Only a couple days left...

Tim Goodman seems to like the fourth season of The Wire, which was provided to critics in its entirety; it almost makes me want to change careers.

investing tidbits

I've been reading a lot about investing lately, as I need to make some financial decisions in the near future. I started with The Intelligent Investor, which was very interesting. I then sought out a discussion of index vs. actively-managed mutual funds on the web, and at first couldn't find much useful, impartial information. Then, I hit upon a great resource: Google Scholar. I found a bunch of interesting papers, both on actively-managed funds and on market anomalies, i.e., phenomena that, at least on the surface, seem to contradict the efficient market hypothesis. Here are some of the more interesting things I came across (you may need various subscriptions to actually read the papers):

• Another Puzzle: The Growth in Actively Managed Mutual Funds shows that many investors consistently choose mutual funds that beat the market, later termed the "smart money" effect.
• Profitability of Momentum Strategies: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations is a recent paper on an anomaly termed "stock return momentum": briefly, a portfolio that buys recently-rising stocks while shorting recently-falling ones is consistently profitable (ignoring transaction costs, I think).
• Does Stock Return Momentum Explain the "Smart Money" Effect? answers the question posed in its title in the affirmative.

I also found this page, which documents various stock market anomalies.

So, what did I conclude? I'm now fairly convinced that a smart person that devotes a lot of time to research can beat the market, in the long term. I'm also pretty convinced that I don't want to spend that kind of time on investing, and even if I did, I may be too risk-averse to be successful. So, for the most part, I'm sticking to index funds.

Vaguely related: this Business Week article on adjustable-rate mortgages is worth a read. Looks like a lot of people made bad decisions with these things.

hedging the election

TradeSports is a cool site with futures markets for all sorts of events. I've been following the markets for the GOP keeping control of the House and Senate in this year's elections for a while. Just recently, I decided to buy some contracts in the House market, meaning I would make money if the Republicans keep control of the House. I figure that if they lose, I'll be happy enough to not care about the lost money, and if they win, the money I gain will be some small consolation. It's a fun experiment. Right now, the market is predicting only a 46% probability of the Republicans winning, so things are looking good (except for my small investment)...

San Francisco Symphony Mahler recordings on eMusic

I was browsing eMusic the other day, as suggested over at The Abstract Factory, and discovered that all of the recent Mahler recordings of the San Francisco Symphony are available. Talk about a sweet way to use your 25 track free trial! Anyway, I grabbed Symphonies No. 1, 2, 4, and 9 (I already owned tbe 6 recording). All are really good, but I highly recommend Symphony No. 2, if only for the absolutely stunning singing of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. The recording of course can't reproduce the live experience (one of the best concerts I've ever attended), but it's still very nice. I'm pretty seriously considering staying on as an eMusic member; with the entire Naxos catalog, they have quite a broad classical selection, and the price is right.

couple classical music things

First, Joshua Kosman, the classical music critic for the SF Chronicle, is also now blogging (via Alex Ross). Second, the BBC Proms is now happening, and you can listen to a bunch of recent concerts for free. Finally, Bayreuth is also going on. Anthony Tommasini is keeping a journal of his experiences, and Operacast has a schedule of online broadcasts.

Behind the Scenes for The Wire Season 4

So...it's been a while. Those who know me know I've been busy. Anyway, here's something that whet my appetite for the upcoming season of The Wire: they've started a behind-the-scenes feature on the web site, with lots of interesting information. I can't wait until the season starts. In other HBO-related news, The first 4 episodes of Season 3 of Deadwood have been great. I also went back and watched some episodes from Season 1 a while back, and found them even better than when I watched the first time. I definitely plan to re-watch the whole series when I have time.

Incidentally, Tim Goodman, the television critic for the SF Chronicle, has a nice blog on television. He has lots of interesting tidbits on HBO shows in this post, and posts on the The Sopranos here.

Re-reading books

I just finished The Metaphysical Club, a very interesting book that I recommend. Apart from its main tale of the evolution of pragmatism, it has many fun side stories, including the beginnings of some universities (Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago) and some background on academic freedom. Anyway, good stuff.

After finishing, I was thinking about what to read next, and decided on Portnoy's Complaint, which a friend bought for me a while back. It's a new read for me, and for a while I've been wondering what the proper ratio should be between reading new books and re-reading old ones. For many good books, I imagine I would get much more from a second read than from the first; this certainly holds for film. On the other hand, I always feel that there are tons of good books that I haven't read yet, and I should be working on those. I guess the same dilemma holds for movies, but since I can watch a movie much faster than I can read a book, I haven't given it as much thought.

Anyway, any thoughts on a good ratio? Or is going with your gut the best thing to do?

FreeNX rules

I just got FreeNX installed for remote access to my school Linux computer from my home Windows machine, and it is amazing. I used these excellent instructions for Fedora, which worked almost perfectly. The only kink was that my existing installation of Cygwin interfered with the Windows NX client; Cygwin does not enjoy having two versions of its DLLs loaded simultaneously. To fix the problems, I renamed the DLLs in the NX client bin directory, so that the DLLs from my standard Cygwin install were used. Everything works great now, and the system is far more responsive than just using a local X server.

