Votes on the MAX

What fun! We just got back from a night riding the MAX (above-ground subway) back and forth, into and out of Portland, registering people to vote. The responses to "Would you like to register to vote?" ranged from a shake of the head to "I'm already registered" to "You're getting paid to do this, right?" There were also plenty of the nods of the head, most often from people with earphones in both ears, which was their (confusing) response to what they interpreted as a slightly different question - "Yes? Oh, you already are? Great." Moving on. Interestingly, I've never been so disappointed by so many people being registered already! But we got three people who had moved recently, a couple of riders who were too young to vote last time around, and a handful of people who were really excited because it's been on their list of things to do, but who really knows where to get a voter registration card?

Now, the question of the evening: Are presidential votes counted as a popular vote in each state, or are they measured by district and then added/averaged, and/or does it vary by state? Stand by....

And the answer is: State votes appear to be counted as a popular vote. (Therefore, us getting on the train in one of the bluest cities in the country really is making a difference. Whew.) But interestingly, the weight of each voter in different states is different. An Alaskan vote, for example, is worth roughly 2.5 times that of an Oregon vote. On the other hand, Alaska gives only three electoral votes, while Oregon gives seven. Ignoring the fact that it is somewhat embarrassing to not have had a grasp on the electoral college system until now, I just found a pretty nice site that lays it all out in nice crisp clarity: "Does my vote count? Understanding the electoral college." (If you're short on time or interest I'd recommend skipping right down to section IV.)

Veggies for Dinner

So far most of the goals are going well. We're doing pull-ups like crazy (with a little help from various gravity-beaters, like my legs), the cuisinart blade has been washed and dried several times, I gave blood and found out I'd be a good platelet donor (which you can do every one to two weeks! Who knew?) and we have eaten out exactly zero times unless you count the 3 lunches we've had on the way home from the pool over the past 2 weeks. But those we forgive ourselves because we use only calories to get to the pool (i.e. no money spent on gas) and because I'm usually so hungry after we swim that pizza just sounds sooo good.

And in an effort to make our own food, I looked up a pizza dough recipe for the first time and found out, as I know Mom has told me several times, that it is super easy. A little flour, a little yeast, 20 minutes... and voila. And the best part is, you can make a gorgeous pizza these days, what with it being September in the Pacific Northwest. This one was so pretty, in fact, that I was convinced I should take a picture of it.



If anyone is looking for pizza topping recommendations, I highly suggest the following (all thinly sliced):
- orange/red/yellow tomatoes
- beets
- bell peppers
- red onion
- zucchini

Add on some delicious splatters of soft ricotta cheese mixed with a little salt and pepper, and mmmm. Too bad there were no leftovers.

When Genius Failed

Book review:

$ $ $ $ $ $

In light of the current turbulence in the markets, I downloaded and listened to a book that has been on my list for a while: When Genius Failed, The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein. The book was read by the author which I always enjoy -- it gives it a little personal touch. If you don’t instantly fall asleep at the mention of derivatives and equity swaps I would recommend it. I gave it 5 out of 6 dollar signs.

Quick summary:

As the name implies, the book is about the astounding rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management from 1994-1998 (not that long ago!). Long Term Capital was one of the first firms to really hire and rely on phd’s and academics to drive their decisions when making trades. They were also one of the most successful investment groups ever, until very quickly in a matter of one month everything started to fall apart. In the end the company is brought down by overconfidence in it’s own models. It turns out the economy of all of Russia including its people, its culture and its politics cannot be easily rolled up into a formula of volatility and expected returns.

Personal touch:

Part of what makes the book enjoyable is that it is largely a story of the people involved. In between the talk of stocks and bonds, it’s full of little windows into the lives of the Wall Street CEOs and the hedge fund managers. It talks about their friendships, their loyalties, their arrogance, and their tears when things start to go wrong. There are even dramatic scenes where the heads of the major banks in wall street get together like heads of competing mafias to make decisions that would affect and maybe save the whole market, but at the same time they are secretly working in their own self interest. More than anything, it paint the people involved as very human and ironically far removed from the robotic beings that LTCM’s models assume traders to be.

