thus spake hareesh nagarajan

Mission Peak

2012-01-29T16:01:00.000-08:00

I find myself climbing up Mission Peak every January. Easy peasy. GPS co-ordinates are here.

You gain about 2400 feet. Coming down is somewhat harder than going up. Takes a toll on your stabilizers.

Total distance: 11.25 km (7.0 mi)
Total time: 2:47:38
Moving time: 2:37:33
Average speed: 4.03 km/h (2.5 mi/h)
Average moving speed: 4.28 km/h (2.7 mi/h)
Max speed: 9.46 km/h (5.9 mi/h)
Min elevation: 68 m (222 ft)
Max elevation: 737 m (2419 ft)
Elevation gain: 689 m (2259 ft)
Recorded: 1/28/12 10:07 AM

Biking around the Arenal Volcano with Bike Arenal

2012-01-29T15:54:00.000-08:00

Biking around the Arenal Volcano was fun but didn't come close biking with ProBici in Riobamba, Ecuador. The path was very, very bumpy and wasn't technical.

We climbed about 2450 feet.

Stats:

Start: Jan 17, 2012 9:53:50 AM
End: Jan 17, 2012 4:02:35 PM
Duration: 6h08'45"
Length: 37.2km
Avg Speed: 6.05km h
Max Speed: 48.2km h
Low: 366m
High: 648m
Gain: 758m

View the track here.

A few pictures from the bike ride. All these pictures were taken from my phone.

We saw these raccoons while driving to the Arenal Volcano.

Our guide, damn, his name slips me, stumbled upon this vine snake. Someone, I think it might have been me, inadvertently ran over the snakes trunk. It was dying. I'm sorry vine snake. I will never be able to give you your life back :(

Lunch stop at Linda Vista. By lunch time we'd done 19KM. We would go on to bike another 18KM. The lunch was simply delicious.

Tilapia + Typical Meals. Yum!

Tortuguero National Park to San Jose Costa Rica on a Propeller Plane

2012-01-29T15:45:00.000-08:00

Here are the statistics from our flight:

Duration: 26 minutes 29 seconds
Length: 66.4mi
Avg Speed: 151mph
Max Speed: 218mph
Low: -25.6ft
High: 9246ft
Gain: 10020ft

You can find the KML and the path taken here.

I quite enjoyed the flight.

Blood work

2012-01-25T10:30:00.000-08:00

Results of my blood test from Jan 24, 2011. They were done with me fasting for over 10 hours.

LIPID PROFILE

Component	Your Value	Standard Range	Units
Fasting Status
Total cholesterol	165	<200 -	mg/dL
Triglyceride	72	<150 -	mg/dL
HDL cholesterol	48	>40 -	mg/dL
LDL Calculated	103	0 - 160	mg/dL
Cholesterol to HDL Ratio	3.4	1.0 - 4.0
Cardiac Risk Factor CHOL/HDL Ratio Male Female Low Risk <3.5 <3.5 Below Average Risk: 3.5-4.4 3.5-4.4 Average Risk: 4.5-6.4 4.5-5.5 Above Average Risk 6.5-13.5 5.6-11.0 High Risk >13.5 >11.0
VLDL (Calculated)	14	5 - 40	mg/dL

THYROID STIMULATING HORMONE (TSH)

Component	Your Value	Standard Range	Units	Flag
Fasting Status
TSH	2.05	0.34 - 4.82	uIU/mL

COMPREHENSIVE METABOLIC PANEL W GFR

Component	Your Value	Standard Range	Units
Fasting Status
Sodium	137	136 - 147	mmol/L
Potassium	4.4	3.5 - 5.1	mmol/L
Chloride	100	98 - 107	mmol/L
CO2	27	21 - 32	mmol/L
Glucose	80	70 - 100	mg/dL
BUN	12	6 - 25	mg/dL
CREATININE	0.8	0.6 - 1.3	mg/dL
GFR Est-Other	>60	>60 -	See Cmnt
GFR Est-African American	>60	>60 -	See Cmnt
Units: ml/min/1.73 m2. Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate values are calculated by MDRD equation and are valid only if creatinine level is stable. GFRs are most accurate for results 60 ml/min/1.73 m2 or less. Reference: www.nkdep.nih.gov/professionals/index.htm
Calcium	8.9	8.2 - 10.2	mg/dL
Total Protein	7.7	6.4 - 8.2	g/dL
Albumin	4.4	3.2 - 4.7	g/dL
Total Bilirubin	0.7	<1.1 -	mg/dL
Alkaline Phosphatase	99	26 - 137	U/L
AST	21	0 - 37	U/L
ALT	38	15 - 65	U/L

Magical Start: Playing golf 2 months after a knee surgery ...

2011-12-31T13:31:00.000-08:00

So 103 day after injury and 58 days after surgery I decided to finally hit the golf course. I felt ready. We played Deep Cliff out in Cupertino. It is a smallish, tight executive course so you don't need to pull out your driver. I don't usually play executive courses because I like to drive the ball long, hard (and out of bounds!), but I don't think my knee is ready to handle all that torque. Anyway, we were a threesome + a single, playing "best ball".

The first hole has a handicap of 3 (3rd hardest hole on the course). It is a 271 yards long par 4. For the opening drive (stroke 1) I would play my 3 iron. I pulled the ball to the left of the fairway. 177 yards to the left. With less than 100 yards to go, I hit my 60 degree wedge (stroke 2) but unfortunately I pulled it into a water hazard close to the putting green. I'd take a penalty stroke (stroke 3) and a drop. The ball was about 65 feet from the cup. Now instead of chipping, I decided to putt (stroke 4) the ball from there. And what a putt it was! I sunk it right in and made par. I didn't take any pictures of the green. I wish I did. Lightning doesn't strike twice. But little did I know what I had in store for me on Hole 2.

The second hole has a handicap of 11. It is a 136 yards long par 3. I'd overdrive on this hole and find my ball behind a bush. From there I decided to chip the ball in with my 62 degree wedge. And I'd hole it! What! I'd hole the ball right into the cup for a birdie! What an insane start! 100% luck.

The view of the flag on Hole #2 from the Hole #3 Tee. You can see the bushes, where I chipped the ball from, to the right.

Deep Cliff. Hole #2. I chip the ball from here behind the bushes right into the cup.

We'd play a total of 15 holes. I made 1 birdie, 5 pars, 4 bogeys.

The first two weeks after ACL reconstruction surgery

2011-11-18T08:10:00.001-08:00

Day 0: November 2, 2011 Day of the surgery

To find out how I got here, read this: How I tore my ACL while mountain biking at Skeggs Point. I had the ACL on my right knee reconstructed by Dr Warren King at Palo Alto Medical Foundation on November 2, 2011. I went in for an (Achilles heel) Allograft. I came out of surgery at around 1:20PM and was home by around 3:00PM. This is me at 1:30PM.

I would, eventually, realize the Percocet that they had me take at the hospital would energize me more than anything. Most people feel drowsy after a surgery. Not me. The damn drug did nothing to alleviate my pain and did nothing to make me feel drowsy. I was all fired up. I didn't know how ineffective the drug was because I didn't have any pain until 11:00PM. The pain would come like nothing I've ever felt before. I had no idea what was in store for me that night. Here are a list of pain killers I took on the day of the surgery.

6:30PM 1 x Percocet (I took this to stay "ahead" of the pain curve)
23:40PM 1 x Percocet (I can feel the pain kicking in. The femoral block began wearing off ...)

Day 1: November 3, 2011

PAAAAAAAAAAAIN! All night. I would not sleep a wink. Pain level: 10/10. At 9:00AM I went in to see my doctor. His assistant, Laurel Greenfield, would immediately jam a giant needle into my knee and drain fluid. This instantly brought down my pain levels to 3/10. She'd also give me a prescription for Norco. Norco would work a whole lot better than Percocet. Here are a list of pain killers I took that day.

2:17AM 1 x Percocet (Didn't work!)
5:40AM 2 x Percocet (Didn't work again)! Peak pain!
8:07AM 1 x 200 mg Ibuprofen
8:17AM 1 x 81 mg Baby Asprin (blood thinning)
12:16PM 1 x Norco
4:50PM 1 x Norco
10:01PM 1 x Norco
11:04PM 1 x 200 mg Ibuprofen

Day 2: November 4, 2011

I started doing the CPM on day 2. I'd do it for 6 hours. I'd reach a flexion of 48 degrees. Pain levels 3/10. The drugs I'd take:

2:26AM 1 x Norco
8:11AM 1 x Norco
10:00AM 1 x 81 mg Baby Asprin (blood thinning)

12:48PM 1 x Norco

11:04PM 1 x 200 mg Ibuprofen

4:27PM 1 x 200 mg Ibuprofen

Day 3: November 5, 2011

More CPM today. 6 hours again. I'd reach a flexion of 61 degrees. Last day of drugs.

2:31AM 1 x Norco

5:33PM 1 x 200 mg Ibuprofen

Day 4: November 6, 2011

More CPM today. 6 hours again. I'd reach a flexion of 76 degrees. I'd stop taking the pain drugs prescribed to me completely. No more pain. I tweeted this on the 6th.

Pizza for dinner (Jalapenos, onions and chicken).

Day 5: November 7, 2011

First physiotherapy session. Still on crutches. At physical therapy they'd measure me to have a flex of 76 degrees, exactly the flexion I had reached on the CPM machine the previous day. More CPM today. About 5 hours. I'd go on to hit 90 degrees. That evening we'd go to Sports Basement to buy a cord for an exercise they described to me at physical therapy. Walking around with crutches and a brace. Still painful. I got tired very quickly. Still not feeling super great. I'd push all the way to 90 degrees with the CPM today. I'd also do the exercises I was taught at PT.

Day 6: November 8, 2011

More CPM and simple exercises at home given to me at physical therapy. I'd do the CPM for about 5 hours. I'd hit 98 degrees. I'd also do the exercises I was taught at PT. Feeling much better today. I tweeted this on the 8th:

Day 7: November 9, 2011

Second physiotherapy session. I'd walk into the clinic with 1 crutch. They made me do squats and steps. This changed everything. After this I was so confident that I effectively dropped using two crutches. More CPM. I'd hit 108 degrees. 4 hours. I'd even step out of the house with 1 crutch and brace that day. This cute siberian husky would even place her paw on my (good) left leg:

Day 8: November 10, 2011

2 hours of CPM. Hit 115 degrees. The max.

Day 9: November 11, 2011

1 hour of CPM. Hit 115 degrees. I wouldn't do the CPM machine again. Uneventful. Odd aches and pains in the knee. Some Thai place in Sunnyvale, CA. The wontons were great

Day 10: November 12, 2011

Don't remember what I did that day. Uneventful. Odd aches and pains in the knee. I'd tweet this:

Hot Pot for Dinner. San Jose, CA.

Day 11: November 13, 2011

Feeling very confident and strong that I finally started driving. Big milestone.

Day 12: November 14, 2011

Back at work. No crutches. No brace. Feeling strong but walking around very slowly. Trying not to limp. More exercises at the Physiotherapy session. Did those exercises again that evening. I'd tweet this. My extension on this day was actually 7 degrees and not 5 degrees.

