The Hunger Games, Mockingjay and Catching Fire

An amazing trilogy by Suzanne Collins set in a post apocalyptic world where humans have been reduced to a single city state "The Capitol" and twelve slave "Districts". Capitols control over technology and more importantly communications lets it completely control the districts, going as far as to running an annual "hunger games". Hunger games are like The Survivor, but you die instead of just being voted out, and the players are picked from the children of the districts. The control of the Capitol is so complete that not only are districts forced to send their children to death year after year, but they are also forced to celebrate the games.

The premise of the book is horrifying, and as I started reading it I kept feeling that this is crazy, something like that can never happen. But in a surprisingly little time I found myself engrossed in the games, cheering some contestants, wishing death of others. On one hand, the book is clearly a work of fiction, there is no way something like that can ever happen in our world, but in other ways it hit close to home. One poignant scene is when a district child is in the capitol, and looks at a typical meal that is served - some meat, some cheese, some wine, some cake. He tallies in his head how long it will take someone to prepare a meal like that in his district. Hunt enough meat. Save enough meat so that you can trade some for cheese. A months salary for the wine. Probably 2 months worth of hunting to get enough money to trade for the cake. But that is not that far from the disparity in our world, just like that Hunger Games is a story of our world.

And that is the beauty of the books. Even with an outlandish setting far from anything that you can remotely identify with, they remain realistic and you cannot help getting emotionally involved with the characters. Even the people of the Capitol, you can almost feel some sympathy for them. They do horrible things, but they are as much a slave of the culture that they live in that it is really as heroic for them to stand against it, as it is for the people in the districts. For those who do not have the courage to fight, you can only be as unsympathetic for those in capitols as you are for those in the districts.

There were a few low spots, more like the nitpicking of a grouchy old man. I found the ending to be too fantastic even for the setting, and unsatisfying. The last book steadily climbs to a climax, and then in a style very reminiscent of Lord of The Rings, instead ending the story, says a slow good by to the reader rather than an abrupt adieu. While I loved the Lord of The Ring for that, here it just left me baffled. I thought it would have been better to have more narrative voices. You are on the edge of your seat wondering if your favorite character will live or die, and then you realize that the same character is narrating the story, so she must have lived though at least this scene.

Overall, highly recommended. All three books end with the closure of the plot, so you do not have to read the next one.

First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began

First off I have to admit that I approached this book as a lay person without any special background in Chemistry or Biology expecting to see something along the lines of a Brief History of Time.

Alas, First Life feels more like a thinly disguised text book and one that was written 20 years too early. First 150 or so pages just lay out the groundwork for the chemistry and are tedious to go through. The prose is like the boring history of magic teacher we all had in Hogwarts. Bunch of people discovering reactions, which to a lay person like me, seem very similar to each other. A big deal is made out of whether basic chemicals needed for life came from space or were synthesized on Earth, but "why" we care is not at all clear. From reading the text, it seems its pretty straightforward for them to be created on earth, and also pretty straightforward for them to be created in space, so lets just get on with the story shall we?

Another problem is that the final chapter of this story is still unwritten, which is why I say the book has been written 20 years too early. The book is basically the Author's proposal for how life started, you get very little context on how well his proposals are accepted by the broader community. The science itself far from approaching an answer, and so the proposal themselves are riddled with contradictions that a lay person like myself can hardly be expected to make sense of. For example, a bunch of necessary chemicals need acidic environment for synthesis, while another bunch of needed elements need alkaline conditions. Both of these chemicals are introduced at different points in the book, and the fact that they both need to appear together for life to start is glossed over.

Author keeps getting back to a piece of meteorite that he analyzed and a volcanic field in Russia that he visited. It gets old pretty quickly. There is only so much you can read about those two incidents. Also bugging are "more about this in Chapter X" where X is half a book away.

I am guessing people who have a background in Chemistry and Biology might find this book more interesting, its not really written for an average Joe.

