Capitalogix

Avoiding Death by Snowmobile

I was in Saskatchewan, Canada last week for my first-ever snowmobiling experience.

When I got there, everyone was in great spirits. Apparently, this is a sport done with day drinking, lots of laughter, and abandon.

We split into groups: Insane, Merely Crazy, and the Turtles.

I figured I was relatively safe with the Turtles. Still, I have to admit that I was a little nervous. The machines are capable of gliding over the snow at speeds approaching 200 miles per hour. And, I heard stories that 70 percent of these outings ended in some form of injury. Those are some sphincter-tightening things to put together.

The scenery was majestic.

But I didn't notice till it was over.  Humans are deletion creatures. That means they can hold seven things (plus or minus two) in their memory. Everything else gets filtered or deleted. For example, in chess, a grandmaster can focus on the portion of the board that is most proximately related to winning. A novice, however, wastes their buffers with thoughts like "the horsey-thing goes up two and over one."

While everyone else was focused on having fun, I focused on how to make the sled do something. There were no instructions that said click this, press that. Here's the brake, or, the three most important things to remember are … 

I quickly learned two rules. The first, you have to lean in the direction that you want to turn (otherwise the sled tips over). By the way, it took me a few iterations to figure this one out. 

Here is a picture of me just after they dug me out from under the sled.

 

 

The second rule is to try to stay on the sled. I never quite figured that rule out fully. 

I guess you can be skillful, you can be lucky, or you can pray.

Luckily, I saw Father Rac before we started.   My question was whether he was here to bless the participants or perform last rites.

 

 

 

After a nice conversation, he said he'd pray for me.

In my industry, we call that hedging.

I did last longer than the sled.  It had to be towed.

Meanwhile, I still have ten fingers and ten toes, ended the day vertically, and had a ton of fun.  Victory!

I’ll suck less next time.

Misheard Song Lyrics with Peter Kay

Years ago, when my kids were still children, Macy Gray came out with a song called "I Try."

When I heard the kids singing, the chorus went: 

I try to say goodbye and I choke, I try to walk away and I stumble, though I try to hide it, it's clear, I wear goggles when you are not near.

Of course, it's not "I wear goggles when you are not here", even if my youngest son swore it was ... The actual line is "My world crumbles when you are not near" ... which makes a lot more sense. 

This has happened to me several times as well (recently, too – which prompted this post). 

Turns out, we humans are pattern-matching machines.  But not all of the patterns we perceive are really there.

Peter Kay plays on our disposition with this funny bit about misheard lyrics. 

Worth a watch. 

 

via YouTube 

NFL - Boom or Bust

Are you ready for some Football?

This chart may explain why my foreign friends prefer a different form of "football" ... It shows how many Super Bowl Championships each region has.

 

 

The regular season is about to start, and the buzz is building ... but, not all of it is good. 

Violence ... drugs ... concussions ... There has been a lot of bad press surrounding the NFL lately.

The Cowboys, alone, have somewhere between  4 to 7 players (depending on appeals) subject to miss games due to league suspensions for misconduct.  

 

The Teflon League:  NFL Revenues and Viewership Are Up.

 

Currently, the NFL is the 11th most important private company in the USA according to Fortune, and has the highest revenue of any sports league worldwide. 

via howmuch

While critics contend that something needs to be done about the various issues surrounding the NFL, it's hard to conclude that those issues affect viewership.  The NFL currently dominates attendance per game, viewership, and revenue.

In an experience economy, the NFL puts out an extraordinary product.

Long term may prove to be a different story, however.  Each year there are less high-school football players and more competition. 

I guess we'll see.

Regardless ... "How About Them Cowboys!"

 

Rubik's Cubes ... More than just a game.

One of my unique abilities is pattern matching.

Even if I'm not an expert in a field, based on context and patterns, I quickly see the big picture – and recognize the bottlenecks and leverage points that impact transformative results.

Perhaps that's why Rubik's Cubes fascinate me. 

A scrambled cube presents an insurmountable challenge to newbies.  It almost seems that there are infinite possibilities ... and most lead towards chaos and failure. In reality, a Rubik's cube is pretty easy to solve if you understand a few simple algorithms (and match the positions of a couple key blocks in relation to the decisions you need to make next). 

As more people learn to solve standard cubes, the game evolves.  There is new generation of "Cubers" that attempt to find new creative situations to add difficulty, solve it faster than the next person, or try crazy variations of the cube that barely resembles the original. 

 

If you're trying to learn how to solve a basic cube, here's a great resource. 

After you've learned the basic patterns, and solved a few puzzles,  you can up the ante.

Here are some examples of bigger cubes with more variables and different shapes.

 

via hananujiya

Ultimately, it is that base pattern recognition and simple solving skills (applied in the right order) that sets the stage.

It doesn't matter where you start.  As long as you continue to make progress, the result is inevitable.

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - July 16th, 2017

Science, Art, or "PooPoo De Toro"...

