ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

No one can predict the oil price 1 month ahead, next week or even tomorrow. But still, some businesses e.g. Airlines have to try because they have to hedge their fuel cost against swings in their fuel cost. In economic planning, governments also need to forecast revenue and expenditure.  One of the ways to hedge is by buying a Futures contract [which is the promise to deliver something at a certain price at a certain time in the future]. Such as the Brent Oil Crude Futures of the CME Group (former Chicago Mercantile Exchange) in the chart above. Can the 1-year, 2 year and 5-year Futures price of oil give us an indication of the direction of oil price? We know that prices change according to events that happen every day and every hour; and no one can predict such events from Libya oil terminals burning to release of data on China’s economic growth. There are two reasons why the Futures price can be a predictor of prices in the future: (1) The futures price is determined by ...

For a long time I have been confused by the terms DNA, Genes, and Chromosomes and what do people mean when they say we have good or bad genes. After reading "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins (Oxford University Press, 1976), I have a clearer picture. With the help of the graphics enclosed, here is an explanation of what are genes, DNA and chromosomes:   Our bodies are made up of thousands of millions of individual cells. Each cell contains your DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) – a molecule with a complete set of instructions for making your body. The double-helix DNA is made up of strings of A,T,C,G* nucleotides stringed together in a particular sequence with  "A" always pairing with "T" and "C" with "G"  *Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine. A gene is a particular length of DNA with a particular sequence of A,T,C,G pairing; that has properties which enable it to survive several generations e.g. a Blue eye gene, a Brown eye...

At a  Palm Civet cat farm near Bandung, Indonesia. The cat is fed fresh coffee berries. When he shits, his poo contains undigested parts of the coffee berry. This is processed to give Kopi Luwak (Civet Cat coffee) which is the most expensive coffee in the world. You may pay up to  US$40.00 for a cup of Kopi Luwak in New York or San Francisco.' The civet cat's stomach enzymes do their work on the beans, and the resultant cup of coffee is a strong, snooth and fragrant, but not acidic.

Recently, Singapore citizens who were born before before 31 Dec 1949 were accorded the status of Pioneer Generation by the Singapore government. This group of over-65 baby boomers received several perks and privileges such as on healthcare and transportation costs. According to the government, Singapore owes its success to their stoic, conservative and hardworking nature, their endurance of hardship, their determination to ensure that their children receive a good education and are inculcated with the right values. But now that they are old, we would think that they would be contented to retire and have a good rest. However: Yesterday, in the elevator, I met the lady who sells fresh chicken meat in the market. I asked her why every time I pass by, her stall is closed. She said she spent three weeks in the UK, with her son who has a Masters in Engineering from Imperial College on a government scholarship and is now working for a multinational corporation in London .She still wi sh...

CAN SINGAPORE’S LABOR PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVE MUCH FURTHER? Not a day passes without an exhortation from our government to increase productivity (especially labour productivity). So how is labour productivity usually measured? It is: Total Output /Total Man Hours Worked. Total Output of a country is its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the Value Add of the economy without double counting outputs which are also inputs to another activity. The charts below show statistics on average daily wage cost (US$) and Labour Productivity in Manufacturing (US$) of ASEAN countries plus China  Chart 1 shows two types of column bars representing average daily wage cost and labour productivity both measured in US$. *Numbers taken from McKinsey Global Institute. This chart roughly shows that Wage Cost and Productivity have a very strong correlation. That is, higher productivity goes with higher wages and vice versa, though we are not saying whether it is the tail that wags the dog or dog t...

In Singapore, a plate of curry rice with various sides of meat and vegetables  is what ordinary workers commonly have for lunch or dinner. Thus, a standardized plate of curry rice can be a benchmark for consumer price inflation. I have been tracking the price of the same plate of curry rice for 50 years. This is the famed original Scissors Cut Curry Rice now at the corner of Jalan Besar and Kitchener Road. I first ate it in 1964, when it was at Garden Street, For 50 years I have been ordering the same combination of sides: breaded pork chop in black soya sauce, braised pork belly, fried egg, and cabbage every time I go to eat the curry rice. And every ten years ,in October I would record the price. Here is a c hart of the price of a plate of rice with the same four sides, over the last fifty years. If you take a simple average, which assumes a constant rate of change, the price increase is [(4.90-1.20)/1.20]/50=6.1 % per year. Which is above the normal rate of inflation...

