Fifty is the smallest number that is the sum of two non-zero square numbers in two distinct ways: 50 = 1² + 7² = 5² + 5².^[1] It is also the sum of three squares, 50 = 3² + 4² + 5². It is a Harshad number.

There is no solution to the equation φ(x) = 50, making 50 a nontotient. Nor is there a solution to the equation x – φ(x) = 50, making 50 a noncototient.

The aliquot sum of 50 is 43 and its aliquot sequence is (50,43,1,0). Fifty is itself the aliquot sum of 40 and 94.

There is more here.

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Sometimes I am at aw of the amount of information that we have generated and stored. Many have postulated that as economic cost of storage exponentially decreased, we will perpetually expand the amount of information produced - an exponential increase of information over time. Its positive repercussions, however, are not easily observed.

Given our current level of environmental control, progress and information accessibility, I am quite baffled of how far some individuals can come to be able to operate within our given habitat without even having a minute level of apprehension or, at most, acknowledgement of its complexity.

We have teachers who can't perceive how a calculator function yet they are endowed with knowledge enrichment and distribution; dentists who can't describe how might an electric motor work yet everyday it is used in their drills and recommended as such as in an electric toothbrush.

Arguments of which that have enabled many to conclude that we have now reached an innovation plateau due to the overspecialization of our métiers. Where in the 19th century, a mathematician may have proven a theorem in her 20s, but now it must take her a decade more to accomplish an equivalent task. The theory is that there is much more material now to be learned and that requires a longer time to have successfully contributed to one's respective field.

Additionally, an innovators lifecycle tended to be more productive at a younger age as shared by von Neumann and many other eminent scientists and mathematicians. The sentiment is that the early years of the innovator are spent in training. Thus, the expanding time costs of education delay the onset of active innovative careers.

This possibility poses a problem for innovation as it reduces, ceteris paribus, the lifetime output of individual innovators, especially if their potential is greatest when young. It has also been proven that innovations in the past tended to occur when an individual crossed pollinated ideas across fields. These connections are not easily made in our current time, as the distance of knowledge within studies has widen.

Indeed, our repository of information may be exponentially on the rise. The question whether that will contribute to our knowledge augmentation is not a certain byproduct. This phenomenon may though undoubtedly increase the complexity of our environments. However, more and more information does not presuppose knowledge augmentation; most of these data bits will be just junk. Innovation has other uphills to overcome.

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no comment.

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From McSweeney's, In Which I Fix My Girlfriend's Grandparents' WiFi and Am Hailed as a Conquering Hero.

But then one gray morning did Internet Explorer 6 no longer load The Google. Refresh was clicked, again and again, but still did Internet Explorer 6 not load The Google. Perhaps The Google was broken, the people thought, but then The Yahoo too did not load. Nor did Hotmail. Nor USAToday.com. The land was thrown into panic. Internet Explorer 6 was minimized then maximized. The Compaq Presario was unplugged then plugged back in. The old mouse was brought out and plugged in beside the new mouse. Still, The Google did not load.

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From Robert Peston:

Perhaps more importantly, and at the risk of repeating myself, the downgrades increase the dependence of the big banks on finance from the European Central Bank – and for the economic recovery of the eurozone, that’s a very bad thing.

The less that banks are able to raise funds in a normal commercial way, the more they’re dependent on a central bank, the more reluctant they are to lend to the wider economy – and given the massive dependence of the eurozone economy on finance provided by banks, that leads to a reduction of economic activity, a reinforcement of recessionary conditions…

..the downgraded Italian and French governments would be seen to be less financially capable of bailing out Italian and French banks in a crisis, so other creditors would be shouldering more risk…

So even if the downgrades don’t lead to default by a nation or a bank, they make it much harder for the banks – and in a way the whole eurozone – to get off life support.

…That creates a damaging negative feedback loop (less lending means asset price falls, more bankruptcies, bigger losses for banks, and even less lending by capital-constrained banks) which makes it all the harder for the eurozone to break free of its cycle of decline.

