2011-10-09

DEATH redacted redacted

HEY G I KNOW IT'S BEEN OVER TEN DAYS YOU ARE DEAD NOW.


deeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaad

2011-09-19

DEATH Redacted

It has come to my attention that under the challenge rules G had ten days from the start of reading the post to solve the problem, and that given G's lack of internet communication he probably has yet to read the post.

G has not won DEATH.

2011-09-01

A Challenge to G

I come back from my job in Chile and find out he made only two posts since I left. I'm sure G has an excuse like "but I had so much wooooooork", but I had a similar workload as him and spent all my free time hiking around and shit and still managed to throw up 30+ posts. Obviously G needs a little motivation. Therefore I send a CHALLENGE!

Often when I was flying around I'd be stuck in a seat I didn't like, a middle seat or an aisle seat. Now I know that there are a lot of people who'd prefer aisle seats just as I prefer window ones. The way the system is set up you can't switch with them. You can pick a different available seat if the plane isn't completely full, but there's no way for two people to use the system to trade seats. This isn't a problem if the two people are friends, or can talk to each other. But how can we arrange trades between strangers? How do I know that the person two rows behind me would gladly switch his window seat for my aisle? As the systems currently work, you can't.

So the CHALLENGE: G, you must work out an adequate system that would ensure that, after all seats are assigned, people can swap seats with strangers. If you succeed, I will owe you a pie of my choosing. If you fail, DEATH.

By reading this, G, you implicitly agree that you will accept this CHALLENGE. You have 10 days.

2011-07-02

Google+

A lot of people that I know have been invited to Google+ already. It seems to be the new toy that everyone wants to try... but not quite switch to completely. Just take a look at your Google+ feed, now look back at your Facebook feed, notice the difference? Sure, we can say Google+ is days old and only has a limited release, so it's not a fair comparison. But we see the same story when we look at Google Buzz vs. Twitter; Google Video vs. YouTube. (To be fair, Google now owns YouTube, but that's more of a technical detail...) The specialized sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube have what is called a network externality that gives them an edge in competition with similar sites.

What is a network externality? It is the value-added to the site from having more consumers. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube all host user-generated content, so more users means more content, and more importantly, more users means a broader audience. When we post statuses like "OMG, suuuuuper plastered yesterday lololol, btw. still looking for my sweater and pants" we are effectively communicating with the people we know, and expect the friends we have on the site to give us some kind of response. In this way, the very fact that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have a larger user-base is a huge advantage, because each user adds to the value of these sites with their content, and a large user-base means people will want to post on these sites because more of their friends can read what they want to communicate.

What does network externality imply about the competition between different sites? During the initial phase, when none of the sites that are trying to compete to be the social networking site, or the micro-blogging site, or the video-sharing site have a large following, a lot is up to chance which site takes off the fastest, but in the long run, the site that takes off the fastest usually snowballs in growth, eventually drawing all the audience from its competitors as well. This is because users of the less popular sites realize more of their friends are on the most popular site, and will move to better communicate with their friends. In the long run, we will see one site dominating the market, as we do for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 

Of course new sites that have similar purposes can rise up and overtake an existing popular site. The textbook example is MySpace and Facebook. I believe Facebook was able to get a head start in spite of the presence of MySpace because they fundamentally serve a different segment of the market. MySpace is more for teens who wanted to make flashy user pages, whereas Facebook started off targeting college students and emphasized privacy. One can argue that Facebook has more features and is overall just "better" than MySpace, but the important thing about the network externality is that it undermines the classical perfect competition in that the better product objectively may not really be better for users, because of course, the users also add value to the site. I personally think Facebook is better than MySpace, but I do not think it was based on superior quality alone that Facebook has overtaken MySpace. The initial differentiation of the two products is important to draw the first wave of users. 

Now that Google+ is trying to compete with Facebook, I do not see much differentiation between the two sites. They seem to be essentially the same product, so I will be very surprised if Google+ does suddenly explode in popularity and become the next social networking site. At best, Google+ will end up being like Google Buzz, a less popular version of Twitter that comes with our GMail accounts. 