Day 13: November 15, 2011

Walking pace improves. No crutches. No brace. Uneventful day. Getting stronger.

Day 14: November 16, 2011

Walking pace improves. No crutches. No brace. Few more exercises at the physiotherapy session. I also began physiotherapy at Google. Got a great trainer there. Flexion now at 112 degrees and extension at 5 degrees. All the bandages would come off today. Getting stronger.

Day 15: November 17, 2011

Back at the gym. I did 10 minutes of stationary bicycling. No resistance. I didn't do this for the cardio but to improve the range of motion of my knee. I'd also spend 26 minutes doing the "Arm Cycle" at a resistance of 15-17 (last 9 minutes) and cover 3.39 miles. Not a great pace by any means, but I'd like to think that I'm getting there. You can see that I'm not even back to my pre-surgery arm/cardio strength.

I'd tweet this:

I can finally shower without wrapping my right knee in a garbage bag.

Day 16: November 18, 2011

Yesterday I could do 0.94 miles in 10 minutes. Today I could do 1.36 miles in 10 minutes. I could easily push myself and increase the resistance, but I didn't, because my PT doesn't recommend it (yet). Side by side comparison. Reconstructed knee is on the right

The good, left knee:

The right knee. Still swollen. Minimal scarring.

How I tore my ACL while mountain biking at Skeggs Point

2011-10-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

On 9/18/2011 we decided to hit one of the trails (Skeggs "4") at El Corte de Madera Open Space Preserve. This preserve is also known as Skeggs Point. The trail was a lot of fun. It was everything the mountain biking community said it would be - flowy, great descents and very technical.

Look at this downhill section! Not very easy.

Views from the highest point on the trail.

Since I don't have great mountain biking skills I decided to go easy on the technical downhill sections like the one you saw above. On the descent, right after the Methuselah Trail forked off into the Fir Trail I hit a sandy stretch. It was here I tore my Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). I was in pain for about 10 minutes. Post accident, we had to climb (walk) 2 miles up to Skyline Blvd. Fun!

Trail Map

(No prizes for guessing where the accident happened!)

So what happened?

While descending, (without warning of course) I hit a sandy stretch. I was clipping at about 15-18 MPH. Here, the bike became unstable. The instability was made worse by the fact that I had pumped way too much air on my front and rear tires. 25/30 (Front/Rear) PSI would have been ideal, but I had it at about 35/45 PSI. But this alone wasn't enough to cause the accident.
Since the bike became unstable I hit both the brakes. I hit the front brake harder than the rear: 70-30 maybe. This caused the bike to get even more unstable and the bike began to "fishtail". If the rear wheel skids while braking force is also being applied to the front, the rear of the bike will tend to swing past the front, since the front is applying a greater decelerating force than the rear. Once the rear tire starts to skid, it can move sideways as easily as forward.
Now, I very foolishly and instinctively stuck my right leg out. The bike was fishtailing and moving outwards (clockwise). I had my right leg sticking out stationary, to absorb all that "fishtailing" momentum. *BOOM* Torn ACL. No bruises. No cuts. If I hadn't stuck my right leg out the bike would've continued fishtailing, I might have even eased off on the braking and at worst I would've fallen on my side with bruises and scratches, a far better option! But of course hindsight is 20/20!

The very benign looking "sandy stretch"

(You can see skid marks if you look closely)

The bike post accident

The Damages:

Trauma on the medial side of the Tibia (shin bone).

Swelling. Can't avoid it.

The Posterior Cruciate Ligament (PCL), nice black band. My PCL was unaffected.

The completely severed Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). Cloudy mess. No black band to be seen.

Longitudinal tear of the Medial Meniscus.

What I did wrong:

I hit the front brake a whole lot more than the rear brake. Why? I think this had to do with instincts. I've done most of my biking in India. In India, bikes, much like the United Kingdom, have the rear brakes on the left and front brakes on the right (unlike bikes in the United States, where the rear brake is on the right). So come moment of crisis, I instinctively slammed the left brake (Front) much more than the right brake (Rear). If this happened once, I know this can happen again, so I've asked my local bike shop, to swap the positions of my brakes, to make them UK style. I think this is a good idea.
I shouldn't have filled up the tires with excessive pressure. More pressure means less traction and less traction means poorer grip. An ideal front/rear pressure would've been 30/25 PSI.

Gearing up for surgery:

I'm 26 44 days out since injury. I'm gearing up to get my ACL reconstructed (Update: 11/2/2011). Anyone who has done this knows there are numerous choices (Update: My choice: Achilles heel Allograft). I won't get into them here, but if you have landed on this page, you might be interested in my survey. I decided to tap into the wisdom of the crowds and build a little survey to gather data from people who've reconstructed their ACLs. You can check it out here:

http://poppedmyacl.appspot.com

Post Injury Exercise:

I'm an endurance, cardio junkie. I started working my knee a week after the injury. My equipment of choice: A stationary bicycle and an "arm" cycle (both with a lot of resistance).

I started exercising on 9/26 (a whole week after the injury) but I only started keeping record from 9/28. Update 1: You can see my progress below. I'd like to think I've got my right quadricep ready for surgery.

Biking (Life Fitness 95Re Recumbent Bike):

Arm Cycle:

Check out my ACL survey here:

http://poppedmyacl.appspot.com

Russian Ridge

2011-08-28T14:02:00.000-07:00

Today we mountain biked around the Russian Ridge open preserve. We followed the recipe at Bay Area Rides. This was an easy ride.

Views from Borel Hill. Cloud all over the South Bay/Santa Clara valley.

Other views

Beware of rattle snakes

I gashed my leg. Dumb move. Mountain biking boo-boo.

Bacon Burger at 5 Guys.

Russian Ridge (gps)

Borel Hill (gps)

Going up Borel Hill to see if the south bay was still covered by clouds. (It was, but just not like it was at 9:30AM)

Biking down the Chimborazo with ProBici

2011-06-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

ProBici is a fantastic mountain biking tour operator. If you are in Ecuador, drive down to Riobamba because, you absolutely must to bike down the Chimborazo. The things you'll see on the drive up:

Bull fighting bulls.

The pan american highway.

You'll drive past an indigenous community. You'll also bike through this community. You won't find a gift shop here.

Ecuador has the *CUTEST* puppies. You'll find puppies everywhere.

And lamas (Though these lamas were seen on the way down)

A very nicely done, Checkpoint #1. We are now inside the Chimborazo National Park.

You'll climb up to the upper refuge (5000m).

Tomb stones. Men who've died climbing.

The Whymper Needles.

Once you've done climbing to 5000 meters, you hike back down to the lower refuge at 4800 meters. Here, you begin biking. You make many stops along the way. You get a nice looking bike.

An inviting dirt path that starts off looking like this:

And might then start looking like this:

The black rock. You'll use the black rock as a reference point as you bike. The Incas had a sentinel to warn of military attacks here. More importantly it had the mineral water spring. It still provides fresh water 24 hours a day.

Delicious carbonated water. It must be drunk.

[From an email Galo sent to me] The Inca Barracks before being an Inca place is believed to have been a ceremonial and religious place for the pre-Inca natives where they offered sacrifices to Chimborazo, like llamas, food, alcohol and even human sacrifices. This is what some historians write, but unfortunately our history starts only with the Spanish conquest, because before the Spaniards nothing was left written, our history before them was transmitted orally or has been put together by archeologists and anthropologists.

During the Inca conquest of this land, because of its very strategic location –below I explain what I mean by “strategic”– that place served first as a temporary Inca army base, thus its name in Spanish is “Cuartel de los Incas” as written in the wooden sign existing there at the moment, which is translated into English as “Inca Military Barracks or Inca Military Base”. Later when the Inca warriors moved away from there and the Inca rule started to develop it became a resting place for travelers, and a place where the famous Inca mailmen, the Chasquis, transmitted their messages to other mailmen-messengers. After, when the Incas were trying to consolidate their conquest of this land –which they never did because of the Spanish arrival– this place served for collecting and storing the royal harvests.

By examining some of the old walls covered over hundreds of years by tough grasses, you can tell some of this walls are from Inca times because they were built using a mortar common to Inca constructions. I have read in some books that this place had some underground Inca constructions as well. The Incas in their language, the Quichua language, called these places Tambo. In Ecuador we have plenty of places that in the past served as old Inca tambos.

[From an email Galo sent to me] The Silver Mine was a place where the indigenous people today say that in the past silver was found after people dug the big hole where they saw fire burning by itself. This they were told by their ancestors. But before the Silver Mine existed, the nearby sanctuary must have existed. The reason for the Silver Mine to exist is this sanctuary, in other words, because this sanctuary existed there, people found the Silver Mine.

In pre-Inca and Inca times, travelers would use natural rocks to commend themselves to the spirits of the mountains called Apu (God in Quichua) in places called Apachita, these places (natural rocks) were sanctuaries where the ancients offered corn, chicha (fermented corn drink) or other goods to these spirits asking them for benevolence and protection in their travels. These sacred places (natural rocks) were common all over the Andes, specially in the coldest, windiest, rainiest and harshest places along traffic ways in the grassy moorland. When the Spaniards came and knew about this pagan spiritual places, they would put crosses on top of them to make them Catholic-Christian.

The silver mine, like the Inca Barracks, is also along the famous first natural access path from the highlands of Ecuador to the coast, therefore, this old sanctuary must have caused travelers and shepherds to burn the abundant grass to build fires for warmth, or to try to clear the ground for farming or to make younger grass re-sprout, becoming younger, fresher feed for grazing animals. When the people burnt this grass, a flame must have appeared and just must have kept burning because maybe a treasure or some metal or mineral was buried, and expelled ammonia or some kind of combustion gas that caused the flame to never extinguish. This permanent fire caused the ancient people to dig and find silver. We have taken mineralogist-tourists to the silver mine and some of the have said there was no silver at the Silver Mine, but others have said there probably was, but not much.

We still haven´t met a person who tells us precisely what happened at the Silver Mine, so it is still a bit mysterious to us. Now, the rock you saw there, is a modern sanctuary, where you can see imbedded in this rock ceramic photos of dead persons, the most famous of which is an old Riobamban bishop who was a very controversial person. He was a bishop for 31 years, during the cold war years, during the land reform years, he was even accused of being a secret communist agent, because he was inciting the indigenous people to invade the old haciendas, to take the land by force, so he was called the “bishop of the Indians” He helped the indigenous people a lot, by selling church land, paintings and other belongings and making projects to help the indigenous people.

This bishop died the 31st of August of 1988 and every 31st of August the indigenous owners of this place –which are the same owners of the Inca Barracks– celebrate Catholic mass at this sanctuary, where you must have seen also a ceramic photo of a Virgin Mary.

You'll even get to see the beautiful El Altar from a distance.

And the summit of mighty Chimborazo.

Man, mountain, mountain bike. The final 10 KM was easy and NOT technical.

