Assembled in the USA from 100% Chinese parts.

6:24am: tb might be interested in this, I thought...so I posted it. That's my story.
From a transcript of Tyler Cowen's TEDx talk on why stories make him nervous:

One interesting thing about cognitive biases - they're the subject of so many books these days. There's the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. And why don't these books tell us that? It's because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you're learning about some of your biases, but you're making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, like "I bought this book. I won't be Predictably Irrational." It's like people want to hear the worst, so psychologically, they can prepare for it or defend against it. It's why there's such a market for pessimism. But to think that buying the book gets you somewhere, that's maybe the bigger fallacy. It's just like the evidence that shows the most dangerous people are those that have been taught some financial literacy. They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It's the people that realize, "I don't know anything at all," that end up doing pretty well.

So if I'm thinking about this talk, I'm wondering, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen?

I'm really not sure, and I'm not here to tell you to burn your DVD player and throw out your Tolstoy. To think in terms of stories is fundamentally human. There's a Gabriel García Márquez memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, that we use stories to make sense of what we've done, to give meaning to our lives, to establish connections with other people. None of this will go away, should go away, or can go away. But as an economist, I'm thinking about life on the margin. The extra decision: should we think more in terms of stories, or less in terms of stories? When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious? and what kind of stories should we be suspicious of? Again, I'm telling you it's the stories that you like the most, that you find the most rewarding, the most inspiring. The stories that don't focus on opportunity cost, or the complex, unintended consequences of human action, because that very often does not make for a good story. So often a story is of triumph, of struggle; there are opposing forces, which are either evil or ignorant; there is a person on a quest, someone making a voyage, and a stranger coming to town. And those are your categories, but don't let them make you too happy.

So as an alternative, at the margin (again, no burning of Tolstoy), just be a little more messy. If I actually had to live those journeys and quests and battles, that would be so oppressive to me! It's like, my goodness, can't I just have my life in its messy, ordinary - I hesitate to use the word - glory? It's fun for me - do I really have to follow some kind of narrative? Can't I just live? So be more with comfortable with messy. Be more comfortable with agnostic, and I mean this about the things that make you feel good. It's so easy to pick a few areas you're agnostic in, and then feel good about like, "I'm agnostic about religion, or politics." It's a kind of portfolio move you make to be more dogmatic elsewhere, right? Sometimes, the most intellectually trustworthy people are the ones who pick one area, and they're totally dogmatic in that. So pig-headedly unreasonable you think, "How can they possibly believe that!?" But it soaks up their stubbornness, and then on other things, they can be pretty open-minded. So don't fall into the trap of thinking because you're agnostic on somethings, that you're being fundamentally reasonable about your self-deception and your stories and your open-mindedness.

This idea of hovering, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, and not everything ties up into a neat bow, and you're really not on a journey here. You're here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don't know what it is, and maybe I don't know what it is, but anyway I'm happy to be invited, and thank you all for listening.

Via The Reformed Broker.

1:46pm: I've been too busy to post about finance in a while...
...but this story is just a bit too good to let pass by. Apparently J.P. Morgan has somehow managed to lose at least a couple of billion dollars through some extremely questionable trades in the last few weeks.

From the FT's Alphaville blog:

In a conference call on Thursday night, CEO Jamie Dimon put mark-to-market losses at $2bn for the unit. Dimon has thus gone from calling the CIO’s trades a “a complete tempest in a teapot” to referring to the losses “plays right into the hands of a whole bunch of pundits out there”.

Other things Dimon said during the conference call:

“…Errors, sloppiness, and bad judgement.”

“Bad strategy, badly executed and poorly monitored”

“It could get worse. This could go on for a little bit.”

“Badly executed, badly monitored. I’m not going to repeat it 800 times”

“I know it was done with the intention to hedge tail risk… it was unbelievably ineffective”

Lisa Pollack of the FT has been covering the story for a few weeks now, ever since it became apparent that something funny was going on with JPMorgan's trades.

Today she appeared on Alphaville's daily Markets Live online chat, and gave this summary in answer to her colleague Bryce Elder's question, "Are we any clearer on what actually happened?"( her answer, and Elder's summing up, behind the cut )

11:11pm: Useless fact of the day.
Somerville, Massachusetts is more densely populated than Hong Kong.

*7,019.3 people per square kilometer for Somerville, 6,380 for the Hong Kong S.A.R.

