cookies again

a colleague called in a favour -- she's one of those churchey types, headed off on a mission trip, trying to raise some cash. their plan: sell cookies, several thousand of them, and she wanted me to share some recipes with her and walk them through the process. i denied my ability to teach. she insisted. she came over and we made a batch of chocolate chip cookies - neither chewy nor brittle nor soft, but something, well, completely different. Saleable, fortunately, so she took the sample and the recipe and did some sums and figured that she could make 5 of them for 20 cents and sell them for 2 bucks.

which reminded me of su-lin's bakery-opening aspirations and set me thinking, for the umpteenth time, why not?. there's margin for error in the food industry, you can afford some missteps, i reckon, and there are all those entrepreneurial-whatever-funds that the gahmen has, and, really the only excuse is inertia. that's the only excuse. i want to admit it and move on with life.

4 months in

-- and i'm settled, if not mildly content. i know that many of you think that i'll just never be really happy here, but i think i at least sink into the mediocrity as well as the next person. entropy will not be denied.

going into a week of leave

first order of business: repaying sleep debt

for the volunteers who come and stay overnight, i've tacked up slumber song, by sassoon:

Sleep; and my song shall build about your bed
A paradise of dimness. You shall feel
The folding of tired wings; and peace will dwell
Throned in your silence: and one hour shall hold
Summer, and midnight, and immensity
Lulled to forgetfulness. For, where you dream,
The stately gloom of foliage shall embower
Your slumbering thought with tapestries of blue.
And there shall be no memory of the sky,
Nor sunlight with its cruelty of swords.
But, to your soul that sinks from deep to deep
Through drowned and glimmering colour, Time shall be
Only slow rhythmic swaying; and your breath;
And roses in the darkness; and my love.

more cookies

attempted cookies with oats, no flour, and ended up with something that tasted really good but stuck unyieldingly to the bottom of the pan. i had a feeling they wouldn't work from the get-go, but having never been failed by a recipe before, pressed on ahead. such regret. i shall trust my instincts next time.

nobels

So it's Pinter this year. Well-deserved.

I was reading about Kahneman's work the other day, and have been showing it about ever since as an example of how winning the Nobel prize can just be a matter of expressing obvious truths in elegant ways.

Prospect theory, Kahneman and Tversky's brainchild, has to do with how we make decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty. It begins with the observation that expected value theory does not explain a lot of real life behaviour - for example, if you walked up to an average person on the street and offered them either (a)$49, or (b) a coin toss where he could win $100 if the coin comes up heads but nothing if it comes up tails, most people would choose (a), this despite the fact that (b) offers the better expected return.

The point: value is not equal to utility - and risky decisions are weighted by the utilities we associate with their various outcomes. Humans have a fairly predictable set of risk attitudes that colour our decisions. We overweight low probabilities and underweight high probabilities; in other words, we are risk seeking for low-probability gains and high-probabiliy losses, and risk averse when we stand a good chance of winning something, or a low probability of losing. On top of this, we are in general loss averse, we need a far greater amount to compensate us when there is the potential that we may lose something we already have.

Thus, the cornerstone of prospect theory is the one equation:

V (x,p) = v(x).w(p)
where v measures the subjective value of the consequence x, and w measures the impact of probability p on the attractiveness of the prospect.

After which you're off to the races. Neat.

A couple of years ago, I had a few conversations with Justin about the wisdom of buying Toto (or any lottery ticket for that matter), and why playing a negative expectation game still felt like it might not be an irrational decision. And -- with no prior knowledge of Kahneman's work -- we constructed, verbally, a pretty good approximation of what (in theory) he would say (i.e. that the utility of having a 1 in 4 million chance of winning 1.5 million dollars can be more than the utility of having 1 dollar, even in a repeated game situation)

It pleases me that we thought of that, and that it's important, and I admire how prospect theory has been constructed because it articulates so cleanly all the ideas about value and utility that have been swimming around in my head for a while now. This has to be the first time a mathematical model has given me a warm tingly feelnig inside. More people need to win Nobel prizes for things like that.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Ig Nobels (ii)

the chemistry prize was apparently awarded to two UMn researchers who showed that people swim as fast in syrup as they do in water. heh.

Ig Nobels

From Nature:

Ig Nobels hail world's longest-running experiment

...John Mainstone of the University of Queensland in Aistrlia accepted the physics prize for the 'pitch-drop' experiment started back in 1927 by the prize's co-winner, the late Thomas Parnell. It shows that an ostensibly solid tar derivative can behave like a liquid, forming drops at the rate of about one every nine years.

Shortly after arriving at Queensland in 1961, Mainstone found a curious piece of equipment tucked away in a cupboard. He had unwittingly stumbled across Parnell's experiment, by then three decades old.

Parnell, Queensland's first physics professor, had taken a sample ofpitch, heated it, and placed it in a funnel. He hoped to show that this appparently solid substance - britle enough to shatter on impact - has fluid-like properties. Sure enough, the material did form drops, albeit at an exceedingly slow rate. Its viscosity, Mainstone and his colleagues calculate, is 100 billion times that of water.

It is hard to know what motivated Parnell, but Mainstone suspects it had to do with the quantum revolution - the idea that "things are not what they seem" - that had overtaken physics. "This was his way of showing there are strange things in classical physics too," Mainstone surmises.