I highly recommend ProBici. Galo, the man who runs the show, is quite the pioneer. He is detail oriented, technical and is extremely passionate about biking. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to him. You will not be disappointed. 10/10.

Total biking: 38 kilometers.

Google maps link.

BMW 335d torque curve

2011-03-12T11:42:00.001-08:00

BMW 335d torque curve. I found this in the E90 forum. I wonder where they got it.

416 miles at an average speed of 65.7MPH

2011-02-22T22:10:00.000-08:00

On Feb 21, 2011, I drove from Irvine, CA to Mountain View, CA. There were no fuel stops. 416 miles. 6hours 37 minutes. 31.3MPG, average speed of 65.7MPH. I hit heavy traffic while getting out of Los Angeles, CA on the 405.

Maintaining over 65MPH door-to-door was challenging (but a LOT of fun). I wasn't hypermiling. My goal was to maintain a high average speed. I don't know how some people claim to maintain average speeds of 75MPH when they cut through Los Angeles? Do they count these stats door-to-door or do they choose to suffer from amnesia and ignore the stretches with heavy traffic? Or maybe I don't know what I am talking about. Perhaps they start their journey early in the morning or late in the evening? Maybe. I haven't done this enough, so I don't know!

At Laguna Beach, CA.

(click for high res)

Stats from fuelly.com

Powered by Diesel!

2011-02-02T22:03:00.000-08:00

So I sold this:

And bought this:

That is a 2011 BMW 335d. "d" for Diesel. "d" for 425 lb-ft of torque"d".

On December 14, 2010 I blogged about the 335d.

- 2011 BMW 335d
- Black Sapphire Metallic
- Oyster Black Leather
- Premium Package: Digital compass mirror, BMW Assist with Bluetooth, Lumbar support, Auto-dimming interior and exterior mirrors, Universal garage-door opener
- Sports Package: 18" Light alloy Double-spoke wheels style 195-with performance run-flat tires, Shadowline exterior trim, Sport seats, Spots Suspension, Sports leather steering wheel with paddle shifters
- Navigation
- Steptronic Transmission
- Heated Fronted Seats
- Xenon Headlights
- iPod
- Sirrus Satellite Radio

It's official. I'm a diesel driver now.

Signed.

Hareesh "Diesel Driver" Nagarajan

UPDATE 1: BMW's 335d Super Bowl 45 Commercial (Feb 6, 2011)

BMW 335d versus BMW 335i and the price premium

2010-12-14T10:53:00.000-08:00

I've been intrigued by the BMW 335d. It runs on diesel. It has terrific low end torque: 425 foot-pounds of torque generated at 1,750 revolutions per minute. In addition, the 335d has a much higher mileage. Read some glowing reviews of the 335d here [washingtonpost] and here [BMW E90 engine forum]. The base model 335d costs $3050 more than the base model 335i. Also, thanks to distortion causing subsidies, the EPA and <...>, diesel costs more than gasoline in the United States.

So I needed to figure out how many years of driving will it take for the 335d to pay off the price premium?

Scenario #1: If you drive 10,000 miles a year, the price of gasoline is $3, the price of diesel is $3.15, the 335i's mileage is 20mpg and the 335d's mileage is 30mpg, then it will take 6.78 years for the 335d to pay off the price difference.

Scenario #2: If you drive 20,000 miles a year, the price of gasoline is $3, the price of diesel is $3.15, the 335i's mileage is 20mpg and the 335d's mileage is 30mpg, then it will take 3.39 years for the 335d to pay off the price difference.

Clearly, the more you drive, the more sense it makes to get the 335d. Another thing to remember is that the 335i suffers from the dreaded High Pressure Fuel Pump issue. The 335d does NOT suffer from this failure mode. Would you get the 335d?

You can play around with the spreadsheet below here. If someone on the interwebs trashes this spreadsheet [I can't quite figure out how anonymous users can play around with the spreadsheet without actually saving it, from within blogger itself], access a read-only copy here.

Now it would be awesome, if I could get the Eco Credit of $3500 (cash + financing at 0.9% APR) which only seems to be available for leasing.

As I plan to spec out the 335d.

PVR Cinemas has a great error message!

2010-11-29T21:12:00.000-08:00

PVR Cinemas has a ~~great~~ terrific error message that pops up right after I key in my credit card and hit submit.

And when I click on OK, I am redirected back to pvrcinemas.com

Questions to the reader:

Did they just bill me? I DON'T KNOW
Did a moron build their website? YES, HELL YES

Job Description: Compiles code into programs ...

2010-11-04T14:55:00.000-07:00

I came across this from a link a friend sent me. Below is the description for "Senior Software Engineer" at Nutrisystem. If you live in the US, and have access to a television chances are that you've seen one or more of their (rather annoying) advertisements. One of the requirements for the job is: "Compiles code into programs and corrects errors detected in compile process". Stunned. I guess junior engineers write the code (without compiling of course) while the senior engineers are responsible for compiling it.

Fascinating!

Falling net compensation and the $200,000 net compensation percentile ...

2010-11-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

Earlier today I stumbled upon the following article. WOW! I then decided to look up the wage statistics from the SSA website. The data that they have begins in 1990. So I decided to look up past recessions. The following were my findings:

In the past 2 recessions 2000/2001 and 1990/1991, net compensation never fell. It was always higher than in previous years. Except in the 2007+ recession when net compensation actually fell. No surprise here, given the gutting recession we've been in.
Income of $200,000 per year is a magic number in the US. Individuals who make more than this are characterized as the rich. So I tried to look up at what percentile does one make $200,000 or more in income per year. In year 1990, an income of $200,000 or more placed you in the 99.80839 percentile bucket. This number has only reduced, meaning more people fall under this bracket these days. This is a good thing (or a bad thing, depending on your point of view).
The inflation rate is ~3% from 1990-2010 then we'd expect net compensation numbers to double roughly every 23 years, which it has.

Tidbits + Death to the DVD + What I don't get from Netflix's 2010 Q3 Earnings

2010-10-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

Read the Q3 2010 Netflix earnings report here:

Netflix has 15,863,000 paid customers and 1 million free customers.
Commentary: The 2000 Census says there are 105 Million households. If we assume that we have the same number of households even today then we can optimistically assume that 10%-15% of these households have Netflix. If the number of households have grown to 120 Million (say), then we have 13% of all households with Netflix. Could move households convert to subscribing to Netflix or have we reached a critical mass? I don't know. But I'd stay bullish :)
Netflix brought in revenues of $553.2 million. Now here is what I don't get: 15,863,000 customers * $8.95/customer/month * 3 months = $425,921,550 or $425.9 million. So how does one explain the $553.2M-$425.9M=$127.3 million in revenue differential? Licensing fees?
Factoid: It costs Netflix $19.81 (1 Free + 2 months = 3 months = of usage to pay off Netflix) to acquire a customer. This is down significantly from the $24.87 (~4 months for pay off) that it cost them in Q2 2010.
Commentary: "Death to the DVD" 66% watched more than 15 minutes of a TV episode or movie in the third quarter of 2010 compared to 41 percent for the same period of 2009 and 61 percent for the second quarter of 2010.

Poor USPS, will no longer be able to draw significant sums of revenue from Netflix.
Bye-bye DVDs. Movie studios are still trying to milk this ca$h cow to death, but delaying Netflix from streaming a movie until 30 days after the DVD is out. I wonder when they will succumb and just let Netflix stream the movie already. But maybe they won't. Maybe they'll only let HULU stream the movie? Who knows. Gotta love fragmentation!

Try refreshing the page?

2010-09-29T22:37:00.000-07:00

My tickets aren't ready (whatever that means). So StubHub had this to say:

Try refreshing the page? You serious? How quaint.

My left knee

2010-09-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

EXAM: Magnetic resonance imaging left knee without contrast

INDICATION: Internal derangement.

COMPARISON: X-rays from 8/18/2010.

TECHNIQUE: Routine sequences were performed through the knee
without intravenous contrast.

FINDINGS: Signal from the bone marrow is within normal limits.
No joint effusion is present. The medial meniscus has a
questionable small radial tear in the mid body junction with the
anterior horn. The lateral meniscus appears intact. The
anterior cruciate ligament, posterior cruciate ligament, extensor
mechanism, medial collateral ligament, iliotibial band, fibular
collateral ligament, and biceps femoris tendon appear intact.
Mild chondromalacia is seen in the patella. Minor bone marrow
edema seen along the medial retinacular insertion onto the
patella.

IMPRESSION:
1. Possible small radial tear involving the junction of the
medial meniscus anterior horn and mid body.

2. Mild patellar chondromalacia.

3. Mild bone marrow edema along the medial retinaculum insertion
onto the patella.
____________________

Idea: Yelp/Local Review Site must let you export noise levels at a restaurant

2010-09-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

Dinner at PF Changs today. Noise level too high. Had an idea.

What if Android/iPhone applications for Yelp or other local review sites let you export the noise levels at the restaurant. With this you can search based on the noise level, just like you do on the price.

What do you think? Like?

manning v. manning

2010-09-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

Today, in the second week of the 2010 NFL season, the Colts take on the Giants. Peyton Manning vs. Eli Manning. Back in September 2006, when the brothers faced off last, the media bid their match up, but in 2010, the media is surprisingly quiet. Has the novelty of these two brothers facing off with each other lost its sheen? Check out the search result trends. The query "manning vs. manning" peaked in 2006, but is not a trending topic in 2010.

Home sales fall! But the sales of homes that are 1Million+ are up!

2010-08-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

While browsing through the National Association of Realtors July 2010 news release, I noticed the following interesting stat. Unaffected by the home tax credit, the sales of homes that are 1 Million USD+ are higher than they were a year before. But across every price range below a million dollars, the sales are lower when compared to a year ago. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone! With startups getting bought out at a record pace (I have no way to confirm this :) in the Bay Area, I can only expect the prices and the sales of homes in the Million + bracket to rise.

iPhone4 FaceTime and lateral inversion!

2010-08-13T21:15:00.000-07:00

Its Friday today, that means a new copy of the Economist is in my mail box. I flip it over and see the advertisement that is on the back. iPhone4 FaceTime. Instantly, I know there is something wrong in the image. Look at the grandfather! He has been laterally inverted! I wonder how this went past the copy writers! Someone will get the boot ...

Comcast rebrands their service; Calls it XFINITY; And raises rates without telling you!

2010-07-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to find a bill from Comcast (high speed internet only) in my inbox. I noticed that they had increased my bill by 3% (nice round figure!).

The fact that they:

Did not tell me that they were raising their prices. [I'm totally OK with price increases, as long as you give me a heads up!]
And that they were not providing any new value add.

irked me. So I decided to chat with their representative online. And here are the highlights!

Christian: Let me share to you a feature, comcast gives free movies on www.fancast.com
hareesh: why has comcast increased my bill?
Christian: Hareesh comcast is making sure customers get the best service they deserved so as new technologies are up on the market then we avail it for you, with such changes price increase becomes a part of it.
Christian: Is there anything else I can help you with today? I'll be glad to assist you further.
hareesh: wait a second; you have increased my bill because of a new technology; and comcast didn't even tell me about it? comcast increased it by 3% and they say it is for a new technology? to me it just looks like a brand change! now i know your hands are tied christian!

