Background on the Name

Unlike some of my more mentally restless friends, I do not create memes for myself. But, you have to name an online journal something, and Johnblog sounds horrible. I called mine Psychedelia on Dewey St. because it is an amalgam of myself but is not catchy. (Why should it be? Assuming someone reads it someday, I wouldn't want to worry that it was a superficial trick) Not giving it a name would have seemed either apathetic or intentionally anti-social, neither of which is a good characteristic to impart on something you send out into the world. (Things that are blatantly anti-social can be just as memetic as anything else.) In other words, it is not superficially special, and I hope that it stands on its own merits; this is my mature self believing in honesty and simplicity and fairness.

"Psychedelia" is so very nebulous, although anyone who has felt themselves in a psychedelic state (whether drug-induced or not) will relate to it as a concrete idea. However, few will find a common definition. In this case, this common uncommonality is a quality I liked in the word and so here we are with it.

For someone who makes few investments but makes them big ones, it is inevitable that even great success is usually a story, overwhelmingly, of the best few ideas. Out of ten investments, one may be responsible for 75% of the returns. For instance, last year, I put a significant portion of my wealth into Clear Choice Health Plans - a regional health insurer - and I walked away six months later with 275% of the money I put in. That made me far more than all of the other investments I had last year.

Life imitates life; patterns are everywhere. If Clear Choice Health Plans was my #1 investment up to this point, then stumbling into living at 3302 Dewey was my #1 social choice (sorry, Finland - a close #2; but then again, that wasn't my idea). All told, I lived there for almost five years, from November 2003 until September 2008. I was living at home and going to UNO part-time when Jeremy convinced me to go looking at houses - he knew enough of our friends that were looking for a place to move to, so we got a paper and went looking one night. We found it almost immediately.

If there was something serendipitous about the random events leading us to finding the house, there would likewise be many things that occurred in due time for me that entered my life with an existential grace that cannot be seen except in retrospect - the arc of a life is too long and subtle, but time burns away the fog.

Despite being in school, I was in a profound mental and lifestyle rut when we moved in. I was on antidepressants not because I was depressed but because I was mostly just shut off. There was an urgency to change into something that I could not put my finger on, but the next six months awakened me. I was helped by being more social more often and meeting more people. I was also inspired to play my guitar more regularly and pay attention to my progress. I found things that I wanted, even if they were sometimes out of my reach. So what. Everybody that is not the Buddha must desire something. I went running or biking. In my mind, it was Spring the first sunny day of January; I was outside, not willing to wait for the temperature to agree. That Spring, particularly, but really all of that first six or eight months, gave me momentum that - profoundly - I have not since lost.

I was the only person who lived in the house the whole five years, and after we had decided to move in, I was often the person responsible for keeping us there at important points - typically when multiple people would move out and we would have to decide between moving on or finding other people to move in. I have fond memories of each group of roommates; some are particularly strong. Particularly, when Mike and Shannon moved in and we focused on music, I stayed quietly ecstatic for months.

Even more so than after moving in, the final Summer and Fall unfolded with such a poetic elegance that it is hard for me to articulate, perhaps because it is hard for me to even process it. It is often an unsung gift when life finds a way to wake up a person who has fallen asleep to their motivations and desires. To me, the Fall began early - a few weeks before school - and it ended the day I left for Mexico with the Richardsons. In between lay the awkward and painful (and, often exhilarating) transition that existed between the past and the irreconcilable but inevitable future.

That Fall, I was working part-time as Avantas' only Product Manager (it is near joke-worthy to consider someone attempting to do this part-time; indeed, perhaps someone at Avantas was asleep at the wheel to even assume it possible, much less a good idea?) while going to school full-time. This would be a handful, but the time between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon belonged to me, and it was a time that Phil, Brandon and I typically set about attempting to drink Omaha. In addition, my mental state reached lows during that Fall that I had not experienced in close to ten years; I was torn apart inside; by stress, by confusion - and for someone so new with the feeling - I was torn apart by my determination - a feeling I didn't know how to moderate. Shamefully, I was torn apart by a greed for more - greed that obscured the thankfulness that I should have felt for what I was fortunate to have had. Indeed, patience for what we anticipate is to thankfulness for what we say goodbye to. But all is well if it ends well.

For a while, I was certain that it would not. I was moody and unpredictable. I was sometimes devastatingly sad. More than a couple times, I had to leave a classroom because I would start crying uncontrollably. I didn't know why. The mind is prone to confabulation. In the absence of other reasons I could understand, I might have thought that I missed someone. The truth is that I DID miss someone, but I was crying because my fortifications for mental coherence were down; for weeks at a time, my mind had been alternately inundated with stress and then alcohol, stress, then alcohol.

It has been observed that the real effects of stress occur all around the edges of a person. It can shorten your life, but it can also focus your efforts in extraordinary ways. Despite the most demanding class load of all my time in school, I ended the semester with a 4.0. I also walked away from my job at the end of the semester exceedingly proud of the things we had accomplished in the last six months. I had found time for a vacation to Mexico; how bad could it have been?

The last couple weeks at our house on Dewey were a slow, brutal chaos. I balanced the demands of work and school with my need to say goodbye to that part of my life, as well as the overwhelming demands of cleaning a large house that had often gone months on end without proper cleanings. In the end, it was a languorous Autumn evening when we drove away for the last time. By then, I had decided on going to school in Finland for the Spring semester, and I imagined that my life would circle back to something close to the Fall by the time I was back the next Summer, but of course it never did.

Going away for five months is a profound point of transition for someone who has never lived away from home for longer than a couple weeks at a time, and so it is hard to connect the past of the event to its future. Maybe it is not meant to. I think my mind is better off with the transitions, because I have a hard time creating them for myself. We have some years in our life, in which we will do some things well and some things worse. I may feel the essence of the world around me, but I often struggle to change. A profound sign helps immeasurably. A profound period in a life deserves, at least, a profound exclamation point, and then we can take a deep breath, and try to believe in ourselves a little more, and proceed.

Reductionism, part one

I have tried recently to make my life, as I perceive it, simpler. This is not the same as making my life simpler. For instance, I could stop going to work, but I would hardly perceive my life to be simpler three months later. Quite the contrary. At its best, work disciplines my mind and challenges me. I am almost embarrassed to admit that I mostly like it and am actually enthralled by it sometimes. I am in a position that requires creativity that is not trivial in the business world, and that is an exceedingly rare thing. I can integrate things I learn from other disciplines into my work: statistics, risk management, cognitive bias. Somewhat paradoxically, Munger's "latticework of mental models" is a way of simplifying the world, because we train ourselves to react to events in more effective ways. Although it often goes unnoticed, we choose to make our thought processes as complex as they are, a choice that is fine until it is not fine, by which time it is a habit. Cluttered thought begets stress, which begets too many unfortunate things to mention. Stress and fructose are too often our killers.

A Steady Pace of Breath

I feel that my life lately can be defined most summarily by the near and distant implications of accepting knowable causality in all facets of my life. But what started this? I think there was a tipping point precipitated by a few things:

1) A growing understanding of statistics (predispositions, tails, perturbations, etc...)
2) Somewhat related - a growing understanding of logical rigor and the need for mental consistency, mostly from reading ten years' worth of weekly columns by John Hussman
3) Cognitive and consciousness study and philosophy of the mind, in accepting that there is a science to cognitive thought and behavior, and the concluding acceptance that true free will is incompatible with mathematics.
4) Somewhat counter-intuitively - maturity, and specifically the existential acceptance that whatever happens to me is my own doing of which I am aware.

