A funny ad

When you in US say "ignorance is bliss", we say "tieto lisää tuskaa" (knowledge adds to pain (Ecc. 1:18)) When the name of a big IT subcontractor, Tieto, surfaces during failed public-sector IT procurements, we say Tieto lisää tuskaa. There is also a metal music festival named Tuska. Tieto made a bold ad to turn this catchphrase from negative PR into positive.

Joined a gym

24 Seven Fitness

Spacious and has versatile set of basic equipment. Perfect for my needs (which are "one step above bomb shelter gym a few times a week.") Features:

• Spacious room for weight training.
• Weight training: Several benches and weight racks, weights, basic pulleys.
• Aerobic traning: Machines in a room I didn't check.
• Bodyweight training:Stall bars, dip bench, several pull-up handles, stomach & back training benches, stretching room with mats and skipping rope.
• Entrance with cards any time, can train late or early.
• along a route from home to work
• 30 min distance from home
• price is 20e / month

Good choice if you want to train with weights and visit city center.

Bad choise if you want to drive there by car, train on guided exercise lessons or with exotic pulleys for all parts of body.

Conclusive proof is out: Satan exists!

Just one week after the black rituals of Steelfest, a shooter in Hyvinkää killed two persons and injured seven. One of the few people with a clue of the root cause is Jouko Piho, who claims that the shooter was possessed by a demon. The shooter can't give any explanation why he did it, which further supports demonic possession. Also he didn't get the idea of shooting from the music, as he has no reported history of interest in black metal.

What is the probability that a shooting happens just one week after a major satanic ritual? In Finland, shooting incidents happen about once every 2 years. In any 2-week period (after summoning ritual), the independent probability of a shooting incident is (2 weeks) / (52 weeks / year * 2 years) =~ 2%.

Hyvinkää has about 45000 inhabitants. Finland has a little over 5m inhabitants. Therefore the probability that a shooter emerges from the same city of ~50000 inhabitants where the rituals were held is about (5 000 000 / 50 000) =~ 1%.

Therefore, the likelihood that it was pure dumb luck is at most 0.02%. This is the probability that a shooting incident occurs within 2 weeks following a black ritual in the same city of ~50000 inhabitants.

Based on this scientific calculations, you must either believe that a malevolent supernatural entity exists or admit that you put dogma above observations!

To prevent these horrible tragedies from happening in the future, Finnish government should immediately set up a working group to formulate demonic policy, which sets up the instutional framework for preventing, indentifying and mitigating incidents of demonic possession.

Reinventing the steel

Death metal and satanic black metal dominated Steelfest's lineup 19.5.2012 in Hyvinkää. When I arrived, Forced Kill was warming up audience by shouting "The next song is dedicated to everyone who thinks that there are advantages to being a vulture!" Dart Management, which just got 1/3 of Greece's remaining treasury after buying bonds by bottom price would surely agree.

The dagger, the chalice, the torch and the iron

The 4 satanic bands had a little contest on the most outrageous stage show. They were all very good at creating the kind of haunted, intense atmosphere which sets black metal apart, where the musicians don't just entertain the audience but channel visions from the other side. Sawhill Sacrifice established baseline with corpse paint and intense drumming. While they are musically great, they need more work on their core message (claiming that Cthulhu will rise from the dead isn't very credible message.)

Cavus continued preparations for the black ceremony by announcing that they were prohibited from summoning the devil, bringing rats and playing with blood, and adviced anyone interested in those to come to the backstage.

After that, Sacrilegious Impalement whipped the audience to frenzy with their perfect combination of fast and relentless music and well thought out mystical, satanic message. The singer had a chalice of blood (maybe from the rats of Cavus?) which he also sprinkled to the audience. Afterwards some listeners took photographs on the grass with the unwashed bloodstains. They also had an inverted, sharpened cross as stage prop - I half expected them to impale something there, but they didn't go that far.

Enochian Crescent finalized the mass with a baptism of fire to cancel the singer's Christian baptism, first warming up an iron with a torch and then grilling himself.

