Open office space: collaborative for pathogens!

I've recently been working with my old friend Rick Lambright at Motiga since they moved to an office with a couple of semi-private offices as well as their open style space they've used in the past.

The last couple of weeks there's been a respiratory bug (or two) going around the office .. and it seemed to be hitting the people sitting out in the open space harder than us in the private spaces.

It turns out it's not just us: recent research shows workers in open office are sick more often than those of us working in private spaces!

Hurray for Motiga for being willing to accommodate those of us who don't want to sit in wide open offices; this looks like just one more data point that should lead them to be fading from the office scene ...

Radiolab!

It happened again! I met someone at a social gathering this weekend unfamiliar with Radiolab,  the amazing podcast on science and other fascinating subjects.

So here are 5 compelling Radiolab segments to introduce you to its pleasures. You can subscribe for free via Itunes or through a smartphone app like my favorite Doggcatcher.

On bliss and its real-world effects.

My previous post on tDCS, supercharging one's brain with a small amount of current.

A story from this month on attempts to communicate with dolphins, from the 60's to today.

Should we eradicate mosquitoes? It's tempting, but ...

How internet retailers get stuff too you so fast, and the human costs that entails ...

This is just a sample of 12 years' work ... if you like these, the archive is available ...

Forex trading: books

I had lunch with a friend with whom I discuss all sorts of interesting subjects, and he brought up the story of an acquaintance of his that was trading forex.

I didn't know anything about forex trading despite having traded options for the last 5+ years, so the past few days I went on a reading binge on the subject.

First, my favorite:

The author is a long time forex trader and manager who has a skeptical view of the market and its participants, with reason! To wit:

• There's no central clearing house for most trades; usually it's trader vs broker, and the broker is in position to exploit the trader in many cases
• Unlike other brokers in options or stocks who do operate with a clearing agency and thus have their client trader's interest aligned in that these firms make more money the more trading occurs. In forex, in many cases the broker can manipulate the trader into losing his or her entire account in a short time (by the use of excess leverage, sometimes up to 400 to 1, and very wide spreads)
• It's advertised as "commission free" but the brokers are paid by the bid/ask spread, so of course it's not "free" and with manipulated extra-wide spreads can be much more expensive than a small commission would be

If you're only going to read one book on forex trading, read this one.

Next is Anna Coulling:

She's apparently a well-known personality in the world of forex and I did find her book useful:

It gives a very detailed look at the entire landscape of forex, with her own warning on unscrupulous broker/dealers (but nothing like as jaundiced a view as Silvani). She does promote a "leading indicator" (fully explained in a more advanced book) of "Volume Price Analysis." that looks worthwhile .. I bought another one of hers, A Three Dimensional Approach to Forex Trading, but haven't read it yet.

One big plus for Ms. Coulling: she disparages paper trading and suggests you instead start with a tiny "micro" account and when you can show a profit trading with this then scale up. This fits my experience ... who cares about paper money?

And with the Kindle reader on my phone I couldn't resist a few other low-priced books:

 All of these were worth at least the (very low) price while I'm trying to get my head around this, but for the moment I'm sticking with options trading ... maybe when that's getting boring (a little too exciting lately!) I'll start with a micro account doing this.

Any other Forex traders out there? Comments please!

Standard math education destroys math ability?

The New York Times on Sunday published this article on the problems Americans have with math.

It turns out that American math education isn't just less than perfectly effective, it even has been shown to mess up the ability of street vendors in Brazil to do the calculations they were doing in their head successfully before being subjected to this "education."

The article focuses on a Japanese researcher who's moved to the U.S. to try and help U.S. schools implement the more successful strategies for math education in Japan and elsewhere.

We've got to do something ... the article also says that a rival to McDonald's quarter pounder that was 1/3 pound failed because most of those in a focus group though 1/4 was bigger than 1/3 and the new burger was a "rip off." 

Have direct experience with poor math education? Comments please!

C'mon, can't I leave spaces in my credit card number? It's 2014!

Probably you've had this experience ... filling out a purchase form to buy something online and entering the credit card number exactly as it appears on the card, say:

4444 5555 6666 7777

You click Submit and you get back (quickly via Javascript or less quickly with a page refresh) something like:

Why the hell should I have to remove the spaces in the form in this day and age?