And, as I said in my earlier note, the downgrades also make it harder for the eurozone to establish a proper circuit breaker – in the form of a giant bailout fund – to protect other sovereign creditors in the event that today’s impasse in Greek debt talks lead to a Greek default.

Here is a useful and only slightly overstated summary of where things stand:

The entire eurozone banking system can be seen to have been nationalised – or at least the funding of banks has been nationalised, even if their ownership hasn’t been transferred to taxpayers.

some comments from RBS.

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Suppose our minds have a hot state and a cool state. In the cool state we are rational and make calculated tradeoffs between immediate rewards and payoffs that require investment of time and effort. But when the hot state takes over we abandon deliberation and just react on instinct.

The hot state is there because there are circumstances where the stakes are too high and our calculations too slow or imperfect. You are being attacked by a hungry lion, the food in front of you smells funky, that bridge looks unstable. No matter how confident your cool head might be, the hot state grabs the wheel and forces you to do the safe thing.

Suppose all of that is true. What does that mean when a situation looks borderline and you see that instincts haven't taken over? Your cool, calculating head rationally infers that this must be a safer situation than it would otherwise appear. And you are therefore inclined to take more risks.

But then the hot state better step in on those borderline situations to stop you from taking those excessive risks. Except that now the borderline has moved a little bit toward the safe end. Now when the hot state doesn't take over it means its even more safe, etc.

And of course there is the mirror image of this problem where the hot state takes over to make sure you take an urgent risk. A potential mate is in front of you but the encounter has questionable implications for the future and the potential consequences are incomputable as so far as within the current situation. Physical attraction receives a multiplier. If it is not overwhelming then all of the warning signs are magnified.

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Happy new year.

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With.. Spalt, Hungary will have the most capable risk manager anyone can hope for. His experience and persistence are a guarantee that our subsidiary in Hungary will soon be seeing less risky times.

Can someone please ask this guy what in the world does he mean?

Can he really claim that one person - one person alone - with his stupendous skills at tackling risk, his immense foresight for intelligently deciphering future economic outcomes can lessen risks? I implore you to please see the bogus narrative in that quote above. Where are the watchdogs of critical thinking? Laughable.

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Hope you did by now take this logical shortcut in concluding that weather forecasting is a crapshoot. Case in point: two hurricane forecasters admit that while their models fit beautifully in hindsight, they were incapable of predicting the future.

Two top U.S. hurricane forecasters, revered like rock stars in Deep South hurricane country, are quitting the practice because it doesn’t work.

William Gray and Phil Klotzbach say a look back shows their past 20 years of forecasts had no value.

The two scientists from Colorado State University will still discuss different probabilities as hurricane seasons approach — a much more cautious approach. But the shift signals how far humans are, even with supercomputers, from truly knowing what our weather will do next.

Gray, recently joined by Klotzbach, has been known for decades for an annual forecast of how many hurricanes can be expected each official hurricane season (which runs from June to November.) Southerners hang on his words, as even a mid-sized hurricane can cause billions in damage.

Last week, the pair dropped this announcement out of a clear, blue sky:

“We are discontinuing our early December quantitative hurricane forecast for the next year … Our early December Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts of the last 20 years have not shown real-time forecast skill even though the hindcast studies on which they were based had considerable skill.”

I've maintained in fact that any type of forecasting is a waste of energy. They are mere useless publishing of empty suit experts who should be storytellers. I salute Klotzbach and Gray for their integrity.

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Haiti backers heralded some good news Monday for the earthquake ravaged Haiti: 44 miles of newly asphalted road, a new 605-acre industrial park in the north that will attract 65,000 jobs and a marquee hotel brand [Marriott].

“This is a very special day. It is truly a day of change,” Luis Alberto Moreno, the head of the Inter-American Development Bank said Monday.

The bank, which invests hundreds of millions of dollars in Haiti, is sponsoring a two-day investment forum in Port-au-Prince beginning Tuesday. So far, 1,000 people have registered, 500 of them business people from 29 countries.

Here is more .