Also animals were killed for the pleasure of Steelfest audience. Not by impaling them to a sharpened, inverted cross but instead beforehand to provide meat for the delicious double steak hamburgers in American Diner's vendor stall. If someone wants to feel shocked and ban something, start with the actual, irrevocable "fun kills" by banning the hamburger stall.

Barely Legal

You could see that the satanic bands were mainly restriced by Finnish criminal law. First of all, impaling something to an inverted cross would have been a first degree animal protection crime, producing a 4 - 24 month jail sentence. Some high priest grilling an acolyte with a hot iron (instead of the singer grilling himself) would have been manhandling, prosecuted even if the "victim" won't sue.

Blessed to resist Islam

Sacrilegious Impalement had heeded the call to arms by Ironmistress by printing T-shirts which resist "the laws of Sharia invading our homes", using Paganism to fill the memetic void when Christianity is too weak to resist Islamic extemism. I saw just one such T-shirt, so it is not a mass movement even if black metal bands would love to lead the nativist defense against violent Islam.

Also Taake's main singer had Norwegian flag as a cloak, and one girl in the audience waved Norway's flag.

If you want peace, prepare for war

Death metal lineup started with Forced Kill and Corpsessed, culminating in Sotajumala's (War God) brutal hammering. War God's message combined cold, harsh military discipline, necessary for effective national defense, with the mindlessness of dying. It appealed to the Finnish audience (3/4 male), most of which had served as conscripts and done the mental exercise of imagining what it is like to be in war. Also shouts from audience reflected that.

Other bands

Also Saattue, XII and The Crown played in the festival, but I didn't see them. Thanks for the organizers, it was a great event except for one thing. Instead of being racist, xenophobic assholes, permit the mages summon devil to the party next year!

Change for the hopeless

And more taxes for those foolish enough to guarantee their loans.

Low-key songs of depression and loss

Enjoy your ROI from education.


History is a nightmare from which we have just woken up, except that larget swathes of humankind haven't, and will shoot anyone who tries to wake them up.


Graveyard is full of irreplacable men.


Others have failed before you and will fail after you.


And this is what success looks like.


"The lyrics are partly just random screaming, because we couldn't find the original lyrics anywhere..."

Movies

Seen 3 movies recently.

The romantic fantasy drama The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn was fun to watch as a reflection of teenage girls' fantasies about ideal mate. Curiously, it had one ideal male figure (Edward) for girls on pill, with soft demeanour and a sensitive interaction style. It also had a strong hothead (Jacob) to appeal to girls not on the pill and are on their period. I was also surprised by the obsession to make Edward tick all high status marker boxes.

Although it was not realistic, it was the only movie which dealt with serious topics (mate choice, sex, pregrancy a la Rosemary's Baby) and where human beings behaved according to human psychology. (The main reason I don't really like movies is that many make my "people just don't behave that way!" warning lights flash red.)

Action flick Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows offered 2 hours of good entertainment, but I'm already forgetting the plot, which was too inconsistent to stay in memory. The central theme was 'steampunk Lord of the Rings', Sherlock was Gandalf, complete with a sneak into Mordor and meeting with Balrog.

Drama road movie This Must Be The Place told about a super wealthy former rock star. It had post-singularity feel, as most people in the movie had all their material meets met, and they mainly drifted in existential void, seeking ways to amuse themselves. Having no material competition left and not that much need for workplace style co-operation, they used disproportionate effort to control the frame of conversation and refuse to answer questions straight.

Finnish presidential elections

The biggest foreign policy question facing Finland is the future of Eurozone.

Our elected representatives can guarantee junk bonds with 20% of our GDP have already pledged 26% of our GDP to junk bond funds, and allow European Central Bank to create 5% inflation with bailouts and quantitative easing.

The politicians can also say "no" to worst excesses, and keep Eurozone as a group of countries which are small enough to default individually; that is a stregth. Greece default means more evolution through trial and error and fewer single points of failure.

EU and euro have been positive forces thus far, but now I see more threats than opportunities in tighter integration.

During Finland's EU negotiations, Paavo Väyrynen demonstrated both ability to oppose EU and also pragmatism (unlike Timo Soini) to admit defeat after the vote had been cast against his views and join again the negotiation tables where decisions are made.

