We have entered the year of The Dragon. The word dragon possibly comes from Greek dráken that is related to "See clearly". Will this be the year some people start to see clearly?

Several people (I am not sure I would call them authors at this stage) have with help of computers published several thousand book titles on amazon (I assume most print on demand). I think the record is more than 200 000 book titles by one person + his many computers.

Most "cyborg" books are not of the highest quality I think (I could be wrong). But this is possibly only the beginning, or is it the beginning of the end?

He Wrote 200,000 Books

A friend of me recently made me aware that retailers also are more actively using computer algorithms to set the prices on some books on amazon.com and other market places. The result of algorithmic "price wars" can be books about flies offered at $23,698,655.93

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

plus $3.99 shipping!! First sign of hyper inflation :-?

When will it be allowed to go short at such prices? Did Helicopter Ben buy it?

Computer algorithms writes and publish lots of books these days, they also price and misprice a lot of books. Computers clearly already read books, but do they enjoy it? It depends on the type of the computer I guess.

I was just walking to Foyles bookstore, and on my way I met a bank with smashed windows, and the bank was marked with "Storm the Banks"...

People are getting angry, big banks got bailed out, and there is little moderation in the bank bonuses for the bailed out banks . And young people are not finding jobs.

Let badly managed banks go bust, let people that are better at running banks and that better understand risk take over.

I would also say take a close look at the monetary system, and the monetary policy!

Too bad my camera is out of battery.

Gresham's law: "Bad money drives out good if their exchange rate is set by law." Do this "law" also apply to banks: Bad banks drives out good ?

Conservative banks that keep plenty of reserves are not able to expand that much in the credit boom and are loosing market shares to banks with no risk aversion. The risky banks are more likely to expand enough to get too big to fail, and are therefore also more likely to get bail out money...

Well the Gresham law can also go in reverse, but that is typically first when things get really ugly.

As the price of a series of base metal (and precious metal) have gone up, so has also the theoretical melt value of many coins. Well precious metal coins typically do not sell below the melt value. However standard coins in circulation can typically be bought at face value.

I say theoretical melt value, because in many(most?) countries it is illegal to melt coins. But clearly some people got more than tempted to buy coins at their face value and then melt the coins to sell them for the metal value.

"January 8: NEW DELHI: The special cell of Delhi Police, on Friday, claimed to have busted two illegal factories involved in melting old Indian coins and converting them to metal slabs for sale..."

Coin melting units busted, 5 arrested

US 1 cent copper coins in circulation (minted between 1909 to 1982) now have a metal value of 280% of their face value. Please do not melt coins, but as collector items they could be interesting.

Options Embedded in Physical Money

It is so cold now that it is difficult even to keep the numbers warm: n(n^2-1)/2>F

When Money Dies is the title of an interesting book written by Adam Fergusson, first published in 1975 and re-printed in 2010. It is about the nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-inflation episode, where money for a short period basically died out and got replaced with barter.

Money follow cycles like many other things: birth, young age, midlife, midlife crisis, old age, possibly followed by hart attack (basically overnight dramatic devaluation), cancer (hyper inflation), death, and finally re-birth (in form of somewhat “new” monetary system.

Greenspan supposedly in 2002 said: “If the evident recent success of fiat money regimes falters, we may have to go back to seashells or oxen as our medium of exchange. In that unlikely event, I trust, the discount window of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will have an adequate inventory of oxen.”

It is some years ago now since I wrote the comic about negative volatility (no I did not have the talent to draw it):

Negative Voatility Comic

A forum member recently hinted to me that Negative Volatility also had entered the vocabulary of the US legal system not so long after (in a different context, but still related to options).

"Therefore, a Phlx XL participant’s account that includes a short call position and a short put position in the same option will have a total negative volatility among the two positions. The two positions, when combined, do not offset one another respecting volatility. Instead, the two positions, when combined, result in the aggregate negative volatility of the two positions."

http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/pdf/E8-23490.pdf

Almost everything I have ever written

I did not write for the reader

I wrote it for the writer

Unpublished, unedited, undated, unread

But still written in the language of a mortal fool

In the language that keeps changing

Until it’s original meaning is lost

But is it lost forever?

A wise man just told me an ancient tablet recently was discovered and decoded

I wonder if it was written for the writer or for the reader?

Philosophy is in the mind of the philosopher. If you not are the philosopher you cannot observe the philosophers philosophy directly. All you can do is observing the philosophers philosophy indirectly through words or similar expressions coming from the philosopher. In other words we are extracting limited amount of information about the philosophy from the philosopher. The words we observe from the philosopher we can call implied philosophy. The implied philosophy only implies something about the philosophy of the philosopher. The implied philosophy can sometimes sound like gibberish that often reflects upon the poor philosophy of the non-philosopher that like to call himself a philosopher. However, that the implied-philosophy sounds gibberish can just as well reflect upon the observer that not is a true philosopher and thereby not can distinguish dirt from gold. Implied philosophy can be skewed and biased. If we observe the implied philosophy from a series of philosophers we will get what we can call the philosophy-surface. The philosophy-surface is dynamic and changes over time. The implied philosophy-surface can go through regime shifts, from periods with great philosophy to periods with mostly gibberish. The implied philosophy is the mask of the philosophers philosophy. Only true philosophers can see straight through the mask of the philosopher or the so-called philosopher. And what you read now is not philosophy. This is implied philosophy. I am not a philosopher.

When I was a king's guard (in Norway) I had a lot of time to think, like figuring out how many minutes it would take to boil a egg in my hat during the summer, that I am sure was just as warm as the British Queens guards hats.

“It boils down to this—we haven’t had a strike in over ten years, so we must have been overpaying them all along.”

Actually I have never heard of a quant strike, are they overpaid or could it simply be because they still are working on finding the optimal strike price? I wonder if it strikes you fellows, as it strikes me, that all we ever seem to talk about is integration and derivation over strike prices!