You would almost certainly have heard of Charles Darwin, and his theory of evolution in his book On the Origin of Species. But it is likely that you have never heard of his equally distinguished grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus also believed in evolution of species by natural selection, and in his case he summed it all up in the poem below, that describes how Life began in the seas, and developed into “breathing realms of fin and feet and wing” [of fish, mammals and birds.] Organic life below the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, successive generations bloom, New powers acquire and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

The Real Economy vs The Paper Economy To know the state of the economy, look beyond stock market performance as measured by stock market Indices. The stock market is more a reflection of short term expectations and paper gains. It may go up and up, even in times of fundamentally weak economic activity. But demand for commodities that are required in economic activity, are a better indicator of the state of the economy.  In the charts below, you can see the prices of Coal, Copper and Oil dropping over the past year. Why are crude oil prices dropping despite the turmoil in the Middle East? It is because the U.S. new fracking technology is now able to extract oil and Gas from its extensive Shale rock formations and the U.S. now imports less oil, leaving a larger supply from Middle East producers to compete on the world market. Copper is a good indicator of modern economic activity as it is being used in the electronic and automotive industries, there is no public ...

IS THIS A GUITAR FORUM OR AN AUNT AGONY COLUMN? www.tdpri.com  is where the enthusiastic/passionate/fanatical fans (of which I confess I am one) of the Fender Telecaster guitar meet to discuss all manner of things about their object of love. It is the world’s largest forum on the Telecaster guitar with hundreds of posts every day on such esoteric topics as: three-saddle bridge or six-saddle bridge, the battle is over. The difference between a 53 Tele and a 54 Tele is more than  skin-deep, or Fret wire sizes for my 52 Butterscotch Blackguard. [I forgot what TDPRI stands for]. But some of the posts on TDPRI are hilarious, and read more like an Aunt Agony advice column for the lovelorn. Here are sample posts gleaned from TDPRI: 1. Is something wrong with my Tele or is it me? 2. Can anyone be a one-Tele man? (Not that I am having other thoughts) 3. After 20 years with a Les Paul, I dumped it for a Tele. No regrets. 4. Is modding (modifying) a Tele sacrilege? Urgent. Please help...

Mental Skills in Jazz Applied to Modern Life I play jazz not for the improvement in mental agility or psycho-motor coordination that it gives, but for the sheer enjoyment. But I have thought about what playing jazz requires our brain to do. And how these skills are in fact required for daily living in the modern world, which is characterized by a need to deal with the deluge of information we are constantly exposed to. We have to find ways to handle all this information and let it be the basis of decision-making.  Managing information includes classification into categories, forecasting possible scenarios, prioritizing, and optimization of time and resources and abstract pattern recognition. Having these skills is actually at the heart of all modern jobs that cannot be replaced by machines. The human skills listed below, and which in my opinion are what we practise when playing jazz, are what gives us the advantage over robots which are ever-increasing in their intellige...

Oh, how I wish I could sleep as easily as this Indonesian Becak (Rickshaw) man. And how I wish I could be as healthy looking as him on his 50 cents meal of fried compressed soya bean cake and rice.  " Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep’st so sound." Julius Caesar (2.1.248-251)

Above: my 2008 Nash 52 Telecaster. Weighing under 7 lbs because the wood is dry, and fitted with Lollar pickups, it is extremely easy to play. Even without an amplifier, the guitar rings loud and clear and with sustain- a testament to the quality of the wood and the build.  I am a fan of relic (artificially aged) guitars, especially Fender Telecasters, and I love how some of the makers of Telecaster type guitars describe the degree of relic-ing . Nash Guitars  www.nashguitars.com  calls them 'Distressed Guitars' And describe their degree of distress thus: Light Distress= Church Gig- as in when you only use it to play for your church. Medium Distress= Working Man; a working musician's tool . Can't be new and shiny but has to be in good playing condition. Heavy Distress= Louisiana Roadhouse'- Look like it probably has smell of stale beer and cigarettes on it and spent nights playing the Blues in some Deep South joint. Extreme Heavy Distress* ...

INSIGHTS FROM WARREN BUFFET'S INDICATOR OF THE STOCK MARKET. * This chart is taken from Bloomberg but with my annotations added. Warren Buffet has a long-term stock market Indicator that has proved to be very prescient. Basically it plots t he total stock market capitalization as a percentage of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (adjusted for inflation) . This chart is from 1949-2014. When the value of the stock market is a high percentage of the U.S. GDP, stocks are deemed to be overvalued. ( I should add, high means high as compared with the preceding decade or so). On my chart, you can see this happening and the sudden drop in those years, and the events in those years. What interests me are these points: 1. It seems that from 1995 onwards,the swings get more and more violent. Personally I attribute this to the wide-spread adoption of IT viz the Internet, global communication, and online financial transactions which really began around this date. By compressing the time frame in w...