Helsinki, a nest of vice

Today I met a streetwalker for the first time in Finland, when walking in Helsinki city center at 2 am. After identifying her from stockings and small pants despite -7 Celsius, I made eye contact. "Hello little one", she said with thick accent. I grumbled "hello." She continued "is the little one feeling cold?", at which point I was already past her. Motherly context may not be the most effective at rousing the flames of passion, but probably she knows something I don't about the kinds of persons who actually pay up.

Someday, I'll lose my virginity after paying for it. I won't report it here, because maintaining privacy requires reciprocal silence. It won't solve my social skills developmental task, but it is actionable and it is remotely possible that I'll learn something useful in the process.

Review of 2011 and goals for 2012

Review of past year's goals

Lose weight to 55kg (BMI 20.7): Failed. The weight bottomed at 56kg. Then I moved to Helsinki, fattening to 60kg during the 2 months I travelled 5 hours a day, leaving little energy for exercise and gulping beer on evenings to wash out the "can you be so pissed off you die" feeling.

Main events:

• Got fired.
• Got a new job from Helsinki.
• No longer working with a dying technology.
• Bought an apartment.
• Got cynical, noticing that the only effect from 4.5 years of work was the balance on my bank account.
• Studied investing to find out how to increase the balance without working.
• Made progress in pole dancing during the 3 non-work months.
• Had fun during 3 summery non-work months, and unparalleled amount of social interaction by participating in The Club's event. No new social skills milestones reached, though.
• Wrote a very early prototype of a teaching game for Chinese, and an unpromising business plan for productizing it.
• Noticed that I'm too lazy punk to develop it while holding a job, abandoning it.

Overall, I'll remember 2011 as the year I studied investing, it is the only change which will still have effect in 2021. Nothing much lost or gained in other fronts.

Goals for the next year:

• Diet to 55kg.
• Re-establish social life in Helsinki.
• Start a regular sports hobby to stay fit.

Drum'n'bass evening@Venue

The biggest difference between Tampere and Helsinki rave parties are in security arrangements. At Venue, there were 4 security guards present, one of them huge freezer-refridgerator combination with tattoos. They had radio phones. At one point in the evening, one of them pimp walked into the bar room, shoulders wide, his whole body language screaming "I guard here!"

In Tampere, there were less guards, they tended to be regular guys - just taller, they didn't have special equipment and they mainly stayed on the background.

When exiting the bar at 03.45, police patrols and guards were visibly present around Kamppi. I took a taxi home, since the night routes of buses were cancelled for Christmas. When I mentioned the taxi driver about tighter security at Venue, he first emphasized that in his opinion any conflicts should be solved primarily by talking. Immediately after that, he played his part in reifying the badass violent reputation of security guards by telling how the steroid beasts have very short fuse, how a customer died in the hands of a security guard, and how he the taxi driver himself had 4 years of karate training.

Probably Helsinki night is more dangerous, as all night shifters feel the need to emphasize their capability for violence. I have to admit that I don't like Kamppi and railway station late at night. I wonder if it is due to diversity, or because larger density of people directly means larger amount of scum per square kilometer.

Happy Solstice!

The move to Espoo is now complete.

The most important piece of furniture has been erected:



The picture is blurry, because using lightning is not possible in front of a mirror. The room had supersize, 230cm x 170cm mirror already installed to living room wall.

6.66%, the number of the Italian 10-year bond yield

Story thus far:

Fundamentals:
- Italy amassed public debt 120% of GDP
- Berlusconi focused on organizing bunga bunga parties
- Feeble attempts to balance the budget were met with mass demonstrations and political opposition

Market mechanics:
- MF global went bankrupt because their Italian bonds lost too much in mark-to-market value (value, which someone is ready to pay if they sold the Italian bonds now on market). MF used criminal ways and took reckless risks, so without Italian bonds they would have eventually found another tree to hang themselves.
- Jefferies, a financial firm, was suspected to be fatally exposed to Italian bonds. They disclosed information about their Italian bond ownership and also sold them. They turned out fine.
- Fire sales of Italian bonds to avoid scrutiny. Nominal Italian bond yield explodes. At least temporarily, yields are past the point of no return, after which savings and cuts no longer solve the problem, as interest accumulates too fast.

