Blessed by the Potato

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!