Speculation and Markets

We have all seen the soaring gas prices recently and depending on what kind of information sources one uses there are a variety of explanations provided. There seems to be some truth to each explanation which is why none of them are particularly satisfying when we hear it.

It’s Biden! It’s Russia! It’s the Greedy Oil Companies!

All of these have some truth but they all also have the common thread of speculation. The reasons for the higher gas prices is because each of these sources gives companies and investors cause to speculate on what is going to happen.

Before the 2020 election Oil Companies stocked up on licenses so they could investigate places to drill and create a bit of a cushion when it comes to speculated increases in regulations for drilling for new oil.

Biden gets into office and gets rid of the XL Pipeline Project and promotes the move to all green energy. Investors speculate that the pivot to green energy by law and by companies will reduce the potential returns on investing in new oil discovery.

Russia goes to war and through sanctions and negotiations the whole world speculates on what impact that will have on the Russian oil supply to the world.

All of these speculations seem absolutely reasonable when pulled out an examined individually but create a mess when thrown around just to find someone to blame. But is it reasonable to accept all of this speculation?

I am not a fan of heavy regulation so that is not the solution that I will advocate for. I believe motivated self-governance (like profit or altruistic incentives) are much more flexible and effective. But what kinds of incentives are there to discourage excessive speculation? We certainly have controls in place to shut down trading but that hasn’t helped with gas prices.

There is the idea that has been used in the past to control the flow of information to control effects within a population but that has also been used to breed corruption. And when it comes to self-censorship I’ll just refer back to the tendency towards corruption, even if the motivation is more along the lines of the consequences of speaking actually align with one’s beliefs.

I am of the mind that investments in companies and economy should largely be driven by growth and invention. The system has morphed into a wealth generation tool and because a few companies do it best they have been able to take everyone’s collective scraps and turn them into mountains that let them have great influence over what should and should not be done by companies.

In the end is the speculation really the problem or is it more about the centralization of investments? You may only have $20,000 in your 401k but because you and 200 million other people do as well instead of being able speculate as individuals and measured in statistical groups, it’s all made done by like minded giants.

Allergies and Skincare

I spent a couple years working for Proactiv in a kiosk and really enjoyed some of their training. I never got good at the aggressive sales techniques but I learned a lot about why certain ingredients are used in their treatments as well as the lotions. It even lead me to a great exfoliant for my dad when he was having some skin issues on his leg and has served me well in understanding exfoliants, emollients, and as well as where essential oils may have their place.

As time has gone by I have developed dryness on my hands and applied that knowledge. And now my daughter gets flair ups of excema particularly when getting covered in sugary or acidic food. Seeing as my daughter is still two and loves all the food we give her in the messiest way we have had to experiment with lotions, colloidal oatmeal, and limited ingredient washes quite a bit.

Now the interesting thing that happens when dealing with excema is that eventually we turn to look at allergies and gut health. We do spend quite a bit of time making sure to add good pro and prebiotics to our diets but right now I’m interested in new things I run into which brings me to this article on drinking Dust Might Dust. This is not exactly a new concept where one tempers their immune response by micro dosing their allergen. But I do find it interesting to see this applied to something like dust mites which I’m sure will strike a gag reflex much as the concept of eating crickets for protein.

I like both of these approaches as being straightforward and simple. They don’t require a bunch of chemical formulation but provide a direct link to something our bodies can make use of. I am all for pharmaceutical and scientific advancements but we really shouldn’t try to perfect the things that shouldn’t exist. Sometimes there can be better options like cricket protein powder.

As long as they can make it taste good I’ll be one of the first to purchase my cricket protein shake supplements.

Just don’t take away my steak dinners.

Minstrel & the Giant

My son from time to time asks me to tell him a story. I will ask him what the story should be about, who should be in it, and what should happen to them. On one occassion he said to me “A giant tickling a person. And the giant lays down and the person has to climb over him without touching his eye.” And below is the story that I told him as it has evolved over several nights:

One day in a time where people still walked everywhere there was a traveling Minstrel. This musician played his guitar as he followed the roads set in the earth by all of the feet that had gone before him. He played and he sang aloud to animals, any travelers that would hear, and if nothing else into the air for his own joy.

One day as the minstrel traveled and played he looked off in the distance and saw a giant leaning against a hill, taking a mid day rest. He saw this towering figure as another member of his audience and lifted his voice on the wind so that it might carry all the way to the giant’s ears. As he performed his song he kept his feet moving and his eyes on the giant. Soon the giant began to nod and move his head.

The giant was so far away that he heard the song a little bit late and so his movements didn’t match the minstrels fingers on the strings of the guitar. Though, as the day drew on and the minstrel came closer to the giant their movements came closer together. But then the giant stopped nodding along and took a big yawn and stretch, standing up straight, and then laying down out of site of the minstrel. The minstrel continued to play but slowed his song to a lullaby to help the giant in his nap.