A lesson:

Economics models just aren’t that great. If you were to use Long Term Capital’s models to predict the chance of their own failure then you would have concluded that failure as it occurred was for all practical purposes impossible. According to their models if the markets had been open everyday from the beginning of the universe until now it would still have been unlikely for some of events that occurred to have happened… but of course they did. In the late 90s LTCM had the best models available… that wasn’t that long ago and as is now obvious current models aren’t much better.

Start of Class

At j's recommendation (both because I would enjoy it, and because it would be good if I want to design medical devices), I started an intro course to Anatomy and Physiology at Portland Community College. What fun... It's been a long time since I've been in a class. The professor is great. She's a 5ft 2in and 275lbs ball of lightening barely stopping talking or moving for the full 3 hour lecture between tirades about drug company conflict of interests and our society's irrational phobia about discussing the lower half of the digestive system, she went through the major systems in the human body. Here are some little tidbits of info that I liked:

• Every single cell in the body has direct contact to a blood vessel (j seemed skeptical that this is 100% correct)
• The lymphatic system relies primarily on body movement and breathing to bring fluid back to the heart. Example: higher rates of breast feeding and lack of bras in the 3^rd world may be an explanation of reduced rates of breast cancer in women from 3^rd world countries.
• People have differences from the average homeostatic states (body temp, metabolism, etc.), but very few people actually know where they sit on the spectrum. She suggested eating some corn and watching to see how quickly it makes it through your system... you know.... just help calibrate yourself.
• On average men burn about 11 calories/lb/day and women about 10 calories/lb/day just lying in bed
• Stomach linings are replaced completely within 3 days.
• Puberty is like new shoes (it was a long story).
• How caffeine withdrawal head aches work: When you drink caffeine this causes your veins to contract, your body reacts to this by dilating the veins. Over time your body trains itself to automatically dilate the veins…. Then when you don’t drink coffee your veins get over dilated causing a headache.

Swifts in a Chimney

Last night we joined hundreds of other Portlanders at an event I would not have believed existed - and didn't, until we arrived. It took place at the Chapman Elementary school in the NW, and when we got there I was surprised to see so many people stretched out on a hill and across the playground, most with blankets and picnics and many with video cameras. In addition, there were several hundred children sliding down the hill on cardboard sleds. Everyone had parked on their chairs and blankets in line with the school's big, brick chimney - about 2 and a half stories tall and looking like it was built in the 1930's. Above the chimney swirled and flitted and swooshed and soared thousands, and thousands, of chimney swifts. (One Audubon website estimated 10,500 swifts last night and 1500 spectators!) Apparently this chimney is an annual stop on the birds' migration to Venezuela (or Argentina, depending on which overheard conversations you choose to believe). Each year, during the month of September, they begin swirling and diving above the chimney in droves and clouds just at dusk, before all diving into the chimney (in a surprisingly orderly fashion) to spend the night.

Needless to say, it was impressive. Also, turns out it is impressively difficult to estimate numbers of swirling birds (at least for us) and even though it looked very much as though there were birds continuously diving into the chimney throughout the entire hour we were there, it was nearly impossible to tell at any point whether there were now more or fewer birds left in the sky. Every ten minutes or so they would all form into one huge, circling cyclone of birds, all swooping clockwise around the chimney, with a steady stream appearing to drop off into the mouth of the column. Then something would cue them to split and spread out into a huge, billowing, entropic cloud of tiny spots, before forming another circling mass.

When it looked to our unaccustomed eyes like only 10% or so of the birds were left - which still resembled the largest flock of swallows I've ever seen - a peregrine falcon/Cooper's hawk (again, depends on who you overhear - I saw one kid run over to his mother and say "Mr. Morton says it's a peregrine falcon!") decided to come swooping in. On its first run through the cloud, it ended up being chased by a hundred or so swifts, which of course gained cheers and applause from the crowd. It circled out to nearly as far as one could see it, then came swooping back in, making unsuccessful dives at some of the 'teenage' swifts, out later than the rest of the pack. We didn't see it make any successful catches (good thing - I can imagine that might be somewhat distressing for a child who has come out to watch the swifts land) but it did ensure that the rest of the birds headed into the chimney. And that was it!