One thing that Google+ does have going for it though, it that it comes bundled with Google accounts, which a lot of people already have because of GMail. This somewhat undermines the network externality that Facebook holds because it makes the cost of making a new account nearly zero, and gives Google+ a large initial user-base of everyone who owns a GMail account. However, owning an account is not the key to network externality. The key value added is content and having an audience. But these two are sort of self-fulfilling in that only if I expect people to check Google+, will I post content there, and only if I post content there, will more people check Google+. Ultimately, a lot rests on people's initial beliefs about the future of Google+. If people have faith that more people will read it, it has a surviving chance against Facebook. The ultimate outcome, we shall see.

Notice that for online products that do not have network effects, Google has managed to replace major competitors. We all use Google search, GMail, sometimes even Google Docs or Calendar. The thing is, more users of these products do not make these products more valuable, so when Google releases these products, it likely only competes with market leaders only on quality, with the additional edge that Google is able to supply all these functions under one account instead of forcing users to go to separate sources for everything. 

The unifying advantage that Google products have is called economy of scale. It is a rather different phenomenon than network externality, although one can generally understand both to be economic versions of "bigger is better." An economy of scale in classical production theory means less average cost from producing a lot of goods. In the Google case, by consolidating every product into one account, users face a smaller cost of signing up for different accounts, downloading different products, etc. by using Google everything. 

It will be interesting to see whether Google+ can become the so-called next Facebook. In some ways, this will sort of be a battle between network externality and economy of scale. Although to be honest, unless if people actually believe others will use Google+, or plan on using Google+ a lot (will you?) it doesn't stand much of a chance against Facebook. But of course, it's Facebook's market to lose.

Correlation and Causation

Correlation does not necessarily imply causation is probably the first lesson taught in a first course in statistical inference. In the second lesson, we are told that "the point" of statistical inference is to come up with "good" theories that explain the observed correlation. (What constitutes a good theory is the subject deserving of its own post!) A lot of times, we remember the first lesson, but don't really remember the second.

Take a look at newspapers that publish shocking results from studies, like increased ice cream sales linked to increased crime; or children attending a lot of 4th of July parades tend to grow up to be Republicans. These correlations are undoubtedly interesting, so it isn't surprising that the media would use these results as headlines. But in doing so, the most important 90% of the social science has been neglected: the causal mechanism that explains why ice cream sales are related to crime, or what the hell parade attendance have to do with party identification.

A lot of times, I see people disregard these studies as being unbelievable because the media overemphasizes the shocking correlations, so the more important causal mechanism that actually sheds light on the situation becomes second in priority. The readers, painfully aware of the first lesson, probably find it hard to translate the correlation to a real life explanation, so they dismiss the result. This is where people start to contrast "those studies" with reality.

It is true that an unexpected correlation can be the seed to developing a neat theory that explains it, but we should never forget that the causal mechanism is still the most important. I want to know it is warm weather that leads to increases in both ice cream sales and crime (more crime because the weather permits staying outside more). I actually don't see how the parade one works without being super cynical.

2011-06-17

New Blog!

Hey guys!

As some of you may know, I'm spending the summer doing physics research in Chile. For those of you who don't know, I'm spending the summer doing physics research in Chile. The admin knew I'm fond of writing and asked me to keep a record blog of my time. You can find it at http://scienceinsantiago.blogspot.com/. I'll still be updating here; that's just for Chile related affairs. This is still my main place for nonsensical rambling.

2011-06-13

Linux

I spent most of yesterday trying to boot Linux on my netbook. To make things interesting, I formatted my hard drive first. All of my old data gone in a flash. Until I got Linux working I wouldn't have a computer. I'd have to use the public one, the one my brother uses to watch the same 'comedy' videos he has the past five years. This was, of course, A Problem. It remained A Problem over 15 hours and five distros. Eventually I pinned it down to a problem in the power management software and got a netbook remix of Fedora working on the comp. Pretty sure I botched a few things on the way. Such is the price of change.

Of course, my job on this blog is to ramble insanely and occasionally talk about physics, not complain about Linux. My thoughts keep coming back to the erasure. Of course I saved the important things. But a sane person would have made sure Linux actually worked before they torched their system. Or they would have had a backup of the old OS, in case they wanted to go back. Hell, why even do Linux? I don't have a major need for it. I can say I wanted to start anew, but then I should have just wiped and replaced Windows.

My family thought I was crazy. And they were right. What I did was possibly the most irresponsible thing I could have done, short of chucking my computer out a window. I knew all of that going in. I knew, I typed in the commands, that there was a good chance I would never get the computer functioning again. And yet I did it anyway. And I have to keep asking myself why.

