Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit (Grace Slick, Woodstock, aug 17 1969)

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall


And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Call Alice When she was just small


When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving slow
Go ask Alice I think she'll know


When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the doormouse said;
"Feed YOUR HEAD... Feed your head"

Checkoway on pwning cars at Usenix Security 2011

Project Glass: One day...

C2C - Down The Road

Jimi Hendrix - Castles Made of Sand

Throwing dice

This was an interesting question posted somewhere on the Internet. I rephrased it a bit as I understood it.

Suppose you're playing the following game: Each time you throw a dice you get the result payed out. If you throw 4 or more, you can throw again; otherwise, the game stops. How much are you willing to pay to play the game? 

The solution I came up with:

 If you write down a tree, you can see you're calculating the limit of: 


(1/6+...+6/6) + (3/6)( (1/6+...+6/6) + (3/6)( (1/6+...+6/6) + ... )) 


of which the fixed point is 


ϕ = (1/6+...+6/6) + (3/6)(ϕ) 


is ϕ = (7/2) + (1/2)(ϕ) 


is (1/2)(ϕ) = (7/2) 


is ϕ = 7


At most 7.


Corollary: if you take ϕ = (2/2) + (5/2) + (1/2)(ϕ) it is trivial to expand ϕ to (2/2) + (7/4) + (12/8) + (17/16) + ...

Bernanke is a genius?

I was looking at an English investor on the London School of Economics channel, and he called Bernanke an 'evil genius.' I don't know about the evil part, but it seems to me that he did everything right. So, this is what I think he did:

What do you do when your assets -mostly debt- in an economy deteriorate and everybody wants to sell them (actually everything) off, leading to possible deflation? You aggressively buy all bad assets at the central bank, supply lots of liquidity to the banks, wait a bit, and let them destroy the bad debt with the returning liquidity.

I am not even sure this leads to inflation since the bad debt is destroyed, but I will not claim to understand a lot of it...

Anyway, people complain about the enormous balance sheets of the Fed today, but at least the Fed now has an enormous capacity to fight inflation when they want to. Bernanke certainly cleaned up a lot of mess there.