To be fair, a few companies get this right, Amazon among them. Others refuse to let you put in a space some Javascript trick as you're typing. This is better than an error message, but not much. Finally, some remove spaces after you hit submit but before you finalize your purchase on another page. This is silly but tolerable.

Let me say this clearly: the display of the credit card number does not need to look exactly like the credit card number that's transmitted to the back end system.

Humans aren't good at parsing a 16-digit number; we need spaces or dashes to break up the pieces of the number.

Web geeks must just be missing the code to do this, so I will provide some examples here in hope of putting this issue to rest for all of us for the future.

Javascript:

var card = '4444 5555 6666 7777';
var cnostr = card.replace(/\s+/g, '');
alert('card b4:' + card);
alert('card after:' + cnostr);

Python:

import re
card = '4444 5555 6666 7777'
(cnostr,ign) = re.subn('[\s+]','',card)
print 'card = %s' % card
print 'cnostr = %s' % cnostr

Other languages are left as an exercise for the reader.

How about this, folks? Please send a link to this page to the purveyor of any web form that doesn't allow you to put spaces in a credit card number. We can start to get this fixed!

A virtual war over virtual hells

I just finished my favorite work of SF since Charles Stross' Singularity Sky.

Iain M. Banks was also a Scot, like Stross; Banks died in 2013. He produced 9 books in a "Culture series" about an advanced civilization, the Culture where AI-run ships and drones have achieved full sentience and are granted equal citizenship and rights.

The first four chapters are just setting up the main characters, so do give it at least until chapter 5.

The protagonist is Lededje, an "Intagliate" who was tattooed at birth right down to her DNA. This marked her as the property of Joiler Veppers, the richest and most powerful man of the Enablement, a less technically and politically (and morallly!) advanced civilization than the Culture.

I won't spoil the story by giving details on how Lededje gets away from Veppers and into dealing with the Culture. But the basis of the story runs several complex threads around a war that several civilizations have agreed to fight only in a virtual environment (like a computer game) to decide the fates of several Hells. These Hells are also running as virtual environments, and the technology exists to transfer the consciousness at death from the body of an unfortunate into one of these Hells.

The complexity of the story threads and the way Banks brought them all together with their interplay with the Culture ships (notables of these named Sense Amid Madness, Wit Among Folly and Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints) is just dazzling. There's also quite a bit of discussion of the sociology and political interplay between the Culture and several other intergalactic civilizations that exist at the same time and several of which are competing in the War Over Hell.

Five stars! You may want to read one previous Culture novel to get your bearings; I'd recommend The Player of Games if you want to read one before this one.

I experienced this as an Audible audiobook, which is the way I "read" almost all fiction these days.

Change your break hours, make $15 million?

I just finished Social Physics, a book by MIT professor Alexander Pentland:

His basic idea is that progress and wealth are generated by group interaction that's balanced between existing connections and new ones, avoiding both "echo chambers" and isolation.

One example is eToro, a social connection site for day traders. Those who found the "sweet spot" between isolation and echo chamber were richly rewarded: "When traders had the right balance and diversity in their social network, their return on investment increases 30 percent over individual traders." (p. 33)

Even more amazing: the consulting practice Dr. Pentland works with suggested that a call center that was sending agents to break individually start sending groups together instead. This worked in an initial test so well that the large bank involved moved all call center break schedules to this plan and average call times dropped to the extent that it produced an extra $15 million profit for the bank.

I'm mostly working from home these days but after reading this am certainly going to make a point to get out to more user's groups and meetups of various kinds. Who knows what riches are waiting in the folds of the social fabric?

tDCS: a tiny amount of current into one's brain produces amazing performance gains!

I just heard the most recent Radiolab Short episode, which concerns tDCS with a couple of people describing their experiences with it and researchers discussing its prospects.

I won't spoil the Radiolab episode by discussing its contents in detail, but you won't be disappointed.

In addition to researchers, there are also a lot of amateurs working with tDCS, since hardware setups can be built for as little as $20. For example, this guy used a Radio Shack circuit teaching kit.