Okay, I know why. The thoughts make perfect sense in my head. Mostly I was asking myself how to explain it. There are two factors at work here, both drives that most people would call insane or stupid. First of all, I had to erase my hard drive so that I had the risk of it not working. This is difficult to describe. We have to face the consequences of our premeditated actions. But consequences are fickle and unpredictable. We have no way of knowing what will fizzle out and what will go too far. Repercussions blindside us. Mastering the art of response is kinda like trying to shoot by getting randomly pushed into warzones for five minutes at a time. We have to find a way to train ourselves by manufacturing our own potential crises. We can't ignore it, because we engineered it to be unignorable, and we cannot complain, because we knew it would be our own damned fault. All we can do is respond. That's the reason I erased everything first.

So why Linux? Linux is something I cannot use as well as Windows, something I'm completely unfamiliar with, something that would cause me great difficulty if I switched to it. Why not Linux? Comfort leads to complacency leads to stagnation. Better constantly shift my world very slightly, make myself eternally uncomfortable, than risk that. I've always been a person obsessed with flux. In confusion and chaos we find ourselves.

I have no idea how much sense these reasons make to another person. All I know is that these are massive driving forces for me. Switching to Linux isn't going to revolutionize my life, but it will continue to familiarize me with taking these unpleasant and beneficial actions. I guess you could ask are they really beneficial. Who knows? Maybe making chaos more comfortable will itself lead to stagnation, and ten years down the road I'll find new driving forces to combat that.


*G's job is to actually be insightful.

Mathematical Psychics

Mainstream microeconomics assume the "end" of human behaviour is to make oneself as happy as possible. In economics-speak, this is to say consumers want to maximize utility. Utility is the catch-all term for happiness and/or benefits of any kind. The problem of utility maximization naturally leads to the question: how does one measure utility?

Difficulties arise immediately when we consider how we should define utility operationally, i.e. how do we define it in a way that allows it to be measured? But that leads to further questions of what we mean by measure? The following example highlights some of these difficulties.

A friend of mine recently observed that video games cost around $50 and playtime usually lasts over 20 hours, whereas movies cost around $10 and lasts about 2 hours. The cost of "fun per unit time" for video games would be around $2.50, whereas for movies it is around $5. (We just divide the cost by the hours of fun it is estimated to provide). He asked me, if the cost of fun per hour is higher for movies than for video games, then why do movies sell more than video games?

A quick look at the empirics shows that the observations are accurate at least for aggregate figures. Counting movies as $10 per viewing, there are significantly more movie views than game purchases, comparing the highest grossing films and best-selling video games. Of course, we cannot determine how these figures are aggregated and how they handle issues such as exchange rate of foreign currency and inflation in these quick statistics. A more fundamental issue is that friend's argument focuses on the substitution of movies for video games because one is cheaper in terms of fun per hour, whereas the raw number of sales says nothing about each consumer's decision to purchase one or the other. [1] The problem that I want to focus on, however, is that "fun" as derived from video games and "fun" as derived from movies are different notions altogether. By comparing $2.5 video game fun per hour to $5 movie fun per hour, we are assuming that video game fun and movie fun are on equal footing. For most people, they are not.

Despite the fact that different sources of utility like video games and movies are difficult to compare, they are all lumped into the category of utility. And we begin to see how measuring all the different sources of utility, and most importantly, combining them into a single measurement is a very tricky business. Indeed, economists over the years have struggled to operationalize the concept of utility into a measurable quantity, and consequently, the role that utility plays in consumer theory has evolved over time.

During the late 19th century, economists under the influence of utilitarianism were convinced that utility is an absolute physical quantity that can be measured, i.e., phrases like "video games give Mary 3 units of utility" carry a meaning independent of how many units of utility Mary assigns to other forms of consumption. This idea led to works such as Edgeworth's Mathematical Psychics, [2] which attempt to make rigourous how utility can be measured in an absolute sense.

Of course, no amount of mathematics can rectify the fundamentally problematic approach of assigning absolute significance to numbers that simply do not carry any physical meaning by themselves. Utility is similar to ideas like mass and length in physics, which can be defined easily enough as the amount of matter in an object and the distance between two objects, respectively, but is more subtle to operationalize into a measurable quantity. And similar to the physical counterparts, if one says the length of some object is 3, we do not have any idea how long the object is at all! 3 could be in units of feet, meters, Planck lengths or light-years. As soon as we specify units, however, we immediately have an idea of how long the object is.

