Blessed by the Potato

Just got back from seeing JoCo and Paul & Storm in concert. It was a really fun concert, including at least 3 separate songs about mad scientists who are sad, so it was like they were singing right to me. Paul & Storm have a fairly large catalogue of stuff on their site, and I find most of it to be hit-or-miss, but in person (where it’s really just the hits) they were great.

It was an intimate setting with lots of feedback (often hilarious) from the audience of hard-core fans (and really, there are really only three kinds of people: those who have never heard of JoCo (yet), those who are already die-hard fans, and those who aren’t the slightest bit geeky and/or without any sense of humour and thus have heard of JoCo/P&S but aren’t fans). However, the seats in the Enwave theatre were horrendous, they weren’t deep enough to sit fully back on (it’s like when the monster truck radio guy says “you get the whole seat, but you’ll only need the edge” — well they only gave us the edge). They also were connected down the row, so whenever someone would move your seat would shake and twist. At least the venue had good acoustics.

Verdict:
Jonathan Coulton - Awesome.
Paul & Storm - Hella Awesome.
Enwave Seats - NOT awesome.

The funniest part of the concert though was Wayfare. During the Mandelbrot Set she just about lost it laughing (and when I first played the song for her, she laughed for like 15 minutes at the “best line ever in a song”). I’m pretty sure it carried right to the front, but JoCo didn’t seem to mind. Then during the encore, all 3 of them come back out to play a cover of TMBG’s Constantinople, and Paul brings out this weird mouth organ blowy thing, and JoCo and Storm comment on it and make a few jokes. Wayfare grabs my arm, turns to me, and with this really intense expression on her face says “Have you ever seen my mouth organ blowy thing? It’s red.” And partly because of how important she seemed to think it was that it was red, and mostly because of how intensely she said it, I just lost it and started laughing like crazy.

Finally, it was really weird to see so many people in “Skullcrusher Mountain” T-shirts (including me).

I haven’t done one of these for a while. There was some bad weather for a few weeks there, and I didn’t get on the bike at all for a fortnight. Not owning up to my downfalls in the exercise routine kind of defeats the point of the public update/shaming, but I also reasoned that I didn’t have any links I wanted to share, either.

The last two weeks have been much better though: I broke the 20 km barrier, and rather easily at that, returning home feeling like I still could have done more, and wasn’t much sore the next day. Now the problem is going to be that to keep pushing myself to be able to bike further (e.g., to train for the Rona/MS bike tour), I need to start committing serious time. I did a (fairly hilly) 18 km on holiday Monday, and that took me about an hour and a half — I just don’t have the time right now to push it any further than that.

Diet: aaaah, you don’t even want to know. So far the multivitamin seems to be keeping away the scurvy.

Random thoughts:

Realtors to Canadians: Chill Out

“There will be no drastic drop in Canadian housing prices, the Canadian Real Estate Association said Thursday, because house prices will stabilize and climbing household income will make owning a home more affordable.”

Wow, I barely included tautology in my list of logical fallacies because I couldn’t think of any examples where it really came up, and circular reasoning is usually fairly easy to spot. But, here it is: there will be no drastic drop in house prices because house prices will not drop drastically.

Then that last tack-on about incomes doesn’t mention a timeframe. Incomes rise at about the rate of inflation, say 2%/year. If houses are 10% overvalued on average (and 30-50% in Toronto and Vancouver), that could be a very long period of flat-lining. If even the CREA is saying that the best case is a flat-lining of house prices for years, then why be in any hurry to buy, especially with uncertainty about where rates will go?

And if everyone’s in no hurry to buy, then won’t sellers have to lower their prices to attract buyers back? I just can’t see a stagnation as a likely scenario. Yes, house prices have stagnated for long periods of time before, but not usually so far from equilibrium, and not following such epic volatility (down ~10% in ‘08, and then bouncing back ~20% in ‘09!).

Plus there’s the issue that Canada is not homogeneous… a nation-wide decline of just a few percent could very well mean that Toronto and Vancouver got smashed while the rest of the country stagnated…

Michael James has a good set of links in his roundup this week, including a couple on your financial advisor, and whether small investors have no choice but to become DIYers.

My Bell bill arrived for the month, and I was greeted with a $30 over-usage charge. Bell’s cap of 25 GB is way more restrictive than Rogers’ 60 GB one (and even that is getting tight as more and more uses for the internet come out but the cap hasn’t changed in years). So even though I had a fairly moderate month (~40 GB in usage, well under what my cap was when I was with Rogers), that qualified me for the full $30 overage fee. What really ticked me off is that even though they have my email address (and phone number) they never notified me that I was getting close to (or exceeding) my cap. I thought I was being good. You can bet I’ll be switching to Teksavvy (with a 200 GB cap!) when my contract’s up…

Stephen Novella has another interesting post up on science and public perceptions. “[P]eople find stories much more compelling than data.”