Now, let us look at Comcast's Q4 2009 (02/2010) Earnings Transcripts:

As Brian mentioned, now that we're almost complete with repositioning ourselves technically we're repositioning ourselves to the consumer. Therefore, we're launching Xfinity on February 12^th in 11 markets. This is a major rebranding effort for Comcast Cable. Xfinity gives the customer more choices, more convenience, more control over their entertainment, information, and communication choices, in more innovative ways and we're really excited to introduce the Xfinity brand to our customers.

So there you have it folks. Comcast re-brands their products. Calls them XFinity. And what do they do next? Raise prices of course! No value add. No shiny new packaging. Love Comcast! Next, utility companies should re-brand the electricity that they provide and raise their prices! :)

Update 1: On March 11, 2010, Scott McNulty a Comcast employee says the following on the Comcast blog:

"Nope, there won't be any Xfinity specific cost increases."

Famous last words :)

Update 2: Comcast's customer service says this:

Hareesh's Golf Stats: Half 2 2009 versus Half 1 of 2010

2010-07-14T12:12:00.000-07:00

Introduction: I started playing golf in the back half of 2009. The data to the right compares my performance for the first half of 2010 with the back half of 2009.
Driver usage: I started using (destroying?) the driver regularly starting April 2010 and things weren't the same again. This can be seen (not in the screen shot) in the precipitous drop in my par 5 average (7.38 in March, 6.5 in April, ..., 6.33 in June)
Lots of improvement: I par 1 in 10 holes in 2010 and bogey 1 in 4 holes. The percentage of "Other" has reduced significantly. I also got my first birdie earlier this year.
Putts/hole: Has reduced from 2.67 to 2.46. A saving of nearly 4 strokes for every round of 18! Like every hacker, I must concentrate on my short game but driving the ball is so much more fun (and manly ;)
HDCP: My Handicap index has not decreased as much as I'd like because I haven't played as many rounds of 18 in 2010 as I did in 2009 (I play a lot more rounds of 9). I am playing very close to 100 of late and it is only a matter of time before I consistently break 100 (or so I'd like to think!)
Warning: I have not recorded every piece of data for every round. For instance, I tracked my driving distance with a Golf GPS in only 1 round so far. But nevertheless, the scores are 100% accurate and account for everything.

IRS, Income Taxes and the H&R Block F42010 Earnings

2010-06-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

Question to the reader: With strong lobbying from Intuit, H&R and the like, will the US Congress ever pass legislation to make the IRS send out pre-filled tax returns?

I read the transcripts from H&R Blocks earnings call last night. Here are the highlights from the call:

... unemployment level of nearly 10%, for many in our core client base, unemployment was in the 15% to 30% range.
We prepared 20.1 million U.S. tax returns this season, down about 4% from a year ago.
We estimate that the total industry shift from assisted to DIY was approximately 1 million returns this year.
In fact, the assisted category currently represents 61% of total IRS filings compared to 39% for do-it-yourself. These are the exact same percentages that they were back in 2002.
... we’ve validated that retails clients remain relatively price [for tax filing] inelastic and that price reductions will not result in immediate and significant client growth. In the Q&A, one of H&R blocks executives says this "... this probably won’t come as too much of a shock that the lower income level folks tend to be more price sensitive around tax prep pricing than higher income levels."
Our retail tax group is our biggest income contributor and continues to be our bread and butter and it’s not going away anytime soon.
On Electronic/Digital returns: Because when we see that clients are using our digital products, as their life gets more complicated and they own a house and they have kids, they then need more help preparing their taxes and want to see a tax specialist. When they are using our digital product and make that switch, they use our retail tax offices at two to three times the rates that people that don’t use our digital products come into our tax offices. So essentially, digital looks like it could be a very attractive feeder channel for younger clientele with simpler returns to do their returns when they are young, but as their life gets more complicated, but they’ve learnt to like our product and trust our brand, when they go to switch to a tax specialist, they are far more likely to pick one at H&R Block.

How I migrated my very small social network away from ning.com

2010-06-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

(the opinions lists here are mine, and mine alone and do not reflect those of my employer) In late September 2009 I started a small social network (http://www.pravaas.org) for a social good on ning.com.

Why did I choose ning?

I didn't find any viable FREE alternative.
I didn't have the time to code the backend by myself.

My experience with ning was a horrible one (they are stuck in the stone age):

They force you to render horrible banner ads on your website, which make your social network look like a spam site.
They force visitors to register for this thing called "Ning ID". They won't let you sign in with your Google/Yahoo/Twitter/Facebook IDs. This stinks! In my analysis, numerous users were turned away because they needed to register with yet another service.
They will not let you export your user list and data.
Their editor to key in text was horribly dated! To make text bold, you actually needed to write HTML code.
They charge you $5 for a redirection fee if you wish to host the social network on your domain.
They make it very difficult (= lots of time must be expended) for you to customize your social network.

The last straw was when they decided to go pay only in May 2010. No way was I going to pay them. Now I was stuck. I could either code up a forum style service on App Engine or I would have to use a viable alternative. But there was none! I found a few startups that dealt with embeddable widgets which would support a forum style discussion, but they too had wierd pricing models. And what if they went belly up? No way! Not again! I then investigated Google Wave. Google Wave was easy to embed on my website, but I figured Wave would take a little time getting used to. Especially for folks trying to post on the network. And then I finally discovered Google Groups. I learned they had added new features to embed the group on a website. I had hit gold. Google Groups met my needs.

Users will no longer need to created a Ning ID, they can simply sign in with their Google Accounts to post.
Every post made on the forum is searchable, yay!
Hosting is provided by Google.
I wrote a small Google App Engine application to host pravaas.org. FREE.
Redirection is FREE.
Since the amount of data that I had was very very tiny, I migrated the data manually.
I invited most of the users who signed up for the social network on Ning onto the new system, by simply sending them an email.

Visit: http://www.pravaas.org

BYE BYE NING!

Screen shots of the network hosted on ning.com:

Screen shots from the current minimal port version 0.01:

My maternal and paternal lines ...

2010-06-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

Results from a recent 23andme.com test.

Cancer "yield" in the State of New York

2010-05-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

The State of NY has made cancer data available. Read the NYTimes article here. (hat tip: aaker). The data is here. I decided to use that data, import it into a spreadsheet and then compute (very simply) deaths/cases (expressed as a percentage) for men and women separately. What I have below is not very useful for the following reasons:

All of us have to die some day. So simply taking the deaths/cases isn't very useful. What we actually need to see is, what percentage of people go on to live for 5 years, 10 years, ... post diagnosis. I think of "deaths/cases" as a "yield" in a sense. A "steady state".
Also, you might have an individual diagnosed with Cancer X, which then metasises to organ Y and the individual dies of Y; I'm not sure how the State of NY reports this.

But the overall findings are pretty clear. Most of us know pancreatic cancer is a death wish and it is. So is the cancer of esophagus, etc.

A momentary lapse of reason on May 6, 2010

2010-05-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

VTI is a Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF that tracks the S&P500 rather closely (but not exactly; but that is not the point). Check out what happened between 11:45AM and Noon PST on the 6th of May 2010. What a ridiculously good time to have bought some VTI. But would it have actually been possible to buy VTI from your retail broker? I don't know. The market had a momentary lapse of reason. A trigger of stop orders getting hit turning into market orders, causing a cascading sell off? My other hunch is that it affected NYSE more than NASDAQ. The tracking error was not as pronounced on ETFs that track indices on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

So, what caused this? I don't know. Party like it is 1987, you know, with the portfolio insurance? I don't know. The pink line is the index. The "Candle sticks" is VTI. Enjoy!

Barely anyone clicks on the links that Megan Calhoun of Twitter Moms tweets!

2010-04-14T22:53:00.000-07:00

I simply cannot understand why no one has done due diligence on Twitter link click through rates. I guess I will have to speak up now. Why is it that people think that click throughs for twitter links are high? Just because someone has 1 Million followers does not mean these followers actually go on to click these links. In fact my analysis shows that very tiny fraction of users actually go on to click these links.

Take the following article [LATimes] for instance:

Megan Calhoun, the 38-year-old mother of two from Ross, Calif., who created TwitterMoms to help fellow mommy bloggers connect with brands and earn some extra cash, said she was stunned she could make as much as $1,500 a pop to plug products on Twitter.
"I couldn't believe that someone would pay me that much just to tweet once," Calhoun said. "That's totally amazing for 140 characters."

Does this make any sense? No! This does not make any sense!

Have a look at Megan's Twitter CTRs. That is, for the links that Megan tweets, how many clicks does she get? I built http://www.whoclicksmylinks.info to answer exactly this question, and here is what it reports for Megan

http://www.whoclicksmylinks.info/u/twittermoms

Click it. You will be surprised!

She barely gets any clicks. 37 clicks for one link, 55 for another. This is a tiny, tiny fraction of her 360,000-odd followers. So is someone still going to pay her $1500 to target, at best 100 clicks? $15/click?

report for twittermoms
recent tweets with links 27
clicks 5,831
followers 360,215
37 (0.01%) Share 10 Tips on Managing & Organizing Your Family & you Could Win a $50 Target GiftCard. Enter by 11:59pm PST 4/15/10 http://bit.ly/bGqFWs (11 hrs ago)
55 (0.02%) Check out this great Playground Workout for Moms video by @HollyRigsby (Fit Yummy Mummy) http://bit.ly/bnjIMu (1 days ago)
7 (0.00%) @Mommieto1 You can find out how to participate and RSVP at http://bit.ly/aI0R3n #tmwc (1 days ago)
38 (0.01%) Thanks @parentsmagazine for sharing the TM Blog of the Week on Facebook! http://bit.ly/cemg7t @reworkingparent - Moms leave your comments! (1 days ago)
102 (0.03%) Share 10 Tips on Managing and Organizing Your Family and you could Win a $50 Target Gift Card http://bit.ly/dhvXfz (1 days ago)
25 (0.01%) Flair Media & Zestra thank all the TwitterMoms! Check out this nice video they made us! http://bit.ly/drzXyO Click on 1st Video on Wall. (5 days ago)
29 (0.01%) Thought you'd enjoy this MVorganics offer: Buy organic face oil & get sunscreen sampler free. Code sunscreen @ checkout http://bit.ly/c3btSY (5 days ago)
1,087 (0.30%) @JenSinger @AlphaMom Just added the Today Show piece to the TwitterMoms home page... http://bit.ly/4l9Hn9 (5 days ago)

Check out the click throughs of other celebrities:

http://www.whoclicksmylinks.info/celebrities

You'll find that the click throughs that these celebrities see is a very tiny fraction of their followers.

Out of Quota in Google AppEngine

2010-03-31T02:23:00.000-07:00

Aww snap! My application (http://www.tweetandbeat.com) has hit its 1GB datastore limit. Time to bulkdownload all my data and start a cron job to delete all the old stuff.

A break down of the data that is stored. Blowup ~5.