Despite the many words up there, I'm not sure I did the description justice. Here's a 30 second clip of the birds.

Juggling:

I’ve always wanted to get better at juggling. This unemployment thing seemed like the perfect time to give it a try. The goal is to be able to do five balls at once…. that of course requires that I be able to do four balls at once first. I got a good head start at bittersweet on the four ball thing, especially when on the way back we got stuck in the providence airport for 4 hrs. With somewhere between 10-15hrs of practice this is what I look like on a good attempt:

There’s still lots of room for improvement. I’ve also started trying 5 balls, with about two hours into it, this is what it looks like:




Not quite as polished, but maybe a little more entertaining. If you look closely I think there’s one try in there where I go through one whole cycle without dropping a ball. It’s the little victories that make you realize how much farther you have to go. How many more hours until I get as good at five as I am now at four? My guess is 30. I’m usually off by a factor of two… I hope it’s not 60hrs away.

Goals to Be Met While Jobless

It will undoubtedly be a good idea for me to maintain goals while I'm unemployed for this as yet uncertain amount of time. Therefore, the following list is my start: if you have any suggestions, please send them this way. In return I will let you know how that particular goal-meeting is going. Or I will let you know that I find your particular goal impossible.

J's Goals for Good Times and Things to Do While Jobless

1) Write more interesting posts than this one is turning out to be
2) 10 pull-ups (it embarrasses me that currently I can't even do one)
3) Make a new recipe each night for dinner (we're doing a lot of creative eating in right now)
4) Donate blood
5) Use the gorgeous cuisinart at least twice a week in pursuit of #3
6) Finish umpteen hours of CME (will this count before I have my license? We shall see.)
7) Try hard every day not to help plan the surprise trip that Oren is planning for us

So far I've done a good job keeping up with number 3. And I can do 10 pull-ups with my feet on the ground - not a terrible start, but we clearly have a ways to go.

Unemployed!

Well, it's happened. We are both, simultaneously, without jobs. Oren left his work last Friday, telling them he would come back when they could pay him (it's been a few weeks now). They were disappointed and maybe a touch surprised, but he stopped short of explaining to them the way a job works - i.e., that employees work in exchange for pay. I don't know that I would have been polite enough to save them that speech.

I'm still looking for work - hoping to wait it out and find a great first position, wondering which will win the game of chicken: my selectivity or my need for a paycheck.

What better time to be unemployed together? We have two bicycles, a fridge full of leftovers, and what seems to be a looming economic depression. Time to read and write blog posts and go camping - and touch up the resumes.

Books: The Places In Between/The Bookseller of Kabul.

For the dozens of visitors to this new blog, may I please make a recommendation: read The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart. Or, The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad. But maybe not both. I just finished the second, and I'm feeling depressed by the state of things - at least according to two authors' personal accounts - in Afghanistan. Oren asked me today how the ending of The Bookseller was - without thinking, I answered "Just as depressing as the beginning and the middle."

This is not to say that either is not a good book; I give The Places Between a nice, solid 9 of 13 ampersands. Tough reading but well told. I liked The Bookseller a little less (8 of 13) but this might only have been because I was getting tired of being so depressed by an entire culture, and the buildup of discouragement was getting heavier.

The first is by a Scottish author who recounts the story of his walk across Afghanistan a few years ago. He meets only men, is made to walk with soldiers for half his trip, witnesses countless discussions of who has killed whom over the years, and gets shot at a few times. The second was written by a Norwegian woman who spent a year living with a man and his extended family in Kabul; a smaller view, for sure, but one that includes family structure and is a fascinating, if sad, window onto the treatment of women in post-Taliban Afghan culture. Despite the sound of it, I really recommend both books.


Julie's Official Book Score (the reliance and worth of which is to be determined after reading, or not, several of the books she has read):
The Places in Between: & & & & & & & & & & & & &
The Bookseller of Kabul: & & & & & & & & & & & & &