Spoilers ahead!

Borderlands: I finally finished this thing. I had no idea I was that close to the end… it just simply ended. I must say, it was very unsatisfying. The beginning of the game had so much promise (and with multiplayer it would probably still be fun), but it felt like they rushed through it and did a little too much cut ‘n paste, as the charm and humour from the first little bit seemed gone completely by the end. It was a grind-fest basically. The reward for beating the final boss? The ability to run through the game all over again on a higher difficulty to unlock “achievements”. Whoopee. The last boss didn’t even drop any epic loot! Oh, and there is no treasure vault: the vault is a prison for some kind of Eridian demon thing, that is unlocked every 200 years by the alignment of the moons, which gives our hero the chance to finish the demon off once and for all. To quote the PA guys: “It is at this point that people begin to question the wisdom behind moon-powered demon prisons.”

Though you wouldn’t think it from the message some housing bulls have. “It’s different here, housing will never go down, the immigrants are coming in waves and buying everything in sight.”

No matter how overpriced the market gets, somehow the magical immigrants will ride down on their rainbow with their pots of gold and buy an investment property or three. Unfortunately, immigrants aren’t going to magically sustain a housing bubble indefinitely. Immigrants are not stupid, and won’t continue buying houses at prices that no one else would touch. Even if they would, there comes a time when there just aren’t enough people with money to keep the whole thing climbing to the moon and it all falls apart.

First off, the “rich overseas investor” is a fairy tale. Ok, yes, there are a few people who come from overseas and buy a house with cash (or “really cheap” unserviced vacant land) and don’t care what interest rates do, but not enough to keep inflating a bubble when all the other buyers face rising rates. Not by a long shot. I don’t have good statistics on the matter, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the wealth and incomes of immigrants is no different than the average Canadian — and if anything, may be lower. Just because a place in Vancouver is still cheaper than one in Hong Kong or London (the Other London) or New York doesn’t mean that people coming from those places will happily cough up Hong Kong prices for Canadian real estate without thinking about it (at least, not forever, and not all of them). Indeed, they’ll probably have Canadian jobs and so the price-to-income measures are every bit as relevant to them.

Secondly, immigrants have never before saved any city from a real estate bubble and collapse. What, you think immigration was invented in 2002? The US has immigration to all its big cities too, and look what happened there. Heck, one of the biggest periods of immigration to Toronto was in the lead-up to the Hong Kong handover in 1997, and real estate crashed big time from the peak in ‘89 through the 90’s.

Thirdly, immigrants are not all that different than other Canadians in their desire for housing. So it doesn’t matter whether a person is an immigrant or not — it’s population growth and household formation that drives demand. I’ve actually had people argue that immigration drives housing prices because “immigrants stop at nothing to get a house of their own; they’ll pay any price and live 3 or 4 families/generations to a house until it’s paid off and then buy the next one.” Well, multiple families/generations living under the same roof actually decreases demand (households) for the same number of people, so that argument doesn’t hold a lot of water, it’s just trying to reach for an explanation as to why anyone would pay any price for a house.

For the country as a whole, population growth has been rather steady for a long time now: any increases (real or perceived) in immigration rates are really just offsetting our natural declining birthrate. Now, I don’t have any data on growth rates by city, so it is possible that recently the immigrants have decided to concentrate more on moving to Toronto and Vancouver, though I doubt that it’s actually out of line with any longer-term trends.

Speaking of household formations though, the one fly in my bear soup comes from this graph (via stats can) of the population pyramid:

The tail-end of the baby boom would have been passing through age 25 right about 1989, which may in part explain the housing boom and crash that happened then. The echo only just started working their way through their homebuying years a few years ago, and won’t be finished for another 5-10 years. I’ve long maintained that the unsustainably high housing prices were due to lax lending, low interest rates, and the madness of crowds. If, however, demographics also play a starring role, then this may take longer to unwind than I thought.

It’s interesting to see how sharp the baby boom was though — the start in ‘46 is very sudden, for obvious reasons, but even the tail end sees a 20% decrease in just 3-4 years. The echo isn’t as sudden on either end (though oddly enough, is more pronounced in men than women).