Rapid prototyping + being a guest on GSBGEN 358

2010-03-09T22:16:00.000-08:00

On March 8, 2010 I was invited by Jennifer Aaker to be a guest (among ~20 others) for the final presentations of GSBGEN 358: The Power of Social Technology (PoST). For fun I decided to spend 45 minutes making a presentation on rapid prototyping (this presentation was made so that I could articulate my ideas concisely; and no I did not have to present it; QED :)

Check out the presentation below (< 1 minute)

MC lays down the hammer

2010-02-24T14:53:00.000-08:00

Earlier today I stumbled on the following article as a part of building my whoclicksmylinks.info service:http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/02/23/mc-lays-down-the-hammer/

In there I saw the following quote:

... And the final panelist, rap star MC Hammer, retweeted comments from the audience to his 1.8 million Twitter followers throughout Monday’s hour-long lecture on social technology ...

MCHammer retweeting a tweet to his 1.8 million followers might come across as something that is super awesome, but a past look at his click through rate is very revealing:

http://www.whoclicksmylinks.info/u/MCHammer

Results: Only 0.02% of all his followers (read that again. 0.02% of his 1.8 million followers = 360 people) or an average of around ~500 people (optimistic number; the real numbers are lower as can be seen in the report above) click his links. If we assume a highly optimistic factor of 100 times that amount of people reading his tweets we get ~50,000 people reading his tweets. 50,000 is a subsantial number, but only a tiny fraction of the "1.8 million twitter followers"

Moral of the story: The twitter link click throughs for most of these celebrities with hundreds of thousands of followers is tiny at best.

Feature request for vanguard.com

2010-02-16T16:05:00.000-08:00

Vanguard.com is where I invest my money. Naturally I have a number of feature requests for them. At the top of the list is the following.

Every paycheck money is deposited into a Vanguard fund
I've setup multiple weekly automated investments where money moves out of one vanguard fund into another automatically.
On occasions I need to move money out of a fund when I write a check or use the web UI to move money to my bank.

Now each time one of these events happen, I get a confirmation, which looks much like this:

As you'd expect I never ever read any of these confirmations. So here is my feature request:

In the subject, provide a short summary of what happened in the transaction instead of simply saying "View your transaction confirmation", which is useless. I'm more interested in knowing if the transaction resulted in a net outflow, or a net inflow. I couldn't care less if it was an exchange from one fund to another. Keeping track of net outflows are most interesting to me.

So Vanguard! Help me find the signal. Kill the noise, so I'll actually pay attention.

Is the NFL a single entity?

2010-02-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

I'm no legal junkie. I can barely write a single coherent paragraph. But this case, American Needle Inc. v. NFL case which is currently in the US Supreme Court docket has me intrigued.

The question presented: Whether an agreement of the 32 teams of the National Football League not to compete with each other or with a jointly selected monopoly licensee in the licensing of their individually owned intellectual property is immune from scrutiny under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, notwithstanding that the teams are independently owned and controlled for-profit businesses that do compete, and are capable of competing, with each other in numerous ways, including in the licensing and marketing of their respective intellectual property?

Facts of the Case: American Needle Inc. filed suit in an Illinois federal district court against the National Football League ("NFL") and Reebok International Ltd. alleging that the teams' exclusive licensing agreement with Reebok violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. American Needle argued that because individual NFL teams separately own their team logos and trademarks, their collective agreement to authorize NFL Properties to award the exclusive headwear license to Reebok, was in fact a conspiracy to restrict other vendors' ability to obtain licenses for the teams' intellectual property. The district court disagreed and dismissed the case.

On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed. It held that NFL teams were a single entity for purposes of antitrust laws, and thus could not have conspired to restrict trade. Therefore, the court stated that the teams were free to license their intellectual property on an exclusive basis.

Core question: The case raises a core question of antitrust law: what kind of joint ventures, perhaps including pro sports leagues, are immune to the Sherman Act because they may qualify as “single entities”? To American Needle, it is all about whether it is going to be allowed to compete with Reebok International, Ltd.., to sell league-sanctioned sports apparel, like hats.

Two very well read lawyer acquaintances had this to say on the case:

The American Needle case has been watched with anticipation by IP specialists. Unfortunately, I couldn't answer with any authority, because I think looking up / studying the applicable law on this would require a lot of time, and I don't have the training yet in IP to know really where to begin. I could do it, but I think Mark Z. may have a more fulfilling answer for you.

Alas, I do not know much about the "single entity rule", but from a very broad (and naive) perspective I suppose that the idea behind the rule is to give judges the flexibility to decline to apply traditional anti-trust law in situations where they have some public policy justification to permit an openly collusive and non-competitive group of independent actors to continue their long-standing practices.

My golf statistics from 2009

2010-01-29T11:35:00.000-08:00

I started playing golf in late August 2009. Here are my statistics from year 1.

I played a total of 270 holes at 4 different courses, with 11 pars and 43 bogeys.
I par 4% of all holes. Put another way, I make a par every 25 holes. Yuck!
I bogey 16% of all holes. Put another way, I bogey, on average around 3 holes every round.

2010, will be different.

If Professor Bernanke is replaced, a computer program must replace him

2010-01-24T15:34:00.000-08:00

I don't know much about economics or about policy decisions such as who must run the Federal Reserve. But if I must make a pick for who must replace Professor Ben Bernanke, I must suggest that it be a:

Computer program.

much like the one Milton Friedman suggests which would grow money supply by a constant factor and one that changes interest rates (inflation targetting) either based on:

The Taylor Rule
or one that is based on nominal gdp like the one suggested by Professor Sumner.

But the key difference to my suggestion would be, once this computer program is in place, all modifications to the program (read: code reviews) must go through a very lengthy and time consuming review process; much like the lengthy review that needs to happen to amend the constitution. This way, no one person or persons can make massive, changes overnight.

A primer on NFL Betting

2010-01-24T15:17:00.000-08:00

Date & Time	Favorite	Spread	Underdog	Total	Money Odds
1/24 3:00 ET	At Indianapolis	-7.5	NY Jets	39.5	-$350 +$290

This was the line spread before the AFC 2009 match between the Jets and the Colts. I asked, what does the pay off structure for a line spread such as this look like? From shreyes: There are multiple types of bets you can make with that one line.

You can bet just based on the spread. So in this case, if you pick Indianapolis, and they win by >7.5 points, then you make the standard 10:11 odds. So if you bet $11.00, you win $10.00. If you bet on the Jets $1.10, and then win or lose by < 7.5 points, then you win $1.00.

You can also bet just on the Total, or some people call if Over/Under. If you bet $1.10 on Over, and 40+ points are scored total, regardless of who wins, you win $1.00. If you bet $1.10 on Under, you win $1.00.

You can also bet based on the moneyline: These are in terms of a $100 bet or winnings.
These are usually phrase as Indianapolis (-350) vs Jets (+290). If you bet on the Colts to win, you need to pay $350 to win $100. So if you bet $1 on the Colts to win, you win $0.28. If you bet on the Jets to win, you need to pay $100 to win $290. So if you bet $1 on the Jets to win, you win $2.90.

Most places will let you bet on a combination of these different bets, so you can bet on the "Colts against the spread and the Over", and they might give you some other winnings if you win both of them (I think the standard is 13:5. So if you bet $5 on "Colts + Over", you win $13, but if either of those fail, you lose the $5)

"EMT is false. Here is the proof." I don't believe this of course ...

2010-01-19T16:39:00.000-08:00

Veteran active investor, colleague and programmer Yaccov says:

Efficient Market Theory claims that markets are efficient, because people are rational, and the collective actions of rational people is efficient. This is clearly false (you can read the "Black Swan" for some explanations, and almost any behavioral economics book about the mechanism that make us irrational.) The main problem is that people are irrational, and make mistakes. The following story is about such a mistake:

http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/19/markets/thebuzz/index.htm?section=money_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmoney_topstories+(Top+Stories)&utm_content=Google+Reader
Of course, for now it is a zero sum game - some people make money, some lose money. The main problem is that the underlying asset worth 0. The company issued few statements explaining that it is unlikely they will worth anything. So, this is a prime example of an inefficient market. Now, think how crazy a small worthless stock is, and consider how likely the price of other stocks is based on collective wisdom and data.

To which I reply:

Nice story. Irrational exuberance! I'm not sure how this is any different from investing inepets.com in giddy 1999 :) Except that then epets never actually spelled out that they had no plan for making any money.

Anyway, of course, over the short term the markets are not efficient and some actors are not rational. People could've been buying MTLQQ with the (rational) hope that a greater fool will follow them, by buying the stock (which is inherently worth zero) and bidding the price up, hoping they can then cash out right before the stock tanks.

pants on the ground

2010-01-13T22:18:00.000-08:00

"Pants on the ground" is a trending topic on twitter right now.

A search on google news says, this is related to an American Idol audition that premiered on the TV tonight Jan 13, 2010. So I raced to godaddy.com to buy the domain, but clearly it was too late to buy pantsontheground.com. By looking up whois on pantsontheground.com, I see Patrick Lynn from North Hollywood, CA bought the domain on November 6, 2009, probably when the audition took place? Patrick might be the entrepreneurial kind.

http://who.godaddy.com/WhoIs.aspx?domain=pantsontheground.com&prog_id=godaddy

Patrick Lynn
11524 Moorpark St. #9
North Hollywood, California 91602
United States

But, wait, the Atlanta American Idol audition was on June 18, 2009

But the domain was bought on November 6, 2009, nearly 5 months after the audition!

So who is Patrick Lynn? Is Patrick an insider? Does Patrick work for Fox? Is Patrick a producer? Of course he is! He is a "senior producer" on the American Idol show. For a second I thought an entrepreneurial American Idol contestant from the Atlanta auditions had bought the domain ... No such luck.

Update 1: On Jan/13/2010, someone seems to have bought pantsonTHAground.com.

Update 2: duuglas says "I wonder how Fox execs feel about producers buying domains to potentially profit from their show?"; Exactly, why isn't the domain registered with Fox?

Update 3: Seems like others have picked up this story, like them; but clearly I was first :)

Long term investment in India

2010-01-11T21:07:00.000-08:00

Tianyu recently posted a question on our internal investment-club@ mailing list. He asked "I would like to start a discussion on long term investment strategies for China and India." So here was my response:

India is hot shit, the growth there is palpable. But don't expect to visit an India city and expect to see cranes and construction like you'd see in China (see "c" below). Expect to see growth elsewhere: in mobile phones, in the middle class that wants to travel, spend and live comfortably.

And just like with any country the biggest hindrance to growth in India are the following:

The government and its short sighted anti growth policy. Very restrictive caps on Foreign Direct Investment and archaic labor laws, that might prevent a construction company from just buying a crane to do a job. Instead the company needs to hire workers who carry bricks on their heads.
Excessive welfare state, India is a heavily socialistic country where villages seem to get a lions share of attention and subsidies. The cities have been ignored for too long.
Land acquisition is very, very, very difficult. Unlike China the Indian Government very rarely uses Eminent Domain to aquire land.
Tax reform. A very complex array of trade taxes instead of 1 uniform tax like the VAT.