From all of this, slow changes came about in the way that I see the world and my place in it:

1) I have to be happy with myself first (and urgently), at whatever the cost to others around me. Societal norms do not mitigate this fact when they conflict with it, and in fact can provide perceptually violent opposition to it and should be treated with such knowledge. Compromise of yourself by the pressure of societal norms is an affront to BOTH yourself and society by extension.
2) I must isolate myself from individuals who would threaten my mental constructs, either inadvertently or intentionally. This necessity overrides feelings of loneliness because loneliness fades, while the pain caused by compromising your values or thoughts increases perpetually thereafter.
3) A truly humble nature is unassailable and is exceedingly rare. It is ignored by the impatient but the happiness that humility brings is exceptionally persistent; it is an illusion that a humble person wants for the things that separate them from others, but it is instantly recognizable that others continually want, despite what they already have.
4) Cognitive biases are so ingrained in ourselves and in society that we cannot avoid exposure to them. However, knowledge of biases is a means to eliminating them in our own actions. As an exercise of item #1, it must be concluded that eliminating a bias must always take precedence over conforming societal pressure or memes.
5) It is important to be at peace today, and at peace now, because we are here today, and here now. This is not a commentary on the unknown; this is a commentary on people's belief that there will be a sudden and simple opportunity to change aberrant thoughts and behavior "tomorrow".
6) Personal connection may be impossible, but what is wrong with being your own audience? Ultimately, the joy of a personal connection is just another cognitive bias. Only we will ever truly know ourselves. Understanding this fact is the only way to find joy for things that we can't find other people to share our thoughts with.

What I Have Discovered Through Music In My Life

The things that making music has taught me about the musical condition:

1) In being a writer of music, there is NO substitute for being a good listener with a clear and peaceful mind. This approach forgives many other limitations.

2) Changing what already exists in search of something new is a shortcut that costs the musician in purity of vision.

3) Melody is troubling in its common tendency to usurp the ability of a song to be a conversation. Instead, a song becomes an untouchable train rolling by.

4) Jazz is generally right to structure the song as a conversation, but to me it misses the point when it forfeits emotional nuance for cleverness or even eloquence, which is simply another tool in the ultimate goal of emotional communication.

5) Most "perfect" sounds are not created by traditional instruments, although traditional instruments are an important practical means of inspiration.

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I have to admit that I am so excited for the new Brian Eno album that I can hardly stand it. What else excites me right now? Everything Christian Fennesz has recorded, Boards of Canada, the first Animal Collective record (which is not derailed by melody).

Things that I lost somewhere along the way

A short list of things that I used to enjoy doing in my youth but that just don't cut it anymore:

- Taking quasi-artsy fake-spontaneous pictures of myself
- Driving in the countryside while listening to loud alternative rock music
- Hanging out at Taco Bell on a Friday night
- Drinking beer on a crisp fall evening

Something About Metaphors

So, tonight I went and saw Fang Island open for some band, which was entertaining but at some point was somewhat repetitive (in the midst of a 3-song medley of their thrashiest material). I sort of got into a free-associative haze (day-dreaming?) and through whatever progression found myself thinking about the scene in the movie Orange County where the girl is at the college party and is listening to the poor guy talking about his TV show idea that he says is about "Vampires, ostensibly. But, underneath, it's actually about the reunification of Germany." And, I have laughed out loud at that line every time I've watched the movie.

I'm sure that the truth is somewhere in between the two possibilities - that I find it funny, or that I consider that "my type" of humor and want other people to know it. Which is what it is. It can't matter much, because I don't think I've ever seen anyone else react to that line or my reaction at all. It's also a little brittle because I can't know that I even find it funny in the way that the writers intended, although it seems somewhat Dadaist to consider that maybe it doesn't matter how they intended it, so long as I find it funny, the meaning is proved present by my identification of it.

But, I have always taken that joke to be a comment on how young artistic types (particularly guys) are often attracted to the concept of metaphor before any other tools of art, and in the world of art, metaphors can be sort of like hammers, they are a good way of replacing other more elegant tools with something that gets a variety of jobs done but they generally lack grace. You might also extend the concept of metaphor as it blurs with subtlety and nuance, and realize that a continuum exists between a big fat metaphor and the infinitely more elegant juxtaposition of elements whose relationship is elemental and grounded, with perhaps some semblances of duality that suggests a metaphorical underpinning. If you wish.

So, I guess, this describes my own maturation as an individual that thinks about art (I would be flubbing to call myself an artist, except to the degree that art resides in the mind). I used to love the big dumb metaphors just as much as the next guy, but now they have grown familiar and have lost their sparkle. I usually find myself longing for an elegance that isn't there except in a cosmic sense.

In a nutshell, I suspect that I have laughed out loud at that scene from Orange County for the last time.

Impulse Response

I was on antidepressant medication and other medicines for AD/HD or other various "behavioral disorders" for a period of many years, and it was a wrest of control to stop taking them without turning into a social vegetable. If there is any justice in the world, one day the term "behavioral disorder" will be exposed for the unscientific voodoo that it is, and medicines purporting to treat these "disorders" will have to be tested in a manner that acknowledges that chemicals have effects on the brain that don't necessarily show up within an 18-month study window (or, are not within the powers of the study's purview to identify). (A thought: any time a medicine is used to treat a condition that has no physiological definition, I would think about how much the drug manufacturer is likely to know about what it really does or how it really works.)

Coming off of these drugs has been a frustrating, seemingly impossible, impenetrable task. Getting here has happened over an amount of time that I am guessing is just what has been necessary for my brain to re-adapt. And it hasn't done it perfectly; my skin often itches for no reason than (I would assume) that my serotonin levels are low; my compulsions (picking under my fingernails, for instance) are strong and difficult to resist.

A person who is ruled by such visible compulsions on the surface is almost invariably consumed by them beneath the surface as well, and this has been my struggle for the past couple of years as I have slowly backed away from my medication: I can take it and become a paean of rationality and slow overheating, or I can refuse it and never have a truly quiet, isolated thought again. It would be an easier choice if consistent medication did not have the equally undesirable tendency to wind me up so tightly with focus that I would give myself headaches, backaches, even swollen eyes.

There is a reality to the world that is hard for any one of us to see natively, that our consciousness always seems perfect until we go to some trouble to drop an anchor and see which way the waves push us. This is an exercise that some people never do. Unfortunately, given enough time with these medications, I've discovered that both states are reliably troubling. For years I thought one or the other were correct; first, I thought that my normal consciousness must be the answer, and second, I accepted that the medicated consciousness was correct. Now, I am old enough to know that both posits are absurd. Not because an ideal consciousness does not exist - it certainly does - but because man-made tools of attaining it are hopelessly blunt instruments to use on something as elaborate as a human brain. Pardon my awesomely crass and lazy metaphor, but it is like doing brain surgery with a hammer.

My question ending this post is like the question that ends many of my posts. I suppose that there is a predisposition at work here. After all, I tend only to write about subjects that I cannot dispatch. It makes sense, then, that I would end posts with the natural summary of a question - the place the post began and ended.

