NEW YORK — Stocks gained momentum on Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing up 48 points, reversing losses from last week’s decline.
Experts hailed both moves as a “remarkable, textbook example of pure statistical chance,” chalking up Monday’s gains to a couple random marginal buyers being slightly more
motivated than a few random marginal sellers.
“Imagine you pick 1 million random people from around the world every day,” said Toby McDade, chief investment officer of Momentum Fee Capital Management. “Some days, 51% would be in
a good mood, 49% in a bad mood. The next day maybe it’s the opposite. Other days, random chance could mean 8% of people are really pissed off for no real reason. This is basically
what the market is on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
…
Satire, obviously, but it might as well not be. I’ve long maintained that nobody, not even (and perhaps especially) economists, understand economics. It’s a fundamentally chaotic system
and at best your years of training and practice on the stock market will give you the edge over a layperson; the fact that some people appear to be doing better is
most-often a result of the fact that those who’ve been lucky historically are more-likely to stay in the game for long enough for you to observe how lucky they’ve been (I’m reminded of
the old “tipster scam” where a scammer would send guesses as horse racing tips for free, and then to the people to whom the scammer had by chance sent good tips they’d
charge for future tips, with increasing cost for the punter the more times the scammer had gotten lucky by chance).
But enough of my ranting. Go read this funny article.
Bitesize introduction to the (mostly-unspoken) history of the last century of sanitary products. It wasn’t so long ago – still within living memory! – that doctors’ advice was not to
exercise during your period and that sanitary products had to be packaged in plain containers so as not to embarrass buyers nor sales assistants. Humans have had a long and complicated relationship with menstruation but the largest and fastest period (no pun intended) of cultural
change has been only recently, and we now live in a world divided by a huge diversity of opinion and philosophy on the subject. This video covers only a fraction of the story of the
recent (Western) social change, but it’s still a strong reminder of how far we’ve come as a culture.
The Boris bike is a magical creature – aptly named after the former mayor of London ‘Boris Johnson’. I say aptly because the bikes are heavy, chunky, provide the absolute bear minimum
service and they are expensive to the public.
At £2 per half hour and with 55 miles ahead of us this was ultimately a race against time, with neither Sergio or I having any experience of long distance bike-riding we trundled off
up Brixton Hill and into the uncertainty of the day.
…
Another epic chapter in Robin’s year of “52 Reflect”, bringing us ever closer to the end of his year. I particularly enjoyed the part of this story where the duo are stopped by the cops
who assume that the Boris bikes they’re riding so-far-from-London have been stolen! (After all, why would anyone in their right mind ride a Boris bike all this way out of the city?).
For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the
form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced.
…
…the only way back from suspension is to “confess and repent,” she says, even if you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. “Amazon doesn’t like to see finger-pointing.”
Suppose you have a competitor on Amazon Marketplace. Based on this article, the following strategies are pretty much fair game and are likely to result in immediate suspension of your
competitor’s account:
Posting fake reviews favouring your competitor’s products, then reporting your competitor for manipulating reviews.
Making a copyright claim against your competitor’s username, even though you’d never used it before.
Buying your competitor’s product, setting fire to it, photographing it, and claiming that it did that by itself and is thus unsafe for sale.
Amazon don’t like controversy, so they always side against the seller. A great illustration as to why it’s dangerous when we let companies (like Amazon) have the power of
judiciaries without the responsibilities of democracies.
Wandered out of my office and around the corner to this cache, which has long been on my to-do list, this afternoon. Waved at the new camera!
Note to future visitors: looks like the “lag time” is about 45 seconds, so you’re likely to have to stand around a bit. I’ve attached a picture showing the window where the camera now
sits so you can position yourself appropriately. Good luck!
Waving to the webcam!
The new webcam points out of this window and has about a 45-second lag.
We need a movement of developers and enthusiasts who loudly, proudly, use @mozilla@firefox
as their primary browser. On our desktops and our laptops. We test in it, extend it, contribute to it. But we never, ever, take it for granted.
“We would have been overjoyed if that many people actually turned up.”
Remember Threatin? Earlier this year, this guy and his band played a European tour to… basically nobody. He’d faked having a successful US career, record deal, etc. and persuaded a
handful of session musicians to tour with him to venues to whom he’d promised that a significant number of tickets had sold in advance. And it was all a lie.
The Beeb managed to secure an interview with him and he’s now claiming that this was his plan all along. I don’t buy it, but maybe. In any case, it’s an interesting glimpse behind the
curtain and into the mind of this strange, strange man.
For many parents, the decision to have a second child is made with the expectation that two can’t be more work than one. But our research on Australian parents shows this logic is flawed: second children increase time pressure and deteriorate
parents’ mental health.