The minstrel continued to play without rest and followed the road even as the sun started to approach the horizon and the shadows of the trees stretched across the road. Soon the road reached the hills and as he walked up and down their slopes he quickly found the giant with his head between two hills right across the road!

“Oh no!” The Minstrel thought, and began to look for how he would get by the giant without disturbing him. He plucked at his guitar steady and slow as he looked and saw the river to near to the giant’s head for him to go around that way. Down the other way he saw the giant stretched too far for him to go around before it would be too dark and dangerous to be so far from the road.

The minstrel played a little faster as he thought of how he might get by the giant. Perhaps he could climb over the giant, but he could only reach his face and he could just imagine getting caught in the large ear or accidentally pulling on an oversized eyelash. He started to grin at the thought, then he considered how he might wake the man from his slumber, though his more playful tune had not already done so. Perhaps there was another way to wake the giant by tickling his ear, but no! He would swat him away like a flea. Perhaps he could tickle his armpit but thinking of how the sun had made his own body sweat made him realize how much that idea stunk! And then he began to laugh and lost the tune on his guitar.

And then the earth began to shake.

The minstrel looked around in alarm, concerned for an earthquake but soon felt a rumble like a giant drum from in front of him. In fact it was a giant chuckling just ahead of him, peering through the side of his eye.

Welcome Minstrel! I wanted to thank you for the pleasant music but did not think it would take so long to meet you and I grew tired. Since I didn’t want to miss you I laid here hoping to stop you on your way.” He laughed again, “And now thank you for waking me with the joyous sound of laughter. Take care in the rest of your travels little man.” And the giant stood and walked away before the minstrel could gather his thoughts to respond.

As fast as his legs could carry him he strode into the next town to perform and tell his tale as the sun set and the shadows turned the world to night. He told of the massive giant and his gratitude and the townspeople laughed, enjoying the tale but calling it of his imagination.

“Why would a giant care what any of us were to do? Carry on with your tales but don’t try to make us believe!”

And the minstrel stayed for 3 days and nights telling his tale again. As he left the town strumming his guitar the town applaused and told him to play louder that the giant might hear him again. As he stepped out on to the road the ground shook and the trees parted as the giant stepped out on to the road to lead the way for the minstrel and enjoy his song again. The town behind cheered louder to have been proven wrong and for the minstrel to be in good company.

Analog Processing

Some thoughts after watching the video We’re Building Computers Wrong by Veritasium. This channel has discussed the use of Analog machines for the computation of sun cycles, tides, and other single use instances. This video in particular shows a programmable analog computer that can be used to represent specific known formulas and how variability in any of the inputs changes the result and how analog can do this very quickly. The downsides of the inability to easily reproduce the exact same output and variability in production of individual parts is also mentioned. The problems inherent in analog computing seem to be overcome by using multiple sensors, matrix multiplication, and training of the correct results to dial in adjustments for each node so that the final output can be reliable. The calibration of the units is even discussed later where a standard gpu is used an example of what would be needed to calibrate a specialized analog chip the size of a CPU. The end calibration of an analog chip would be able to perform as quickly as the larger GPU albeit on more limited functions such as depth, voice recognition, or movement recognition for VR.It’s interesting to consider future computers that augment their processing with these analog chips that perhaps need one time or regular calculations. I could see this application in specialized authentication, Crypto Mining, or perhaps the back end of financial or spreadsheet software.I am also somewhat intrigued by the question of how this could relate to the development of our own brains. We know we need to sleep or else we can’t focus or remember as well. I can see these outputs as an inability to process the inputs correctly, or variability of an analog system shifting enough that it can no longer produce the same output reliability. Sleep could then be a part of a process that uses a more dormant calibration mechanism that the brain can make sure that it can reliably output the expected result.If nothing else these are interesting thoughts that I can use for developing stories on Artificial Intelligence or Science Fiction that integrates different forms of calculations whether it’s binary and analog or an analog that’s locked into more of a base 3 system instead of base 2 binary.

Aerosolization of SARS-CoV-2

I want to review stories such as this one from CNN: Experts tell White House coronavirus can spread through talking or even just breathing.

The headline itself is sensational and while the article does mention some of the caveats about that possibility it does not caveat the statement “Research by the University of Nebraska shows that genetic material from the virus was found in patients’ rooms more than 6 feet away from the patients, according to the letter.”