12:26pm: While I'm on the topic of things to see in Cairo, I have two museum recommendations.
Everyone knows to go to Giza. Most everyone knows to go see the Egyptian Museum. (If you didn't catch one of the many travelling exhibitions of King Tut's treasures, you can see them in their permanent home in the museum.)

However there are two museums that I strongly recommend anyone visiting Cairo make time to see.


Coptic Museum. Image from Wikipedia.
The Coptic Museum in Old Cairo was renovated in 2005-06, and has the largest collection of Egyptian Christian artifacts in the world, all of it helpfully labeled and signed. It is the highlight of Old Cairo, of which Coptic Cairo is a major part. While you are in Old Cairo you can also visit a number of working Coptic churches, and the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

Old Cairo is easily reached by Cairo Metro Line 1 to Mar Girgis station. The Museum entrance is directly across from the Metro exit, while Coptic Cairo can be accessed by a pedestrian underpass under the city wall, off to the left and across the street as you exit the station.

quezz notes that this neighborhood is under threat, so it's best to see it while you can.


Museum of Islamic Art. Image from Wikipedia.
The Museum of Islamic Art is one of the greatest Islamic art museums in the world. It reopened in 2010 after an eight-year, multi-million dollar renovation. The items displayed are placed in their historical and thematic context, well-labeled with explanatory signage in Arabic, English, and French.

The museum is about a fifteen minute walk from Naguib station on Line 2.

Both museums were largely empty of tourists when we visited on a weekday. Most of the other visitors in the museums were local art students who sat on the floors and benches sketching pieces.

One of the other visitors we met was an Egyptian expatriate, now living in Paris, who had come back to Cairo many times over the eight years of the Museum of Islamic Art's long-delayed renovation and been disappointed to find the museum still closed. He expressed his joy at being able to visit the museum where he had done his dissertation research many years before. It was complete chaos back then, he said, but it was beautiful now.

He was absolutely right. The Egyptian Museum could use a makeover like the ones these two museums have gotten.

Both museums are world-class, and both offer a cool respite from hot days in Cairo. Neither has a working gift shop or a working cafe, however. And neither allows cameras.

The Coptic Museum's website: http://www.coptic-cairo.com/museum/about/about.html (Note that the ticket prices have not been updated.)
The Museum of Islamic Art's website (www.islamicmuseum.gov.eg) appears to be down at the moment, but the BBC has a gallery of photos of the museum and some of the pieces in its collection.

9:49am: Today's Google doodle reminded me to post some relevant photos.
In honor of Howard Carter's 138th birthday, a few photos from our visit to Giza back in April:


Modern Egypt: Yum! Brands within a short walk of the Sphinx.


The Sphinx is smaller than I expected it to be.


Two pyramids against a backdrop of present-day Cairo's haze and sprawl.


bedfull_o_books riding a camel off into the Sahara.

11:57am: Satnav (GPS) recommendations wanted.
Anyone have any good recommendations for a satnav that doesn't send you through Harvard Square at the least provocation?

bedfull_o_books is looking for a new satnav. She has finally reached her wits end with her old Magellan unit, which seems incapable of coping effectively with Boston's street layout. It signals turns with insufficient granularity, loses track of where it is and then gets confused as to how to put one back on track, and almost invariably suffers from the Harvard Square problem*. On one memorable occasion it even insisted we were on the wrong side of the Hudson for an hour and a half of high-speed driving, solved only after we crossed to the side of the river it thought we were on.

I have problems with its parochiality. To it, roads outside the continental US are terra incognita. For me personally, this is crippling. Even my Cheetah GPS red light/speed camera warning device knows about cameras in Europe and Australasia, as well as the US and Canada. (I recommend this device, and its perpetual database update add-on, to anyone who drives in places with speed and red-light camera revenue enhancement devices.)

As it turns out, other people have asked this question. Unfortunately those threads are years old, and dead. Apparently there wasn't an easy answer to this question.

I would guess that any satnav capable of dealing with London's street layout would be able to deal with Boston. If the satnav can get me from Hanger Lane to Islington without doing something insane like sending me south of Regents Park (just to take a random example) it should be able to avoid Harvard Square.

Unfortunately, stories of antics perpetrated by drivers too slavishly following satnavs in Britain are legion. So I don't hold out great hope.


But your suggestions are welcome.

---

*( on the Harvard Square problem )

1:17am: Few things scream "Third World Country" as loudly as the grid power going out, followed by the building's backup generator coming on with a roar.

Particularly when it happens twice a day.

