Dispatch

Photographs from the Rosetta, a probe following in the wake of a comet. The trail of dust and gas gives it a ghostly appearance. That this is even possible amazes me.

I picked this up in a store in Tokyo last year. We had no idea what it meant until I asked the lady at the counter, who told us it was a sign for a fire extinguisher. I thought it looked cool and bought it anyway, in a moment of tourist stupidity.

When we got home we were surprised to find we had a fire extinguisher tucked away under our kitchen sink. So now the sign points it out, though few of our guests will understand it.

A tidbit from Randall Munroe’s exploration of what might happen if you tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw:

Since people get mad if you turn off the world’s most famous waterfall, they’re required to leave at least 100,000 of those cubic feet per second flowing over the falls for everyone to look at. (50,000 at night or during the off-season). Sometime in the next few years, the falls may be turned off for maintanence.

This level of control is startling.

Jesse Livermore again, in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator:

The public might profitably consider the disadvantages under which it labours when it tries to make money buying and selling the stock of a company concerning whose affairs only a few are in position to know the whole truth.

In other words: the public always gets screwed.

I’ve really enjoyed this book, even as someone with little interest in the stock market. Livermore’s depiction of Wall Street in the early 1900s confirms much of what you might already expect: financial forecasts are garbage, stock tips are phony, and anyone who speculates long enough ends up broke. What’s remarkable is how little has changed since then.

Things didn’t end well for Livermore. He ran out of money and ended his own life several years after the book was published. This gave an air of prophecy to the stories he told about other traders that died. His era may be approaching it’s centennial but his advice remains timeless: do your homework, trust your gut, and learn from your mistakes quickly.

You can transmit knowledge — that is, your particular collection of card-indexed facts — but not your experience.

Jesse Livermore, in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.

When I began a career in software I didn’t understand why experience was so important if you could program well. Later I would learn that being a good programmer has very little to do with code.

A reader beginning a poem is like someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars; the first few draws on the long oars through the deep water tell a lot — is one safe, or is one apt to be soon drowned?

Mary Oliver, in her wonderful handbook on poetry.