How do I establish mental balance without the use of side-effect-addled (and potentially damaging) chemicals?

McCarthy

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

-"Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness in the West", Cormac McCarthy

Discipline

Why is discipline (of all kinds) so difficult for people to adhere to?

Well, it is my belief that people's minds are not built to natively enforce discipline. Human cognition is more like a regression model than a flow model - that is, factors are weighted for "best fit", not added or subtracted in order to mimic functional need. In order to be a flow model, evolution would need sufficient time to work and sufficient latitude for proper selection (in other words, rationality would have to equate to higher reproduction rates).

When we have to make a decision, first, a situation compels us to utilize conscious thought to identify relevant inputs and generate a new output (action). We will retain a gestalt sense of the decision, along with a more vague sense of the factors we considered. One thing we will not retain well is the actual process by which the factors are weighted to come to a decision. If we try to remember why we made a decision, we will overwhelmingly confabulate the reason based on our memories of the inputs and output (this based on studies of patients with separated brain hemispheres).

Our output for a given decision will be of varying quality, based on our rationality, experience, and the decision subject matter, but ultimately, it is not the quality of the decision that matters in the long run. What matters is how well we are able to select pertinent inputs in a manner that is consistent across decision cycles. This is to say, how disciplined our mental processes are.

Pertinence is important for fairly obvious reasons - if we allow cognitive distortion to destroy our ability to normalize brain process to true rationality, we will not achieve sufficiently successful outcomes to optimize our learning.

Consistency is important because if we make a similar decision in a different way each time, we will never improve the quality of that decision-making process. This is because we will never accurately identify correlations between our decisions' quality and our decision-making factors.

:|

Enthusiasm, Is That You?

I've certainly been an enthusiastic consumer of many artistic forms in my time, but so what? That's easy; ideas beget ideas. Do you want the secret to a good life? Self-examine your heart and your ways, and learn what turns your mind on. Then, in that mind, sow some lonesome corner so many flowers bloom.

I have gone through phases of false promise in regard to creating art. I could eliminate some occurrences that would fit some people's technical definitions (The Real Inspector Hound), and I would be left with a series of haphazard disappointments and frustrations (losing song lyrics and at least one entire short story at different points). These frustrations may be symptomatic of a latent capacity for one or more art forms; or they may be nothing. Maybe I am pawing at the glass and I will turn around to sleep in the wood chips now.

More mysterious is what triggers such latent desire to create. There have been two occasions this year that have left me feeling ready, and they have come during times that I can not explain by any conventional means. Perhaps their triggers are not explained by my external life, or my internal life, but by happenstance to encounter their mediums with time to explore and a little luck to bolster confidence. Yes, confidence is often my undoing. I would sooner call it "sobriety"; that I try to control my ego and be objective, but the difference between myself and most others that make music or write literature is that they ultimately have a surplus of confidence in their abilities to do something worthwhile, while I do not.

And to end with something that I think most people would think is a total lie: I have little desire for others to experience what I create. What I want more than anything is to be able to admire something I created for myself, knowing that it was born in my mind alone and the result of my witness to the world in its becoming. And if this is a satisfaction born out of loneliness or isolation, then so be it, but I will go on at peace with an idea, which is enough for me.

A Mirage in the Most Obvious Place

As fun as it has been spending my time bike riding and lifting weights and reading books on esoteric modern subjects and watching independent movies and listening to independent music, I cannot help but think that there is a fork in the road available just ahead. I am coming to the conclusion that the simple and absolute benefit of all these things is an illusion.

How many of them will I remember? Certainly, the book I am reading on consciousness ("Consciousness: An Introduction", go figure) is fascinating, but I am absorbing frighteningly little of it. There simply aren't enough memorable ideas to hold together a narrative, which is how we are most apt to learn. Instead, there are isolated pockets of highly interesting, memorable studies that have been done that unfortunately do little to clarify the most important overarching ideas by themselves. Usefulness is simply an illusion if we forget a book when we put it down, so what use is this one to me?

Tonight I am wondering, how many of the pursuits I've found - so easy in concept - are similarly illusions from which I will receive no ultimate satisfaction?

Tools and Determination

Quite simply, the more sophisticated the world gets, the more success becomes a matter of knowing about, understanding, and utilizing what already exists over the determination of blind creation. To the contrary of our intuition and what we have been taught, the determination of creativity is often just a set of blinders. Everything has been pursued, you cannot hope to be terribly original unless you stand on the shoulders of giants.

Such a trend is irreversible; so, what are the long-term implications? What happens when the world is a post-consumer economy? How do we finance the decades that lead up to each of our few moments of singular contribution to humanity?

The Gloaming? (a cycle maintains)

I am recently fearful that I am entering a lull; or worse, a hard stop. School had just finally become comfortable to me when I broke free (by natural causes, at least). For obvious reasons, my work life feels like a resumption of some past - and inferior - existence. What am I to do with myself? I have tried to bury myself in books and movies (to ultimately bury myself in ideas), but where does the time go? How long have I been reading this goddamn book on consciousness? How many guided tours can one man lead into Glen Canyon? Will even one of Calvino's short stories approach the brilliance of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler...'s vivid, feet-on-the-ground-head-in-the-clouds fantasies?

Nothing can happen fast enough. My drive to improve, refine, eliminate excess itself needs refining. I get frustrated at the time it takes to drive to work, although there is nothing to be done about it. I can't save money fast enough. The other day I was mildly annoyed at the thought that I had to put in for PTO to go on a trip, and I finally thought to ask the question: What priorities have gotten confused if the chance to go on a vacation has come to feel like a liability?

I need to find simultaneity between the goals that I have made opposite through my own attempts to engineer my behavior: focus and relaxation. Advice welcome.

What is the light that you have shining all around you?

With all the confusion and sadness that I have felt lately, music has been a comfort. Music can be like a back-rub when our minds are knotted up with the detritus of emotional distress. And as therapeutic as it can be when we are sad, music works even better when we are experiencing emotional states that are complicated - specifically, ones that are beyond our ability to deconstruct.

I have been stockpiling music for all the unforeseen future moments when I will need it. I believe that The Clientele alone will be able to carry me through every nighttime snowfall for the next fifty or sixty years. And one can only hope that The Field will eventually have enough music to soundtrack every plane flight for the rest of my life without growing stale. If I am worried about anyone, it is that Joanna Newsom will only put out a few pages worth of lyrics a year. It is tricky because there are no close substitutes. At least in the case of Noah Lennox you have everyone from Memory Tapes to Luomo to Ducktails to [imperfectly] fill the void.

But what to make of the Flaming Lips? They should have tattooed onto me already, at this age, and having listened to them for so long, but I have no specific memories to cling to, besides learning to play "Fight Test" on the guitar - which doesn't count. I think I missed the train if I didn't have at least one night, laying in the grass on a hill, drunk as hell, listening to The Soft Bulletin.

Come to think of it, I have the same complaint about Boards of Canada.

Why is it that so much music creates a stronger impression at nighttime? Easy, it's visceral, and it's related to what Borges said about nighttime:

"... night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."

Clarity is tremendously therapeutic, I think. Or is that backwards?