Rejected solutions:
- Italy balances budget - if they could, they would have already done that
- EFSF: European countries just don't have enough money to bail out Italy while staying solvent

Next steps:
- ECB prints money and causes high inflation
OR
- Eurozone turns into nineties depression historical re-enactment society
OR
- Italy converts debt to liras and devaluates

Simo jumps out of burning platform

Got a job from Helsinki. Death cab for Qt now chugs on without me. I travel to work on rails (=by train) to work on Rails (=a web programming stack.) Now I have provable regular income to get a mortgage and actually move to Helsinki.

Finally, a picture of Ruby:

A true story of grit in education and life: The complex analysis class of 1999

Summary: Grit is the character trait of persisting in the face of hardship. My high school class faced an unintentional test of grit. Life outcomes differ starkly between the 4 who passed and the 12 who didn't.

The grit scale

Duckworth's grit scale is a short self-assessment quiz for persistence, with questions like "I finish whatever I begin" or "I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one." It has been tested to work immensely well in the military:

Duckworth and her collaborators gave their grit test to more than 1,200 freshman cadets as they entered West Point and embarked on the grueling summer training course known as Beast Barracks. The military has developed its own complex evaluation, called the Whole Candidate Score, to judge incoming cadets and predict which of them will survive the demands of West Point; it includes academic grades, a gauge of physical fitness and a Leadership Potential Score. But at the end of Beast Barracks, the more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted and which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth’s 12-item grit questionnaire.

(HT: Steven Hsu, Aretae)

The complex analysis class of 1999

Päivölä is a math-oriented high school. Before entry, candidates are screened for mathematical aptitude. The special sauce of the school were university-level math courses. Initially all 16 of us attended unimath. The school was still in formation: We were just the second boarding year-class there. Teaching was a bit shaky and there were few exercise sessions. Consequently students kept dropping out of unimath. The school was designed to teach the top as much as they could handle, so little was done to address those who dropped out. It was an unintentional test of grit: persisting despite woefully inadequate background and few exercise sessions.

In the last spring, there were 5 people in unimath: me, Vesa, Tuomas, Mikko and Jussi. The final course taught complex analysis. I was the last one who dropped out of unimath. At that point, 1/3 of the course had passed and I was completely dropping out of cart at lectures, not understanding much anything.

It was preceeded by 6-month limbo of linear algebra and calculus. During the limbo, lack of preliminary knowledge and mathematical maturity meant increasingly severe dropping-outs (not understanding anything about the taught topic). The first lecture where I completerly dropped from cart was about QR decomposition and numerically more stable way to solve linear equations, so complex analysis dropping-out was anything but surprise or whim.

This divided the class into 4 who passed the grit test, and 12 who didn't. It was not just about talent, because everyone had been screened at entrance.

The wall of abstraction

CS lore describes programming students "hitting the wall" during teaching. Some understand the subject swimmingly, while others struggle even after explanations. Some consider this "IQ in action": Either you have innate ability to get it, or you don't, in which case you need a lot more exercise to learn it.

Little research has been done about this. Dehnadi and Bornat assumed that setting a variable is one such wall. They measure one's grasp of variable assignment with questions like below.



The students had not yet been taught programming, so it was enough to use any consistent mental model. For example, the mental model "assignment moves the values from left to right" produces answer "a=10, b=10". The consistently wrong need to learn just one thing to get all correct.

44% answered the test consistently, and the test predicted well if the students would pass or fail their first programming course(*):



(*) Some attempts to replicate failed to find correlation, and a meta-analysis with improved test protocol found clear but weaker correlation.

Hitting the wall

The first time I hit it was at a physics lecture. A visiting Russian lectured about mechanics. Unlike in earlier lecutres, there were no numbers involved: the masses of the objects were m and M. I had all the required background (high school mechanics; math problems without numbers) but still couldn't answer a single exercise. Afterwards, I heard others commenting happily that at last someone was lecturing things properly. Before that, I had always been on the other side of The Wall, delighted to skip slack.