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Walter Russell Mead explains the difference as he notes that we are very close to breaking the record for longest period in recorded US weather history without a Category 3 hurricane hitting the mainland. An excerpt:

For those of you who are confused, let me remind you: the only meteorological phenomena that count are the ones that confirm the climate alarmist case.  It doesn’t matter what it is — drought, flood, blizzard, heat wave — if it can be made to support fear about the climate, it matters and it needs to be thoroughly analyzed and widely publicized.

Meteorological phenomena that, to the unsophisticated, might appear to undermine the case that WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE if we don’t immediately pass a stringent carbon treaty, are meaningless and should be ignored.

A spate of hurricanes is climate; an absence of big storms isweather.  The absence of any major hurricanes for six years is a meaningless phenomenon; should a couple of big ones hit in any given year, then every editorial page in the country will fill with hand wringing, dire warning and I told you so.

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or any central banking institution for that matter. Paul Krugman points to a very important, very recent paper by Hyun Song Shin (pdf), excerpt:

As we will see shortly, foreign banks’ US branches and subsdiiaries drive the gross capital outflows through the banking sector by raising wholesale funding in the US through money market funds (MMFs) and then shipping it to headquarters. Remember that foreign banks’ branches and subsidiaries in the US are treated as US banks in the balance of payments, as the balance of payments accounts are based on residence, not nationality.

The gross capital inflows to the United States represent lending by foreign (mainly European) banks via the shadow banking system through the purchase of private label mortgage-backed securities and structured products generated by the securitization of claims on US borrowers. In this way, European banks may have played a pivotal role in influencing credit conditions in the United States by providing US dollar intermediation capacity. However, since the eurozone has a roughly balanced current account while the UK is actually a deficit country, their collective net capital flows vis-a-vis the United States do not reflect the influence of their banks in setting overall credit conditions in the US. The distinction between net and gross flows is a classic theme in international finance, but deserves renewed attention given the new patterns of gross capital flows due to global banking.

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What does it take to be a Victoria’s Angel?:

She sees a nutritionist, who has measured her body’s muscle mass, fat ratio and levels of water retention. He prescribes protein shakes, vitamins and supplements to keep Lima’s energy levels up during this training period. Lima drinks a gallon of water a day. For nine days before the show, she will drink only protein shakes – “no solids”. The concoctions include powdered egg. Two days before the show, she will abstain from the daily gallon of water, and “just drink normally”. Then, 12 hours before the show, she will stop drinking entirely.

“No liquids at all so you dry out, sometimes you can lose up to eight pounds just from that,” she says.

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To be dumb also has its merits. In economics, where central decisions affects the lives of all, the discipline's technical side must be explained to the lay people. Definitely not on par with physics but one needs talent to be able to communicate the essentials to the average Joe.

Not much of a challenge for most disciplines, where there's not much technical information to be relayed. The problem becomes apparent in economics where most seem to have rather an opinion of the matter - sometimes a very strong one. A useful exchange of ideas thus requires one to understand where their opinions are rooted and the logic behind them.

Their opinions must not have possibly sprung from thin air so an investigative mind must see the logic behind the wrong ideas. This process requires one to be sufficiently dumb to gauge the others perspective and their conclusive operation that formed their position. The reasoning for this is explained through the notion that an extremely intelligent person may have never entertained those ideas and/or have considered them unworthy of lengthy analysis.

Contrarily, you must be smart enough to see where and why the other's logic is incomplete. Albeit, that's usually isn't so challenging. The challenging part comes when you must do both; you must be sufficiently dumb and smart enough to explain to the regular person and the smart people on the other side.

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This sort of isn’t the essence of the European financial situation, but at least an important part of the back drop is the objectively terrible economic performance of Italy over the past 10 years:

Italy also has slow population growth and low workforce participation, so put it all together and it’s not a very bright debt outlook. This has all been overwhelmingly under the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi who, as far as I know, has no particular economic reform agenda or indeed any kind of policy agenda at all except keeping himself out of jail. Today, however, Berlusconi is organizing an emergency cabinet meeting to consider some kind of putatively pro-growth reforms and even going so far as to have “skipped a scheduled court appearance in Milan on Monday, where he is on trial on charges of corrupting the course of justice, because of the crisis in Rome.”