Jules after the War

"What's appalling about war is that it deprives man of his own individual battle."
- Jules and Jim

We are wired to desire success, but in the modern world, what is success? Food, shelter, reproduction? We are capable of much more. It is painful to know that we can fail, but it is worse that we are flying blind to begin with. We make our decisions about the future based on our feelings, and our decisions subsequently affect our feelings. What hope is there to read the map and navigate our future to be happy?

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I have postponed my future for much of my adult life. I do not regret this - I do not think that we should be so eager to move through the stages that we will only know once. But I must also be brave to go forward. I feel that the privileges of the modern world and the fortune of conscientiousness have taken me past my parents' destinies - I feel that I am standing on their shoulders now. In a strange way, it is my grandmother alone that I feel is beside me in what I am becoming. "There are more worlds..."

But I am neither beside nor above my own confusion with my place in the world. I want to live in peace, but the world is quicksand - the struggle to break free hastens the departure of my heart from this world.

Threading the Needle-of-the-Day

I am a thinker, but I am not consistent. (just in case anyone wanted a one-sentence overview of this post)

There are people, I am informed, that follow daily routines for significant portions of their lives - I'm talking 360+ days a year, perhaps 40+ years with minimal adjustments. At the other extreme, getting up at 7 a.m., five days a week to go to work, has often nearly killed me. Not from exertion or stress, but because it all seems so bleak. For better or worse, I like variety, and I like free choice.

This does not bode particularly well, especially if someone considers that I actually like my job, and feel inspired to do well - some of the time. What will happen when these things are no longer aligned? How long is the ramp of job satisfaction that I can hope to climb? Am I building momentum? Or am I approaching a day of reckoning?

Lately, I have found my mind to be both active and "under control" (which deserves those quotes after ten years spent on behavioral medications), although my focus has shifted. I have done a horrendous job of staying physically active since I graduated. I suppose a person can only focus on so many things at once, and I have been gearing up my brain to take on bigger and better challenges at work. On the other hand, my diet has also changed for the worse. Something tells me that school simply primes me for multitasking and productivity in a way that work does not. There are fewer shortcuts at school. The "to-do" list is more absolute.

But, these things will have to come under control at some point. I do think it is important to "keep moving", mentally - to learn to love learning so that you are constantly doing it. This has been hard for me because I had an early innate response to shy away from things that I did not understand. Teaching yourself to act oppositely to that predisposition is a pot of gold.

Some day, I will have to learn to execute more consistently; I stopped working out and eating healthy after two short years. How do I build a mindset that will force me to get exercise and proper nutrition every day, without waste or excess, and enjoy it for the next 40+ years?

Arterial Blockage

Coming out of two years of school and other consuming endeavors has been akin to clearing an arterial blockage; everything rushes ahead faster than ever, compelled by physical law to catch up with the gears that never stopped turning. The two years that I spent reading textbooks (or not - at the least, I was mentally attending to classroom concepts) blocked out mental space that I would have otherwise loaned to nonfiction reading on subjects of interest to me (the one that did consistently get through was investing). I recently breezed through Creation: Life and How to Make It, and I believe that it has begged that I traverse at least two other books - Consciousness: An Introduction, as well as Prey, the Michael Crichton novel. While the first book may seem like a natural progression, I am aware that the second may not; however, Prey is the story of a Steve Grand-style artificial intelligence. It is actually Consciousness that is out of place here.

I also recently read A Widow for One Year, which like Owen Meany, I took more pleasure in reading than in finishing. Irving's narrative momentum works wonders on my mind and his characters are always very true. I think that The Hotel New Hampshire is next.

I am also finishing up Desert Solitaire, which is something like Walden for the Southwest U.S., though composed of the more colorful (and questionable) morality of the Cowboy, which is appropriate to the setting, in a sense.

Ordering Malcolm Gladwell's other books - notably, What the Dog Saw and The Tipping Point was also an easy choice after reading Outliers. He is an author that I am kicking myself for not reading sooner.

If the summer is boring it will be my own fault.

The Actions of an Outlier

I have been reading the book, "Outliers: The Story of Success", by Malcolm Gladwell, before and during my trip to North Carolina. Flawed, intelligent, driven people can feed themselves with a steady stream of ideas and let their predispositions towards self-improvement do the rest. This is one of my graces.

The book could be called, "Success De-mystified", and it would be quite apt. Gladwell cites vivid examples that illustrate fallacies in our concepts of what makes people successful (or failures). Social entitlement, cultural power distance, and demographics can all play overriding roles in success, as he shows. Intelligence, ambition, and determination are important, but they pale next to these environmental constants, which simply overwhelm us. The best-laid plans of mice and men, indeed. Maybe we should all be reading more Cormac McCarthy.

Thus far, it is social entitlement that keeps hold even when I put the book down. I identified immediately which of Gladwell's groups I fell into in this regard - the group that does not feel the innate entitlement to ask things of other people and thus utilize social knowledge to my own advantage. Gravely, Gladwell shows just how crippling this deficiency is when he illustrates the differences in college experiences between Chris Langan (with the highest IQ ever measured - around 200) and Oppenheimer, the scientist who would lead the group that developed the atomic bomb. Langan repeatedly failed to get second-rate colleges to grant him the slightest freedoms, such as to accomodate the fact that his family had no car and he had to commute a long distance; meanwhile, Oppenheimer was merely put on probation for attempting to fatally poison one of his professors. Later, Oppenheimer charmed his way into the head position of the team to create the atomic bomb. Such examples are illustrative of the difference between two philosophies of sucess: 1) that we should strive to grab what we can get; and 2) that we will be rewarded naturally with what we deserve. I have always believed I will be rewarded naturally with what I deserve.

But, of course, this is true only in Disney movies. For years, I assumed that I would be rewarded with a significant other that I deserved, and for years, it didn't happen (the secondary pain of this approach is a predisposition towards assuming that the ones that DO come along must surely be better than they appear; or, perhaps I didn't even see them as they were).

The problem with more lasting significance is the fact that I do not know how to befriend people that could benefit me intellectually; the times it has happened have been incidental. For whatever reason, I tend to isolate myself intellectually, even when I admit that what I want is for intellectual loneliness to end.

The mentality of social entitlement that Gladwell describes, then, is absent; but I am intelligent, determined, and am learning my flaws. How will I build this behavior to be my own future second nature?

Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders' Weekend

Well, that time is upon us again, when private jets rain down on Eppley Airfield by the thousands (hundreds?) and every yuppie-wannabe in the city leverages their entitlement-oozing $4000 worth of Berkshire Hathaway shares to join the absurd spectacle known as "Woodstock for Capitalists". It is quite possible, I would imagine, that a line is already forming outside the Qwest center, 16 hours before the doors open tomorrow morning. Although the desire to access information is understandable, given Buffett and Munger's history of prescience and rationality - you can download a transcript twelve hours later; I'm not sure that I will ever understand the fervent behavior of the herd that pushes through those doors and up the stairs and around the corners leading into the auditorium at high speed, so that they can sit the closest to Warren Buffett, 80 years old, and Charlie Munger, 86 years old, as they talk about market dislocations and risk mitigation and how many Coca-Colas Warren has drank in his lifetime.

In that sense, it is strange that I can find the capacity to complain; I have resented so many times the vapid musical acts that engender similar reactions. Surely, this is what I want, right? Haha, well, hardly. Replace disgust with confusion; I am not healed.