The potential for this "9-volt nirvana" seems enormous in so many areas of human endeavor it's hard to count ...

Any of my 6 or 7 regular readers tried this yet?

No shower for 12 years?

The New York Times recently ran an article on a research project on encouraging bacteria that live on our skin rather than discouraging them ... for example, by showering with the kind of soaps and shampoos and deodorants we typically use in industrialized societies.

The article describes a startup AOBiome that has been collecting bacteria that feed on ammonia. One of the researchers has been working with such bacteria (with himself) as a subject and hasn't had a shower in 12 years, according to the article. (Supposedly he still smells OK according to those he works with due to the action of the bacteria doing their job.)

Fascinating article. Anybody else here tried such a thing? Hard to imagine giving up showering but if the benefits turn out to be compelling I could certainly see changing out soaps and shampoos for something more bacteria-friendly.

Amazing times we live in ...

If I needed a hearing aid, I'd try this one first! (Currently, though: the best ear plugs are ...)

The New York Times just ran this article on a new type of hearing aid that's controlled by an iPhone! It's from GN Resound, who bills its Linx as "the world's smartest hearing aid."

Currently I don't need this, as I grew up on a farm in Louisiana, didn't listen to a lot of loud rock music growing up, and may otherwise have just genetically more sensitive hearing than most folks. For example, I'm one of the very few if any who plug my fingers into my hears when at least half of flight attendants or pilots come on airplane's intercoms. To me, these people are painfully loud.

So for the moment instead I use Hearos, my favorite earplug. They're rated at -33 dB sound reduction and can make the most noisome flight attendant into an easily tolerable and still perfectly comprehensible stream of words.

I'd be interested in the review of anyone who's actually tried the GN Resound Linx. Readers?

Fake Chicken salad: not identical ... but OK!

Here's my update to my last post on Whole Foods Vegan "Chick'n" salad:

It's make with these soy-based vegan-approved strips. I don't see how anybody thought it was identical to the real chicken version. For one thing it's much less dense. The carton of the actual stuff I get at Whole Food's is only 1/2 full for 1/2 pound (my limit so I don't eat until I burst!), but I asked for a pound of the vegan version and a carton full to overflowing of the vegan stuff was only 0.88 lb.

But: it tasted like chicken and tasted OK, to my omnivore's tastebuds. I won't go out of my way to get the vegan version in the future, but if served this I would absolutely not feel deprived.

Fake Chicken now as good as the real thing?

I stumbled upon Whole Foods' curried chicken salad a couple of years ago in preparing for a potluck. It was so good I ate most of it myself!

I have been avoiding the 'curried vegan chick'n salad' as not possibly as good, but apparently I was wrong! The New York Times carried this article a couple of days ago, claiming that a batch of customers accidentally getting the vegan version, could not tell the difference.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool omnivore, but I've got to give this a try. I'll report back here next week.

Recent recommended SF & Fantasy

I have been mostly "audiobooking" fiction for the past few years, and
the books listed here are no exception. Here's the roundup.

I had never before tried Child, but Nancy Pearl recommended "anything by Lee Child" and I greatly enjoyed it. Child is an MP in the U.S. Army in this story set in 1989-1990 when the Berlin Wall was crumbling ... and strange things were going on in the army. Reacher is violent and possibly amoral, but a very enjoyable character. Five stars and I'm just going back into the Reacher pile for another one shortly.

Another violent story that I enjoyed:

This is the first book on the "culture war" between two future starfaring civilizations: the culture (hedonistic, AI-loving) and the Idrians, an expanding tri-pedal warlike world. The protagonist is Horza, a "changer" working for the Idrians. He was a bit hard to get to like, but the closing parts of the book were so fast-paced and plotted that I got a bang out of anyway. Four stars and I'm planning to continue with the series.

Next, a well done near-future Mars mission gone wrong:

This was an enjoyable tale that focuses on Mark Watney, who's been accidentally left on Mars when the rest of his crew escape during a storm. He turns out to be not only alive but resilient enough to start planning to survive until the next mission ... four stars!

