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...