Life outcomes

Out of the 4 gritty and talented ones, 75% are now in managerial roles. Vesa is a vice president at Pohjola Insurance. Mikko has worked for 6 years in various managerial roles in Nokia. Tuomas is an assistant professor and has 30 publications. The only remaining professional is Jussi, but he is quite short (under 160cm). Jussi still has a PhD degree, so he is not a total loser even by the yardstick of this group, unlike me.

Only 25% of the remaining 12 ones have done well in career. Jani already had industrial-strength programming skill when he entered the high school at age 15, so he was right to ignore the class. Tarmo and Tommidefy the complex analysis cutoff limit.

Too lazy to work, too chicken to steal

Summary: This post tells a formula for deciding when to quit your day job.



First we define Enough money. It is the monthly sum, which allows you to buy most things you want, so that not working increases your standard of living more than extra income from your day job.

Mortgage is such a huge factor that we exclude it from Enough and account it separately as Debt Costs. It covers both interest and repayments.

Secondly, we assume that investments are the basis of your new income. Investing is the only way to pay once and get money back for the rest of your life with minimal effort, either as dividends, interest or rent. Historically 4% withdrawal rate has proven robust. Even after you spend 4% each year, your pot still grows enough to resist inflation. We also assume 25% tax rate, which is the average of dividend and capital gains tax rates.

You can quit your day job when:
Debt Costs + Savings / 12 * 0.75 * 0.04 + Side Income >= Enough
Debt Costs + Savings / 400 + Side Income >= Enough

Notes about the formula:

• You need to own 400 euros to get 1 euro of monthy income. 400 comes from multiplying the constant factors. Only with compound interest and lots of waiting is it realistic to get these kinds of multipliers.
• To get there quickly, you need side income schemes. For example €100 of monthly ad income from a blog corresponds to €40000 of savings. While writing interesting content is hard, it is probably easier than to save €10000/year for 4 years.
• Side income schemes also provide cover, if you have to explain, what you did for the past few years.
• Cheaper apartment speeds up the plan by years. There can be €100000 difference in apartment prices between Helsinki and Oulu city centers. If you value big city life, you probably prefer working to idle life in Oulu. Debt Costs depends very much on your lifestyle.
• If you are near retiring, you can withdraw more. Multiply your monthly pension by 400 to see how much less you need to own at retirement.
• If side income raises the sum past Enough, you should save the difference to gradually phase out the necessity of side income schemes. Otherwise, you either are not lazy enough for this plan, or have set Enough sum too low.
• Enough sum raises with inflation.

Work and idleness 4/4: Individualist take

If it's not personal what you do for 40 hours a week, then what is? Individualism has two sets of attitudes towards work.

The ideal condition is to do what you love. This is based on the idea that you should express yourself and reach your potetial. Your unique life is an identity project, where you work towards reaching your highest potential.

For the rest of us, work is just a way to earn money. Self-actualization is pushed to leisure, for example holiday trips. Work is a little despicaple sign of slave mentality and lack of wealth, visible in phrases like "office drone" or "grease monkey". It is the opposite of life. How tough guy you are is measured by how much money you get, how much ass you kick and how little you give to others.

For both earners and self-actualizers, the impact of work on others is irrelevant.

Individualists admire people who have found "cheat codes of reality" and don't need to work, for example poker professionals, and also people who game the system to distribute income to them.

Problem: Free riders

Societies embracing individualist attitudes run into problems, when having a work ethic becomes contemptible. Not everyone can be idle.

Most people seem to follow individualist work ethic. Citizens vote governments, which allow them to free ride on social benefits, which are never high enough. Governments take debt to fund social spending. Sovereign debt crisis follows.

Work and idleness 3/4: Transhumanist take

During the last 200 years, technology has lifted the Western masses from rags to affluence. The logical end of this trend is Iain Banks' Culture, where robots do all the work, but we are not there yet. Work should maintain and improve the standards of living and guard against risks like nuclear war, which may stop us from reaching singularity. Workers can be classified based on whether they advance this goal.