All in all, India is too damn hot and I don't say it because I'm Indian. I don't invest in India. I simply buy VWO.

twitter spam

2010-01-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

yardi et. al. have a paper titled "detecting spam in a twitter network". it is an interesting paper. but i'm rather surprised that they haven't made even one mention of an exceedingly useful signal that i've used in my twitter mashups to remove spam.

that signal is the tweeter's client! is the tweeter's client an "API", or "twitterfeed", etc.

Predictions that you can profit from in 2010 ;)

2010-01-05T22:34:00.000-08:00

Making predictions is a fool's errand, but I like to do them anyway. Here are my 2 predictions for 2010.

Volatility. The VIX (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=^vix) is currently 19.35, I predict sometime this year it will be perhaps 50% higher than where it is now ~ 29. I recommend buying the VIX now and selling it when it hits ~29. (There are caveats to this trade, as you can't just go out and "buy" the VIX, unfortunately).
Democrats will control the house of representatives after the 2010 congressional elections. You can this intrade contract at 65 and sell it when it hits 85 netting a 30% profit (http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/common/c_cd.jsp?conDetailID=639645&z=1262729585179)

Recreational programming with Google AppEngine over a vacation

2009-12-16T17:32:00.000-08:00

The backend engineer is dead. If you want to build a webservice quickly, it is so easy and so cheap to do. Don't ever pay for hosting. Not in the age of Google AppEngine. Over my 3 week vacation I've built 3 services, all of which are hosted on Google AppEngine. The 3 websites have cost me under $20 to build, in total.

project #1: "better than cake"

http://ps3btc.com

hosted on app engine. total cost $7.57
the following link is wildly popular http://ps3btc.com/n
over 10,000 unique visitors and growing: http://www.twimgr.com/Ps3btccomBreaks10000UniqueVisitorsInUnderAMonth

project #2: "twimgr.com: embed your tweet inside the URL of the image that you upload"

http://twimgr.com

hosted on app engine. total cost to godaddy $7.17
upload images and post them on twitter
simply login with your google account

project #3: "linky binky"

http://linkybinky.com

hosted on app engine. total cost to godaddy $1.17
a marketing, targeting system on twitter that I have not yet released to the public.

Hyperinflation and the collapse of the US Dollar

2009-12-15T11:36:00.000-08:00

I'm tired of hearing people tell me that we'll have hyper inflation and the US dollar is going to collapse. Sure in a 100 years all of this might happen. But I don't see it happening in the next 5 years. So to me this is bunk. If there is one thing all modern reserve banks know by now is how to keep inflation in check. It is pretty simple stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_rule

Also having inflation is a happy problem to have, given the situation we are in. That means the recovery is in and the recovery is strong.

The Buttonwood column in the economist newspaper summarized this nicely:

Low interest rates seem like good news for investors. But why are central banks holding rates so low? Either they are correct in assessing that the economy is still fragile, in which case corporate profits will ultimately disappoint. Or they are underestimating the strength of the recovery, in which case inflationary pressures will start to emerge (and bond yields will rise sharply).

If you look at the spread between the 5, 10 and 20 year treasury with their inflation indexed counterparts:

http://www.treas.gov/offices/domestic-finance/debt-management/interest-rate/real_yield.shtml

http://www.treas.gov/offices/domestic-finance/debt-management/interest-rate/yield.shtml

You'll see that the market is expecting the following inflation numbers:

5 year: 1.84%

10 year: 2.19%

20 year: 2.40%

Pretty harmless stuff.

Of course expectation of inflation could rise very rapidly, just like volatility in the markets.

A moron runs IT at UTI Mutual Fund and AXIS Bank

2009-12-08T02:03:00.000-08:00

In early 2008, after plenty of running around, I opened a bank account at AXIS bank, to move some token dollars in exchange for Indian Rupees since, having a non resident bank account in India is never a bad thing. Exactly a year ago, in the depths of the market panic, I invested a tiny amount into a UTI Nifty 50 Index fund (this is the "best" fund I found after some research; no entry load; "low" expense ratio by Indian standards; etc; etc;) by transferring money from my bank account with AXIS bank to UTI Mutual Fund. The experience was not pleasant but it worked. Yesterday, I decided to invest in a short term gilt fund (Indian government securities) again at UTI MF and I decide to transfer a token amount. And this is the error message I saw:

And today, I see this on the UTI MF website (as I plan to go ahead with my transaction). Note the "null" in the screenshot below. UTI MF routes to BillDesk.com to make the transfer happen.

Does a moron run IT at UTI Mutual Fund (and less so) at AXIS Bank? Do these two firms even have CTO? Make me an offer (I cannot refuse) AXIS or UTI MF as CTO of your firm and I'll revolutionize Bank IT in India.

Update #1: I contacted the bank, showed them the screenshots above and said "WTF?" and they quickly proceeded to "enable" my account. Whatever that means. Now I decided to go ahead and retry the purchase.
Here are some of the screen shots I was presented with:

2 passwords and 1 pin later they want me to re-enter my password again, you know, just to be safe.

I tried keying in the wrong password. The website immediately told me I had 3 attempts left. Now, I went ahead and keyed in the correct password. A breezy 3 minutes later I was presented with this delightful screen.

The transaction still hasn't gone through. What a delight!

Update #2: Success!

Update 3: Feb 2, 2010: So for the last 2 weeks I've been trying to move money from my axis bank account but none of the transactions have gone through.

Using My Tracks on a Golf Course (Sunnyvale Golf Course 11/8/2009)

2009-11-09T01:08:00.000-08:00

I turned on the "My Tracks" application on my HTC "My Touch" Android phone and left it turned on in my golf bag. Ideally I should have turned on the GPS, and noted my lat/long every time I hit a shot, and not have left it turned on for the four and a half hours like I did. I uploaded the KML file into Google Earth and analyzed some of my shots. Inconsistent, mis-hits and a fear of water.When I did not mis hit, I hit 190-210 yards rather consistently with my 4 iron. I do need to learn to hit my driver and hybrid though.

"My Tracks" does not save time spent at a given location; I wish it did.Google Earth supports time. I'm going to do more interesting stuff with my data. Maybe someone has mapped out Sunnyvale Golf Course already just like they have for the Golden Gate Disc Course.

View Sunnyvale Golf Course in a larger map

Horrific front 9 (shudder), with 6 of the 9 "Triple Bogey and beyond" coming in the front 9. An improvement of 5 strokes in the back nine.

A list of my undergraduate projects

2009-11-03T17:49:00.000-08:00

When I applied to Graduate Programs in 2003, I prepared a beautiful LateX document listing all my projects. Check it out.

Sunnyvale Golf Course

2009-10-17T23:08:00.000-07:00

[October, 17 2009] My first time at the Sunnyvale Golf Course, I drove well, in distance, beating everyone in my foursome with my 4 iron. Many weird mishits. Here is the score card. Pretty shitty.

[On October 31, 2009], I played again at this course. I hit a 114. Just 1 stroke better than the last time. Compared to October 17, 2009 I improved in 6 holes. I was worse off in 5 holes. I was unchanged in 7 holes. I need to watch out in holes 8, 10 and 18.

10/14/2009, 10:11 AM, Dow Jones flirting with 10,000

2009-10-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

The DJIA Index hasn't yet hit 10,000 as can be seen below.

But the ETF that tracks the same index "DIA" or the Diamond, hits 10,000, by trading at a premium.

The market is going crazy, with this flirtatious behavior! And ETF investors are especially euphoric!

Theory versus Experimental

2009-10-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

After a heavy lunch at Cafe Bigtable, Dave asked Shreyes and myself the following question: "Assume we had a uniform random number generator that generated uniform random values between 0 and 1. On average what would be the difference between any two random numbers that are returned by this random number generator between 0 and 1?"

Shreyes, the prolific MIT new college grad (at Google) had the following solution in no time:

"Basically the key is when you add/subtract random variables, you have to convolve their probability distributions. This follows intuition. If you add 2 random numbers from 0-1, you'd expect the mean to be 1, but 1 is more likely than 0, because you can get 1 many different ways (.1 + .9, .2 + .8, etc). So the distribution of a+b is like a triangle, not uniform. If you were to keep summing more RVs, the triangle would eventually reach the normal curve."

Shreyes Solution

But since I am incapable of solving this problem with calculus (given the number of years I've gone through life without using calculus) I decided to solve this problem (2 days later on the following Monday; I didn't of course spend my weekend thinking of this problem; The weekend was of course spent playing golf :) using a simple python program :

#!/usr/bin/python2.4

total = 0.0
iterations = 0

TOTAL = 100
for right in range(TOTAL, -1, -1):
  for left in range(0, TOTAL + 1, 1):
   total += abs(right - left)
   iterations += 1

print 'avg. delta: %f' % (total/iterations)/100.0

avg. delta: 0.336633663366

What this program does is, enumerate all possible deltas between 0 and 100 and then computes the average. It then divides that average by 100, since we need to scale out solution back to a decimal between 0 and 1, to finally get ~ 1/3.

Shreyes ended this exchange with:

"You can see now why the theoretical physicists never got along with the experimental physicists in school. (though unlike in this case, the theorists win the race to find the answer by orders of magnitude)."

1 month later, at Deep Cliff

2009-10-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

I mentioned my round on August 31, 2009 here. Here is how I've improved, somewhat, 1 month later.

On 10/3/2009, we played the back 9 before the front 9. I started off with a par on hole 10. I ended horribly. Holes 4, 5, 6 and 7 were eminently forgettable and left a bad taste in my mouth. *spit*

1,751 impressions and $0.68 in income, after getting linked off marginalrevolution.com!

2009-09-29T13:33:00.000-07:00

I usually don't blog often, when I do blog, I like to analyze something new that hasn't been analyzed before, and if I have data all the better.

At 3:31 Pacific Time on 9/26/2009 marginalrevoluton.com decided to link to my article. Exactly 3 hours before they posted my link, I setup Google Analytics on this blog. About 36 hours later, I setup Google Adsense.

And here are the results:

marginalrevolution.com single handedly contributed to 56% of the 3000 odd impressions. Quite powerful. Would this have been the case, if my article wasn't as engaging? I don't know. Was it the weekend effect? I don't know.

Here is the income that I made running Google Adsense.

Unfortunately, I only ran Adsense for one third of the 3000 odd impression, resulting in net income of $0.68. If I were to extrapolate it linearly, perhaps, this article, would have brought in $1.50.

I have quite a few things I can pick for $1.50.

Twitter trending topic spam

2009-09-21T21:15:00.000-07:00

Payton Manning wins the game for the colts. Payton Manning is a trending topic. Look at these creative spammers inserting their crud into a Trending Topic. How original!

Twitter! Do something about tweet spam!

As of November 5, 2009, Twitter seems to have fixed this problem.

Why does Tennis have fewer unique winners than Golf?

