Myers-Briggs for the New Millenium (Falcon)

There's a new, more accurate* rubrick for interpreting the Myers-Briggs personality test for those of us in the post-Woz**, Bennifer & Shrub world we live in today. I wholeheartedly endorse it, even if it is slightly rough on the ego.





* and by more accurate, I mean potentially less imprecise.
** and if you don't know who Woz is, then 20 FD 1B while I tell you....

Driving and Texas

Friday night Maddie had a weird request: she said something on the order of "I know this's irrational, and I know that Mildred (my motorcycle) needs to be turned over, but would you take the minivan to the Zen center tomorrow instead? I've just got a really bad feeling about it." This might seem like a weird request, and it seemed to me at the time. But, if there's one thing I've learned since moving to the DFW metroplex, it's who this country's worse drivers are. I've driven everywhere from New England to California, and I can say, hands down, that while Texas drivers are extremely courteous and polite, that they're finely counter-balanced en-masse by Dallas drivers, who are the most selfish, disrespectful, "I'm getting mine now" drivers I've ever encountered anywhere. Sure, Boston drivers are rude and reckless. Granted. Yeah, D.C. drivers will cut you off in a red-hot minute. Absolutely. It's true that Rhode-Island drivers think stop-signs are optional. And Los Angeles drivers pass from the right and never account for a less-than-perfect road surface. All true. But I've never seen the sheer numbers of people literally aiming their cars right at other cars, running them off the road, just so they can shift lanes on an access road. And Dallas drivers are even worse on the freeways. There aren't many places I've been where the quality of freeway engineering is so bad, with uneven surfaces, inconsistent inter-lane heights, multiply-decreasing-radius off-ramps, etc., but in most other areas where the roadway engineering & inspection was as clearly bribery-managed as Dallas's must surely be, the drivers are more cautious, not less. Here, instead, it's as if they collectively said "in for a penny, in for a pound".
So it was no surprise whatsoever when the teenager driving a big F-150 on Highway 30 Saturday in the passing lane wasn't phased in the least when, minding his own business in heavy stop-and-go construction traffic, driving perfectly normally, I clipped his rear-end with Mildred and went down next to him. And you know what's nice about Texas? In California, the driver would have not only had my driver's license#, phone number, insurance, etc., but would have asked for a DNA-sample and copy of my family lineage just to be safe; this kid, though, after his friend picked the broken bits out of his rear-right tail-lens assembly, was much more concerned with whether my bike was going to run and if I was OK than the fact that I'd damaged his truck, and, in fact, wouldn't let me give him my phone number, etc., in spite of the fact that I'd done $70-100 damage to his truck at no fault of his own. While Texas seems to hold its own with California on the availability of cluelessly myopic jerks who don't realize they're being offensive-it never occurring to them that your terms and theirs might not coincide (the hate-filled, homophobic "y'all seemed so grounded I just assumed you had to be from Texas--how could you be from California?" nitwit couple we met last night, of the sort who give Texas such a bad reputation in California, included), Texas is way out in the lead on the amount of just plain nice people.
Now if they'd just fix their uneven, wobble-inducing inter-lanes so you can ride around the stripe instead of having to duck into the lanes while splitting....

trading, programming, and math

I've been out of the spot forex market for a while now, but have finally finished modelling a trading system that, while not as "fish in a barrel" profitable as my previous dip-buying system, doesn't hemorrhage when the market turns sideways (reversals were just fine). The downside is that this system, unlike the last one, requires very active participation to work, more active than I can do while I keep my day job, and much more active than I can manage while asleep, so I need to automate the darn thing. Given the particularities of the bucket shopmarket maker I use, though, this means learning C#. The language doesn't bother me, and, in fact there are a few aspects of it that I like, like namespaces and partial-class declarations. But it also means learning an entirely new vast set of libraries.... ugh!

And I can't get back in the market without it.... But I did learn something nifty though: if you're simulating random walks of equal probability, which is what time-independent price-movements do when there's nothing significant going on, an easy way to add up the various path-dependent outcomes is simply to compute out the nth level of Pascal's Triangle! It gives you the summed-up potentials for free, rather than having to write a monte-carlo simulator just to do 50/50 probabilities. Pretty neat, and very labor-saving.

Killing Yoga

Almost ten years ago I started studying a martial art called Yi Quan, which was created by the Xing Yi Quan master Wang Xiangzhai in the 1920's, to alleviate what he perceived at the time to be incorrect teaching of XingYi. Xing Yi Quan is one of the three main "internal" martial arts originating in China, the other two being Tai Qi Quan and Baguazhang, and thus Yi Quan is as well.

I started studying under Sifu Cheuk Fung, and had a terrible time of it. I saw other students progressing, but never managed to get anywhere myself. After a bit of time, I started wondering if there were things he wasn't telling me, and made the egregious mistake of attempting to force my body to do what it wasn't prepared to do naturally. This showed superficial progress at first, but eventually let to a number of subtle injuries that took me out of training altogether. It didn't help that I started with a bad knee, but the soft-tissue injuries I added completely screwed me up in ways that the knee wouldn't have. I quit Yi Quan for a while, but eventually came back and started taking classes again. This time my eyes were more open to what was going on (serious Zen training helps you see all kinds of things), and I realized that far from holding out on us beginning students, Sifu Fung was handing us the proverbial "keys to the kingdom" on the even more proverbial "golden platter". Within a month of being in class, any beginning student had been shown all that he needed to know to engage in years of successful training -- boy did I feel like an idiot! As Sifu always said, "those with eyes will see". Yet I was still unable to progress.

I've been frustrated for a number of years to understand the basics of how Yi Quan works, yet be able to make no progress whatsoever in terms of practice. Based on conversations with my brother, who's studying a Imperial-era form of Xing Yi, I've decided that just like Xing Yi, Yi Quan should be considered an advanced martial art, suitable for study by those who are already proficient in another martial art and whose bodies therefore already enjoy a certain level of conditioning. My body is not suitably conditioned, however, and experiment after experiment as to how to get my body to make itself amenable to Yi Quan has either failed, injured me, or both.

After ten years, though, I now believe I'm on the right track, and that the key to the whole mess is what Russ (my brother) refers to as "paying the price of admission". For tubby, ill-conditioned computer programmers such as myself, any plausible method of Yi Quan practice must concentrate on preparing the body to be able to do what is being asked of it, and to this extent I've formulated a slower, more rudimentary program of Yi Quan training that I believe will allow me to regain what ability I did have, but in a correct and natural way that will also allow me to progress further. It's not theoretically any different from Yi Quan as Sifu Fung taught it, but should be much easier for the beginning student such as myself to handle.

Without fully connected strength, none of rest of Yi Quan is worth a damn, but acquiring this body characteristic is the equivalent of jumping over a four-foot wall from a stand-still -- hard for most to do. My new regime is much more akin to jumping over several one-foot walls instead -- much easier. After all this time, I'm finally optimistic that I may finally start to achieve some proficiency with Yi Quan, and I'm going to start practicing again with regularity, albeit at the snail's pace that my new regime requires. I won't get into details here on the blog, but will note success or failure when either surfaces.