Day Screens is an auto regime-switching model. * for reference on Sunny Day and Rainy Day screens see http://valuengine.blogspot.com/2007/10/sunny-day-and-rainy-day-screens.html James D. Hamilton of the Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego is one of the pioneers in work on regime-switching models. To explain "regime-switching models", we first quote from the introduction of his paper " Regime-Switching Models" (May, 2005) prepared for the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. "Many economic time series occasionally exhibit dramatic breaks in their behavior, associated with eve...

The street food in Singapore reflects the multi-racial composition of its population. Chinese, Indian, and Malay food can be found everywhere, at all hours of the day. It is not uncommon for a Singaporean to have Indian food for breakfast, Malay food for lunch and Chinese food for dinner. Even to categorize Singapore food into Indian, Malay and Chinese does not do Singapore food justice. Among the Chinese, the various dialect groups from different provinces of China have very different cuisine. So too with the Indians and Malays. Indians hail from different parts of India with very different cuisine, and Malay food has different nuances depending on whether it is near to the Indonesian islands of Sumatra or Java, the Eastern or Northern parts of Malaysia. There is also the food of the Peranakan, as we call the descendants of immigrants who have inter-married with the indigenuous Malays. Peranakan cuisine is unique and refined. Of all the food available, I like home-style Malay food. It...

Top picture shows what is claimed to be the original Hamburger. Just some good fresh grilled beef on a sandwich bread, not a bun.This comes from Louis Lunch, in new Haven Connecticut. The restaurant has been preserved as a hertitage site, and the original utensils for grilling the beef, and slicing it are still used. No requests for ketchup and pickles will be entertained . Next picture: Back Rib of Danish piglets from Jay's in Palm Bay, Florida. $12 gets you this slab of barbecued baby back ribs, eaten with cole slaw, potato salad, collard greens, and washed down with pink lemonade. The next two pictures are from the Alabama Soul Food and Seafood Restaurant in a poor, mostly African-American neighborhood in Trenton, New Jersey. One of the few places where you can have a good meal for US$5.00. Typical dishes are: fried chicken, chitlins [fried pig's intestines] catfish, stewed belly pork, oxtail, Turkey wings, Alligator tail and Baby-Back ribs. Eaten with rice, [not Asian rice ...

By the 1980's, the ubiquity of computers made the encroachment of the computer into the territory of the A rts inevitable. It is only natural for humans to see if the computer's powers can be used to help them in artistic endeavours. Computer-generated art, music and poetry have been around for decades but it is only recently with the advent of high-performance personal computers that developments in this field has accelerated. Powerful computers allow for more sophistication in the algorithms that generate the poetry. Whereas earlier poem generators, used very simple rules-like picking a random verb, noun and adjective and stringing them together into sentences, the new poem generators may use artificial intelligence and pattern recognition, and 'learn' from the stylistics of real poets. Thus, it is able for example, to read dozens of poems by William Wordsworth, absorb the vocabulary, try to identify if there are any patterns in Wordsworth's use of words and sent...

In the last seven years or so, one combination of archtop guitar, amplifier and speaker cabinet has come to be regarded by many mainstream jazz guitarists as de rigeur . From the jazz joints in clubby Manhattan, New York City to the boisterous jazz scene in Miami, Florida, and even in mid-west cities like Cincinnati, Ohio this combination or 'rig' as musicians call it has found a place in the equipment collection of every professional jazz guitarist and become a standard by which other rigs are to be judged. Granted a proficient jazz guitarist can play good jazz even on a Fender Stratocaster put through a Twin Reverb , still there is no other sound that evokes the magic tone of a jazz guitar better than an archtop , fully hollow-bodied and big-bodied, out through an amplifier and speaker that faithfully reproduces the acoustic qualities of such a guitar. In this aspect, the Acoustic Image Clarus Series 2R/ [ see http://www.acousticimg.com/ ] Raezers Edge [see http://ww...

I am beginning to believe that most of the phenomena in our world are too complex to be modeled using closed-form analytic models. Even if you could identify the variables, the inter-relationship between the variables are forever changing, and the variables themselves might change. The natural tendency is to turn to computer simulation modeling, where we generate data for the simulation, run the simulation and analyze the results.. From this we can calculate probability of outcomes and the confidence intervals. Computer simulation is widely used in many fields from the simulation of manufacturing processes, to military planning and econometric forecasting, and the valuation of financial derivatives. On a more pedestrianlevel it can help estimate waiting times in queues, estimate the resources required for a project or help with decision-making when there are several options. The exponential increase in the speed and power of today's computers makes simulation less of a chore than i...

There was a time not too long ago, when as individual stock investors, we lamented the lack of information on the market and on specific stocks. Just 13 years or so ago, with the advent of the Browser, the Internet became an everyday technology for every man. Online trading, the instant transmission of information, the power of modern computers, the sophistication of new software for analyzing streams of financial data in real-time-all these became too much of a good thing. Soon we were deluged with too much information which confused us, and the noise clouded our decision-making process. Modern stock markets are characterized by this excess of information. In this globalized, super-speed environment of modern financial markets the winners are those who adopt a quantitative, objective, independent and unemotional approach to investment that is able to filter out the noise. The best way to cope with information overload is to subscribe to the philosophy and methodology of Quantitative A...