Now, all this isn’t to say that immigration can’t have an effect on a housing market, especially in the short term and when immigration is not smooth — there’s a fundamental limit* to how sharp a baby boom can be, but an influx of new people to an area can happen quite sharply, which can distort a market badly in the short term. Ft. McMurray is a good example of this. As the tar sands projects ramped up there was a huge influx of people to Northern Alberta to work the oil patch. Housing simply couldn’t be built fast enough for the people coming in, and combined with the high wages, the cost of shelter shot up there, to the point where a house in Ft. McMurray was in many cases more expensive than a house in Toronto. But that’s all short-term: as the rate of house construction has a chance to catch up to the demand, then it’s reasonable to expect prices to settle back down to whatever the incomes can support (though in Ft. McMurray those are fairly high), and then down to the cost of building a new house when the builders overshoot the demand.

* - octomoms and bunny rabbits excepted.

As an experimental scientist, I know that there is a lot you can only find out through direct experience, and more that is best learned that way. There are also a lot of questions that you really don’t want to find the answer to the hard way, such as whether there’s an afterlife, what would Stephen Harper do with an unfettered majority government, or would looking at a solar eclipse without eye protection be awesome enough to warrant the retinal damage?

To that list, I can now add: can my car withstand being kicked by a disembodied deer leg? (The answer is yes; also, deer have a lot of blood inside of them.)

PS: I’m really thankful I’m not the guy who just discovered how well his SUV took a head-on collision with a whole deer.

The S&P500 was down nearly 4% today, which is a pretty huge one-day move. We’re now below the point we were at two weeks ago before the Greek bailout package was announced (the close after the “flash crash”).

This is not purely out of partially-unfounded fears over what’s happening in Europe: some fairly bad news has been coming out of North America, including US numbers indicating that inflation has gone away, raising the probability that we are facing a protracted or double-dip recession.

So, what does that mean for the young investor? Periods of panic and weakness are generally good times to buy (or to choose to rebalance and shift more of your portfolio from strongly-performing safe assets to underperforming equities). However, in the past I’ve bought too early and used all my cash in the early innings. Since buying a car and paying rent at two places while I finish my PhD has lead to negligible savings, I don’t have any dry powder at the moment to invest. That’s forced me to sit on my hands through this and wait for some truly delicious bargains.

I am considering using some modest leverage if prices seriously decline (ala 2008/2009), though getting Wayfare to sign-off on that plan will be a challenge since she’s allergic to debt (she is also allergic to cats, so it’s nothing personal, debt). However, while I can appreciate the logic behind leverage (and bringing your future purchases forward if you’re young and saving), I’m also not one to get too comfortable with debt. Even if I maxed out my LoC, that’d only leave me about 7-8% leveraged.

The question then becomes, at what point do I start buying? When is it truly “raining gold”? I doubt we’ll go as far down as the March ‘09 lows, but who’s to say how long or how deep this panic will run. The big bear lasted over a year; the two moderate corrections on the way up lasted about a month and were less than 10%. Some may argue that it’s better to wait for the bottom to be in and buy on the way up, and I don’t have a good comeback to that except to say that then it becomes easy to continue to sit on the sidelines until long after the bottom has passed. I’m not trying to get my timing perfect — I’m trying to tell myself I’m not timing at all — I just want to buy at a fairer price. So, I’ve got a few stink bids in now for a few stocks, sitting about 10% below where they are today (which for many is already 10-15% below where they were last month). After that, I’ll probably buy again when I save more money or if the market goes down another 10-20%…

The point to remember is that for many of us, this is a better time to invest than it was last month, despite the calm markets then.

The mollusk eye is often used as a counter-point to intelligent design arguments. The human eye, if deliberately designed, was not designed particularly well. The layers of tissue are laid down backwards (with the photosensitive layer that actually lets you see underneath the non-transparent, thin, easily separated blood vessel layer), and the lens setup leads to failure in middle age. The mollusk eye, on the other hand, shows evidence of having evolved independently, demonstrating that not only can an eye evolve by the process of natural selection, but that it has done so more than once. The octopus eye is in many ways more advanced than our own: the layers of tissue are the right way around. The lens changes focus by moving back and forth rather than being stretched (which means you don’t have to worry about compliance changes as the lens ages and stiffens). Indeed, camera makers have long turned to the octopus eye for inspiration on how to solve problems like how to make lenses that focus clearly on large photosensitive areas.

So then it led me to wonder: maybe there is an intelligent designer, but He designed octopi. I mean, not only are their eyes superior, but they are very smart, without having these delicate spines and specialized brain regions — they are a marvel of decentralized processing. Many can change their colours, and with their highly flexible bodies (no constrictive skeletons, just muscle), they can even mimic the outlines of other animals. They are ruthless and calculating — quite capable of escaping their laboratory tanks and eating the fish in neighbouring tanks, and smart enough to go back at dawn so no one is the wiser.