How units help us is that we have defined what exactly a meter is in terms of a physical object or occurrence. Historically, a prototype meter stick was kept in storage by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, but to reduce uncertainty, now the meter is fixed relative to the speed of light. Other fundamental quantities like mass and time are similarly either directly defined by some physical standard or is mathematically related to other quantities that are defined by physical standards. Therefore, measurements make sense only inasmuch as they are relative to some established standard.

Later interpretations of utility acknowledge the fact that it is meaningless to speak of x units of utility. Instead the substitution interpretation of utility became the standard. This is an attempt to put preferences of goods relative to each other. Therefore, even though units of video game fun per hour and movie fun per hour do not carry meaning alone, their quotient, video game fun per unit of movie fun does. Economists call this the marginal rate of substitution of video games for movies, which means the minimum number of hours of video game playing a consumer is willing to give up to gain one hour of movie-watching. (the minimum and consumer "willing" requirements together force the consumer to be indifferent before and after this substitution). [3] This is certainly an improvement over measuring absolute utility, for now at least the substitution of goods is observable.

With the solution to one problem, however, arises another. With substitution, we can reasonably say measurements of utility with respect to one consumer is well-defined, as long as the consumer's preferences are "nice". [4] But does substitution provide a well-defined way to compare utility between different consumers, i.e. can we compare one consumer who claims he is willing to give up 1 hour of video games to watch a movie with another consumer who claims she is willing to give up 8 hours for a movie?

I claim that we cannot because the two consumers' values of an hour of movie watching may be inherently different, which is to say the basis with respect to which the two consumers are measuring the value of playing video games may be different, so measurements relative to the two bases cannot be directly compared.

The physics analogy here is say two observers are asked to measure the distance between two points using two different meter sticks. The first meter stick is made slightly longer and the second slightly shorter, so the same physical distance is measured to be longer by the second observer than the first. To each observer, using his/her ruler as the basis of measurement, their measurements are accurate, yet the differences in the meter sticks prevent the two observers' measurements from agreeing.

The fix to the physics case of measuring length is obvious: give everyone a standardized ruler! Unfortunately, this implementation doesn't translate well into economics because the equivalent would be to use a neural-scrambler to set all consumers' values of movies to be exactly equal. Manipulation of preferences to achieve mathematically nice results is really not what economics is about.

Surprisingly, even the physics fix of standardizing the rulers used by the two observers is not enough. One of the consequences of special relativity is that there is no universal rest frame, so there is in fact no physical grounds to believe a single set of measurements should be taken as the absolute standard in physics either! [5] Physicists deal with this problem by exploiting invariant quantities, i.e. quantities that are independent of the observers' state, such as Einstein's postulate that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames. Along with invariant quantities are transformation rules that give a mathematical connection between quantities made by observers in different states. By applying the correct transformation rules, one can in fact compare observations made by observers in two different locations, traveling at different speeds relative to each other, etc.

Economists cannot emulate the physicists' solution. As far as I know, there are simply no invariant quantities that economists can take advantage of. (Setting everyone's value of movies as the same amounts to arbitrarily setting an economic invariant, but then again, the keyword is arbitrarily). Without an invariant, it is not possible to derive transformation laws that connect consumer A's value of a movie with consumer B's value of a movie, and cross-person substitution rates remain painfully incomparable.

This inherent incomparability is usually silently neglected in economic works. For example, every time that the utility functions of individuals are aggregated to derive the social welfare function (i.e. the well-being/utility of the society as a whole) we are assuming that utilities of different people can be added, which would require that utilities be comparable in the first place!

Perhaps the incomparability is just a philosophical nitpick and doesn't really affect the end result of our work? Examples of carelessly comparing measurements made in different reference frames in physics, and the host of paradoxes they lead to, should convince us otherwise. [6] On the other hand, relativistic effects in physics only become apparent in real life when we deal with objects traveling near the speed of light, so for most phenomena on earth, classical mechanics still holds well enough. Perhaps no difficulties arise in economics currently because we are not dealing with situations that approach some yet-unknown limit.

