Author: Muttrox

Overall, it was great!

For one thing, it’s the first Bond movie in decades that’s based on one of the actual Ian Fleming books. Loosely based, to be sure, but based. And they took the opportunity to “reboot” the franchise. Bond is now much more human in interesting ways. Sure, he’s emotionless — but that’s explicit. More importantly, he gets hurt and he exerts himself. It takes effort to do things. He sweats, he goes all-out, he gets bumped, and his hair does get mussed while doing it. It reminded me a lot of the two Bourne movies, which I also enjoyed for the exact same reason. Action sequences that are reasonably realistic are much more exciting than comic book fights. Any given stunt or fight should give you the impression, “That’s wild, and implausible, but not laughably impossible.” (It does have the usual motivation plot problems, which Easterbrook nails (scroll down to “Bunk”.)

So a big thumbs up. With that said, here are two things that bothered me.

1) Continuity. Having recurring characters and story arcs that span more than one movie makes a series infinitely stronger. Most movies can’t afford to do this. It’s so hard to get a hit that you don’t want to spend precious minutes laying the groundwork for a sequel that may not ever happen. So all the girls get killed, all the villains get defeated, everything gets wrapped up with a nice bow, because you get the biggest bang for your movie-making buck that way. But the Bond franchise is different. There is always going to be another Bond movie next summer, so you can invest in the future and make it that much stronger. Have a villain get away. Have the trail go cold. Have the girl he loves survive for a couple of years for once, would that kill you?

2) Poker. In the book (which I read many years ago), the game is Baccarat. Baccarat has no element of skill, and no one in America understands how it’s played. It’s a very stupid game. So the writers made a smart move and changed it to poker. More current, more chances for Bond to do clever things, and more familiar to the audience. But the poker was terrible — just awful from top to bottom.

There was no poker skill displayed – In every important hand, the players win by having a great hand. In the first half of the movie, Bond wins a sports car by having the nut aces when the other guy has kings. Whoo, that took some serious skill! In the final hand, Bond pulls a straight flush, which beats out two separate full houses and a three-of-a-kind. Strangely, he makes a big dramatic pause before decding to call the all-in bet. In any normal game, his reaction would be instantaneous, “You bet I’m in, you blood-spurting freak! Take a peek at these babies, I like to call them Nut One and Nut Two!” Or something along those lines. At any rate, the point is that it doesn’t take any poker skill to get dealt a great hand. It takes skill to take terrible cards and bluff everyone away and still win. That might actually require the best poker player in the service (which they claim Bond is).

The tells — no great poker player has a tell so obvious. If they have any.

The betting increments were insane. I see your $50,000 and raise you another $50,000. Big deal, standard raise is up to $200,000 or so. Anything less is a terrible bet. No one ever raised enough to scare anyone out of a pot.

There were too many people on big hands. On the winning hand, why would anyone stay in with trips? There’s all kinds of great cards on the boards, three other players in the hand, let them fight it out. That’s how you win a tourney.

Why did the CIA send such a bad player to play? What’s the point of that? Much as I like the Felix character, and making him black worked great, it didn’t make any sense for him to be there.

In fact, the whole game didn’t make any sense. The plot is that the bad guy is such a good poker player that in a $150 million winner-take-all tournament, he is such a threat to win that both the Americans and Brits infiltrate the game with their best players to try and stop him. First of all, no one is that good. At a 15 person table of top players, the best poker players in the world might have a 1 in 3 shot vs. a 1 in 15 shot. That’s why no-names keep winning the WSOP. And if the bad guy is really that good, why is he screwing around with financing terrorism, manipulating world stock markets, and working with people who like to chop his hand off? The heck with that, just become a professional high-stakes poker player. A lot easier, a lot more legal, a lot more fun — and with that bleeding eye schtick, your endorsements would be through the roof.

But even so, I liked it!

Him: …is it true Dad?
Me: What – what are you talking about?
Him: Dad! Is it true! — that if you try you get what you need, but you don’t always get what you want?

Me: Um.. It’s kind of complicated. It’s mostly true.

Most guys knows that the most comfortable bed in the house isn’t even a bed. It’s the couch. Naps are more effective. When I can’t sleep at night, I head off the the couch to get some Zs. That’s one of the great guy secrets: If you’re mad at us, we don’t mind sleeping on the couch. It’s fun. So I brought up the obvious big questions with Mrs. Muttrox.

Why don’t they make a whole bed that’s made out of couch?