That leads us to wonder: what designed the octopus? And there is only one answer:

Cthulu.

So, will octopi one day take over the world? Here’s the scary thought: 2/3 of the world’s surface is under water, and fairly poorly explored. It’s quite possible that the octopi already rule the world, and the tiny dry sliver of land we call home is just a wild frontier they haven’t yet got around to dominating yet.

Just a quick note: there will be minor spoilers all through this.

I was trying to think of how to review Iron Man 2 when Orson Scott Card beat me to it.

It was a pretty movie that was fun to watch. But there were a lot of holes in it, especially with the characters and their motivations.

For Tony, he went through this whole nonsense of discovering a new element to upgrade his arc reactor to get around a problem with heavy metal poisoning. Supposedly, his use of the Iron Man suit exacerbated the leeching of toxins into his body. However, this made no sense to me, since he obviously managed to make power suits with their own power supply (such as the one Rhodie took), and only needed the power from a car battery to power the electromagnet in his chest. He easily could have externalized the arc reactor and used a conventional battery to keep him from dying.

I also didn’t like Don Cheadle as Rhodie, he just played it so straight. And as Tony’s friend, it made no sense to me why he’d steal the armour (even if under orders) just to give Stark’s competitor, Hammer, access to it. In all his interactions he was just such a divergence from what we saw in the first movie, where they skirt that line between professional camaraderie (or even babysitting) and drinking buddy.

I also didn’t think we got a very good look at Vanko — it wasn’t quite as bad as Star Trek for glossing over the villain, but Jebidaiah from the first one was just so much more real and sinister, and we got to see him develop and go power-mad before our eyes…

Anyhow, for all its shortcoming it was action-packed popcorn-munching fun, so go have at it!

I got the windows on the Prius tinted last weekend at Auto-Links. I ended up choosing them because they had a lot of good reviews over at redflagdeals, including a group buy discount from that group (which is still good if you’re considering tinting your car), and their prices were roughly $100-150 less than what the dealership wanted for tinting. John and Cody seem to run a quality shop, taking care to wash the windows really well before applying the computer-cut tint. In fact, there was a minor problem with one of the tint sheets and John threw it right out, no hesitation on doing the job right.

I have to admit that my heart leaped into my chest when I heard the “pop-pop-pop-pop” of the retaining clips releasing the door panel (they need to open the door panel to get the film to the bottom of the glass), but of course they’re pros, and it all went back together nicely (no door rattles either, which was my big worry since it’s a problem I’ve managed to avoid thus-far on the Prius).

I ended up up-selling myself into the ceramic tint: I really don’t care about the electronic non-interference perk, but I did want to stay with a fairly light tint since I do so much night driving, while getting better heat rejection. One of the big reasons for getting the windows tinted in the first place was to reduce heat build-up, and the ceramic was not that much more for a fairly large increase in heat rejection. The film came in a “30%” and “40%” optical transmission, though apparently the ceramic is actually lighter than the rating. It is indeed a fairly subtle tint, this isn’t a black-out gangsta limo tint:

I got 30% on the back, and 40% on the front, and there is zero issue with night-time driving, with the possible exception of some light from headlights behind me appearing to streak out along the defogger lines of the rear window (I hope to update later with a picture of that effect). I’m hoping that will settle down as the film cures and adheres better to the window, but either way it’s not a big issue. In fact, I probably could have gone darker on the back (I had in my head going in that I wanted something in the ~20-25% range), but unfortunately the one downside to Auto-Links & ceramic tint is that there aren’t a lot of choices along the tint spectrum, with nothing available between 15% and 30%. One final perk I should mention is that these guys take Monday and Tuesdays off so they can work the weekend, which was great because Sundays are a good day to have this sort of thing done!

For those who don’t know, if you preorder StarCraft 2, you can get access to the beta and start playing right away (albeit, a beta version). I’ve been too busy to play much, but I have had at least one game with each race, and here are my first thoughts:

The general game: Blizzard’s last RTS, WarCraft 3, was a real revolution to the genre. Heroes, smaller armies, autocasting, smart casting, creeps/mobs, treasure, potions, shops, and mercenaries made the game a pretty wild divergence from the earlier RTS games. StarCraft 2 on the other hand, is pretty true to the original StarCraft. Autocasting and smart casting did get brought up to reduce the amount of micromanagement required, and unit group sizes are no longer limited to 12 (which, IMHO, further encourages massing units). But there are no heroes, no creeps/mobs, no shops, and the unit cap is still quite high at I think 200 (I haven’t had a chance to actually hit it yet).