Economics and utility theory have a "can't live with it; can't live without it" relationship. The shaky foundations of utility measurement is one of the main criticisms toward modern economic theory, and economists are always searching for new ways to make the concept of utility or preference more rigourous. Barring some miraculous invariance relation, the current trend in experimental economics and neuroeconomics essentially boils down to the need to find more systematic ways to characterize preferences. Yet, no matter how we look at preferences, economics cannot do away with utility because "the point" of economics is to allocate scarce resources such that utility, happiness, fun (no matter what word you use for the concept) is maximized. Without considering utility, the enterprise of resource allocation, and hence economics, will be for naught.


----
[1] The aggregate statistics merely give the number of video games versus movies sold, but does not shed any insight on the degree of overlap between the video game and movie market. It is possible that there is great overlap between the two markets, suggesting that consumers actually tend to buy both goods together as opposed to choosing one over the other as friend's claim tacitly assumes. Even if the market overlap is small, the fact that both goods bring in decent numbers is sales suggests that there are probably better reasons for the divide in the markets than the substitution effect. For example, it may be that younger generations play more games, and older generations watch more movies.
[2] No joke, I seriously it said Mathematical Physics when I first happened upon the title. 
[3] Below I provide the mathematics behind how utility gives rise to the marginal rate of substitution:
Let x be hours of video game playing and y be hours of movie watching, and U be the utility of the consumer. Assuming a consumer has well-defined utility that is affected by movie watching and video game playing, so the utility U is a function of x and y, i.e., utility is denoted U(x,y). The first-order total differential is
dU = (U/x) dx + (U/y) dy.
Setting dU = 0 and rearranging we get 
- dy / dx = (U/x) / (U/y)
The right-hand side is the quotient of the marginal utilities of video games and watching movies, which is the ratio of the raw units of utility gained from playing an extra hour of video games and from watching an extra hour of movies. (In this context, U takes on real numbers, but should not be interpreted as an existing, acceptable measurement of utility in the sense that the numbers that U take on have a physical meaning. Instead, one should think of U(x,y) as the image of an order-isomorphism U, between the totally ordered set of the consumers' preferences to the real line). We see this is equal to the left-hand side, which is the hours of movies the consumer is willing to forgo (hence the negative sign) for one hour of video game playing -- the left-hand side is certainly a physical quantity. Since we assumed dU = 0, we know this equality holds when the consumer is indifferent before and after the substitution.
[4] By "nice" consumer preferences, we specifically mean preferences that can be cast into a total ordering, i.e. reflexive, antisymmetric, transitive and complete preferences. Of particular note is that these properties force the non-existence of cycles in preferences, e,g. situations where a consumer prefers x to y, y to z, but z to x
[5] Special relativity is covered in almost every introductory mechanics or electricity and magnetism text. Kleppner & Kolenkow's An Introduction to Mechanics, and Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics both offer illuminating discussions of the implications of special relativity on measurement. 
[6] Length contraction, time dilation are good examples. Of particular note is the relativity of simultaneity, which leads to paradoxes that seem to defy our notion of causality if we do not treat it carefully! 

2011-06-01

The Problem of Conceptualism

I have a confession to make, a confession that will probably bar me from theoretical physics forever: I'm a conceptualist. No, not the philosophical kind. Jury's still out on whether universal qualifiers can exist. I'm a physical one. I believe that everything in physics should be understood in terms of physical concepts.

The physical part is important. There are two ways to analyze anything in physics. The first way is with math. If you take the Poynting vector of an oscillating dipole you see that there is energy at infinity. Bam, radiation. But this doesn't tell you why you get radiation. In order to get that you'd have to notice that due to finite propagation time an oscillating dipole creates expanding "kinks" in the electric field. These kinks look like waves. Ergo radiation. This is conceptualizing the problem, recasting it in terms of what the world is actually doing.

Obviously mathematics is important in physics. You can't quantify anything without it, and without quantification you don't know whether your bridge will fall down or explode. What about qualification? Do we need conceptualization? Certainly it helps all physics before 1915 or so. Einstein built special relativity entirely off of gedanken, or conceptualization experiments. Things started getting a little tricky with quantum mechanics, though. It's really goddamned hard to imagine a probability wave, and the uncertainty principle is designed specifically to mess with our heads. Then you get deeper. Cosmology. Particle physics. String theory. The deeper you go the more the qualification becomes math. There is no physical reality happening, just math becoming macroscopics. Do isospin and hypercharge even exist? I have no idea.

