Fire

I'm quite surprised that people have stopped reading the blog. I will keep posting but it looks like I must have managed to offend everybody. My last post got ten hits, and that was probably just robots.

Anyway, this was just to say that I am pleased that I swapped my iPad for a Kindle Fire. Although I've hardly scratched the surface with it , I am using it to play music and watch TED talks and some YouTube videos, and it certainly is easier and outperforms my iPad Air (which is now, as far as I am concerned an ex iPad).

I thought I was doing well on Google searches but it turns out that if you have posted about what you are searching for , and you are logged in, it will bring back your posts, giving you the false impresssion that your search engine optimisation has been very successful.

Although I was going to go to bed early again , the internet has kept me awake, continually looking for ideas and stimulation.

The EFL kicked off and Preston won their opening match for the first time since 2008 , nine years back, against one of the expected promotion hopefuls. As with most seasons the Sky pundits see Preston as cannon fodder for the big clubs like Sheffield Wednesday. Next week it's Leeds, who turned us over severely last season, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

I was having a problem transferring data from my phone to my PC. My phone is a Sony and it turns out is you don't use the SONY USB cable (that's UNIVERSAL Serial Bus) then the connection may not work. So the question is why can't you use a generic cable to connect the two devices ... unless SONY want to make you pay more.

Anyway it's later than I thought so I'd best go to bed, and what better song than The Cure's "Let's Go To Bed"

Random Precision

Yesterday my rando play played three consecutive tracks from the Van Der Graaf album "Present" starting with the opener "Every Bloody Emperor" and finishing with "Nutter Alert", this was followed by a couple of Spirit songs thwn that awful Cream song then two Stone Roses songs. At first I thought it had slipped off random play but as I was walking and I like the album I was OK with it.

A couple of months ago I was talking with Juliet and Kirsty and about how people don't really understand the concept of "random". She had provided a "random" data sample, then the requester came back and said they wanted data from Area "A" , Area "B" , well each area they covered. Kirsty pointed out that that this wouldn't be a random sample if you started applying criteria.

Jordan Ellenberg point to an American Lottery result where the same numbers were selected two draws in a row. In a true random selection 1,2,3,4,5,6 is just as random and likely as any other. Ellenberg points out that the improbable is highly probable. The nature of random is that it may appear ordered, it's not, but our minds always try to order things, and see logical patterns, and we can see logical patterns where the probability is just complete randomness and even chaos (think reading tea leaves and the I-Ching which is basically throwing sticks. You can add divination by cards like Tarot (I do have two Tarot decks but they are just works of art), which again uses randomness to determine fact, which really is not a practical or logical path to go down.

Well we are at Friday , and the real Football season starts today whith Sunderland playing Derby and Nottingham Forest take on Millwall. It looks sunny, but it looked sunny yesterday. I will walk into work today and listen to more random music

Tom Waits,Cream Sours and Stone Roses

One of the great things about walking with music on random play is that you get to rediscover music you have forgotten, discover new music, and the odd time uncover some complete rubbish.

While Cream  were a great and groundbreaking band, with a plethora of great songs there were the odd rubbish ones ("Pressed Rat and Warthog" springs to mind, I 'm not sure if Pete Brown was responsible in part for this monstrosity) but today a horrendous almost scat jazz thing came on. I thought I'll give it time. I wish I hadn't. It's called "Hey Now Princess" and it's at the bottom of this post if you want to risk it.

Luckily that was followed by The Stone Roses' "Waterfall" which is one of my favourites of theirs, although there were a few of their songs , many of which sound like "I Wanna Be Adored" , but one came on called "The Foz" which I thought was actually Tom Waits , and then eventually I got a real Tom Waits song , the excellent "Singapore" and then I found an excellent youtube version soundtracking some "Pirates of The Caribbean footage.

So that's the second post today, and I did manage to hit 15K steps , and enjoy so reasonably healthy food as well,

Have a lovely night

The Baltimore Stockbroker

Well the #August50 hasn't started well, so much for two posts a day, although I have a lot of time to make it up, though because August has a few weekend away , I probably only have about 25 days when I can write, so the two a day is sort of essential when I can write.

My walking has got off to a reasonable start, and last night it poured down but today looks like another bright day, that's perfect really , rain at night the sun during the day.

Though there's no direct posts about The Baltimore Stockbroker, it's something I had heard about but not thought about. It came up in the Jordan Ellenberg book an is basically about targetting people to take advantage of them. Anyone can do it, it's just whether you are enough of a git to actually do it but financial institutions and governments do it all the time. This is the full story from Mike Adams blog

"To repeat from the beginning: Suppose you received a letter from a financial advisor who told you a certain stock was going up over the next several weeks. You watched the stock, and sure enough it went up. A few weeks later that same financial advisor sent another letter to say another stock was going to go down over the following few weeks. Sure enough, as you watched, the stock did go down. Then that same financial advisor sent a third letter to tell you to watch another stock that was going to go up. Sure enough it did. With the next letter the financial advisor told you to watch another stock that was going to go up. And sure enough it did. That same financial advisor sent another six letters each time predicting correctly the direction of every stock he told you to watch – a perfect prediction ten out of ten times.