10:42pm: For bloodstones.
Some time ago, Nasri Atallah posted:

Language is an odd thing. Being Lebanese, I often think in three separate languages, all three of which I’ve been immersed in since infancy. I think differently in each language and according to what I’m feeling. There are beautiful things I want to say to people sometimes, which I can only say in French. There are vituperative, cynical, acerbic things I want to say which trip off my tongue in English. Arabic surfaces predominately during altercations in traffic, and usually involves unspeakable acts being committed by people’s mothers.

Rest assured, I’m sticking to English for this blog.

12:35am: Seems there's no escape from phone spam, no matter where you go.

1:48pm: Two rather cool language maps from Wikipedia.
The maps accompanying the articles on

Varieties of Chinese



and

Varieties of Arabic

9:02am: This should have gone out yesterday, but packing was more important.
Heading out this morning into the sun
Riding on the diamond waves, little darlin' one
Warm wind caress her
Her lover it seems
Oh Annie, dreamboat Annie, ship of dreams
Oh Annie, dreamboat Annie, little ship of dreams

Going down the city sidewalk, alone in the crowd
No one knows the lonely one whose head's in the clouds
Sad faces painted over with those magazine smiles
Heading out to somewhere, won't be back for a while...
(1975)

5:08pm: Çäkçäk and Sachima.
A few weeks ago digitalemur and I were in Brighton Beach. We found a couple of places selling Çäkçäk, or chak-chak (Чак-чак).


(Çäkçäk)
The stuff looks an awful lot like Sachima (萨其马), which I grew up eating and I still love.


(Sachima)

Uncharacteristically, I didn't just go ahead and buy some to try it, because it appeared to come in pound-lots only and I'd just eaten. Also, sachima goes stale faster than I can eat it, so I was concerned that chak-chak might, too. (In Beijing, you can get it in individually-wrapped single-serving packages, which they really ought to do here.)

I'm very curious as to how the two are similar and how the two are different.

Now it's late enough in the day that I'm afraid the markets in Brighton Beach are going to close before I can buy some. I guess I should wait until my next trip through NYC.

Anyone tried both of these and can report what they taste like? Both chak-chak and sachima are in the Rice Krispies Treat family of food, except that they're made with wheat dough rather than Rice Krispies.

Crispy starch covered in honey. What's not to like?

ETA: Why aren't tasty foods like these on the hundred foods list that's going around on Facebook, anyway? (rhetorical question)

2:13am: It seems a bit too convenient to attribute to wisdom that which is adequately explained by aging.

1:24pm: Sometimes it is best not to succumb to the temptation to correct people.

Internet or not.

3:16pm: Hiking trail app, anyone?
Is there a Google Goggles sort of app for hiking trails? I would like to be able to look "through" the phone and see a brightly colored line the color of the trail blazes that indicates the trail route I am supposed to follow.

Some of the trails I've been on lately are really badly blazed. It doesn't help that last fall and winter was not kind to the trees and trails so some of the blazed trees are now flat.

As it is, I do a lot of backtracking and cursing.

6:27pm: I just filled out my absentee ballot for Tuesday's election.

"If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and measures you want to vote for... But there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time that truly intelligent exercise of the franchise requires." --Robert A. Heinlein

One of the great things about the modern world, at least in this neighborhood, is how easy it is nowadays to find the opinions of those well-meaning fools. The comments sections of news articles on political candidates, no matter how local, are full of them. Every idiot has an opinion, and many of them feel compelled to post. You can learn quite a bit about candidates from the people who hate them.

Makes research on municipal elections more fun.

Time to get this ballot into the mail stream and hit the road.

4:36pm: From An Imagined Girls Night With Katniss Everdeen, Hermione Granger, Bella Swan And Buffy Summers:

In celebration of the release of The Hunger Games in theaters, I figured there was no better way to welcome Katniss Everdeen to the pantheon of pop culture heroines, than by imagining what it would be like to be a fly on the wall during Girls Night. Clearly, Carrie Bradshaw was not invited.

(via the Financial Times' Alphaville blog)

4:10pm: Rooibos tea.
Being reduced to clear liquids recently reminded me how much I liked drinking hot beverages. I somehow got out of the habit of drinking them. This didn't make any sense, particularly during the winter. (I lose my brain in the winter, that's my story.)

One of those hot beverages is rooibos tea, which has become quite trendy outside South Africa since the end of apartheid.

I see a lot of expensive varieties of this herbal tea in the shops here, but for my money the mass-market rooibos tea popular in South Africa is just fine for me. It's what I'm used to anyway.