I want to believe that conceptualization is still important. Certainly it becomes important in applied physics. If you can't imagine how the physics interacts with your intentions, then you fail as a technologist. I do not know how to rationalize it for pure physics. Surely you can get an understanding of what is going on without caring about it's physicality? But then we're no longer doing physics. We're doing reality math. That does sound pretty cool, but it also seems almost antithetical to the ideas of both reality and math.

There is one possibility to patch it up. We know from special and general relativity that there are things we know are real, but far to complicated for the human mind to comprehend. That's why we represent them entirely mathematically. This bothers me for other reasons that I will not go into now, because it is convention nonetheless. This allows for reality to be happening at the particle level while still requiring that the only qualitative analysis be mathematical. This is probably going to be the way it's going to go.

But what about the skills of conceptualization? Do they simply become useless with the patch? I'd say no, and it's a stance I feel comfortable taking. Conceptualization is simply a manifestation of imagination, and imagination is irrevocably wedded to creativity. And creativity is essential for insight at all levels. Einstein used them all to formulate both relativities. But we're all not Einstein, and we have to show that it also applies to us mere mortals. So let me give an example.

A capacitor is a set of two oppositely charged plates. Obviously they'll attract each other. This gives them potential energy, which for a very long time we've been taught to think of as energy that "balances the checkbook" for conservation. In EM we learned that the energy is in the form of the electric field between them, which carries it's own energy. This was the point where I asked the teacher "so is it field energy or potential energy?" She changed the subject. Later on a friend and I worked out that potential energy was field energy. Any sort of potential energy is actually real energy "trapped" in some kind of field. This has provided a great deal of insight into physics and provided a useful tool for understanding how certain problems interacted with each other. This was a realization that could not have happened without creativity and imagination. Even if you do argue that it could have, you would have to accept that you'd need such creativity to actually do anything with it.

That's my current position on the topic. Creativity in the form of conceptualization may not be necessary to 'get' what's going on in advanced physics, but it's hugely beneficial when you need to create new knowledge and models of reality. It's also necessary to craft the knowledge and models into practical creations for human use. That's why my love of conceptualization keeps me out of theoretical physics. I'd be much much happier doing applied.

2011-05-30

Is Procrastination an Optimizing Behaviour?

Procrastination. We all do it. And we all have those pangs of regret at the wee hours of the morning trying to finish something that we should have been working on a long time ago. Ask just about anyone, they would probably say procrastination is a bad thing. But if it is so bad, why do we do it all the time? The short answer is, we do it because it is the best choice for us to make!

If we consider the work that must be done as dreadful and we would do anything to avoid it, which is to say that work is a cost, then we can think about our decision to do work as a decision about how to pay a cost over time. Procrastination in this case would be to delay paying the cost until as late as possible.

To understand how we make decisions over time, we must first understand what possible choices there are to make, and the possible trade-offs. At any moment, there are two choices: to do work now or to put it off. The trade-offs in either case are clear: on the one hand, we get the work out of the way and forgo leisure at the present; on the other hand, we enjoy leisure now, knowing that we will have to pay the cost eventually.

When faced with the choice of paying the cost now or in the future, for most people it is in fact optimal to pay later. To delay paying the cost is optimal because experiments show that we tend to "discount" the future, in the sense that we tend to place more importance on the present than on the future. As a heuristic example, consider whether you would prefer to receive $200 today or $200 next year. (In the case of doing work, we can consider the choice of delaying work as preferring to enjoy leisure today over leisure in the future).

There are a few theories as to why we discount the future. One reason is simply that we are impatient and do not look very far ahead into the future. Surely, we've all experienced these kinds of moments. For those that demand a rational-choice reason, however, we discount the future because we lack immediate control and perfect foresight over the future, whereas we can manipulate and have close to full knowledge of the present. For example, there is no guarantee that hyperinflation won't hit and $200 will become entirely worthless by this time next year. Also, if you were give $200 today instead, you could do whatever you want with it, including putting it in the bank and getting the $200 (plus interest) back the next year. Therefore, consumption in the future is worth less than consumption today because we cannot access the future immediately and because there is uncertainty over the future.

The above seems to suggest then, that procrastination is in fact optimizing behaviour because at any given moment, we would want to delay doing work as much as possible. Indeed if there was no deadline, it would be optimal to delay work indefinitely (keeping in mind our assumption that this work is only costly and does not bring any benefits when completed).

