Doesn't that feel better?

Mikki Huxtable, 46, McCain voter from Liberty, Missouri– say something good about Obama.

“He‘s a really good family man,” she said. “He’s a momma’s boy, and I say that in a good way– he cares about the moms in this country, because he was raised by his mother and his grandmother. He stopped his campaign to go visit his grandmother because she’s sick. I have a son who I wish was as much as a momma’s boy as Obama is. I wish he would depend on me more."

Comment by ScentOfViolets via shtetl:

While you make valid points, Scott, it is my considered opinion that you’re fighting the good fight just by doing what you love to do and are paid to do. And making more significant contributions. Myself, I see this as a fight between enlightenment-style thinking, with it’s emphasis on empiricism, hypothesis testing, willingness to admit error, and acknowledgment of lack of surety, versus the sort of ‘Dominionist’ thinking that goes with received wisdom, unquestioned dogma, and unwillingness to admit error. Which is almost always in the service of the established order. That’s what this election is all about. A McCain victory would just us up for another round of narrative-style thinking: Government is the problem, not the solution. Our enemies hate us for our freedoms. Antichristianists are corrupting our societal morals and our precious bodily fluids. This whole financial mess could be solved with a tax cut for the rich. There is no crises in medical care, just a crises in government intervention. And so on and so forth.

It won’t last of course, and the present round Dominionism is just about played out.

So just pause, take a deep breath, and turn your thoughts to your garden, as Candide would say.

I think I'm amazed that anyone can write software for a living. I've written about 400 lines in the last two days [nothing terribly challenging; mostly proof of concept for what will become a C++ implementation]. I have spent the last hour or so with IDLE finding all of the naming things that I have hosed up.

EDIT:

File "C:\Documents and Settings\dscoughl\Desktop\SBGEM\py\bullet.py", line 18, in tick

v_new = self.velocity + drag*dt + self._gravity*dt

TypeError: can't multiply sequence by non-int of type 'float'

Who knew?

do all functions in a python class get 'self' as an implicit argument?

that I think I understand, but want some back up.

Say I have vector in the x-y plane, and want to rotate it towards the z-axis. I need to use Euler's rotations. Is the scheme then to rotate the vector to an axis, rotate around the other axis in the plane, towards the z-axis, then do the inverse of the first rotation? That should get me back to where is was I think.

The final auction results are up.

Looks like JPM set the bottom of the market with a big buy at 8.625.
Merrill had the biggest fill [670] at 10.25, and Goldman filled 625 @ 9.75.

Barclays had 775 lots filled at 9.75, over 5 orders [200, 50, 25, 200, 300], and very little anywhere else. I guess they had a CLEAR valuation in their minds.

Citi filled 500 at 9.125.

Funny to see some bottom feeders taking shots at four figure lots in the 2% range.

I count 13 firms acquiring the Lehman's debt, most of which is concentrated in Lehman's direct competitors. Makes me wonder how this plays into the CDS game. Is it cheaper to acquire the debt and pay yourself in the swap, for a lower net outlay?

I'm pretty stunned by the Lehman auction. Someone is going to make a killing on that debt. Probably in line with what debt collection agencies pay for bad consumer debtors, though.

Gelman is a statistician at Columbia. Mostly he does social science research. He has a fun historical graphic up on the website for his book.

It's an hour long, but he says some interesting things. I've lifted the synopsis from Steve Hsu:

Thursday, October 02, 2008
Buffet on the credit crisis

Charlie Rose interview

Skeptics will claim he is talking his own book, with the recent GS and GE investments. But I think he knows what he is talking about. Buffet says that if he could take a 1 percent stake in the bailout (investing $7 billion), he would. He thinks the bailout will make money investing in distressed mortgage securities at current market prices.

"I love to buy distressed assets... I just don't have $700B to do it with." (At about 13-14 minutes into the hour long interview.)

Bubble logic: "Innovators, Imitators and then the Idiots" (20 minutes)

"Confidence in markets and institutions is like oxygen... when you have it you don't think about it... but you can't go 5 minutes without it." (24 minutes)

"Beware of geeks bearing formulas!" (takes a shot at quants at 27 minutes)

Upper income people should pay more taxes (basically endorses Obama's tax plan) (42 minutes)

"It is terrible that income from investments (capital gains) should be taxed less than income from labor." (against regressive taxes) (44 minutes)

"If AIG had to unwind their derivatives book, it would have hit every institution in the world." (50 minutes)

"The Fed structured the AIG deal very well. They are very likely to get their money back or more." (51 minutes)

Number 4 on the list of links for my name in the Google 2001 search for my name had my friends in Tucson all freaked out. They thought I had been killed.