An eighty tea bag box of Five Roses Rooibos Select for R24.49 ($3.10) at the local Pick n Pay will really do me just fine. I've been working on my current box since my last trip to South Africa.

Because I started drinking the stuff there, I drink it hot with milk and sugar, or as sweetened iced tea. It was a great discovery to find a standard tea option that came without caffeine. I basically spent the last five weeks of my trip to Southern Africa drinking it with each meal. It never got old.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to ask anyone coming back from South Africa to bring back a box. (Of course I'll pay.) The stuff is cheap and light, although the box tends to get smashed on the way home. I put mine in a tupperware container, so the box got back to the States intact only to get crushed in a move from Connecticut. (I might even be able to supply a tupperware container.)

3:34pm: Parallel appetizers?
Last night, I ordered preserved egg (皮蛋) with tofu*. bedfull_o_books left most of it for me, nibbling on a bit of the spring onions and tofu and carefully avoiding the 皮蛋.

It occurred to me then how conceptually similar the Shanghainese version of this dish:


(diced century eggs, soft tofu, and green onion, drizzled with sesame oil)
From a recipe at tastehongkong.com.

is to Insalata Caprese.

(sliced fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, drizzled with olive oil)
Both require no prep other than slicing, assembly, and plating. Both are composed of four ingredients, plus some optional seasoning (salt in both cases, balsamic vinegar on the Caprese, soy sauce on the Century Egg; both of the latter are dark liquids). Both are thus very dependent on the quality of the ingredients used.

In conversation with digitalemur later, I mentioned how I thought the set of people who like both of these appetizers as much as I do was probably small: most people who like century eggs are culturally unused to cheese, and most people who like cheese are culturally unused to century eggs.

This is of course changing, but there really aren't that many people globally who ate both as children. Most of us are probably in the Chinese diaspora.

*At a restaurant which used to be one of our go-to Shanghainese places but which since appears to have swapped chefs and now highlights Sichuan cuisine.

7:05pm: Canada will stop minting pennies in April.


Canada joins Australia and New Zealand in ending production of 1 cent coins. Australia stopped minting them for circulation in 1991, and New Zealand in 1987.

From the Globe and Mail:

The last one-cent coin will be minted this April, ending close to 150 years of the issuance of Canadian pennies. This unit of currency was first produced in 1858 although Canadian-based minting of the coin only began in 1908.

The Royal Canadian Mint will stop distributing pennies to financial institutions in the fall of 2012 and the government will work to withdraw one-cent coins from circulation.

If anyone has some Canadian pennies they'd like to sell me I'll be glad to buy them at face value. I'll also pick them up, if you're willing to wait for my next visit.

(For that matter, if you have other random coins lying around, I'd have a look at those too.)

4:36pm: I guess some web coder at Kayak.com is irritated at IE.
Embedded in many of their hotel results pages is this comment:

<div class="hidden">
Dear bill Gates! Why does your browser ignore inline styles unless they are specified
inside a div, that also must have content? Isn't that crazy?
<style type="text/css">

5:52pm: Egg cartons! Up for grabs! I'll even deliver, within reason.
bedfull_o_books was collecting them for friends who kept chickens and ducks, but then they stopped needing them. We now have some. Six of them, so far, and they keep piling up.

If you're somewhere along one of my normal driving routes (i.e., Northeast Corridor Eastern MA to Northern VA, sometimes inland along Western MA-Northeastern PA-South Central PA-MD-DC), give a shout and I'll bring them to you. (I've tossed them in my car.) Or if you're likely to be in Eastern MA and you can come by, let me know.

Good for paints as well as fresh eggs, I hear.

5:56pm: It takes a community to be poly.
And for all of you who help me with advice and comfort, thank you. I am so lucky to have you all in my life.

I would shout-out by name, but then this post would get very long, and outing some of you would be rude. :)

9:52am: Speaking of quotes, dpolicar made reference to one from the Narnia books.
He can't remember the exact phrasing, and I can't find it on the web, so I'm giving crowdsourcing it a try.

At one point, the lion says something along the lines of "It is not given for mortals to know the outcome of the path we did not take."

Anyone know what the actual quote is?

Thanks in advance!

8:22am: et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum
(and a word once uttered flies abroad never to be recalled" [Horace)]

or, to repurpose something parallel I've heard attributed to browngirl:

"That which is said cannot be unsaid."

But it's better to know than not, eh?

Thanks to dpolicar for the Latin expression.