The problem is that most work have a deadline so we cannot put it off indefinitely. In this case, two contradictory incentives act. Far ahead of the deadline, when we plan how we will do the work, it is optimal to enjoy leisure now and delay work to later. This incentive to delay paying the cost will be present at all times leading up to the deadline. However, the deadline represents a hard limit at which time the entire project must be done, and forces us to work, against our desire to procrastinate. Given that it is optimal to delay as much as we can, and that we are constrained to finish the project on time, the optimal behaviour would in fact be to start the project as late as possible such that we would still expect to finish on time.

The story is a little more complicated than this though. Since finishing the entire project at once can be physically taxing, and usually involves no leisure at all in those few hours, the fact that we generally like to "smooth consume" is actually incentive for some people to pace out their work more evenly. Smooth consumption means we tend to prefer to have a few hours of free time everyday (and perhaps to sleep a decent amount every night) than to have no free time and no sleep one day, and a lot of free time and sleep the next, i.e. we prefer consumption in an evenly paced way. The other complication is expectations. Notice I wrote it would be optimal to start the project as late as possible while still expecting to finish on time. Since our expectations are rarely, if ever, perfect, we often overestimate our abilities and have to ask for extensions or else sacrifice in quality.

The negative consequences of not smoothing consumption of leisure (just think about the sleepy day after the deadline) and incorrect expectations often lead us to think that procrastination is a bad habit, when in reality it is arguably optimal given our preferences of discounting the future. So next time you get the urge to procrastinate, just be sure that you can finish the work under the pressure of a deadline and feel good in the fact that you're just optimizing your leisure consumption.

Or perhaps we just need to take on less projects.

2011-05-26

Air

The air has a taste. We just never realize it. Some air tastes better than others. It's a combination of the smell, I think. A burnt match is better than a dry heat. Water also has a taste. Sometimes memories do too. Emotions? I think. If they can cause pain or pleasure, they can cause taste.

2011-05-23

Names in the Wind

Yesterday I lost my name.

Not the 'H' one. Although to be honest I don't know why I refer to myself as 'H' here. The veil of anonymity isn't opaque when all of our followers are our friends. But we pretend the cloth conceals us, and that game makes me reluctant to share the name I lost. It was an internet moniker, eternally buried in the the Google graveyard. Let's refer to it as "Lia".

I invented Lia when I was twelve. It survived a move, three changes of secondary school, and a particularly horrible Objectivist phase. It even survived the edge of graduation six years after I first named myself. I used it in every single website sans the few I did not want associated with me (looking at you RealSuperPowers). Everybody online called me Lia, not H. Lia was who I was. It was my name. Yesterday an old online friend got back in touch with me. It had been three years. We had both gone to college and lost contact. When he contacted me on Gchat, his first words were 'Hi Lia'.

It was a full fifteen seconds before I remembered who 'Lia' was.

We change. That's an inescapable fact. We change and leave our old selves behind. Yet it's still jarring, deeply troubling, to leave behind your name. After all, I am not a person with H's characteristics. I am H. The two qualifiers are as different as night and justice. And for six years, I was Lia. Was. Time sliced my past self and me apart. H and Lia, now just H.

There are seven bridges of Koenigsberg. We cannot cross them all.

2011-05-08

2011-05-07

Mama Shaq


http://snitchcockscav.com/shaq/


Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Where the seal swim among the trees and smooth brick buildings stand, cast from the iron of the seas, there is a rose of infinite beauty posted atop a lamp pole. Its black hues and bright darkness light the sky when the moon has pulled too hard and torn itself apart. Whether the pieces went in peace, nobody knows but this black rose and its bespectacled creator, for deep beneath the ocean floor lies the source of its dark power: the moondust bubbles, hisses, and boils while the white-coated man, watches the dials and gauges for signs of good or evil. Making light out of darkness is not to be taken lightly, so heavily he takes it and darkly he waits on it.
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
The only three of them to step on the spikes of the horizon's adhesive were the ones with black sneakers. This, of course, was unacceptable. The only way to stop the reaction between them was to increase the overall energy to upwards of 450 GeV; the machine simply could not handle that much energy. If they had instead tried to open up the three and check their hydraulics, they would have found that the energy field was already full and only needed a kick start.
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
So I'm looking for a class in Rosenwald Hall--- actually, I was looking for Swift Hall-- and, I thought i'd found it. no sign-- no main entrance.
So I walk around the building and find what I perceive to be an acutal door with and actual doorknob. So I opened it.
Inside was a room at least 150x50-- maybe half a football field- maybe more- black concrete- 20ft ceiling.
Two guys in white overcoats. A cow. Upside-down with hooves pointing into the air. On some type of cart.
A chainsaw.
They were as embarrased to see me as I was to see them.
Everybody stared at everybody else for about 6 sec. (except the cow, who was not facing me.) And I shut the door.
"Not econ."
I wasn't more than 10ft away from the door when I heard it lock.
I don't know what the hell they were doing, but they seemed to need privacy.
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact
Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's your mom, that's a fact