Regardless, I sit here excited for the weekend. We shall see...

Creation, Creatures, and Consciousness

I have been reading the book "Creation", by Steve Grand - a welcome return to nonfiction - now that there is a final wane in schoolwork volume as graduation approaches. Grand describes a model for artificial life that approaches the task from a novel point of view - a view of the universe as a laboratory for persistent phenomena and emergence. In this way, everything from atoms to ecosystems are really just stages (or levels?) of the same process. His other important diversion from the traditional A.I. blueprint is a better understanding and application of the principles that allow neural networks to function as learning machines (no surprise, through the same principles of emergence, persistence, and patterns of feedback). I'm excited to finish his book and try out the game that he created using his principles - Creatures.

I think that after this book, I will move on in a logical progression to another book I bought years ago (around the same time as Creation): "Consciousness: An Introduction". I have been scared of that book for some time (not wanting to totally remove the sacredness from my childhood universe). But, there is a time for everything, and bravery begets personal growth.

Drama and Recognition

When I'm going to see a movie, I enjoy a good drama. They push some satisfying buttons in us. As with anything that has ever been considered artistic for any length of time (dramas go waaaaay back...), there has spawned a legion of cheap renditions that have become uncomfortably popular.

There was a time when one popular breed of these cheap renditions were called "soap operas". Nowadays, the main audience for soap operas are mainly senior citizens, due to habit and [importantly] to relative expectations and values. To many younger people, they appear silly today. Of course, our way of categorizing things is askew because we "chunk" the data that enters our minds (essentially, we find patterns in it that then trigger a grouped/pre-built recognition and response). If our recognition were not askew, we would see that they had become a moving target because our societal values and expectations have changed. Today, any number of evening television "dramas" appeal to the lowest common denominator through the same mechanism that made soap operas popular years ago. The fact that a soap opera viewed today is not identical to one of these "dramas" is not the point - the point is that their respective relationships to us, in each of their heydays, was/is the same.

They exaggerate people's actions and proclivities. They reduce people's thoughts and actions to simple and associative processes. People are "good" or "bad" for no reason than because they are "good" or "bad". Personality aspects that real people have disappear completely (usually if you can't define a necessary "arc" to the aspect, or a purpose to the storyline, a person will not have the aspect).

Sometimes it makes me laugh. People actually act quite peculiarly, if our yardstick is real human behavior. For instance, witness someone who "seeks revenge" (superhero style, of course) in these shows, and when they do, it is noble and powerful and right. They are ethically compelled to set things right. Uh, yeah.

In real life, when people seek revenge, it is unbearably disturbing to watch, as they first squirm and shrink from fear and belittlement, and then slowly (and in private), they twist their sexual drive into feelings of aggression and hunger which they extinguish in acts of violence, sometimes against the target of revenge and sometimes against an inanimate object nearby. Sometimes, too, their target simply becomes themselves. This is known as masochism. Ironically, television mostly gets masochism right, at least in theory, although the TV ratio of masochists to human beings is approximately 1,000,000 times greater than in the real world. However, I suppose this sort of predisposition is necessary. I don't want to watch television shows about people living empty, banal lives any more than anyone else.

On the other hand, I also don't want to watch David Duchovney play a "good guy" who just happens to be addicted to sex and gets into alternately hilarious and adventuresome situations (you know, like having sex with an underage girl) and relies on his wits and heart of gold to escape. Or a woman who decides that selling marijuana is a regrettable but necessary way to pay to raise her kids so that they don't have to move out of their ridiculous yuppie surroundings (heaven forbid; a lower standard of living is like a public execution), and oh my, falls further and further into this unfortunate world. It is telling that these sort of plot outlines could underpin some of the most terrifying and cautionary domestic warning tales in years if the outcomes were traced to their conclusions through processes akin to the real world.

Not that anyone would watch them.

And yes, I am concerned about the answer to one question: how much time do I spend complaining?

The Peak?

Two peaks are on my mind.

Peak oil. It's amazing to me that there was any doubt for anyone who had read Hubbert's basic argument for peak oil. It is just a question of when. It would have already occurred if it weren't for technology. But I think it is a dim hope that technology will delay the peak long enough to effect market changes to make the transition smooth. As Charlie Munger has observed, it is unfortunate that we are eating through our supply of petroleum NOT because we rely on it so prevalently for transportation, but because we rely on it so prevalently - and without practical substitutes - for agriculture. Fertilizer is predominantly petroleum-based, and for these fertilizers, there are no petroleum-free alternatives. Clearly, the worrying risk associated with peak oil is not a collapse in Real GDP, it is a Malthusian catastrophe as agricultural land productivity plummets without recourse. This sets up the (admittedly slim) potential for extreme irony, as the vilified company Monsanto could literally end up responsible for saving millions of lives with the greater land productivity of their genetically-modified seeds.

The solution? Hedging massive real price inflation with stock holdings that will soar with oil prices. Trickier than it sounds, of course. If oil prices really take off, governments will tax oil producer profits (even though that discourages investment in new production). More practical for long-term safety is Transocean (RIG), who owns the world's largest fleet of oil rigs for underwater drilling (it is important to appreciate that deepwater oil deposits are undergoing the early stages of a large and rapid secular growth phase, as they become economical to develop with higher oil prices). Oil services companies are not as obvious of targets for windfall profit taxation, and better yet, Transocean is not an American company, but a Swiss company.

More exciting is peak #2, and is the absurd terror I feel approaching as so many things recently have gone my way. I have a very short history with determining my own destiny, so the concept of providing myself with significant amounts of satisfaction and joy is fairly foreign. And, I have to admit, I am a little skeptical.

The solution? Relax and take one day at a time, perhaps? But what am I going to spend my summer doing?

Sad Progress in a Bubble

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html

This is a fascinating field of inquiry that I believe is valid and holds significant promise. My only problem with it is that I believe that the knowledge of what is being taken will affect the success rate. Hopefully, I am incorrect. Regardless, I think there are simply too many societal barriers for this to become accepted any time soon. And, I resent that - I wish it were acceptable - but what can be done? This just goes to show the overreaching arm of the government in controlling what we do to our own bodies. Whose bright idea was it to control substances that are neither dangerous to others, nor physiologically addictive?

Psychedelic drugs (and psilocybin, in particular) have a profound effect that can best be understood by examining their effect in the context of the behavioral model of the human mind. There is a certain statistical situation that sometimes arises where the best predictor of a future value is the previous value; in other words, there is a tendency towards consistency, or mean-reversion. This tendency can be applied to human behavior. In other words, when held up to the wide variety of decisions that myriad humans will make, the best predictor of some individual's future behavior is their own past behavior. While this is commonsensical to us as observers of human nature, what we may not understand is the underlying neurological reason for this. In essence, behaviors, consisting of behavioral firing patterns, are learned in our actions because the firing patterns are learned in our minds. What we may not appreciate is the intricacy of these firing patterns. When we teach ourselves out of a behavior (which we have all experienced as being a difficult process at one time or another - whether it is an addiction such as smoking or something as simple as biting our fingernails), we are not re-writing the firing patterns from the ground up. Rather, we are interceding at one level - among many levels - to divert the learned sequence. Indeed, this level is very "high" on the continuum between deeply-learned, subconscious firings and high-level, conscious decision-making. In essence, there is a very real, "gestalt" behavioral pattern that gets built (at a high level) behind a conscious decision-making sequence when we perform it.