2009-09-16T16:40:00.000-07:00

So I was on the treadmill at work yesterday watching a re-run of the Tennis USOpen match between Federer and Del Potro and I wondered why we see so much more consistency in the winners in Tennis than in the winners in Golf. So I downloaded the data of past winners from usopen.com [Golf] and from usopen.org [Tennis]. I then wrote a simple python script to do the following (since I can't grok Excel) let me explain it with an example.

Consider USOpen Tennis winners:

2009, Juan Martin Del Potro
2008, Roger Federer
2007, Roger Federer
2006, Roger Federer
2005, Roger Federer
2004, Roger Federer
2003, Andy Roddick
2002, Pete Sampras
...

The script then does the following:

It considers the first year (2009), for which we have 1 winner, so the 'unique ness' percentage is unique winners divided by total years = 1/1 = 1.00 (=100% uniqueness)
It then considers years 2009 and 2008, for which we have 2 unique winners and 2 years. So unique ness percentage is 2/2 = 1.0 (=100% uniqueness)
It then considers years 2009, 2008 and 2007, for which we have 2 unique winners and 3 years, for a unique ness percentage of 2/3 = 0.66 (=66% uniqueness)
So on and so forth ...

We chart the rolling uniqueness percentages for 60 years and here are the charts:

USOpen Golf

USOpen Tennis

Observations:

It is quite clear from the trends above that at winners in USOpen Tennis tend to win multiple times once they've won once, pushing down the total number of unique winners. Check the following spreadsheet USOpen Golf/Tennis winning trends at 10 year groups.
We see that at the 10 year mark USOpen Golf has 7 unique winners but Tennis has only 6. At the 20 year mark, USOpen Golf has 14 unique winners (=70%) but Tennis only has 9 (=45%)! Golf hovers around the ~70% mark, but Tennis hovers around the ~50% mark! And these trends hold through for not just 10 years or 20 years, but 60 years! See the spreadsheet above.

Assumptions:

We consider only the last 60 years, ignoring world wars and other periods in time when these games weren't as competetive as they are now.
Also, in the last 30 years or so, it has been easy for anyone in the world to travel to play this game. Not having money should probably not prevent talent from being discovered.
We assume technology improvements in both sports in the time periods, have been the same.
We assume improvements to drug technology (= steroids! :) in both sports have been the same
We do the analysis only for men's {golf, tennis}. Perhaps, there is much higher turnover in the women's form of the game.

What could the reason? Possible explanations

One of the reasons is variability. USOpen Tennis is the same court (material) year in and year out. Changes do happen, but they happen slowly over decades. But in USOpen Golf, we have a different golf course, every year. And the placement of the hole is a lot different every time. Also, the weather plays a much bigger role in Golf than Tennis. Perhaps I could discount this as Manu says in the comments, to grab data from the Augusta Masters which is held in the same course year in, year out.
In the comment below Mike says the following, "Tennis is a match play tournament vs golf stroke play. Stroke play severely penalizes 1 bad swing or 1 bad bounce."
Also match play (Tennis) is much more forgiving and when you are seeded highly you get easy opponents so it favours the winners from the get go. Not so much with stroke play (Golf). So stroke play is more challenging and determines the best player at the given time.

Contact me / Disclaimer:

What could be the reason? Perhaps I should test this hypothesis with other Tennis grand slams and maybe Swimming, Cycling, Badminton and other individual sports. Email me at hareesh.nagarajan@gmail.com, or just add a comment. If you want the data that I yanked and the script that I wrote, mail me. Also, I wrote this document up very quickly, as I procrastinated writing my annual performance review.

There are GREAT comments below. Do read!

Appendix

Winners from the last 60 years with their win count.

USOpen Golf

Angel Cabrera 1
Arnold Palmer 1
Cary Middlecoff 1
Corey Pavin 1
David Graham 1
Dick Mayer 1
Ed Furgol 1
Fuzzy Zoeller 1
Gary Player 1
Gene Littler 1
Geoff Ogilvy 1
Hubert Green 1
Jack Fleck 1
Jerry Pate 1
Jim Furyk 1
John Miller 1
Ken Venturi 1
Larry Nelson 1
Lou Graham 1
Lucas Glover 1
Michael Campbell 1
Orville Moody 1
Raymond Floyd 1
Scott Simpson 1
Steve Jones 1
Tom Kite 1
Tom Watson 1
Tommy Bolt 1
Tony Jacklin 1
Andy North 2
Bill Casper Jr. 2
Curtis Strange 2
Ernie Els 2
Julius Boros 2
Lee Janzen 2
Lee Trevino 2
Payne Stewart 2
Retief Goosen 2
Ben Hogan 3
Hale Irwin 3
Tiger Woods 3
Jack Nicklaus 4

USOpen Tennis

Ashley J. Cooper 1
E. Victor Seixas, Jr. 1
Juan Martin Del Potro 1
Malcolm J. Anderson 1
Andy Roddick 1
Arthur Ashe 1
Arthur Larsen 1
Boris Becker 1
Fred Stolle 1
Guillermo Vilas 1
Ilie Nastase 1
Lleyton Hewitt 1
Manuel Orantes 1
Manuel Santana 1
Marat Safin 1
Mats Wilander 1
Rafael Osuna 1
Rod Laver 1
Rodney Laver 1
Stan Smith 1
Andre Agassi 2
Frank Sedgman 2
John Newcombe 2
Ken Rosewall 2
Neale Fraser 2
Patrick Rafter 2
Roy Emerson 2
Stefan Edberg 2
Tony Trabert 2
Ivan Lendl 3
John McEnroe 4
Jimmy Connors 5
Pete Sampras 5
Roger Federer 5

What happened to WholeFoods twitter followers after the WSJ Oped?

2009-09-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

Ever since John Mackey, the CEO of WholeFoods, published his thoughts on Obama's health care plans in a WSJ oped, the 7 day growth rate of twitter followers of @WholeFoods (via http://twitterholic.com/) fell from 6146/day (8/4 - 8/10) to 4718/day (8/12 - 8/18) . A drop in the growth rate of a whopping 22% 7 days after his article was published. Correlation or coincidence?

What does the future hold? Trends?

2009-08-31T11:20:00.000-07:00

So Dave, Anand and I had this discussion on ideas for the future. Here are my contributions to the thread:

i have the following overarching observations, but i can in no way predict what the future holds. it is a futile endeavor me thinks.
the data center, information arms race that we are in => build apps, try and get users to use it for free, ?, profit! => is much like the railways expansion of the 1850s where companies went on a railway building spree; build the tracks now, ?, profit! the real money, growth and improvements in productivity came with the transformational aspects of railways, and not in building the tracks themselves. i don't know what the tranformational aspects of the data race is going to be.
the world is aging. women are having kids later in life, which means they will end up having fewer kids. rapid increases in life expectancy are over, because infant mortality has dropped off to very low numbers. so the easy part with improving life expectancy is over. life expectancy, in my opinion, will cap and probably grow at a much lower rate. so in the future (2040), with more old people in the mix we will have economies in general taking fewer risks. also, old people don't lead to increases in productivity. productivity is all that really matters which leads to improvements in standards of living. the welfare state that we have now in most rich countries, will break down by 2050. people retiring at 60 and collecting a comfy pension (when they go on to live until 85) is over. work until you drop, that will be the new mantra.

And then a followup, where I clarify what I really mean:

It is not the physical aspect of building data centers that I'm referring to, when I mention "land grab". What I really am referring to is the current drive to grab the user's attention to use a product in return for a sliver of the user's data. So, the quest to grab and store a facet of a user's data is the land grab of this decade (2005+), akin to the railroad building binge of the 1850s. A grab, that does not seem to show any clear way of making money of.

Today, the premium for a user's data is very high, since few companies have the might to grab this data, make sense of it and somehow massage it into a form that can be monetized. Later, in the next decade (2010+), as the flight to grab a facet of a user's data becomes the norm, the premium to pay for users data will fall, as lots of market participants will have a tiny, one dimensional view of the user (What music does the user listen to? What book did he last buy? Is he looking to buy a house?).

The transformational aspects of what market participants (not just the ones that hoarder this data) will do with user data is unknown to me. All I know now, is high tech companies now, are in this undying quest to grab user data (Use my social network! Listen to songs from my website) without much of an idea of how they are going to make killer uses of it.

The round of golf at Deep Cliff

2009-08-31T11:19:00.000-07:00

So yesterday Ryan and I played a round at a local golf course yesterday. We were paired up with this older couple to make a 4 ball. The older gentleman really made my round hell with his irritating ways. These qualities embody him:

He was jabbering non-stop
He took more mulligans than I'd like to count
He'd take practice shots
He wouldn't keep his mouth shut as I've said in 1.
He'd move the ball, picking and choosing a better lie as he seems fit.
He would suffer from selective amnesia when he mentioned his score. I knew he had gone 3 over but he'd count it as a bogey. And he'd mention to me, for some reason.
He was micromanaging his partner non-stop (surprisingly she was in top form; I don't think she minded it one bit)
And finally, worse of all, at hole 10 he started advising me. And with it, went my game.

John Chambers' Playbook

2009-07-24T21:33:00.000-07:00

John Chambers on surviving:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203517304574305901375020562.html

The official rules:

The first element of his playbook, he says, is to “be realistic,” that is, to gauge how many challenges are created by the economy, and how many are self-inflicted.
The second is to “assess your situation,” which means to ask how long a downturn will last and how deep it will be. “And,” Mr. Chambers says, “it will usually be longer than you think.”
His third element is to “get ready for the upturn,”
And the fourth is to “get closer to your customers.”

The unwritten rules, for good times and bad.

The first is “watch the stock market”: “When the [dot-com bubble] crash came in 2001, the stock market had been going down for a year, but we hadn’t really noticed. I watch it a lot more closely now,” he says, an especially good idea after Cisco replaced General Motors on the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 9 of this year.
The second is to “always have more cash, not less.” “We didn’t have enough cash going into 2001,” Mr. Chambers says. “This time we went into it with $34 billion. That wasn’t accidental.”
Finally, Mr. Chambers’s third unwritten rule is to “be aggressive.” Coming out of the 2001 crash, Cisco embarked on one of the most spectacular acquisition programs in high tech history—more than 130 companies to date—in the process expanding its product lines from computer networking routers to local area networking switching, voice-over IP (the technology that allows Internet telephony), and home networks.

TOI the number 1 online news site: Really?

2009-07-13T13:46:00.001-07:00

So I came across the following link on an internal mailing list:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS-India-TOI-Online-is-worlds-No1-newspaper-website/articleshow/4769920.cms

What a joke.

Trust Times of India (TOI) to report that they are the #1 news paper in the world, without any freaking reference to the COMSCORE report. So I went to comscore.com and tried to search for "TOI", "newspaper" , "India" and didn't find a single reference to this repor. Perhaps it isn't public? Unlikely.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases?year=225&keywords=india&location=0&searchBtn=Search

Also, you'd think this news such as this would be so newsworthy that other websites/blogs pick it up. But no!

And finally, what is comscore using for search on their website? It doesn't look like Google's CSE or the Google Search Appliance. Search on their web site is legendary slow and reminds me '98, when 1 pentium II Box would power some search engines.

To bonus or not to bonus?