More news to come about Scav, promise! Including our record breaking for largest traditional scavenger hunt!!

2011-05-06

The Second Scav Post

I'm focused a lot more on performance and cheating hacks. So far the items I've completed were making a timelapse of the meeting room [218], giving a 2000+ chess AI two free moves and then beating it [237], and using Gandhi to justify violence against other people [185]. Pretty proud of all of them. I think I remain on four projects plus whatever gruntwork I can do. No Angryballs this year. That's good.

Also: Mama Shaq Mama Shaq Shaq's Your Mom and That's a Fact.

2011-05-05

The First Scav Post

The UChicago Scavenger Hunt officially started on the midnight of Thursday. (But the most important thing is: Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's Your Mom. That's a Fact). Unlike previous years, where a small group from each team retrieved the list from the judges, this year the judges had everyone come out to list release (probably so that they could tell us in detail about the world record for largest scavenger hunt attempt on Friday, yes, it's going to happen!). Of course, the world record will be eclipsed by the fact that Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's Your Mom. That's a Fact.

Some things that I've been working on are peeling an egg with one hand in under 30 seconds with the shell in one piece. [Item 67] (Still working on that...) and making a cladogram for the original 151 Pokemon. [Item 267].

But most importantly, Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's Your Mom. That's a Fact.
http://snitchcockscav.com/shaq/


I personally have no idea what this is about, but apparently, Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's Your Mom, That's a Fact. I hope repeating it once is enough... But just to be safe, Mama Shaq, Mama Shaq, Shaq's Your Mom. That's a Fact.

More news to come on Friday and Saturday! Judgment is on Sunday.

For the curious, the list can be found here.

2011-05-04

Welcome Post, the Second

Decompositions of the name.

Momenergy = Momentum + Energy.

Physics. So these authors must really love Physics to dedicate their blog name to it?

True.

In fact, momentum and energy are the most fundamental concepts in Physics. Conservation of momentum and energy have been around for a long time, and remains the cornerstone of every new formalism and new theory in modern physics. Even though seemingly fundamental laws like Newton's laws, the uniformity and absolute nature of space and time (what is now known as the Galilean formalism) have gone through radical transformations and reinterpretations, conservation of momentum and energy largely retain their classical interpretations (although relativity does provide a unification of the two ideas as two manifestations of an equivalent phenomenon).

We named the blog Momenergy as a sort of tribute to the two fundamental laws. Also, it sounded cool at the time. (Also, also, it can be thought of as Mom + Energy, the best of both 1950s domestic life and physics.)

This blog will not exclusively focus on Physics. It will more be a mixture of different subjects like math, economics, physics (duh) and perhaps literature and creative writing. There will be a mixture of formats, from quick updates on something that is going on in our lives to random musings, to more serious entries.

I hope everyone enjoys reading this blog as much as we enjoy writing it!

P.S. The next four days will be the annual University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt. I will be documenting some of the events and photos here. Hope it all goes well!

What is Momenergy?

Momenergy is momentum energy, the binding arrow the unites all space and time. The homogeneity of space leads to the mass velocity of all reality being eternal, unchanging. The uniformity of time creates the infinite fields, stretching as r fib two, melding together to form a Noether umech. Momenergy is the relativity of meters and seconds, letting the fields step into movement and the movement into fields. Momenergy is the unity. Momenergy is the divine vector.

Momenergy is also mom energy, the collective will of soccer moms across the multiverse. When this will stirs, it censors video games for having sex in them.

But not violence. Violence is okay.

Soccer moms are weird.