Finally one from the seventies:

This is a time-travel story set in the 1970's ... and in 1882. The time travel "technology" in use is so dumb it almost made me give up on the book ... but I'm glad I stayed. The author romanticizes 1882 way too much, but there's enough plot and tragedy and conflict to keep anyone interested. Five stars despite my quibbles!

A straightforward options trading strategy to return 3-6% per month (almost every month)

Options trading can be complex; one can look at it as the biggest video game in the world!

But some relatively simple strategies can produce reliable income without a lot of effort and without requiring moment-to-moment monitoring of a position.

The one I'll discuss today is the Iron Condor:

Basically, you:

• Buy a put, strike price A
• Sell a put, strike price B
• Sell a call, strike price C
• Buy a call, strike price D

This is essentially the combination of a put credit spread and a call credit spread. You make a profit if the price of the underlying stock (or ETF or index fund) remains roughly between B and C at expiration.

The return on capital one can make with this trade depends on several factors, but the one we're going to focus on today is the width between strikes B and C. Basically we're going to choose these strikes such that there is about an 87% chance that the stock will finish between these strikes when the options expire. But we plan to close this spread before expiration, when it's achieved about 50% of its maximum credit. This makes the chance for profit more like 95 to 96%.

How do we figure this initial 87%? We use the normal curve:

See where the 1.5 and -1.5 marks are? That's where we want to choose the short strikes.

Let's look at an example ETF: SPY, the S&P 500 index ETF. If you set up the main trade screen to show %OTM (percentage out of the money), you're looking for something in the range of 92 to 93% probability:

This is the short put we started with; now we need to buy the same number of puts at least one strike away. Let's choose 5 wide, as this gives us more credit (in Thinkorswim, one holds down the CTRL key to build up a multi-leg spread one leg at a time.)

Now we look for the same 92 to 93% probability on the call side:

And choose the long strike 5 points away on that side too:

Here's where we calculate the yield:

300 / 4660 = 6.4% ... so if we close the trade when we get 1/2 that, that's 3.7%.

Suggestions for beginning this: start small! Use 1 contract SPY (instead of the 10 I'm using here). Your max loss would then be $466 instead of $4660. Try this for a couple of months. Then move to 5 contracts, then 10 ...

When you're comfortable trading 10 SPY's, try 2 SPX. SPX is 10 times larger than SPY, and trading it is a little different in that it's not (currently) automated. It's "open outcry," meaning humans are still involved in the trades. You'll have to move 25 to 75 cents away from the midpoint to get SPX condors executed.

How big do you go with this? Just decide how much income you want to make and size accordingly. Using this example ... if you want to make $3000 per month you'll need a 20X larger trade, which means 20 contracts of SPX.

Happy trading!

How to get a remote job

There's a recent trend of widely dispersed teams working with the help of the Internet and communication technologies that run on top of it.

A couple of books have been published on this topic: The Year without Pants and Remote. The former is a narrative of a former Microsoft manager's work for Wordpress, which has a globally distributed workforce. The latter is a justification that could be used to try and sell remote work as a concept to management or a work team.

I'm currently working mostly-remotely for a Silicon Valley employer. Here's how I did it.

First, I used the Modern Job Hunting Hacks techniques I describe elsewhere on this blog. Often this is all that's required; in particular many recruiters ignore the 'I am only looking near Seattle' flag and send job listings from other places. For jobs that look interesting I reply "I can't move but could go for a month and then work remotely" and sometimes this works, as in this case. It's always worth a try.

Until I got this job I also started scanning two job listing sites: We Work Remotely and StackOverflow. StackOverflow has a very useful allows remote checkbox and generally more listings than We Work Remotely, though the latter is growing and has (currently) a higher proportion of non-programmer jobs than does the other site.

There are also niche sites for specific skills/interests, for example Django Gigs.

Caveats about remote jobs: you have to create your own structure and your own opportunities to socialize. For an extrovert this can be like being sentenced to solitary confinement! Get out there and have lunch with a friend!

Interesting Tech Roundup

Heat your home with other people's computers for free: nerdalize.com.

A worldwide network of virtual pilots exists, some flying the same routes on
the same schedule as the real airlines.

A price war in cell phone plans is currently going on, mainly due to T-Mobile. This is a good time to renegotiate your current cell phone deal.