The role of psilocybin and other psychedelic compounds is to change firing patterns at a very low level. This has both immediate and long-term effects. The immediate effects are known as the "psychedelic experience"; a state, notoriously, where the "true nature of the universe is revealed". (Of course, this is not true, except in the perspective of the philosophical assertion that all reality is subjective) Instead, perception is altered because consciousness - as an emanation of the brain's memory mechanism - is altered. The fact that it is altered in such a perceptually unusual way is not an effect of a change in firing patterns per se - after all, a change occurs when we intercede on one of our habits, as well, and that doesn't seem perceptually unusual - it is altered in a perceptually unusual way because our firing patterns are altered at a very low level, and this is one of very few situations that can arise where such a change takes place. (as the above article alludes to, it would seem there is some sort of drug release that precipitates moments of "enlightenment"; would I be the first to speculate that the evolutionary mechanism of predispository selection would encourage this because of the positive effects of divine perception on morality in early cooperative societies? That is not only a mouthful, but it is spectacularly speculative, to the point of uselessness. Perhaps I should read "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" first...)

The long-term effects of psilocybin are to assist our "un-learning" of behavioral repetition that I mentioned before. In other words, someone who has been depressed for some period of time, and who escapes depression by means of a psychedelic experience does so not because they rationalize a greater mystery to the world, but because to some degree, they unlock the negative behavioral pattern that pushed them into depression in the first place. Having impliedly discounted the direct visceral effects of the experience, it is only fair to admit that the inspiration and excitement produced by a positive psychedelic experience are very capable of predisposing them to a replacement of the negative behavioral cycle with a positive one, capable of putting them in a position to fix their issues rather than let them compound.

Greener Pastures

You could call it a ten-year plan.

The most recent step:

http://www.deltarep.com/alphafund.html

Also, doing some research on Nicholas Financial (NICK) this week. From a rudimentary check, can't see too much downside to that one right now.

A Silver Mt. Zion

Of the bands that I admire, A Silver Mt. Zion is at least as removed from the masses as any. Among their gifts is a propensity for awesome song titles. I often feel that it would be possible to relate entire travails using nothing but one or more song titles. For instance, how was my week? Well, it was this:

This Gentle Heart Like Shot Birds Fallen
Hang On To Each Other
Stumble Then Rise On Some Awkward Morning

Conversely, the year 2000 for me could be described as:

Tho You Are Gone, I Still Often Walk With You
Broken Chord Can Sing A Little
I Fed My Metal Bird The Wings Of Other Metal Birds

I have constant, timeless dreams that my future will be thus:

Sow Some Lonesome Corner So Many Flowers Bloom
C'mon C'mon (Loose An Endless Longing)
Collapse Tradicional (For Darling)
13 Angels Standing Guard 'round The Side Of Your Bed

Did I mention that I recommend them? I am not uniformly in love with their music; actually, I probably like a mere minority of it. But I couldn't live without such songs as "Movie (Never Made)", or "Horses in the Sky".

Help Me Measure My Own Sanity: A Survey

I have had some dreams lately about my friends from Europe, and it makes me wistful.

Wistfulness seems to me to be impervious to happiness; even when content, still, it comes wanting more. My dream was a warning that the factors are shaping up for me not to go to Oktoberfest this year, although my honest desire is to do so. I want to get back to Europe; I want to see my German and French friends, especially. It would also be a good birthday present. My birthday this year is convenient, I suppose: I feel I am in a period of fundamental transition.

I had wondered for years how to invoke a self-actualization that never occurred and that I feared was not merely delayed, but missed. I feel like I am now on this precipice.

And so I ask: How crazy am I to assume such knowledge of the future?

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I got a fit of wickedly recent nostalgia, viewing my blog title image just now; I am getting the ceremonial "haircut before the job search", tomorrow. I like my hair long, and a little out of control. It just about fools myself into thinking I am capable of being more unpredictable than I am. It also reminds me of the "haircut weekends" of two summers ago. (confused? ask me about it sometime)

I didn't pay much attention to my outward appearance for most of my life. I was loved intensely and unconditionally at a young age, without criticism, and so I grew up stubbornly resisting such concessions. In the past few years, I started to make these changes as I saw - and could not ignore - the undeniable proof that they were valuable. Besides, I lost the ego for holding onto such things. (although I cannot say when or how)

I will probably always be drawn inward, left wondering how others are so adept at finding common ground in others. Therein, though, lies the question and the answer. I have spent years thinking in isolation; I can seldom relate to others about the pressing concerns of my days. My friends are for fun and trivialities. Against all my will, I still relate best to that Thoreau quote, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation."

Men, wired to conquer the ambivalence of potential mates, wind up desperate to conquer the ambivalence of the world. The modern world, enormous and eternally cementing into its collective destiny, is so thoroughly confounding to affect in any meaningful way that men are left with a proverbial, "un-scratchable itch". The need to collect joy from outside ourselves - joy brought about from within - is tenuous, suffers, and can die. Indeed, without imagination, without dreams, without art - the agents of mitigating this frustration - this process would be both quick and violent.

Oh, and I am reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is far more impressive than I ever assumed it would be. It has reminded me to live in the driver's seat. And, of the importance of making strong and brave decisions, and to make those decisions now.

A Thought on the Limits of Knowledge

I have heard it said many times:

When you have an undergraduate degree, you have no idea what you don't know; by the time you have a graduate degree, you have some idea of what you don't know; and when you have a doctorate, you know precisely what you don't know.

This is the circle of competence idea, which is unendingly valuable in all sorts of pursuits. It is absolutely critical in investing, where there are 100 ways for a company to fail. It does little good to know 50 of the ways, since you are still wearing restrictive blinders in such a situation. Knowing what you don't know is a critical tool to evaluating an investment. Anyone can concoct a bullish case for a stock. What is more important is the ability to identify the presence and degree of various risks to arrive at a risk-adjusted idea of intrinsic value.

And, of course, this implies that an investment with fewer risk factors is usually better.

A Horrible Gift from Richard Dawkins

I am terrified by the statistic that Richard Dawkins gives us in an interview:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6804971.ece

40% of the American populace does not believe in evolution. My first reaction, of course, was to wretch (thankfully, I had an empty stomach). My second reaction was to be reminded that rationalization faces an uphill battle in the human mind to cement to belief and thus, action. This is because the memory mechanism is enhanced in the presence of strong emotion. So, to be statistical: we have a stronger correlation between memory-formation-enhancing emotion and religious/spiritual experience than we do between memory-formation-enhancing emotion and rational insight.

All theories of behavior or the brain that can be described so succinctly are probably vast simplifications and thus, possess gross misrepresentations. Oh well, one more: there is a tendency in individuals to seek out pleasing things - that is, to attempt to replicate pleasant experiences and to avoid repetition of unpleasant ones. Rational belief systems, beware. Without a rigorous latticework of mental safeguards against emotional decision-making, time is against you.

Trusted Sources

We are a social species. It is to our own benefit; we would still be fishing in the bogs if we couldn't learn from others. A large brain created a tipping point to social learning, producing a fundamental change in the way our species lived and evolved. Now, the challenge is to learn efficiently and effectively.