Me: Hey, why don’t they make a whole bed that’s made out of couch?
Her: What?
Me: You know, just make it official. I already use it as a bed, and I get a better sleep than on our fancy mattress upstairs.
Her: No. That doesn’t make any sense.
Me: What doesn’t make sense about it?
Her: I’ll tell you what doesn’t make sense about it. What doesn’t make sense about it is that- What does that even mean, a couch that’s a bed?
Me: I dunno, I guess take a couch, make it wider so two people can fit- sort of like two couches facing each other- something like that. I’m not an engineer.
Her (getting increasingly annoyed and incredulous that she’s taking the time to even have this conversation): That is the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.
Me: We could make millions.
Her: How are you going to put sheets on it?
Me: You don’t need sheets.
Her: You don’t need — what are you talking about, or course you need sheets!
Me: When you sleep on a couch, you sleep in your clothes.
Her: You have to have sheets! That’s disgusting!
Me: No, it’s not! You don’t say it’s disgusting when we take naps on the couch!
Her: You are gross. And you better not have taped over Desperate Housewives for some dumb cartoon again!

Many of my readers know the drill by now. Criminals buy a bunch of some random penny stock. They send out spam email to hundred of millions of people, touting the stock. Almost all those people are just annoyed, but there are always a few suckers. They buy the stock. Stock goes up. Within a day or two, the criminals sell out, taking their profit with them, leaving the suckers to hold the bag. Recent research (Frieder, Laura and Zittrain, Jonathan, “Spam Works: Evidence from Stock Touts and Corresponding Market Activity”) has shown this is suprisingly effect, netting over 5% on average. Not bad for a few days work.

I always wonder whether you can’t make money even as a sucker. As long as you’re one of the first suckers in, and one of the first suckers out, maybe you’re not a sucker.

Let’s say you respond to the email, and you’re one of the first people who does. Then the stock price will not have risen much. Shortly after you bought, there will be a flood of new suckers who will push the price up. Now you sell, one of the first people to do so. You get out with profit.

In essence, you let someone else do the manipulation and the spamming, you just ride their coattails. You won’t make quite as much as they did, but you ought to be able to get some profit.

The trick in this is – how do you ensure that you are one of the first people to get in on it? You don’t know when it was sent out, you don’t know when other people received the email, all you know is when you got it. But what you can reasonably assume is that most people would think about it for a while. Your advantage is to act instantly. The sooner you act, the better your odds are of being one of the first buyers. You won’t always be right, but overall you should beat the system.

I haven’t done this. I never would, not my thing. But I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. My wife (per usual) thinks it’s one my stupider ideas, but I don’t see any real objection to it.

Update: On further review there is a simulator based on the data the authors used. Fun to use, but the time detail isn’t fine enough. Everything is at a daily level in their research, whereas I would suggest a strategy that lasts at most one day.

They also add an interesting corrolary (on page 24): “Overall, our results imply that, in theory, a spammee could profit by forming a zero-cost portfolio that entails buying non-tout stocks and shorting tout stocks each time he or she recieves a spam touting stock. This strategy would have a high expected return (7.92%)…”

Sorry about that. Big thanks to Jabley for generously donating enough bandwidth to get me to 2007! Happy Holidays everyone!

I love thinking about good pranks. I never do any of them, but I like making them up, and I talk a good game. Anyhow, here’s one for ya — the auto-replace feature in Microsoft Word. It’s just begging to be abused.

One day, when your co-worker is out for a few minutes, slip over to their desk. Go to Tools, Autocorrect, and start adding a few entries. For example, change “proactive” to “practice”, or “tone” to “stoned”. Next time your co-worker happens to type those words, they’ll be automatically changed. This all happens very quickly, it’s very easy to miss. If you make the autocorrect subtle enough, odds are good it will slip right past. Even if it noticed, most users don’t know this feature exists, and will have no idea what on earth could be doing it. Since it probably won’t be noticed until weeks or months until after you made the change, it will be hard to connect it to you.

It’s like being evil Letterman.

Have fun!

Last weekend, I was about 20 feet from the Guvanator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was odd… he isn’t a very big man anymore, and as the photo below shows, his glory days are way way behind him. But he still projects power and solidity, even at 59. Which brings us to today’s question.

How old does he have to get before you can kick his ass?

So far, informal poll results are:
* 65
* 75
* 82
* Never
* Right now, I’ll take you down any time, any place old man! (said after a couple drinks)

This notice was taped up on various signs throughout the neighborhood. Just a thought, maybe you should tell someone how to get in touch with you? You know, to actually get the dog? As is, this is just an enormous taunt.

Now here is a hacker through and through. The Connecticutt for Leiberman party has only one member. It’s not Joe Lieberman. In fact, he doesn’t even like Joe Lieberman. But I like him!

