The power of IB students?

It's new year's eve and I decided to watch a Japanese sing off show which they have every year (this would be their 60th time), in addition they are running a bunch of boring documentaries which for which I am bored out of mine watching.

The world's fattest female model? Putting a guy in a box of ice for 1.5 hours for a new Guinness record? Top 5 most "astounding" UFO videos?

My brain is exploding from boredom. Interestingly I managed to find a site online where we have a bunch of 16 (17?) year old guys in an IB program somewhere doing a marathon game of nearly all the Zelda games to raise money for charity.

It's apparently their second day and they've raised $2,600 already at the time of this writing. They've made a site with streaming video of them playing live with commentary and a IRC like open forum where everyone can post messages while they play. The dialogue is immature and hilarious at the same time, but I am quite amazed at these guys for setting up the entire website.

Goes to show that intellectual prowess does not necessarily have to go hand in hand with maturity.

If you've got time check them out here, they'll be on for only a few more days.

The nice thing about eating at home

Winter holidays started Friday for me and it feels great to be taking a break from work. This Saturday was a hotpot party with some friends, Sunday I had a chance to check out a Capoeira (a type of Brazilian martial / dance art) where there were some very excellent performances and then spent the day doing some errands, then to come home and cook some pork chops.

I got a great deal on these pork chops, 4 slabs for about $5 so not all meat in Japan is that expensive. The only thing that can get pretty pricey over here is the beef. If you want chicken, pork or fish, then you're in for a treat.

It's been a while since I did any real cooking. The limitation being time and I don't have a kitchen in my room, not that I let the lack of a kitchen stop me. A good hot plate, which costs about $50 here does a very good job of cooking meat or even for a hot pot. The other reason is that I'll be going on a trip for the next 4 days and it wouldn't be a good thing if the food in the fridge went bad.

I bought some spices a while back and spiced up the port as such in the image below and let it rest for about 10~15 mins. The dry rub consisted of coarse pepper, salt, chili powder, basil, rosemary and some 5-spice mix.

The seasoned pork chops looked a little something like this

After that, I had the hot pot at about 230C ish and started cooking. The one nice thing about using a hot plate for doing cooking is the temperature control -- I have a good idea of how hot the plate is by the setting. The biggest problem with cooking dry spiced chops is that if you cook them at too high of a temperature, the spices end up getting burnt and you lose flavor.

After cooking for about 10 mins

The one unfortunate thing about the hot plate is that the one I have doesn't go to a high enough temperature to do a good searing on the meat, just for aesthetic purposes but for consumption purposes, the pork was great.

I served the pork with rice boiled with an assortment of beans and a side of smoked salmon salad, which looks like something below.

Pork steak served with rice and smoked salmon salad

The dinner was great and I ended up having 2 pork steaks for dinner which was absolutely stuffing. I am sure I managed to put some weight on from this dinner. I still got 2 steaks left and will be having them for lunch and dinner tomorrow before I head off to Okinawa. More pictures to follow after I get back!

3 more days till holidays

The holidays just can't come fast enough. I'll be starting my holidays after this Friday and won't be in the office until next year. Yay. It's going to be a much needed break. Will be heading out to Okinawa for a few days and will be back to chill out in Japan for the winter. Getting some relaxing in is going to be great!

If it says "happy new year" then it's going to cost you extra

I looked up on the Japanese postal service website this weekend that postcards cost about 80 cents to send abroad. In Japan, it is rather customary for people to send out post cards for seasonal greetings. I bought a bunch of then wrote them up and sent out 15 of them just today.

I then go back to the site to take a look around and realize that "greeting cards" cost $1.20 to send abroad. If it says "happy birthday," "congratulations" or "merry Christmas," then instead of the usual post card price the price to send out my cards jumps up to the $1.20 price mark. Instead of "net neutrality," I think we need "postal neutrality!"

Long story short, it means that the cards that I spent a few days writing are apparently going to get trashed. If you get your card late, you'll know why... time to do some re writing....

bah humbug!

My outlook on the US economy

Obviously from the last post, I have been busy so I haven't had much time to much in depth research as of late into the economy but my forecasts are still going to be bleak for the US economy. I haven't been doing much research as of late so I'll be talking off the hip today, it's late and I should be in bed.

What I will be watching for in the US is their debt and interest levels for the foreseeable future because that will be effecting the value of the US dollar, tax rates and bank interest rates. Interest rates in the US was at about 5% before the whole housing crash, which brought down the interest rate at 0.25%.

Using a future value of money model with the internal rate of return set at the FED interest rate we can calculate for the present value of a security that provides a perpetual return. The present value is multiplied by the annuity by a constant, dependent on the interest rate. I have no time to write the formula here but for those in the know, you know where to look or how to do the calculation.