A company onlycoin is rolling out a single card that pretends to be all of your credit cards at once. But how are they going to adapt to the chip-and-pin cards coming to the U.S. (finally) in the wake of Target's little problem?

The 50 smartest companies? MIT Technology Review has a list.

Redox Power Systems' PowerSerg 2-80

Affordable fuel cells are coming, finally, in the next couple of years.

That's it for now ... comment on your suggestions for this feature please!

A selfie you'll never forget

... from superstar political cartoonist Mike Luckovich:

The easy way to buy a car, a crummy car dealership, an OK dealership, and my New Year's Resolution

Several years ago a friend recommended Heidi the Amazing Autowoman, an auto broker who will find the car you want at a price and list of options that you negotiate with her. All you have to do is meet her for 10 minutes, sign paperwork, write checks, and drive away in your new (or new used) car.

Heidi is terrific and I will never buy or lease a car any other way ever again.

Heidi happens to have a relationship with a local poorly run car dealership: Lee Johnson of Kirkland. This needn't have affected me, but I bought a Chevy Volt in late 2011 through Heidi and this dealership left out a couple of small parts: cargo net and front license plate holder.

They eventually got these parts in and I got them installed. They were a bit slow/sloppy in the way they handled this and I should have stopped going there after this. But I had an issue with the car losing the charge on its 12-volt battery, which runs the car's computer and locks and other systems and which is required to be able to start it. I called a tow truck who helped me jump it and I had them tow it, silly me, to Lee Johnson.

Not only did they no root cause analysis, they somehow goofed up the key fob that you use to get in and start the car ... and sent me off in the car without saying a word about this to me. If I hadn't had the owner's manual on the front seat I'd never have been able to figure what was going on (I thought at first the battery on the key fob had just run down) and get the car started again.

Clearly, this is egregiously bad customer service. (I got the car fixed at Michael's Chevrolet in Issaquah, who have been OK.)

I recently sold the original Volt and leased a new 2014 through Heidi ... via  Lee Johnson. I met Heidi at the dealership, sat in one of the LJ people's cubicle, signed paperwork, wrote checks, and was out in 10 minutes.

I had to go back and pick up my license plate when it was ready (actually about a month after it was ready, but that's my problem.) This was also at Lee Johnson, whose I guess subsidiary goes as Eastside Auto Licensing. I picked up the plates (and a refund check: $154.50; not sure why but I deposited it!)

The woman who gave me the plates said, brightly, "you can get the service department to install them for you!" I replied without thinking, "they messed up my previous Volt and I'll never do business with them again."

She looked stricken. I could have just kicked her dog or something. "That's terrible!" she said.

It was terrible, it was stupid, it was unnecessary. I'm telling you about my experience with the dealerships, but what good did it do to hit this lady over the head with this information? None.

So: (1) I forgive Lee Johnson. I still don't plan to do any more business with their service department, but I'm going to drop the chip on my shoulder and I don't have to broadcast my problem with them to any other individuals in person.

(2) If I have the chance of interacting with another of their employees, I'm going to bite my tongue and instead say "Oh, I'm a computer programmer and this is one of the few mechanical tasks I feel competent to handle and it's satisfying for me to be able to handle this." All true, and I got to dispose of the Lee Johnson advertising license plate frame at the same time.

I learned grudge-holding from my father and let it mostly go on an individual level years ago. But organizations are made up of individuals, many of whom don't have a clue about the running of the organization ... so no more!

The B612 Foundation: Finding the asteroids coming from our blind spot

Anytime you think you've had a bad day, just reflect on the fact that you haven't seen one of these coming:

Unfortunately, we have up to now only been able to see/track asteroids that are out where we can see them: on the side away from the sun, so the sun's light shines on them.

On the other side, we're looking right into the sun and the asteroids disappear. This is apparently what happened last year at Chelyabinsk in Siberia.

These things can ruin one's whole day.

Since our government is paralyzed when it comes to important things like this (although one would think it could be spun as "national defense"), there's a private foundation working on a satellite to be able to view the blind spot.

The B612 Foundation is that foundation and they're getting my support. How about you?