  

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• Ray Kurzweil: There's a Blueprint for the Master Algorithm in Our Brains (Futurism)
• Brain-training Games Don't Really Train Brains, a New Study Suggests. (WashPost)
• Why Men Don't Live as Long as Women. (Nautilus)
• What a Hunter-Gatherer Diet Does to the Body in Just Three Days. (CNN)
• Is Philosophy Simply Harder Than Science? (TLS)

Trading Links:

• Return of the Day Traders. (Forbes)
• The Unexpected Economic Consequences of Video Games. (Vox)
• Why Elon Musk's Early Adopters Take Risks. (Forbes)
• Nvidia Heads 50 Companies that Will Change the World. (Alphr)
• This is the Future of Investing, and You Probably Can't Afford It. (BizInsider)

March Madness: The Last Perfect Bracket Busted After Just 40 Games

March Madness is in full swing, and it feels like everyone (and their mom) has filled a bracket.  But how do they do it?

More importantly, how do the people that are successful do it?

The video, below, highlights the "Bracket Busters" of 2015.

 

via FiveThirtyEight

 

So, who were they?  A 13-year-old who used a mix of guesswork and preferences, a 47-year-old English woman who used algorithms and data science (despite not knowing the game), and a 70-year-old bookie who had his finger on the pulse of the betting world.  

Proof that different factors can lead us to believe we have control over something with odds at 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. For those who don't wanna do the math that's 9.2 quintillion. 

That's not to say that different factors don't provide an edge. Knowing the history of the teams, their ranks, how they performed historically in the playoffs, all provide important information, to humans and machines that try to make the perfect bracket.

The way people fill out their brackets often mimics the way investors pick trades or allocate assets. Some use gut feel, some base their decisions on rank and past performance, and some use predictive models.

Just as an FYI, this March Madness, the last perfect bracket busted after just 40 games.  This includes reporting on tens of millions of brackets from NCAA.com, Bleacher Report, CBS, ESPN, Fox Sports and Yahoo.

People aren't as good at prediction as they predict they are.

Something to think about. 

NFL - Bad Lip Reading

Hope you have enjoyed Super Bowl weekend so far.

Here is an oldy, but goodie.

It is kind of the opposite of one of those old Kung Fu movies where the dubbed words you hear aren't synched with the mouth movement. 

Here it looks like they are saying what you hear ... it's just that someone changed the words.  You could call it "So THAT'S what they were saying ..."

 This video works for the same reason trading often doesn't ... Humans are great at finding patterns (even when there isn't really a pattern to find).

Regardless, this was fun (and it's gotten almost 70 million views on YouTube).

 

 

Recently, they also did one with clips from Trump's Inauguration.  

Pretty funny. 

Quick, Draw!

Our non-human overlords haven't taken over yet.

However, A.I. is getting smarter faster.

Can a neural network learn to recognize doodles?

Google's Quick, Draw! will try and guess what you're drawing.

It did pretty well with mine, and I did not inherit my dad's artistic skills. 

Try it by clicking below!

 

 

Kind of cool!

Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading - September 25, 2016

At least in Pro Wrestling, there is usually a 'Hero' and 'Villain'

 

via Cagle

 Are you going to watch the Debate?  

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• Wells Fargo Just Became the Poster Child for When External and Internal Values Don’t Match. (QZ)
• The Value Driven Product Roadmap – a New Approach. (OmriZiv)
• Mossberg: Apple, the King of Tech Taste and Daring, Takes a Breather. (TheVerge)
• The (Not So) New Data Scientist Venn Diagram. (KDNuggets)
• CIA Using Pokemon Go for Mass Surveillance. (USAPoliticsNow) 

 

Trading Links:

• Traders Watching for More Volatility. (CNBC)
• New Kind of Correlation Spotted in Factors Obsessing Wall Street. (Bloomberg)
• Wave of IPOs Could Hit Global Markets within the next 12 Months. (ValueWalk)
• AOL Co-Founder Steve Case: Third Wave of Tech M&A Coming…. (FoxBusiness)
• Apple’s Tax Avoidance Illustrates Gap between Law and Economics. (WSJ)

Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading - August 13, 2016

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• Three Ways the Tech Industry (Still) Misuses Metrics. (FastCompany)
• Machine Learning Key Terms, Explained. (KDNuggets)
• We Have Become an Idiocracy. (Time)
• Combat Juggling. (Neatorama)
• How to Use Distraction to Your Advantage. (99u)

 

Trading Links:

• Beaten-Up Hedge Fund Billionaires Reminisce About the 'Golden Age'. (QuantNews)
• A Booming Wall Street Business is Based on Guesstimates, and That Could Be A Problem. (BI)
• Authorities Want to Know If Electronic Trading Giants are Cheating Small Customers. (Fortune)
• Who Owns America's Debt? (Money)
• Megacities, Not Nations, are the World’s Dominant, Enduring Social Structures. (Quartz)