At 0.25% the factor is 401 and at the FED rate of 5% at 2007 the factor drops down to 21. This model obviously breaks down for very small values of interest rates because the multiplier starts to become huge. As interest rates drop we should expect stock prices to rise. This was exactly what happened as the FED started cutting interest rates. What they were really doing was masking the real drop in equity prices by lowering the FED rates, thus pushing up stock prices. With the FED rates at 0.25%, they have nowhere to go when it comes to rate cuts and the only direction that the interest rates is up. Unless the US decided to pull a Sweden and go for negative interest rates. This scenario is unlikely.

The multiplier curve for the present value of cash as a function of interest rate is very steep at interest rates rise from a very small interest rate. The US economy is still very weak as it is right now and raising interest rates will cause equity and commodity prices to fall considerably. While interest rates are low, however, money will be pumped into the financial system leading to inflation. The drop in the USD is already is a direct result of this. As long as the FED rates continue to be this low and the US continues to pump out debt, expect further devaluation of the USD.

The only thing that will stop value erosion of the USD is if the US economy becomes productive, producing a financial surplus to pay off their debt and with significant enough profits such that the FED can raise rated without killing the economy. I don't think this will be happening for a while.

We've already seeing speculation on a interest rate hike because the USD is getting hammered. If a rate hike does happen, it will probably be done to stave off fears of inflation in the sort term by temporarily driving down prices of say gold and oil, but I believe that the economy is still going down; I think it's just rumor mongering to temporarily stop the drop in USD and rises in gold. The economy will continue to drop until the full extent of bad investments have been realized. In other words, until when the parties that made the bad investments have taken their losses. Unfortunately, these losses are being mitigated from the private sector to the public by bailouts to banks and other large institutions.

Recovery will happen if these institutions become profitable using public money and paying off their debts. If that doesn't happen then these institutions will likely to continue on a "life support system," until someone pulls the plug on them. It's a matter of accepting the losses or trying to pretend that nothing happened and climbing out of a hole with a weight around your neck.

For US economy to improve, we need to see debt numbers to stabilize and see good investments in the economy. Right now, I don't see it. People don't have money to invest and they have too much debt. The people that can probably make the biggest difference are the ones that don't have debt, either people that are too young to have debt or the very rich with no debt. People without debt are the ones with power.

Got sent home early from work; did too much over time

Looks like there are even limits to the Japanese when it comes to doing crazy overtime hours. I've been busy building a new generation of prototype samples. The schedule is kind of tight so I've been working some long hours to get things done. In addition, I managed to develop a simple simulation model to start evaluating our devices.

The guys I work with are hard core experimental types and there seem to be a lack of theorists in the group. From the measurement data we've been collecting, I've found that I can back solve for some device properties like resistance and semiconductor constants. We've never been able to get hard numbers before and this is a first for the group. I ended up staying in the office till 2 am on a Friday night summarizing data and writing up a presentation for our Monday meetings because I knew I'd be busy with experimental work.

Apparently I hit an internal 16 hour work day limit. Meaning that it is usually mandatory for people to take the next day off. Unfortunately on my experimental schedule, I don't have the luxury of taking the next day off. Since I have booked machine time and the experiments must go on. Instead, I got sent home early, at 5 pm, because HR called in to say that I shouldn't be doing any over time. The call was at 4 pm and I got into the office by 7 am and I was already on overtime.

I spent the weekend chilling out, doing nothing but after getting home and eating dinner, I konked out and slept for 4 hours. It's 1:30 am now and I'm need to get into the office by 7 am again to start taking data. The problem is that I'm not sleepy. Tomorrow is going to be rough.

Looking forward to a vacation and I'll be taking one later this month. But more on that later.

Do they want a blood sample too?

What does making an online transaction have to be such an intrusive procedure. If I was buying a physical item, I would understand why I would need to provide my address and contact information, but when it comes to buying something like a music subscription to some streaming audio, do they need my address and telephone number?


The payment is done through paypal and this is the amount of detail they want out of people doing transactions through them. When I go in person to make a physical transaction with my card, I am not asked my age, where I live or for any contact information. What next, do they need a blood sample too? I shake my head at this.

Friday night, at the office till 2 am

I don't know why I did it. I managed to create a crude model of a resistor and a diode and it looks like I can get plenty of data out of some measurement data. I still can't convey complicated thoughts in written Japanese but after finishing experimental work at 11 pm, I was compelled to stay late at the office to finish writing a presentation for a regular Monday meeting.

I gave up writing in Japanese for the first time. I had detailed ideas that I wanted to communicate, that unfortunately are beyond my skills to convey in written Japanese. I find it awkward that I can't think as deeply in a second language and sadly a lot of information does go over my head. Learning to master a second language and being able to communicate in the subtle nuances is tough stuff. There's more to communication than just the words. It's like a good joke; it's about the delivery.

Language is more than just words.