Maintainers keep the system running at current level. For example postal workers maintain capability to send packets, and soldiers guard against foreign army burning down the nation. We would notice very soon if these people stopped working.

Improvers make technological and political progress happen. For example researchers may develop a cure for cancer, or a politician may remove a wasteful regulation. We would notice big difference in 20 years if these people stopped working.

Leeches neither maintain or improve other people's standards of living. This includes not just people who live on income transfers (it doesn't matter if it comes from state or from dividends of inherited wealth) but also workers who have little impact. We wouldn't notice any difference if these people stopped working.

In the long run, more and more people can neither maintain nor improve standads of living better than robots. In that case it's ok to relax and take it easy, but anyone reading this blog can't use stupidity as an excuse.

Virtues: Efficiency and enlightenment

Technology enables "hard" efficiency, for example food production no longer requires 50% of the workforce to labor at farms. This frees resources also to "soft" wants and needs, like better human rights, social safety net, education, healthcare etc. No matter if your values are hard or soft, efficiency powered by technology delivers it. (But it doesn't deliver relative wants, like being wealthier than the Joneses.)

Politics must ensure that greater efficiency does not translate into more efficient slaughter in gas chambers, etc.

Enlightenment and knowledge help spot opportunities to organize things differently.

Problem: It's not possible to be the only transhumanist around

It is practically impossible to talk with most people about transhumanist impact of work. It is too abstract topic for someone who usually talks about cars and apartments. Also most people only care about how much they and their ingroup get, making it heresy to talk about outgroup's interests. People with a mortgage and a family to provide for couldn't care less if a project produces nothing and it is clear from day 1.

Nowadays transhumanism is to me mainly quiantly naive idealism of the youth.

Still haven't bought any stock

Summary: This post tells a formula for deciding if you should postpone purchases in times of a looming crisis.

Update: Added a paragraph on probabilities.

After I finished reading Saarion sijoituskirja, the Arvopaperi OMXH index showed that Finnish stock prices had moved -10% since 1.1.2011. I postponed purchasing stocks because of the following calculation. It had two scenarios:

(1) Greece crisis becomes acute with probability P(crisis).
(2) Orderly recovery happens with probability P(recovery) = 1 - P(crisis).

Let the change in stock prices be C(crisis) or C(recovery). We should postpone purchases if

P(crisis) * C(crisis) + P(recovery) * C(recovery) < 0

When Lehman Brothers collapsed, the prices decreased by 40%. Let C(crisis) = -40%. By contrast C(recovery) = 10% - 20% since recovery is usually slower.

Avoiding probability estimates

We can pick stock price changes from historical data. Regarding probabilities, let's look at the equation at 0 when it doesn't matter whether we postpone investment or not.

P(crisis) * C(crisis) + (1 - P(crisis)) * C(recovery) = 0
P(crisis) * C(crisis) + C(recovery) - P(crisis) * C(recovery) = 0
P(crisis) ( C(crisis) - C(recovery) ) = - C(recovery)
P(crisis) = C(recovery) / (C(recovery) - C(crisis))

With C(recovery) = 15% and C(crisis) = -40%, the equation gives P(crisis)= 15% / 55% = 27%. This means that we should postpone investment, if we estimate that P(crisis) > 27%. We should invest now if we estimate that P(crisis) < 27%. It doesn't matter if we invest or not if we estimate that P(crisis) = 27%.

How it turned out

What in fact happened was that Greek crisis materialized but it was an orderly restructuring and prices collapsed only by 20%. The debt and the budget deficit are still simmering.

The situation now is almost the same, but the 'risk scenario' is 2008-style banking crisis. Only this time, goverments are part of the problem and no longer part of the solution. I'm still postponing investment.

If stock prices recover from current -30% to -10% in the next 3 months, then I suck at predicting and am better off investing to index funds. Stock traders divide profit to 'alpha' and 'beta'. 'beta' is the profit from market. You get beta profit from index funds, because stock prices on average rise with economic growth. 'Alpha' is the profit from skill. It is negative if you suck at predicting. Finding your own alpha by making successful and failed predictions is called alpha discovery.