ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

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...