The experiment has attracted a cult following, he says, yet it also raises some serious scientific questions. No one knows, for example, how each drop actually detaches. Mainstone believes that fibres supporting the drop in its final stages become unstable and fall catastrophically, but this hypothesis is unconfirmed.

Part of the problem is that in the experiment's 78-year old history, no one has seen a single drop fall. That's not surprising, says Mainstone. "We're talking about a descent of a few centimetres, lasting a tenth of a second, that occurs just once a decade." The last drop, which fell in November 2000, should have been recorded on a webcam, but technical problems intervened. "We'll have to wait until next time, which could be 2010 or later," Mainstone notes.

There is enough pitch left to sustain the experiment for another century, he estimates, and he hopes it will continue, despite the constant battles he has waged with the "philistines" who believe the experiment wastes precious time and space. Mainstone's labour of love, along with Parnell's pioneering work, were recognized in 2003 when the Guinness Book of Records named the pitch-drop experiment the world's longest-running laboratory experiment. The Ig Nobel prize, which Mainstone shares with the late Parnell, provides further recognition.

...

Mainstone is a great believer in the Ig Nobels, and not just because of his award. Science has become a "rat race", largely as a result of the pressure to compete for grant money, he claims, adding that it's important to get a break from that sometimes. "When we cease to see the amusing side of science, it's all over," he says.

Steve Nadis

i am to start shadowing one of the clinical psychologists in sgh in december, possibly january. he also teaches a class, and has invited me to join that as well. it is a step forward - a hard-earned one - nothing comes cheap when what you're chasing is in all probability a castle on a cloud.

at least my intolerance for the general slowness of progress diminishes. (glass half-empty: perhaps that's also a sign of waning ambition.) i used to be convinced that i would suffer massive internal hemorrhaging if i didn't get a phd before age 30; now it matters so much less. one day at a time, right?

mid-october. tempus fugit. did september even happen?

random things that don't quite qualify as whole posts, or even significant news:

* things at work have been routine for the past two months, thus the accelerando of perceived time. more days than not i eat out and get home late, and weekends get gobbled up by chores and admin and restoring my sanity with wine and song. cue my favorite steinbeck quote: from nothing to nothing is no time at all.

* dukegabe's patience in getting the singaporean class of '04/05 together is inexhaustible. he'salso one of those people you kind of don't really want to meet until you do. on the agenda: various juicy things about people breaking up and finance chiefs making egregious errors of judgment during interviews. journalists are right up there on the waiting list for hell.

* does anyone want to go to any oktoberfest events while it's still oktober? i like beer and sausages. very vimesian.

* there's a new cd/dvd store (gramophone) in the basement of scotts next to the rotiboy. i thought i'd advertise for them because they had monty python and the holy grail and priscilla queen of the desert, both cheap, both dvds i'd been looking for for ages.

Currently reading:
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst

booker

so ishiguro didn't win. had a disagreement with the mother over whether, in his book, kathy is making the best of a bad situation, or if she is just using her power as narrator to camouflage her disgust and feelings of futility. must go reread.

from a random woman's magazine:

"Any of us would hate to have our future happiness placed upon another person. It relinquishes the power to make ourselves happy, rendering us quite useless. To be needy leaves us women in a highly volatile situation. Even sadder, a male scrape goat at whom we can point fingers and exclaim, 'I'm not happy because he's not!' In this day and age, we would like to think ourselves more self-sufficient than our 60s Doris Day apron touting counterparts.' (sic.)

From Today, 7 Oct 2005:

Longer life span calls for longer protection

"From actuarial statistics, about 30 percent of males and 40 percent of females at the age of 55 are expected to live beyond 82. This proportion is expected to increase. Many people decide to invest in a life annuity as it offers better protection against living too long."

Excellent.

question

if anyone knows why they stick the little sharpened chopstick things into potted plants, could you please tell me the reason. i've narrowed the possibilities down to horticultural or superstitious. or, as someone i know suggested, "because the neighbours put so i also put lor".

corpse bride

-- was not quite as good, i think, as the nightmare before christmas. the jokes felt worn, and you kept getting the feeling that you would much rather be seeing johnny depp than his claymation effigy. liked the dog, though.

Currently reading:
Have Mercy On Us All - Fred Vargas. (Indeed)

my boss has asked me to check out mri made easy, an interactive dvd narrated by someone who sounds suspiciously like stephen fry, to see if it's useful as a teaching tool. the 'easy' part is a little bit of a lie, but the writers try their level best to persuade you that it's so. "as you may remember from school," the narrator says, "a proton is etc.", and just as you glow with pride at remembering introductory science they hit you several seconds later with the bloch equation. physics is evil.

i mentioned to cp to other day that i watch a couple of shows with my mom every week (rome and arrested development, and six feet under before it went off air). strange that we should both like these, i grant you, and stranger still in that the hbo shows are pretty adult, not really the stuff of mother-son bonding (one would think more along the lines of the radio programs minz and her dad listen to). even AD gets naughtier by the week. moms, i think, will always see their kids as being about nine years old, no matter how old they are. my mom tells me that when she was still living in england her dad used to make them cross the road if he saw anyone ahead of them making out. they'd also have to change the channel to the news every time anything remotely sexual came on. just one generation, and look what remarkable strides we've made.