Acapella Thriller

Mathmetitican "solves" The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night with Fourier Transform

Its a short and interesting story, find it here. I particularly likes the end:

"“Music and math are not really that far apart,” he says. “They’ve found that children that listen to music do better at math, because math and music both use the brain in similar ways. The best music is analytical and pattern-filled and mathematics has a lot of aesthetics to it. They complement each other well.”"

Did you know god prefers Atheists?

Sad Shark

Apparently humans aren't the only species feeling the credit crunch... =(

The Sun

I got the breathtaking .gif above from this article where you can find more pictures of our beloved star.

Numerical Sex Positions

Are dolphins pissed now too?

Leaping dolphin gives Fla. boaters cuts, bruises

Related: Sharks are pissed

The Most Awesome Cop in the World

Chicago Sheriff refusing to evict people in foreclosure

Suicide By Bear

From lovelyivy

The Nautilus is Not a Fibonacci Spiral!?

Tonight I had to go back and update my Fibonacci Life post from last year. That post has consistently been the most frequently viewed post on this blog representing 13% of all traffic over the past month and I'd like to keep it accurate. Much to my surprise, I read that the Nautilus is actually not a Fibonacci spiral. This is something that you read about in books and all over the internet but you'd never check for yourself. Its possible that this is because Nautiluses are rare and you don't often find these shells on the beach, but I'm more inclined to think that its because we believe pretty much everything we read in scientific contexts. If its in the physics textbook, its probably true. If its in the math textbook, good luck proving it wrong. I don't want to steal the thunder on this from Akkana, the blogger who brought this to my attention, so read her post if you want more color on this. For more details on the Nautilus spiral read here. The point I'd like to make is that scientific/math media should be held to a much higher standard than other types of information. In particular, before anything goes in a textbook, especially those aimed at yonger folks, the authors must be 100.0% without a doubt certain of everything they publish. Maybe this much is obvious, but I am certain I heard about the Nautilus in some math book as a kid and its just plain wrong. I assumed nautilus=Fibonacci was truth and kept it with me ever since. I care about this because turns out that there is something being printed in physics text books today that I take great issue with, the Big Bang. I'm gonna do a post sometime this week providing justification and details about my thoughts on this matter, but just to tease you a bit: the Big Bang is bogus too.

Interactive Brokers Olympiad 2009

The fourth annual Interactive Brokers (IB) college trading Olympiad has been officially announced! This year's competition appears to be unchanged in rules and structure from the previous years. The only minor change I have noticed is that they want you to explain more details about your program in the "trading plan" part of the application. This year you'll have to tell them what language you are using and how you will write/compile your code. They also want to know what method you will use to connect to the api (application program interface). I had initially given them my trading plan from last year which completely left this info out. They called me on it and said:

"Thank you for you interest in the IB Trading Olympiad.

We cannot review your application because it is incomplete for the following reasons:

-Trading Plan did not contain information regarding the API and programming language you will be using"

I had planned on completely re-writing my trading plan later and just did a quick copy and paste in order to ensure my spot in this years competition and get a paper trading account to begin testing with. Market conditions are changing so rapidly right now that I imagine the market will be a completely different place come January 12th when the games begin. Anyways, I gave them the info they wanted and asked about how to update my plan later. IB told me:

"Dear py,

You can update your plan until December 31, 2008. After the application is
approved, you can login in Account Management and update the plan."

So its that simple, just log in later and update it as you test your code. Good luck everyone, this should be very interesting time from automated trading strategies. All the market chaos seems to provide amazing trading opportunities, at least if your are cold and fast, robotic. I'll post more on the Olympiad later, I plan on re-publishing all my old posts on my strategy soon as I think its obsolete now. My last email from IB read:

"Congratulations, your trading application has been accepted into the Interactive Brokers Collegiate Electronic Trading Olympiad. Your Olympiad account is now open. You may not trade in this account until the Olympiad begins, but you can create a paper trading account to test your applications. ..."

So good luck everyone, am I the first person to sign up this year?

From Stock Geometry: Dow Jams 500 Points on PHISH Reunion

Rumors began circulating of a re-union announcement Tuesday morning igniting a massive 500 point rally in the Dow. Then on Wednesday the official news broke of three shows next march in Virginia. Unfortunately the extreme euphoria eventually wore off and led to a "crash," something common with hippie traders. Interestingly the market reacted quite the opposite to news that the emergency bailout bill passed congress. Shorts be warned, Phish could announce more shows as early as next week. Furthermore, if traders are able to actually get tickets to the Hampton shows next March we could see a sustained rally in stocks. For those of you who think this is just a joke, Phish is big money. This tour could easily surpass any previous economic stimulus packages:

Texas Blue Crab Cruising the Gulf of Mexico on the Back of a Nomura Jellyfish

!!PHISH RETURNS!!

Phish is re-uniting in 2009 after breaking up for five years. This is fantastic news for phish heads around the world! We've all known this was coming for some time but I am still blown away by the news. It broke yesterday and you can find a plethora of stories online about the impending reunion.... Waiting for the time when I can finally say, this has all been wonderful again! Woohooo!

In honor of this great news I will do a post a day for the next week, I have a que of ideas all lined up. So check back soon.