RARE METALS. Recently,in the course of work I came to be acquainted with rare metals with names that I never heard of: Antimony is not a spice, Yttrium is not a Swedish word, Dysprosium is not a medical condition, Germanium is not a flower, These are all a class of metals known as Rare Metals. Few are aware that these metals are strategic to the modern economy, as they are essential components of many modern industrial processes. This is because these metals have properties such as high electrical conductivity, hardness, corrosion resistance, high refractive index, high melting point, strength and light weight. All these properties are required for many products of the modern industrial economy: Electronic capacitors, missile parts, jet engine fan blades, machine tools and drills, semi-conductor etching, surgical instruments, nuclear reactors, chemical processing plants, LEDs and LCDS, X-rays, fibre optics, hard glass and ceramics... the list is endless. These materials are so i...

THE TRANSFORMERS NOT AS FAR-FETCHED AS YOU THINK (Self-Assembly, the science of things that put themselves together.) Self-Assembly is a sub-field of Nanotechnology, as it is about inducing change at the molecular level to produce desired  structures. Things that put themselves together are already a reality on a small scale. In the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, there are fascinating examples of self-assembly. Here is a link to a set of videos from Ted.com http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/04/see-self-assembly-and-4d-printing-in-action/ featuring Skylar Tibbits of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. Like many of Mankind's inventions, Self-Assembly was inspired by Mother Nature. The engineered self-assembling systems we have, were constructed based on the same principles and forces that drive self-assembly in Nature. There is nothing magical about self-assembly. When the right conditions exist, molecules can self-assemble.Self-assembly is when molecules form bonds according to a set ...

I am re-posting these photos from my Facebook. One set shows some of the weird things you find in Chinese Medical Shops in Singapore. The other shows some of the very colorful cakes you can get here in Singapore. ASIAN CAKES LAYERED MULTI-COLORED RAINBOW CAKE FOR CHINESE NEW YEAR PATTERNED CAKES FROM SARAWAK, MALAYSIA  ASSORTED PERANAKAN# CAKES 1 ASSORTED PERANAKAN# CAKES What are Peranakans? See http://www.fu-lu-shou.net/2009/02/my-peranakan-heritage-discovering.html  DRIED STUFF USED IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE Flying Lizards Giant Wood Mushrooms Pipefish Skin of some reptile Clumps of earth containing some minerals. Cuttlefish tentacles

Juust as wine-tasters use words such as full-bodied, flowery, earthy, fruity etc to describe wines, so electric guitar players use words to describe their guitar's tone: Bite- what the tone of a good Fe nder Telecaster's bridge pickup should have. Glassy- the kind of tone you get in a Fender Stratocaster when the pick-up selector is between neck and middle pickup. Creamy- when high notes are played with a thick round-end pick like a V-Pick. Fat- Thick tone, not necessarily mellow, favored by jazz guitarists. Muddy- Mellow but not clear tone. Singing- the tone of an old Les Paul, or any guitar with long sustain. Woody- the acoustic tone of a hollow body jazz archtop. Snap- when a little bit of fret buzz sounds nice. Honky- Like the tone of P-90's or an out-of-phase pickup Woman tone- a tone first attributed to Eric Clapton's '68 Gibson SG through a Marshall amp, and typical of British Blues in the sixties. Bell-like- a Rickenbacker used as rhythm guitar Big Bo...

2014 D'Angelico NYSS 3B FM (flamed maple) 2013 Fender American Vintage Telecaster Thinline 1967 Gibson ES-330 as advertised for $520 on AliExpress After more than 3 years, I had a relapse of the Guitar Acquisition Syndrome (GAS). I thought I was cured. Why would a 67- year old man with probably less than 15 years of life left, and with more guitars and amplifiers than he can play with, want more guitars? But succumb, I did, to GAS. So here is a blow-by-blow account of my latest attack of GAS.   It began with a sudden craving for a Telecaster Thinline, though why I would want a Thinline when I had, during my lifetime bought and sold three Thinlines I don't know. So I bought the Thinline.  Then I saw an ad in AliExpress to sell a 1967 Gibson ES 330 for $520. I could hardly believe my eyes. I convinced myself that this anomaly in price was due to the ignorance of the seller. Alas, how true the adage that if its too good to be true, then it probably is...

Thoughts on definition of Noise and Thresholds 1.     I am obsessed by the thought of being able to make my everyday decisions in a more objective way, unclouded by emotions and biases so common with us humans. There must be academic papers on the topic of quantitative-based decision-making. But I have never read any.  So these are the ramblings of a novice in this field. 2.     Any data-driven (quantitative) decision support system must have (a) some kind of noise removal method for initial ‘cleaning’ to remove data that is considered not relevant to the model  (b) Methods for setting thresholds of some kind i.e. a numerical value that is the boundary for, and triggers a Yes/No decision. 3.      Thus, the two key aspects of any quantitative decision-making process are the removal of noise, and the establishment of thresholds that trigger decisions. For this reason, I am fascinated by the definition of Noise and...