"Swine of the Times" in Harper's

I wanted to recommend the May issue of Harper's, which includes a great article "Swine of the Times" on the pork industry. All I can say is, these ain't no charmin' motherf***in' pigs (through no fault of their own, of course). The author is Nathanael Johnson, a friend and a very good writer. So, grab the magazine off the newstands and check it out.

Personality Feedback

Check out http://realpersonality.com, a web site AJ wrote to allow anonymous feedback on your personality traits. Cog has some interesting thoughts on the site. And, of course, if you'd like, rate me.

Complete New Yorker Blog

For those of you that own The Complete New Yorker, Between the Squibs is a new blog that tries to dig through the mountain of articles and find some of the great ones. They just accepted a submission from me, and I'm looking forward to having time to read the other posted articles. Oh, and if you don't have the collection, think seriously about getting it or asking for it as a gift. The software sucks, but the content is amazing.

Thelma Schoonmaker

I heard this interview with Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's editor, a while back. It had many interesting anecdotes, and it sparked my interest in Michael Powell, to whom she was married. I just saw The Red Shoes last night, and it's a wonderful film.

Various logs

Inspired by Abstract Factory, my filmlog, musiclog, and booklog, all with RSS feeds. I'll do my best to keep them up to date. I might cheat and write about old stuff once in a while too.

A Thought for Graduate School Admissions

I was discussing the admissions process for the EECS department with a friend at lunch today, and a question popped into my head. Why is there nothing similar to "early decision" for applying to grad school? Actual early decision probably would not work, as we have no admissions office reading applications, so the extra work of going through applications early would be too much. My idea is instead to have a checkbox on the regular application, saying something to the effect of, "If admitted, will accept offer." This should probably actually say something like you won't accept an offer from another school, whatever the early decision form says for undergrad admissions.

According to my friend, this information would be useful during the admissions process. There are lots of qualified students that get rejected for essentially arbitrary reasons, and with this information, it might be slightly less arbitrary, as certain students could be accepted to guarantee a certain yield. The very top students would be admitted regardless of whether they had committed or not, but for others, checking the box may provide their application with a little boost. Of course, applicants who don't check the box may be at a disadvantage compared to those who do. But, some applicants who would definitely come to Berkeley may be at a disadvantage now, since they can't communicate this information to the admissions committee.

Anyway, I'm curious as to what others think about this proposal.

Wikipedia shock

I had a bit of the "Wachet Auf" Bach cantata stuck in my head earlier today, so I went to seek it out on Rhapsody, but couldn't find it. Then, as I often do with random things in my head, I looked up its Wikipedia article. Lo and behold, the article links to a recording of a full performance of the piece...done by the MIT Chamber Chorus, when I was singing. Yikes! I realized that if they had our Wachet Auf recording, they may also have the Schubert Mass performance from the same concert, where I sang in the trio in the Benedictus, having never taken a voice lesson in my life...yup, it's there. Well, we gave it our best; enjoy, worldwide Internet listeners.

The Met. Opera and Levine

Here's a nice article on James Levine, showing him geeking out about some Mozart. Incidentally, I've been making fairly decent quality recordings of the Met. Opera broadcasts this season; check out this site for the schedule, and Operacast for where you can listen online. Wozzeck was really good, and An American Tragedy grew on me after a couple of listens. Let me know if you want the recordings.

Music Rights for TV DVDs

I just read this article on securing music rights for DVD releases of TV shows. The difficulties particularly annoy me since I imagine they are holding up the DVD release of The State and make releasing the Beavis and Butt-Head music videos almost impossible. There has to be a better way.

Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody

I wrote a Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody that shows full album names in the album lists. The truncated album names were really getting on my nerves. Hooray for Greasemonkey!

Anti-aliased Emacs on Fedora Core 4 (and 5)

I managed to build Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on my FC4 machine. I mostly followed these instructions (ignoring the Debian-specific stuff), with the following extra steps:

• I had to install the libpng-devel RPM (I used yum). The lack of this library was not detected by the emacs configure script.
• I had to install setarch to use during the build process. The exec-shield functionality and randomization of virtual address spaces in Fedora Core 4 messes up the emacs bootstrapping process. I ran ./configure ; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to build emacs.

The build seems to run fine, and the anti-aliased fonts make a big difference.

UPDATE (10/27/06): I just did a re-build on Fedora Core 5 using these instructions, and everything went fine. Now, when compiling, you need to run ./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to make things work. Hopefully soon this code will be stable enough that someone releases an RPM.

Wall Street Journal through ProQuest

I found a fairly decent way to read the Wall Street Journal (which charges for online access) through ProQuest, which I can access through the UC Berkeley library proxy. Go to this page to see issues by date. Then, after choosing an issue, sort the articles by page number rather than alphabetically. Finally, skip all the articles listed as being on "p. 1", as they are just short blurbs; the long articles start on "p. A.1".