Intelligence, I have learned, can be overcome a number of ways. It is NOT universal as a means to separate the haves and the have-nots. More important are the patterns of learning that we selectively introduce ourselves to and adopt. One of the most important patterns to get right is the filter of trust in regard to learning.

Certainly, we will meet people whose knowledge - that they will be all-too-willing to transfer to us - will be detrimental to our continued learning. On the other end of the scale, there are people who we should go to great lengths to seek out. If we cannot differentiate these two scenarios, we are at a disadvantage larger than the disadvantage of moderately less intelligence.

Furthermore, quantity of ideas is no substitute for quality. Indeed, quantity is an impediment. The more ideas we assimilate, the more will necessarily be contradictory, and the more time we spent reconciling these ideas. Now, it is no crime to think critically, and reconciliation requires critical thinking; but this process is learned easier than most people think. The process of learning critical thinking does not require, say, 10,000 repetitions - it is just that it takes 10,000 repetitions for an average person, bombarded with ideas both good and bad to wade through, to be world-wise. A person can learn to think critically if they are given a dozen opportunities and have an adequately developed idea of the value of a critical-thinking approach.

It is a wonderful occurrence to discover one or more people who are not only illuminated, but are interested in spreading a greater illumination. For instance, I would never have learned of Atul Gawande - who is as illuminated regarding the American healthcare system as anyone I have learned of - without having known of Charlie Munger. I think that people like these are good people to spend inordinate amounts of time learning from.

A Sort of Archaeology, Part One

My fascination with the American Southwest began with my Grandmother. It leaves me wondering when she fell in love with it; was she younger than I am now? I bet she was.

Her house was imbued with its calm tans and grays, exuding light; pottery; coffee table books on the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley looked up at you when you sat at her sofa, itself covered in a Navajo pattern. Georgia O'Keefe - who had her own inextinguishable love for the Southwest - hung at one end of my Grandma's long living room, a sort of mirror.

The first family vacation I remember taking was also the first - and last - that I would take with my Grandmother, and it was to my aunt's house in Farmington, New Mexico, and then on to the Grand Canyon, where we camped. I was a sheltered child. My parents stayed in a tent; my Grandma and I, in her camper van. That was just the right amount of adventure for me. I wonder what emotional "stamps" would be different today if I had experienced a few horrible nights in a tent at that age. I wonder if I would ever have felt like returning to the Canyon.

I will most likely spend the rest of my life slowly picking apart the reasons that my Grandmother affected me as profoundly as she did. If my parents assured that my roots were established deeply and securely, my Grandmother did a lot to show me which direction to grow. I have always associated my relationship with the natural world with her; she put it there. For as long as I can remember, the sacred spirit I sense in the world is felt most strongly in the presence of juniper trees and sandstone.

John Irving and the X-Files

I have been reading "A Prayer for Owen Meany" in a focused manner for the last week or so (I am a purposely slow reader), and I have reached the end of the chapter entitled "The Dream", in which a story is slowly crawling into focus. I have really enjoyed this book. It reminds me of both "The World According to Garp", as well as the likes of "Lunar Park", by Brett Easton Ellis - there is a darkness unfolding upon the world.

It reminds me, in both mirrored and inverted senses, of the episode of the X-Files entitled, "Sein Und Zeit" ("Being and Time"), named after Martin Heidegger's philosophical treatise. I suppose to be accurate, I have to point out that the X-Files episode was only part one. Part two, "Closure", actually possesses the most powerful moments of the pair, although it is wrong, I suppose, to talk about either episode without the other; they make two segments of one statement. In all the years of the X-Files - a show that played second-to-none, before or since, in its ability to bring not only supernatural matters but spiritual matters to the human level - this statement was always one of my favorites.

I don't believe I would "ruin" the episode for anyone - even if a thousand people read this. If you liked the X-Files, you would have seen this episode. But that is not the point. Selfish or deluded, I simply won't say more about it.

A Brief Exercise in Stretching Systemic Design Issues Too Far

Our mind is wired to adapt through an inference into causes and effects. This is - almost certainly - the evolutionary requirement fulfilled by the phenomenon we know as "memory" (yes, I am indeed skeptical that the existence of memory has anything to do with spirituality - although it may be the mechanism that creates the illusion of "spirit" from which people extrapolate preorigin; or, if you prefer - "divine origin"). I can make no promises that this post follows an organizational pattern to any meaningful degree.

Interpersonal relationships, learned first through our family members, consist of dynamics that follow predictable patterns. When we experience things we do not like in these dynamics, our first instincts are to cry. Slowly, we learn to compromise - inside or out - behavioral change, a change in our beliefs, or both. In these relationships, we achieve an inherent perception of ethical behavior, which society will later attempt to encourage us to follow in our actions.

The imposition of rules is a tricky business - not because rules cannot be implemented (they clearly can), but because complex systems inherently invite contradiction. Simple systems, then, must achieve their goals through fewer rules, which must necessarily be more general, encompassing, universal. Far from the conclusion that simple systems are easier, they often require an order of magnitude more thought to design properly. Why? Because it is easier if you are allowed to band-aid over each of the rough edges.

Many people argue about politics. Candidate A, candidate B. Perhaps we can draw certain conclusions about whole groups of candidates by some criteria. Left, right, populist, centrist, minority, lobbyist. Indeed, maybe we can draw conclusions about the actions of politicians in general. Is it right to complain that Candidate A is a "damn crook"? Well, it may be true, and I wouldn't suggest that it is not worth discussion. But perhaps the crime is that the system of politics invites corruption, and thus selects citizens adversely (the crooks become politicians). In as much as these crooks operate in politics as crooks, the architects of the political system enable them. Now, I am not suggesting that the founding fathers - in their roles as political architects - were either crooks OR unsuccessful (our system has worked well enough for long enough to debunk any case I could attempt to build, assuming I wanted to try), but as human beings, they were fallible. Perhaps a better way to say it is that their foresight - although great - was not perfect.

One could argue that interpersonal relationships, politics, society - all rest on larger and larger systems that must operate under more and more elegant, simplistic rules in order to be effective. I like to look at the nature of existence as the largest such system. Setting aside the question of whether an architect was present in any sense is beside the point - the system is exposed to the same Darwinian qualities as all these other systems. In other words, it is obvious, if you have an appreciation for physics, chemistry, biology - the universe didn't have to produce "life". You could have an educated conversation where you invoke the modern understandings of those various disciplines and come to some guess as to how likely "life" was to occur in this blindingly vast (and strangely peculiar) expanse we know as the universe.

The part of the universe that I find the most extraordinarily peculiar is the illusion of free choice. Of course, there is no rational argument that can be made in the context of mathematics (as the language of the universe) to support the theory of true free choice. But, the universe possesses an extraordinary quality that does the next best thing - which is, it provides the illusion of free choice. How does it do that? Of the dimensions of the universe - all ten or eleven (my reference is a trust in the basis of string theory as the most legitimate "theory of everything" that our society has come up with), it decided that one - no more, no less - would act so peculiarly that we can only travel one direction through it. Three others, of course, are bidirectional. The others are "wrapped up at the Planck scale", whatever that means.