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Bump it up to full screen for best viewing.

Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva Microfunds.

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[Tyler]I'm not an asshole I just don't give a fuck a lot/The only time I do is when a bitch is screamin' "Tyler, stop!"/The big bad wolf to me you're just a minor fox/Red ridin' is gettin' some of this wolfly odder cock

[Earl]We the niggas you scared of, like bad dentists/Flow is anthemic, dirty like it's plants in it/Sick, spit a pandemic, crack and Cancer mixed with cannabis/To have a bitch, ready to stab a clit with some glass and shit

[Tyler]Your whole gang will be diminished, Bunch got the Brady's in it/(Spit sick shit like my saliva got the rabies in it /Fuck rap, I'll be a landlord so I can rape a tenants daughter/Leave my house with a new stomach, and a baby in it

Have the arts diminished morality in men? Harboring the virtues of righteous men is looked upon as being less than a man within the world of Odd Future and amorality within their lyrics conjures up the imagination of brutality in men as a quality to be admired and fashioned in ones life. To them, this is the epitome of swagger and boastful phonetics enacts an air that is beyond ignorance.

Rousseau argued though that the nature of men is neither virtuous nor wicked and the morality of men arises through the disinclination of men to see their fellows suffer. Society and the arts, however, has veiled our true nature with acute politeness to the point of extreme reversal to our instincts, plagued by fear, jealousy and suspicion. Is Odd Future merely the first to publicly manifest those tabooed instincts?

Society's product of reasoning and justice may just be the detrimental demise of men. Rousseau continued:

As long as differences in wealth and status among families were minimal, the first coming together in groups was accompanied by a fleeting golden age of human flourishing. The development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labor and resulting dependency on one another, however, led to economic inequality and conflict. As population pressures forced them to associate more and more closely, they underwent a psychological transformation: They began to see themselves through the eyes of others and came to value the good opinion of others as essential to their self esteem.

We no longer dare seem what we really are, but lie under a perpetual restraint; in the meantime the herd of men, which we call society, all act under the same circumstances exactly alike, unless very particular and powerful motives prevent them. Thus we never know with whom we have to deal; and even to know our friends we must wait for some critical and pressing occasion; that is, till it is too late; for it is on those very occasions that such knowledge is of use to us.

..Sincere friendship, real esteem, and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness; that boasted candor and urbanity, for which we are indebted to the light and leading of this age.

Ultimately, I can only take Socrates word:

None of us, neither the sophists, nor the poets, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I, know what is the nature of the true, the good, or the beautiful. But there is this difference between us; that, though none of these people know anything, they all think they know something; whereas for my part, if I know nothing, I am at least in no doubt of my ignorance. So the superiority of wisdom, imputed to me by the oracle, is reduced merely to my being fully convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know.

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Consider an infinite-horizon decision problem consisting of a sequence of beats. Each beat is divided into two eighth notes and you have to decide when to play them.  If you have standard exponential discounting you will evenly space your beats through time.  You will play a classical rhythm.  But if you are what behavioral economists call a hyperbolic discounter and you have present bias, you will procrastinate the first eighth note.  But then in order to complete the beat you will need to play the second eighth note in quick succession.  This pattern will repeat through time.  You will play a swing rhythm.

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How lucky do you think you are? Damn very lucky if you consider the amount of humans that had to procreate on your behalf for you to currently take up breathing space. However, let us consider the near past. The past that is your lifetime up until now. Do you think you have any special talent that you believed has risen you in the pecking order of life? How is success represented in your profession? To me, it is of utmost ludicrous to think that some sort of unique talent caused a person success in the extreme professions. 'Extreme' in the sense that input in the tasks of said profession does not correlate with the economic gains attained as output. Examples of such professions include writers, musicians, venture capitalists, artists and actors; they are career undertakings that are scalable. They allow you to add additional zeroes to your output and income with little to no effort. Whereas if you are a consultant, a dentist or an accountant, you are paid by the hour and your revenue depends on your continuous effort more than on the quality of your decisions.

