Why I won't be buying new desktop parts

Based on my normal computer cycle, I should have upgraded my desktop in late 2008, early 2009, but haven't. As a computer approaching 5 years old, my desktop is aged, if not obsolete. There are some things that it chokes on, mainly any computer game released after 2005, and playing back certain poorly-compressed HD video. Looking at the parts I would buy to make it new and fancy again, they are relatively cheap (in computer terms): ~ $600 for new motherboard, processor, and RAM. I could probably make do with spending half as much if I were planning to replace it sooner (i.e. in 3 years instead of another 5).

Still, my computer is fine as-is (i.e. until something breaks), I don't need a slightly shinier and fancier new monitor, and $600 (or even $300) goes a long way towards buying more Legos. :)

Rating investment products

Although not the sole factor (by far) that led to the financial crisis, a failure of ratings agencies to provide accurate estimates of the risk associated with various investment products definitely played a big role. (i.e. investments were rated as being safer than they actually turned out to be -- at least this is what is commonly believed)

I'm wondering whether ratings agencies should take notes from places that continually calculate risk, like authorized bookies in Vegas who produce odds for various bets. If the odds of an outcome are set properly, one would expect roughly even numbers of bettors for both outcomes. If an overly large number of bettors choose to bet on one outcome instead, then that may be taken as a signal that the odds are not set correctly and a bookie (or whomever is handling the bets) can adjust the odds based on the behavior of the crowd.

As has been reported recently, many firms and organizations bet that certain CDOs would fail. A ratings system based on crowd-sourced information would consider these bets as an indication that these produces actually have more risk than previously assessed. In other words, treat all players in the system as more or less rational actors and use their betting behavior as economic indicators to set risk rather than relying solely on independent estimates that may be biased/incorrect. This type of rating system would, of course, depend heavily upon a databased of what bets people are taking, but that's what the SEC is for, right? (i.e. don't allow firms to make bets hidden to the SEC)

Dynamic Range Compression

Taken at face value, Maaya Sakamoto's Everywhere is a pretty good value: 30 pretty famous songs spanning her career for just 700 yen more than a regular CD, and it includes a DVD with some promotional videos on it.

Here's the problem. At some point in the past, I stumbled across Richard's website, which really is just an index to his vast collection. (You should be aware that searching for "Animephile" now returns some rather sketchy results in Google -- this wasn't always the case...) Anyway, as Richard points out, dynamic range compression has now infected our beloved Jpop imports!

Compare, for instance, the waveform from the Nikopachi* version of Hemisphere looks like this:

The version on Everywhere, whioh I believe to be a remaster of the Nikopachi version (based on length and waveform) looks like this:

On first playing the two, the most noticeable difference is the increased volume in the "Everywhere" version. The obvious reason for this is simple psychology: people generally prefer louder music, hence increasing the volume on a song makes people like it more. With a hard limitation on the maximum amplitude in a given format, this naturally results in a reduction in dynamic range. In essence, the softer sounds become louder while the louder sounds get clipped. For a song like Hemisphere with both loud sections and soft sections, this makes a pretty big difference.

A good analogy is going to a rock concert vs. going to a classical music concert. In a rock concert, the music is blared at near pain-inducing levels to a point where it can be hard to make out subtleties in music. Contrast this with classical music concerts, where the venues are (usually) designed for acoustics, everyone tries to be super-silent (you'll notice a distinct increase in the number of coughs in-between movements). There's a ton more dynamic range between the softest solo portions and the bits where the orchestra is going full blast. Because of these differences, I avoid rock concerts even for artists I really like, but will go to any classical music concert if it's in my budget or if I really like the pieces.

* For those of you who are curious, the Nikopachi version looks noticeably different from the single version beyond the addition of some silence at the end. It looks like at least some parts may have been rerecorded or remastered. Here's the waveform for the single version:

The return of touchscreen?

Remember back in 2002, when Microsoft had these big plans for tablet PCs, with a whole separate version of XP?

Yeah, you probably don't, but back then I had this wonderful pipe dream for a slick note-taking application. First, it would obviously need to be able to open and write a variety of file formats, including plaintext, richtext, MS word, PDF, and PPT. Being able to annotate the last two formats would be especially wonderful for marking up papers and lecture slides. Couple this software with handwriting recognition, a computer-algebraic system, and graphing capabilities, and math nerds would eat it up. Imagine being able to note down equations, converting them into symbolic entities, manipulating and solving them in software. As a tool for doing math homework, it could be invaluable.

Separate pieces of software would probably be likely to simplify things, but if they were all made by the same company and shared UI structure...