…
New research shows that while it’s true that having a child will, on average, improve the mental health and wellbeing of parents, having a second makes it worse again. I’m not sure I
needed to read this research to feel like this was true, but it’s interesting to read that it’s statistically true as well as on a personal level.
Noticing that our bagel supply was running low and with two kids who’d happily fight to the death for the last one if it came down to it, I decided this weekend to dust off an old
recipe and restock using the ingredients in our cupboard. For a festive spin, I opted to make cranberry and cinnamon bagels, and served a few at my family’s regular Sunday brunch.
Little did I know that they would turn out to be such a hit that not one from the resupply would survive to the end of the day, and I’ve been pressed into making them again in time for
breakfast on Christmas Day (or, as Ruth suggested as she and Robin fought for the last one in a manner
more-childish than the children ever would, I could “make them any time I feel like it; every week maybe?”).
Even the slightly-charred one turned out to be flipping delicious.
If you’d like to make your own, and you totally should, the recipe’s below. I prefer volumetric measurements to weight for bread-making: if you’re not used to doing so, be sure to give
your dry ingredients a stir/shake to help them settle when measuring.
Festive Cranberry & Cinnamon Bagels
Yield: 8 bagels
Duration:
When my dough is unevenly shaped I call it “rustic”. These are rustic bagels, ready to go into the oven.
Eyes on the prize: this is what you’re ultimately aiming for. You might even make a less-“rustic” one.
Directions
Whisk the yeast into the water and set aside for a few minutes to activate.
Combine the flour, one quarter of the sugar, and salt.
Make a well, and gradually introduce the water/yeast, mixing thoroughly to integrate all the flour into a sticky wet dough.
Add the vanilla extract and mix through.
Knead thoroughly: I used a mixer with a dough hook, but you could do it by hand if you prefer. After 5-10 minutes, when the dough becomes stretchy, introduce the dried fruit and
continue to knead until well integrated. The dough will be very wet.
Mix the cinnamon into the remaining sugar and scatter over a clean surface. Using well-floured fingers, form the dough into a ball and press into the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Fold
and knead against the mixture until it’s all picked-up by the dough: this approach forms attractive pockets and rivulets of cinnamon throughout the dough.
Rub a large bowl with oil. Ball the dough and put it into the bowl, cover tightly, and leave at room temperature for up to two hours until doubled in size.
When it’s ready, fill a large pan about 6cm deep with water, add the honey, and bring to a simmer. Pre-heat a hot oven (gas mark 7, 220°)
On a lightly-floured surface and with well-floured fingertips, extract the ball of dough and divide into eight (halve, halve, halve again). Shape each ball into a bagel by
pushing-through the middle with your thumb and stretching out the hole as you rotate it.
Submerge each bagel into the hot water for about a minute on each side, then transfer to baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper.
Thin the egg white with a few drops of water, stir, then brush each bagel with the egg mix.
Bake for about 25 minutes until golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.
Most bagel recipes I’ve seen claim that they freeze well. I can make no such claim, because ours barely cool before they’re eaten.
Mostly this recipe’s here for my own reference, but if you make some then let me know how they turn out for you. (Oh, and for those of you who prefer when my blog posts are technical,
this page is marked up in h-recipe.)
A Louisiana woman’s unusual Christmas decorations have inadvertently ignited a beef on her street—because they’ve apparently got her boring-ass neighbors worried that she’s a member
of a “demonic cult.”
Author Diana Rowland just wanted to celebrate the spirit of the holiday season by, naturally, setting up a
bunch of inflatable dragons on her front yard. Of course, dragons are an appropriate and welcome addition to a lawn at any time of the year, bringing a nice Khaleesi vibe to an
otherwise routine patch of grass—but one neighbor wasn’t having it.
Rowland took to Twitter last Friday to post an anonymous letter one of her dragon-hating Grinch neighbors left, calling her decorations “totally inappropriate” and laying on some very
thick self-righteous trash about “the true meaning of Christmas.”
…
Just glorious. The real joy of this story is that after the owner of all the dragons posted online about them (and about the snotty note she’d received from her anonymous neighbour) she
quickly received donations allowing her to expand her lawntop collection of the beasts, so now there’s even more of them.
Not Christmassy enough for you yet, anonymous neighbour? Perhaps she can be persuaded to, I don’t know, construct some kind of nativity scene with them or something…
I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a while now, and I can heartily recommend it. You should try it (and maybe talk to your
relatives about it at Christmas). At this point, which browser you use no longer feels like it’s just about personal choice—it feels part of something bigger; it’s about the shape of
the web we want.
We need a new movement: a movement of developers, influencers, and tech enthusiasts who loudly, proudly, use Firefox as their primary web browser. We use it on our desktops. We use it
on our laptops. We use it on our phones. All of us test sites in it. Some of us write plugins for it. The bravest of us write code for it. But none of us, not one, takes it for granted.