They are also within predictability's reach. If you are a hemorrhoid specialist or a prostitute, you know if you double the amount of clients you see, this effort will also double your revenue. Nevertheless, you are limited. You can only see a maximum number of patients within a given time frame. It is not scalable. My argument is, in the extreme professions or idea professions, neither talent nor skills can be ascertain nor is talent a precursor to success. Inequality rules in idea professions and your success depends solely on randomness.

Let us carry out a thought experiment. Say you gather 100 people across the world randomly and line them up by height from shortest to tallest. You do an average and some other statistical methods on your sample. After your calculations, I would say that you now have an idea of the height of all humans on the planet. A person being as tall as 50 meters is close to impossible. No one in your sample size will represent more than 1 percent of the total height. You can do the same for weight. Take the heaviest human you know and line up 99 randomly chosen humans. Again, if he may be even considered human, he would be a slight deviation from the total. Increase you sample size to say, one thousand, then his weight becomes less than 1 percent.

Now lets take again one thousand people randomly and add Waren Buffet to the sample. How much do you think his wealth would represent from the total wealth of all the others? About 99.9 percent. The others in the sample would merely represent a rounding error or the fluctuations of his portfolio during a trading day. In the physical world, when your sample size becomes large enough, no single occurrence can significantly change the aggregate. However, while height and weight are physical matters, wealth and all other social aspects are abstract and they serve only to relay information. They are nothing but numbers and as such they can take any single value without energy expenditure. This fact alone allows us to have the J. K. Rowlings of the world. The winner takes all effect in the idea professions. Where, with the advent of technology, one person or one idea can dominate the field. Where the formation of unexpected giants takes root while surrounded by tiny dwarfs.

Let us dive deeper into the mater and see how does this relate to talent. In the good old days in Italy, if you wanted to hear Paganini play his Caprice No. 24 in A minor, you would have to travel to wherever he was at the time. Perhaps he had a performance coming up in Vienna or in Paris. It was only possible to hear him while he performed. Likewise, Paganini had to always perform in order to gain that one extra lira just as today a surgeon is (still) needed to be present in order to perform an operation. Paganini was never bothered by some other gifted violinist from far away who threatened his livelihood. Fast forward to current times however, Paganini is dead but Akiko Meyers has access to a new form of technology which allows her to record Paganini's Caprice No. 24 in A minor for others to purchase. Her performance can be heard individually by millions without any additional effort. I can go to a store and buy her DVD for $16.99. Meanwhile, a brilliant prodigy, recent graduate from Julliard also has recorded Paganini's most famous work and sells her performance for a bargain at $5.99.

In any case, I would still rather listen to Meyers' take on the piece. If you were to ask me why, I would go on to tell you that it's Meyers' 'passion', 'rhythm' and the perfectly blended combination of both 'finesse' and 'bravura'. This is what I will tell my friends when I recommend Meyers to them. I have never heard the prodigy, recent graduate play and I will never hear her play so I will never know. She plays just as well but she did not make it to the stage. This phenomena implies the idea that those who, for some reason, start getting the attention of some minds can quickly garner more minds and dislodge the competition from the stage. The success of artists, movies, actors, ideas, and even your own DNA depends on contagion. People do not fall in love with works of art because of its own sake but rather to feel that they belong to a community. We imitate to get close to others. We imitate to fight solitude.

When we sit back and observe the successful movies or fashion designers, we would form a sample and gather the evidence we need in order to find the patterns that stick out. We formulate theories and come to conclusions. Yet we always forget about the ones who do not show up in the sample. The silent actors who still wait tables and have yet to receive their breakthrough. The silent musicians who call their guitar cases home but who can easily rock out a stadium. All endeavors that harbor the winner take all effect are plagued with these silent characters, plagued with silent evidences. The cemetery of aspiring writers is immense. Comparative talent thus becomes impossible to gauge. I may say that Meyers has 'passion' and 'rhythm' and this is her attributes; the superior qualitative talents that will make you successful. But what if there are hundreds more with these same qualities? Meyers would thus become a beneficiary of disproportionate luck. I only need one other to exist to say that talent has absolutely nothing to do with success.

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