The letter itself can be found here Rapid Expert Consultation Update on SARS-CoV-2 Surface Stability and Incubation for the COVID-19 Pandemic (March 27, 2020) With a follow up at Rapid Expert Consultation on the Possibility of Bioaerosol Spread of SARS-CoV-2 for the COVID-19 Pandemic (April 1, 2020)

Each of these have some notable quotes relevant to how concerned someone might be about Aersolized SARS-CoV-2 and some of questions of transmission are based on studies of previous viruses.

I’ll start with Page 3 under B. Natural history Studies Starting 3 lines down “All samples were tested using reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). There were no efforts to assess virus viability.” This is further emphasized at later points that only the presence of RNA was tested not actual infectious material. On page 5 about a third of the way down the page referencing a separate study it is noted “The percentage of positive samples from each room ranged from 50% to 100%. There was no clear correlation between severity of illness, cough, or fever…” And when I combine that with this from page 6 just a few lines down “.. a direct source of SARS-CoV-2 may be due to resuspension of virus-laden aerosol from the surface of medical staff protective apparel during removal.”

When I look at all of that information together I get the impression that they aren’t actually sure how the samples are getting into the air and can’t account for the variances in concentration. So even though they have found evidence of viral material on air vents or aerosolized outside of the room it is not any kind of proof that this was transmitted simply by talking or even coughing.

One last piece of relevant information is further down on page 6 under C. Caveats, Needs in the second and third Sentences, “Although Viral RNA was detected in many environmental samples across various studies, infectivity is not known. It is important to note that there are no available data to our knowledge that speak to the possible linkage between the presence of environmental viral RNA or even infectious virus and the risk of transmission from these environmental sites to humans.”

I appreciate all the time and effort the researches are putting into these studies and even the degree to which it is being shared and discussed. Largely what they are saying is they have found evidence and developed the next theories that need to be tested. Perhaps some of these theories need to inform policy or personal decisions about enhancing our social distancing or safety precautions.

I do not think this research warrants the sort of hook that CNN decided to open with “A prestigious scientific panel told the White House Wednesday night that research shows coronavirus can be spread not just by sneezes or coughs, but also just by talking, or possibly even just breathing.”

GScripts, Gmail: Regex

For my work I receive a few entirely text based emails for invoices, bank drafts, and some that are just informational that I commonly translate into either spreadsheets or into a Document.

I have found that using GScripts accompanied with Regular Expressions has greatly helped me automate this translation process for a number of different projects. I have used it for Reconciling Bank drafts, creating searchable files with a whole months worth of invoices in a text document, and evaluating manual entries for misplaced decimals.

Finding multiple spaces and reducing them down to one lays the foundation for separating columns.

Using ^ for beginning of sentence and $ for end of sentence as well as \n\r depending on how the body of the document needs to be parsed are great for breaking the email into rows.

Once I have those basics set I can start looking for lines or parts of lines that can be removed entirely and use an expression to match those especially if it’s multiple full lines with string.replace(/^(this|that)$/,"") in one expression to make the entire line blank.

Partial line removals each get their own Regex

I then replace all commas with nothing, all spaces with commas, and split each row to create columns.
string.replace( /,/g ,"").replace(" ",",")

At this point I may need to look at the length of each row and as I iterate through each row, throwing out blank rows, I will also add additional columns to clean up the layout before it’s placed into Sheets.

A specific example involved pulling a table from emails. I was able to string.replace(/(<td>|<tr>|,|<table border=1>)/igm,"") to get rid of code that I wasn’t going to use for splitting

I was then able to make my rows and columns in separate steps

string.replace(/(<\/tr>|\))/igm,",").split(",") which results in multiple rows
string[i].replace(/(\<\/td>|))/igm,",").split(",") which iterates through the resulting rows and makes columns

I did have an unusually sized row at the bottom so to make my columns uniform in this case I did a comparison of the length of the most recent row to the first row then cutoff the remaining part of the array using splice

if (string[k].length < string[0].length) {
string.splice(k,string.length-k)
break
}

Power Queries and Logic Statements

The last week I’ve been spending time learning more about Power Queries, advanced editing of those queries with M, and being able to use Slices as a type of easy to access filter. I have also been exploring the suggesting of using True/False as the values 1/0 to get away from using Nested If statements in order to streamline formulas.

I found out that Google Sheets is implementing some of the same tools Excel has with the slices https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/08/sheets-slicers-scorecards-themes.html and want to explore more with that for creating easy to view sheets for others to use

Example for true false uses:
=rept(“Canine”, –(search(“dog”,a1)>0))& rept(“Feline”, –(search(“cat”,a1)>0))

The use of Power queries to manipulate 1 or more CSV files to either automatically filter for desired data sets and compare against other lists or combine multiple sets of data (250,000+rows) and filter them to display only the relevant data (~45,000 rows) has helped streamline review processes for my billing procedures.

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