The Gettysburg Address PowerPoint presentation

Many intersting facts about sleep

General Zod’s homepage (thanks cuz)

Martin Scorcese’s Sesame Street

If you read Thomas Friedman’s the World is flat, you must read this scathing review. Although I liked the book overall, there are a lot of great points landed here.

I don’t get college sports fans. This is a follow-up from the Almighty Sports Guy about people who are fanatics about the sports programs of colleges they didn’t even go to.

Q: I read your article about rooting for a soccer team in England and can understand your point about the lack of passion in pro sports. While I will grant you that might be fun, the obvious question is why not throw yourself into a college team?
–Michael Spurlin, Austin, Texas

SG: You root for a school for four reasons: Either you grew up near them, you followed them since you were kid, you went there or your kid is going there. And that’s it. For instance, let’s say that I decided tomorrow, “UCLA is a half-hour from my house and I like their uniforms … screw it, I’m becoming a Bruins fan!” And I started going to football and basketball games and sitting with alumni and fans whose families had been following them for four generations. I mean, wouldn’t that be a little weird? That’s like showing up at some stranger’s house for Thanksgiving and being like, “Hey, I’m in the family now! Pass the turkey!” I just couldn’t do that and feel good about it.

I usually like Matt Bai’s work. And there is a lot to like in this story. But a large part of it is that Bush’s extremism finally caught up with him, and that voters are pretty bright after all.

Hogwash. This kind of thinking perpetuates some of the worst memes out there in political thinking.

(edited for length)
Daschle seemed to have lost patience with George W. Bush and his entire administration. He talked with very little prompting about the way the president refused to compromise on legislation, bullied their own party’s senators and ignored leaders of the opposition. Daschle said he hardly ever spoke to anyone at the White House. I asked him whether he thought this kind of arrogance would eventually come back to hurt Bush’s presidency.

I put the question to him another way: in all his years in politics, I asked, had he ever seen anyone act so imperiously and not eventually lose power as a result? Daschle shook his head. “No,” he said. “I never have.”
That exchange was on my mind as I stood in the offices of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on election night, watching young aides with markers erase and replace the latest election numbers on a white board, effectively wiping away what remained of Bush’s influence in Washington.

Presidents serve for a maximum of eight years. Bush got all eight. That’s not losing power. For six of those eight years, he has had a Congress that has done everything he has asked and never put up any serious barriers to his goals. That’s not losing power. And now, for his last two years, he will have more trouble getting things done that require congressional assent. That’s not losing power.

Articles like this miss the big picture. Bush was rewarded, not penalized, for his extremism. For staking out a policy, for doing whatever it took to make it reality, he achieved his policies. Even if you hate everything he did, you must admit it worked. In nearly every case, being more extreme has helped him, not hurt him. The fact that 25% of his regime will be a bit tougher for him does not mean the last six years never happened.

If this election was about the cost of arrogance, though, then it should also be viewed as a vindication of the much-maligned American voter. Since Bush’s disputed victory in 2000, many liberals have been increasingly brazen about their disdain for the rural and religious voters; one popular e-mail message, which landed in thousands of Democratic in-boxes in the days after the 2004 election, separated North America into The United States of Canada and Jesusland. The populist author Thomas Frank won widespread praise for his thesis that unsophisticated rural types had been manipulated into voting against their economic self-interest, while the celebrated linguist George Lakoff posited that conservatives had rewired the brain synapses in these unsuspecting voters. Two eminent liberal political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, wrote a more scholarly book, arguing that Bush could govern as an extremist without paying a price, because Republicans had gamed the electoral system and deceived voters.

But this election, in which conservative incumbents in states like Kentucky and Indiana went down to defeat, should discredit such alarmist (and elitist) theories. As it happened, despite all these neurological and structural impediments, ordinary voters proved perfectly capable of recognizing failed governance when they saw it, and seemed plenty capable of defending their own interests.

The voters, particularly the rural/religious/conservative ones, have been wrong in the last three elections. They were wrong to vote Bush over Gore in 2000. They were wrong not to hand Congress to the Dems in 2002. They were deranged to vote for Bush over Kerry in 2004. They were wrong. After being hit with a sledgehammer for six years, they decided that all things considered, they didn’t like that ol’ sledgehammer. Heck of a learning curve.

As the GOP likes to say, elections have consequences. And they have. Six years of Bush rule has done so much damage to this country, and indeed the world, that I can hardly stand to think about it. It’s nice that the grownups finally got one branch of government back, but it’s a little late. This election is not a vindication of the ordinary voter. It is a condemnation of their appalling track record until now.