In the eleventh letter he asked for a big investment. What would you say? He had been right ten out of ten times. What the investor does not see is the total picture—the whole story. That financial advisor began sending letters to 10,240 prospects. In 5,120 he predicted the stock would go up; in the other 5,120 he predicted the stock would go down. The 5,120 to whom he sent the letter saying the stock would go down never heard from our financial advisor. Of the 5,120 to whom he said the stock would go up, 2,560 got a second letter predicting that second stock would go up and the other 2,560 got a second letter saying the second stock would go down. The 2,560 who got the letter predicting the wrong direction of the stock those people never heard from our financial advisor again. Of those who got the correct prediction, 1,280 got the third letter predicting a third stock would go up and 1,280 got a letter saying the third stock would go down. You the reader now the full story. Only 10 prospects would get letters with 10 perfect predictions. The other 10, 230 people never heard from the advisor ever again. "

So a small group of people think that the guy is a genius. The book goes on to state , quite rightly, that the improbable is highly probable because there are so many people. It's high;y improbably that you will win on the lottery or a horse race , but people do and sometimes quite handsomely. The thing is with today's speed of communication we hear about these things a lot more quickly. We have tools to help us if we so choose,  but improbabilty and  chance can always throw a spanner in the work.

Part of life is about minimising risk, and we all do that. You set out a bit earlier to get the bus that will get you to work on time, but sometoimes the bus doesn't turn up and you are still late. I try and minimise risk by building in contiongency and options to everything, but it doesn't alwys work , but actually does 99% of the time. I don't tend to miss trains or flights or be late for work or miss paying bills because I have things in place "just in case".

Sorry this is just a functional post, but I suppose the theme points toward the superb Penetration song "Life's A Gamble" . Will I do another post today? We shall see .....

Have a brilliant Thursday everybody 

#August50

I had this mad idea of doing 50 posts in August under the tag #August50. That's like two posts a day. The most I've done is 43 which was last October so it's certainly not impossible, jyust it will take time. I really need to be able to to a post in under twenty minutes but more importantly find something to write about.

I finished the Million Step Challenge having done 1,071,635 steps in three months , which took in 92 days, and daily totals ranged between 2.5K and 22K that's an average of 11.6K a day. I was wondering how I could keep this up and decided to set a target of 340K a month and we will see if I can keep to that. The winter months may be problematic and February will require me to average over 12K steps a day.

Today looks a little grey but I haven't hit 11K for a week, but I am going to to hit that today, starting by walking into work, which is a daily target.

It is always good to have something reachable to aim for, and it costs nothing to walk. Although my weight loss is unspectacular to non existent from this exercise and reasonably sensible eating (bread virtually cut out , but the odd Marathon bar when blood sugar drops) today I was 102.6 Kg (16 stone 2lb) which is the lowest I 've recorded myself since getting digital scales a couple of years back,  and I havent been under 16 stone in 35 years so it's a little progress.

Anyway what more appropriate songfor this post than "The Weight" by The Band. It was going to be used in the film "Easy Rider" but the film producer opted for a same version cover by a band called Smith.

Have a great Tuesday and first day of Augus.

Speed and Goundhogs

I used to be able to write a blog post in ten minutes. These days it often takes me an hour or more. The irony being that less and less people seem to be reading, that isn't a problem as I mainly write for myself and to instil a sort of discipline to get something down, which I may wish to remember. I've been doing this for ten years or so and some of my early posts were extremely short.

I like to think that I can write at least 250 words, but I don't think you will get this today as I need to get off to work fairly rapidly , and as it looks sunny I want to walk at least part of the way, but I need to get in , do a few things then zip off to a podiatry appointment (due to a cancellation, they rang me and said they knew I preferred early appointments so did I want to come in this morning? That was Friday, I love the NHS).

I also noticed last night it seemed to get dark earlier, and we are past the Summer Solstice so the daylight hours are getting less.

Anyway it's Monday , it's time for work, and Nemone on  6Music mentioned Groundhog Day so why not go with "Cherry Red" by The Groundhogs, a sound which I always think inspired Franz Ferdinand.

Have a good one friends.

Numbers and Men In Skirts

As a kid I used to wonder why we had to learn our "times tables". Learning things parrot fashion , is not useful, especially when you are talking mathematics. Fast forwrd to "some time later"  and I find I don't have to look up , work out , or use a calculator to work out this simple multiplications, I just know them. And applying thouse concepts I'm pretty quick on working out the product of any pair of two digit numbers, but up to twelve I just know them, so actually learning the "times tables" benefitted me.

I am learning quite a lot about mathematics and number from my latest book feast, "How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life" by Jordan Ellenberg which is just going through the differences between large and small sampling operations which has thown a lot of interesting concepts.

Tomorrow is the last day of the month so this week has been a rest from walking though I have still hit more that 7K each day so I am not being average, and from Tuesday I will attempt to do 340K steps in August and repeat that each month.

The last two days I have felt incredibly drained, and really not up to actually walking , and today I had the added extras of changing the bedding, mowing the lawn , and refilling the bird feeders. Added to that I think my phone is going through one of it's phases of not recording steps (a couple of normally 1K walks clocked at 200 steps), but I still hit 9K today and am 70K over the million for the last quarter.

Yesterday I was totally drained but I got myself over to The Doll at The Black Bull to catch Woment In Revolt (they are the ones in skirts) and you can see the video evidence here from a great night, but I was done by ten o'clock. I came home went to post the video online and managed to screw my computer by plugging in a USB cable. It then took an hour to do a restore, but all is good now and all seems to be working well. I've just had a look at the demographics of my audience for youtube and only 20% are female, I am not sure why that should be, but you could say  "C'est La Vie" as Chuck Berry once said , and we got the Pulp Fiction Twist scene featuring John Travolta and Uma Thurman for you to enjoy.

So the weekend is over and Monday is upon us, I hope to feel a lot more energised tomorrow, so I am going to get some sleep.