If you play a musical instrument and are just getting into jazz music with its improvisation, here's a piece of advice for you. Because not everyone has a good ear and/or a good memory, reading from the music score is still important when you are jamming with others. Also, when you are just starting to dip your toes into jazz, learning music theory is a great help, and for that you need to read music. But having said that, once you are familiar with a song, do try to do away with the score especially at a jazz jam. There are several reasons why you should gradually get to a stage where you can play some jazz standards without looking at sheet music: 1. Jazz jamming depends on spontaneity, and interaction between the players. The surest way to kill the spontaneous element is to look at the score while playing. You should at least be able to play the 'head' [melody] without referring to the score-else don't go up to jam or worse still call the tune. As for the chords, wh...

Fuzzy Logic is the use of Fuzzy Sets to give what its proponents believe is a truer representation of most real world situations. In the real world, things are often not strictly black or white but shades of grey. Unlike computers, humans think in shades of gray also not just Yes/No, Black/White or One/Zero but everything in-between. For example, what does it mean to say the temperature is cool or hot? The areas falling into cool and hot, overlap. Fuzzy Logic applications is widely used in modern consumer appliances with the Japanese engineers as early-adopters and pioneers of Fuzzy Logic controllers for airconditioners , washing machines, rice cookers, cameras, elevators etc. It is only in the last decade that Europe and America have caught up with Fuzzy controllers for automotive, aircraft and machinery components such as for engine performance , brakes and driving control. The first step in the creation of a Fuzzy controller is to draw up the Fuzzy sets. {see middle picture}. This d...

* no distinction is made between 'towns' and 'cities' since it seems to be a meaningless definition. There are towns like Summit, NJ or Madison that deserve to be called cities and cities like Egg Harbor City, NJ that are not even proper towns. Pictures: Nice Towns and Not-So-Nice Towns: From Top: Jamaica, Queens, NYC a poorer neighborhood with many West Indians, Africans and Afro-Americans(2) Saint Augustine, Florida: a touch of Spain in Florida plus history galore (3) Wheeling, West Virginia nice natural scenery on the banks of the Ohio river, but a deserted ex-coal mining town(4) Princeton New Jersey, upper class town centered around the famed Princeton University. Lots of cultural events, good food and beautiful houses. There are nice towns and there are not-so-nice towns in every State. In my travels through 21 States in the South, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and North-East, I have come across small towns that are depressingly derelict, but also small towns which are rea...

The economy, the stock market and each sector, industry and business all go through cycles of their own. What goes up must come down and vice versa. As an investor, understanding why cycles occur will help you to look at stock prices with an additional perspective. One of the major reasons business cycles exist is because of a very fundamental fact: For physical goods, Supply cannot adjust to Demand instantly. Suppose for example, that there is a sudden surge in demand for a hypothetical brand of shoes called 'Royal Glamour'. At the shoe store level, the stock of shoes will run out and the store will call the shoemaker. The shoemaker will then need to make more shoes and order more leather for that. The leather maker will need to order more hides, the hide supplier will have to kill more cows. And when there are no more cows to kill, they will have to wait till cows reproduce and the calves grow up. In our hypothetical example, Demand for Royal Glamour shoes may have suddenly s...

Of all the cuisines in the world that I have experienced, my favorite is the cuisine of the Indonesian islands. Indonesia is a vast archipelago of 17000 islands stretching 2000 miles and more from New Guinea to Sumatra, from Sulawesi to Kalimantan. The great diversity in people, language, culture brings forth great diversity in cuisine. Nasi Padang is steamed white rice accompanied by a variety of meat, fish and vegetable dishes. 'Nasi' means 'rice' in Indonesian and 'Padang' is a town on the island of Sumatra where this dish is said to have originated. The people of Sumatra, being part of a culturally distinct Riau archipelago are more akin to the Malays of Singapore and Malaysia than to the Javanese and Balinese next door . So Nasi Padang is also a common dish in Singapore and Malaysia. Unfortunately, the standard of Nasi Padang in Singapore has deteriorated so much, that I find most of the stalls serving almost inedible Nasi Padang. No more only sold by smal...

Images (top) self-explanatory from Charles Crowley at http://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/Complexity/index.html (bottom) Stephen Wolfram's four classes of cellular automata illustrating diversity with small initial differences or perturbations. Studies in Chaotic Systems, which are sub-cases of Complex Systems, show four types of movements: (1) movements that eventually become extinct of (2) movements which produce regular cycles (3) movements which grow structurally but the growth is not totally predictable (4) movements which dissolve into utter chaos. It is category 3 that is most interesting as it seems to represent the state which Life in this Universe follows and may explain how interesting, complex systems, such as living things, arise in a world where one of the most fundamental principles is that entropy, that is disorder, always increases. [Second Law of Thermodynamics]. Experiments carried out with Cellular Automata [which are grids created on a computer and populated and all...