2009-07-10T09:42:00.000-07:00

One of my friends at work, brought up this article that he fiercely beliefs in. I decided to spend a few minutes writing up an email disagreeing with the premise.

For Best Results, Forget the Bonus
By Alfie Kohn
http://www.alfiekohn.org/managing/fbrftb.htm

So here's why I do not agree with it (copied mostly from the email):

If you are given a target, a goal that can be clearly measured, for e.g.: reach x-million users on day y or generate $10M in profits trading international bonds at your trading desk this quarter -- then you will be given a bonus. This is the cherry. The cherry is dangled at you, because the goal is well defined. Now, if you hit the goal, you get to eat the cherry.
If on the other hand, the goal isn't clearly defined, hell the goal is at best nebulous and a cherry is dangled at you. Now you think you've hit the goal, but the boss who dangled the cherry thinks otherwise, then you need to brace yourself for a world of hurt.

So in the article what "perform well" mean? If 16 years from now, you tell your son you'll buy him a 2025 Ford Mustang if he scores 1500+/1600 on his SATs. If he achieves the score you give him the keys to the car, if you don't you'll give him the keys to a 1999 Honda Civic. OTOH, if you tell him, you'll get him a 2025 Ford Mustang if he scores "well" on the SATs. He manages a 1280, which he thinks is "well enough". Now he expects the keys to the Mustang, but you, the boss, of course think otherwise.

SUMMARY:

Clear, well defined goals => Cherry dangled => Goal Achieved => Cherry given >>> ALL IS GOOD <<<
Nebulous goals => Cherry dangled => The party working on the goal thinks nebulous goal has been achieved => Counter party thinks otherwise >>> ALL IS NOT GOOD <<<

Toxic Equity Trading Order Flow On Wall Street

2009-07-04T14:24:00.000-07:00

I read this paper on Toxic Equity Trading Order Flow On Wall Street:

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/toxic-equity-trading-order-flow-on-wall.html

And I don't quite find it compelling enough as a primary driver of increased trading. But it is a possibility when you cannot disprove it. Here in lies my reasoning:

The author of the paper makes an argument that it is these rebates from the equity bourses which is driving up trading volume, but he never tries to cross reference it with NYSE/NASDAQ balance sheets to see how much they paid out in "Liquidity Acquisition costs" so to speak. So I looked up NYSE's Q4 2008 Earning transcript and if I'm reading this correctly, only a net of $5M/month was doled out in these rebates => $15M/quarter. That translates to 30Billion trades for a year at best. The NYSE itself sees about 4Billion trades a day on average. So do the math. The paper is interesting, but their reasoning is not compelling as I'd have liked (unless of course I've made a mistake, which is a possibility).

http://seekingalpha.com/article/119420-nyse-euronext-q4-2008-earnings-call-transcript?page=-1&find=rebate

"""
The way to think about it, every time a DMM or an SLP is one side of the trade obviously we’re paying them a pretty substantially higher rebate then we’re collecting on the take side. Back of the envelope if we keep the spread the same at eight but we raise the take from eight to 18 so that we’re getting paid 18 on the removing liquidity side when we’re paying out the kind of rebates we talked about I think it narrows that spread of the inversion. Our guess is it’s probably something like $5 million a month is the bottom line impact would be.
"""

Ultra Shot ETFs: Arithmetic v/s Geometric Return

2009-06-27T19:02:00.000-07:00

Here is what I had to say about Ultra Shot ETFs at an Internal mailing list:

If market is down or up x% for the year, we are referring to the geometric return which in turn is the *product* of daily returns. Now, this is NOT EQUAL to the *sum* of the daily returns a.k.a. the arithmetic return. Some people get confused by this, even though the prospectus of these ETFs is quite clear. For e.g.:The prospectus of one of them says clearly: "Ultra ProShares are designed to correspond to a multiple of the *daily* performance of an underlying index."

So if you look at these ultra ETFs for a long duration, they'll do funny things. For e.g.: If an index which starts at 100, is down 5% 20 days in a row, the index ends at: 100 * (0.95**20) = 35.84. For a (geometric) return of -64% for the period and an arithmetic return of -100%. The 2X ultra long is down: 100 * (0.9**20) = 12.15 for a (geometric) return of -88% but an arithmetic return of -200%!

So in a uni-directionally trending (up or down) markets, these ultra ETFs make sense and they make great sense for daily trading, but as a long term hold, how they behave over years (for buy and hold investors) their returns are at best, unknown.

Why do I index?

2009-06-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

Active investors -- those who go in and out of the stock market based on various reasons such as fundamentals, charts, macro economic conditions -- bridge the information asymmetry gap which in turn leads to price discovery. Some of these reasons in hind sight seem to be mistakes but at the time of the trade are not. Now, as an indexer I'm doing to little to foster price discovery in some sense because I'd buy the index if the index is up and I'd buy the index if the index is down. **But** here in lies my reasoning: I do so only because I know not everyone is an indexer **and** because I know I'd beat 80% of the actively managed funds out there. Now, we would not have a ponzi scheme that you describe since the information that everyone is indexing has become public so a "rational" indexer like myself would switch to being an active investor, because now he has better odds at beating other investors (Let us say that at this point index funds beat only 20% of actively managed funds out there). The reason I feel I'd be sent to the poor house is it might take me a long time to realize this, given my general lethargy and I'd be stuck with some sub par returns, because I don't have much experience with active investing, even though the odds of doing well here in this scenario are a lot better :)

Real median household income

2009-02-18T21:11:00.000-08:00

Here is an excellent document published by the Census. Look at page 13: In 1990s real (= inflation adjusted) median household income actually went up. Look at page 38, for an actual year by year break down.

So if someone makes a claim that median household incomes have fallen since the 90s, tell them two things:

No body cares about nominal incomes. Real, inflation adjusted incomes is what matters.
They are wrong. Medial household incomes actually went up.

Surely from 1999 and 2000 we saw real median incomes of $50,641 and $50,557 and that fell to $49,455 in 2001 and $48,878, thanks to the recession. The same happened during the 1990 recession, the income 1990 fell compared to 1989. For 2007 it stands at $50,233 and for 2008 when the numbers are out, it should be lower thanks to another gutting recession.

The take away is median incomes have grown by 0.6% year on year from 1980 to 2007 and during recessions median incomes fall, just like tax receipts fall.

statistical quote from "The trillion dollar meltdown"

2009-02-18T21:04:00.000-08:00

So a colleague at work presented the following paragraph from a book we've both read:

One of the most striking developments over the past quarter century is the dramatic shift of taxable incomes toward the wealthiest people. Between 1980 and 2005, the top tenth of the population's share of all taxable income went from 34 percent to 46 percent, an increase of about a third.

The changing distribution within the top 10 percent, however, is whats truly remarkable. The unlucky folks in the 90th to the 95th tiles actually lost a little ground, while those in the

I 95th to 99th gained a little. Overall, however, income shares in the 90th to 99th percentile population were basically flat (24 percent in 1980 and 26 percent in 2005). 'Almost all the top one-tenth's share gains, in other words. to the top 1 percent, or the top "centile," who doubled their share of national cash income from 9 percent to 19 percent.

Even within the top centile, however, the distribution of gains was radically skewed. Nearly 60 percent of it went to the top tenth of 1 percent of the population, and more than a fourth of it to the top one-hundredth of 1 percent of the population. Overall, the top tenth of 1 percent more than tripled their share of cash income to about 9 percent, while the top one-hundredth of 1 percent, or fewer than 15,000 taxpayers.quadrupled their share to 3.6 percent of all taxable income. Among those 15,000, the average tax return reported $26 million of income in 2005, while the take for the entire group was $384 billion.

Here is my reply: I liked THE TRILLION DOLLAR MELTDOWN (which was a good book btw, until the author statrted his spiel on inequality. groan!) Have a look at the PDF i sent you earlier. across every single category, white, black, asian, hispanic, median incomes went up from 1980 to 2005. Sure the rich are getting richer and there is always a new entrant in the Forbes 500 list -- A constant change of guard.

To top it all that sentence is worded deftly: he says "all taxable income" went to 46% of people. he says it like it is a bad thing as if our tax code isn't progressive enough. You squeeze tax payers more and the more taxable income will fall. The more you squeeze your cash cow, at one point the cow will break and will stop giving. Unfortunately a progressive tax code isn't a gift that can keep on giving. We wish it were, but it isn't.

Enough rambling. check this out. cold. hard. stats. because it is hard to mess with stats. I looked up 2006 tax returns from the IRS (Link)

15,712 tax returns were over 10Million+. They contributed to 10.7% of 2006 tax receipts. On average they paid $5.7M in taxes. Thats right. These 15000 odd people that he excoriates, contributed to nearly 11% of all income tax receipts for 2006 and on average each of them paid about 5.7 million dollars in taxes. This is just federal taxes mind you. It does not include state, social security and medicare.
24,303 returns were between 5M-10M. They paid 1.6M in taxes on average and contributed to 4.6% of tax receipts.
10M returns were for incomes between 100k-200k and 3M returns were for incomes between 200k-500k. These 2 groups, the "middle class", pays the lions share of taxes.

Sources of demand and supply in an economy

2009-01-11T01:14:00.000-08:00

Hal Varian, sketched something that is obvious to most students of economics in his op-ed piece in the WSJ.

There are 4 sources of demand in a modern economy:

Consumer consumption
Production fueled by exports
Government spending
Investment

And there are 2 sources of supply:

Imports
Production fueled by domestic production

Deflationary bias of gold standard!

2008-11-24T20:39:00.001-08:00

The WWII (interwar) gold standard suffered from the fundamental problem of asymmetry which resulted in deflation. Here you have some countries with a deficit gold supply and others with surplus. When a country receives an inflow of gold, they should in turn increase money supply or inflate. Deficit countries should reduce money supply to prevent losing whatever little reserves they have. But surplus countries on the other hand, had no incentive to say "Let me inflate my currency, to handle this gold inflow to keep the money supply" in check.

The Bank of England, had no incentive to hold gold. It was a "for business" enterprise and was interested in gaining interest from the fractional money it created backed by the gold. So when gold came in, it made sure it kept its mandatory reserves, but any more, they'd inflate, keeping money supply in check with gold. But France and the US had no incentive to avoid accumulation of gold! So now, when you have 1 country that is inflationary (England) and other countries which aren't (US and France), what happens? Gold moves out of the inflationary system (England), into the non-inflationary system (US, France). And France was especially singular. It received all this gold and didn't inflate money supply!

And since many countries had fractional banking based on gold. For x of gold that went out, the money supply didn't just reduce by x! There was no 1 is to 1 correspondence. But, with a reserve requirement of 40% (for example). That is for gold/money_supply = 0.4 when gold went out, money supply shrunk by 2.5, causing crazy deflation!

Mortage interest tax deduction

2008-11-24T20:34:00.000-08:00

I am increasingly convinced that getting a tax deduction for mortgage interest was one of the factors in increased house ownership and in turn rising house prices over the past 20 years. Mortgage interest can be deducted from U.S. federal taxes, provided they meet some basic requirements.