When you start talking about the physics of the universe, you have to keep in mind how predisposed human minds are to perceiving certain things in a certain way. But, ten/eleven dimensions is an arbitrary number, which in my mind, is highly suspect. If a dimension is a dynamic of two directions, even the innocuous number one is an arbitrary value. So, we have two suspect occurrences of the number one - one dimension of them all, which is locked into unidirectional travel.

It amazes me that people believe that the argument for God is whether he designed the illusion that things older than six thousand years exist in the world as a test for nonbelievers. The evidence of God, of a predisposition for arbitrary decisions and whatever that means - is in the fabric of existence. The universe could have been one-dimensional. At least it would have one fewer arbitrary element in its architecture. Suffice to say, I would not be writing this now. Thus, all of the peculiarity might just be a sort of randomness that is solved through the idea that we will never know the nature of universes not suited to our existence because we can never visit them. There is a term for this that eludes me. We have some sort of negative-selection criteria at work that colors the conclusions we can draw about whether the architecture of the universe is representative of other universes, which I believe almost certainly have to exist.

Since I constantly need to quote Jorge Luis Borges, and since he was both familiar with these issues and wrote eloquently about them, we're getting that quote, which to a thinking man might be a better starting point than MY rambling:

"We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal bits of the irrational to form its architecture, so as to know that it is false."

More Books

For some time, I have vacillated between books and movies as an "escape of choice", with the past three months marking a turn towards books. For the record, I do find it to be a blessing of the modern age (Amazon.com, especially) that I find things to read that I generally like, despite a lack of like-minded cohorts to provide any recommendations.

I have recently read two books by Italo Calvino. I am thankful that I read "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler..." first, even though "Invisible Cities" was the title that first brought him to my attention. "Winter's Night" is far more engaging, which is perhaps inevitable when you consider that "Invisible Cities" is all but bereft of characters. "Winter's Night" shows Calvino's powerful imagination and equally powerful ability to convey these images. It is quite unafraid of itself, acknowledging of its own limitations and existing completely in its own excesses. In concept, it may be nothing as much as it is an exploration of the possibilities of the literary act. In this way, these two books are somewhat analogous, "Invisible Cities" being an exploration of the nature of cities. In "Invisible Cities", however, the philosophical act suggested upon the subject is closer to the surface of the writing. Perhaps it even IS the surface.

I do believe that I will read more of Calvino's works in the future.

I also recently read "The House of Sleep", which by my perceptions of the categories of literature, exists in the amorphous blob of modern literature, so many of which are "bestsellers" by default (Really, how much does that term mean anymore?) that are long on situational creativity and tenuously short on any sort of discipline in the story-making or writing processes. The book, like so many of its categorical brethren, is marked by unlikely situations, unlikely characters, unlikely decisions, and heaps of coincidence. Quite simply, this is lazy writing for the sake of entertainment and sales; some sort of literary equivalent of the soap opera. At least THIS literary soap opera contains the correct elements of the genre in order to be enjoyable. Ahem, I'm looking at you, "Wuthering Heights".

I did finish the book (as if that is hard to do), and I did enjoy many parts and several overall aspects of it. Some time ago, I vowed to work hard at appreciation, so that I would choose to endure things that produced feelings of both affection and disgust, rather than reject them wholly. This book was a beneficiary of this attitude.

Next up: Gravity's Rainbow and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Sleep Bloviation

Amazing- the heart a dream can contain. A dam breaks, lets a feeling through that seems obvious in retrospect but that was precious, and obscenely missing, all along. Can feelings be so concrete? Perhaps such a dream is a distortion. I am unsure.

Many of my dreams take someone that I have formed into my mind in quite a strong way and embellish them with some detail that amounts to an "a-ha!" moment in the dream. I am not sure what these dreams represent, except perhaps an omission on my part, an act of consciously convincing myself of the understandability of something that I had some distance left to go on. I believe that the mechanism that leads to this phenomenon is known by psychologists as "projection", which I think suggests that the distortions we place onto other people come (this should be unsurprising) from our own predispositions, or our own desires.

I wonder if someone who grew up without verbal or written language would relate to their inner dream world with greater intuition. I can't believe there is anything inherently mysterious about dreams, except that we choose, as members of an outwardly-focused society, to avoid trying to speak their language. I certainly don't believe that dreams are the act of "trying to tell ourselves something", except to the degree that we attempt to anthropomorphize the nature of our own perfectly explainable (though not understood) subconscious into a separate being.

I believe it would be okay for me to outlaw dreams as a blogging topic for, say, six months.

A Survey of Investment Activity, 2009.

• The Fairholme Fund was named Morningstar's "Mutual Fund of the Decade" for the domestic class. I'm very happy and I think it was a shoo-in for the award. It has outperformed almost everything else out there - emerging markets, energy, sector-rotation strategies, etc... And the most extraordinary thing about the fund is that it doesn't require macroeconomic bets. The fund outperforms both because of and despite an aversion to guessing future trends. The only trend the fund plays is the trend that durable, cash-generating businesses bought at attractive prices will outperform the market as a whole. Although I hope we never find out, I am strongly confident that it will prove to be one of the most durable funds in the mutual fund universe if true disaster (i.e. dirty bomb in a U.S. city, severe inflation) one day strikes.
  

• Clear Choice Health Plans received a buyout offer for $26/share. At the time, it was trading for less than $10/share, which is approximately the price I paid for it. I am fortunate that my investment mentality had been enlightened at that point by a not-irrelevant bit of wisdom from Charlie Munger: that if you know what you are doing, then when a great opportunity is identified, a person should commit a significant amount of money to it - regardless of what may be small (but real) risks - and that action will meaningfully improve the financial results of one's lifetime.

• Wellcare Health Plans went on a tear after March, recovering approximately 500% from its low. I believe that it still has significant upside, given that they carry approximately $30 in cash - net of reserves - on their balance sheet. This is not a risky proposition, either; they are trading for 9x free cash flow in an industry with significant growth prospects (or perhaps they will simply be bought during this secular acquisition phase). Indeed, unlocking the value of the cash is quite a contingent upside possibility, not the necessary thesis.

• KSW installs HVAC systems in New York City, so their business fell off a cliff when building activity went into free-fall. Now their backlog has reached near-record levels again and the stock price hasn't recovered. Another story of cash obscuring earnings power. This one was trading for $21m when I bought it, with $14m in cash net of all liabilities. Basically, they were trading for 2x their 2007 earnings number once you backed out the cash. The point of the cash buildup is uncertain (as well as the conditions for it to cease), but the company could probably pay out $10m in cash, the P/E ratio would plummet, and the price would come right back to where it was once people figured out what was happening. Expecting a significant return unless building activity double-dips, and the huge amount of cash limits downside, making the risk/reward profile on this one excellent. (another stock with a similar story and even more cash as a % of market cap is EnviroStar)
  

• Manhattan Bridge Capital makes short-term loans to businesses, secured by inventory, real estate, etc... They are profitable, but the business is trading for 50% of book value, which is primarily comprised of cash and notes receivable. Management's record so far is strong in the arena of lending. Let's see if they can convince investors that the company is worth a premium to book - that would achieve a 100%+ return in stock price.

• I am investing approximately 25% of my cash into a local real estate venture. The base scenario provides me good diversification and a decent return thanks to the power of the most secure type of leverage - real estate mortgages. There are several factors that could provide significant upside, and the diversification effect extends to the exemplary inflation protection that real estate provides.