The units got mixed around and changed quite a bit — the firebat is gone, for example, leaving the Terrans without any melee units. The zerg queen has gone from being a fast flying scout caster to a den mother that watches the hive. The bigger change under this is that the rock-paper-scissors aspect of the original StarCraft has been watered down to an extent. There are still units that get bonuses in their attacks to units of a certain size, and armour still plays a role, but it doesn’t appear possible to counter specific mass strategies as it was in the original StarCraft (or Brood War). Back then, someone could build a fleet of 48 mutalisks, and you could pop them all with just 4 Science Vessels and some micro, or a handful of Valkyries. Basically with some good scouting, you could counter most “mass unit X” strategies with much fewer resources than massing something of your own would take. In SC2, the damage seems to have levelled off a bit, forcing you to build up your army rather than fleshing out your niches. With just a few weeks left to go before release (eek!) there probably won’t be too many drastic changes to the game, but balance issues will be front and centre in what changes do get made.

I was reading some of the pre-beta articles about the game, and was afraid that it would be chalk-full of transforming units to keep track of. I don’t remember if the articles just seemed to focus on the Viking or if there were other transformers as well, but it sounded complicated from the previews. In practice, the transforming nature of the viking and siege tank are not overwhelming.

Macro is the new micro: One of the changes that really struck me was how your macro game — harvesting resources and building your armies — has really come to the forefront in SC2. Much of the micromanagement in a match is now dedicated to the macro part of the game, and these can be very crucial things to optimize (indeed, find yourself just a minute or two on the slow side in building your queens and your allies will jump down your throat!). The Terrans can call down advanced, time-limited workers called MULEs to harvest resources at a faster rate; the Protoss can turbocharge their buildings to pump out units faster, via a spell that must be recast quite frequently; the zerg Queens can increase the larvae spawn rate at your hives with a spell of their own. Also, there is no residual vespene extraction: once your geyser is depleted, you have to move on, which leads to a tiny bit more micro to support your macro game.

Other changes: The way the game handles having the high ground has changed. In case you didn’t notice in SC1, there was a definite advantage to be fighting from the high ground: units firing up the cliff would have a miss rate applied to them. Now, you can’t fire up a cliff at all without a spotter, but if you can see up, you do full damage. There’s also no need to scout just to see the terrain: maps start fully revealed (but covered by the fog of war). Plus, of course, the pretty, pretty graphics.

The players: It’s only the beta, I’m still in the newbie league, there’s no single-player or battle the AI option to learn how to play, and yet people are still assholes when you don’t play “perfectly”. Dudes: relax, people have to learn somehow, and even if these matches were ranked, your ranking on the beta ladder doesn’t really matter (even when compared to how little the release ladder rankings matter).

Rushing seems to be huge from my subset of games played. I’ve even seen players build barracks/gateways inside another players base to rush them, which is pretty damned audacious. Past strategies for defending against the rush don’t seem to be as effective any more — blocking the choke-point doesn’t work on many maps because many bases have a back door with destructible terrain, and I don’t know if the movement speeds are higher or what, but just having “a few” defenders doesn’t seem to be enough to hold them back any more (a rusher used to be at an inherent disadvantage because even if you were a little slower, you had some extra time to build more units while they were charging down from their side of the map, and if they tried to beeline for the workers, they’d often get chewed up by the marines). WC3 seemed to have a lot of resources to try to block rushing (and it was novel strategies like the orc tower rush that often proved to be the most annoying to counter), not the least of which was the strength of your hero, and the defense of the workers (wisps were completely enclosed, humans could turn into militia, undead acolytes were admittedly corpsicles, but you were guaranteed to have at least a few ghouls to get wood, and orc peons could jump into the burrows and shoot back), plus the strength of the early tower defenses.

A weird, weird day in the markets today, as on basically no new news there was a huge negative spike at about 2:45pm. The markets are still down considerably as I write this (a few minutes before the close), but if you check there are a lot of companies with a big spike right at that time, some down 30% or more.

My day started off weird too, as I tried to put a bid in for SPB just to have it cancelled instantly by TD; the stock went down to $8.40 at one point with no bids (and that was when I really wanted to be the only low-ball bid!) before trading was halted. When it resumed it came back to the $13 range. Again, a weird computer issue at the exchange?

Update: it looks like they are indeed blaming a computer glitch, and are reversing some trades.