Walstad Aquarium not doing so great

5 Gallon office aquarium is not doing so great. 10 new shrimps that I had added seemed to do well for a few weeks, but then one missed week of water change and they are all dead. I think Walstad aquariums are pretty picky on the type of soil that you use. Mine seemed to have a lot of organic matter, the water keeps turning yellow in about 3 days, and is really yellow in a week. I added a pair of Badis Badis which seem to be doing ok, but keeping my fingers crossed. It was a mistake to add shrimp first, since shrimp seem to be much more delicate than the Badis.

I need to change water every weekend otherwise it turns really yellow. Zero maintenance was the main draw of Walstad aquarium in office. I am still hoping that eventually all the soluble chemicals from the soil will leach out that the aquarium will settle down.

Office Aquarium Update

A quick update on office aquarium. Plants are growing like crazy. Every one of them looks healthy. Specially the floating duckweed and amazon frogbit. Of the 6 shrimp, at least one died. It's difficult to find them, so I am not sure how many are still alive, as far as I can tell, they have not bred. Snails have, lots of tiny snails and eggs all over. Also for the first time, I see tiny crustaceans in one of my aquariums. I need to get a good magnifying glass to figure out exactly which but it was very cool to see them darting around. I removed the filter media from the water filter, so it is now just used to provide water movement.

The biggest problem has been brown water. I have had to twice change about 60% of the water because it becomes so brown that almost no light reaches the bottom. Oxygen also seems to be a problem in this state and I see all the shrimp sitting on the surface of the water. I have also had H2S bubbles from substrate, but they seem few enough to not be worried about.

A list of plants in, before I forget them:

• Java Moss
• Subwassertang
• Cabomba
• Najas (Guppy Grass)
• Amazon Frogbit
• Duckweed
• Ludwigia
• Dwarf hairgrass
• Some sort of Amazon sword
• Spiral Valisnaria
• Some sort of chain sword
• Green Wendtii Crypt
• Java Fern
• Baby Tears (?)

Here are couple of pictures.

Top shot with duckweed and lots of floating plants

Side Shot showing the rooted plants. Floating plants are not very visible because of the glare from the light

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking

The best description for India Calling that I can think of is "Indians for Dummies", those three words describe both what is great about the book and what its limitations are. Its a great way to quickly learn about the India, its people, its customs and shared heritage, but always keeping in mind, that what you learn is only an approximation.

Indian emigre's usually are much more conservative than Indians back home. Their "Indian" values and customs stop evolving as soon as they leave India, so ironically enough when they go back to India, they usually find that Indians have progressed far while they still have a vision of India that is stuck in the past. Our author also suffers from this, since his version of India is from 1970's. His problems are compounded because his India of background in India was in the british influenced upperclass household that has as much in common with a average Indian as Paris Hilton with average American.

The book is basically a series of character portraits of a number of Indians. A long chapter on Ambani's seems out of place, it looks more like a piece for Vanity Fair rather than saying anything insightful about India. Moreover, that one chapter also undoes a major theme at the beginning of the book - that India in 1970's was a stifling place where to be successful you had to emigrate. Ambani's were contemporary of author's parents and brought up in much poorer circumstances, still they were able to reach epitome of success in India.

The most interesting parts of the books were little insights into Indian society, and a way of looking at them that I never did. The author is at his greatest when he talks about the individual and families, the "the family relations of guilt", "the vibration and madness that numbed one's sensitivity to oneself", "lightness of being without roots". At the other end of the spectrum, I thought he failed miserably when he tried to talk about the overarching conflicts and path of history and society. A section on Maoist insurgency is shallow, at times devolving into meaningless drivel you will expect in a liberal arts journal

"Just as the new self-confidence in India was nourishing a rediscovery of traditional ways, so, too, the individuation ushered in by modernity was, in fact, ..., a return to the past, to an older pattern of division known from the villages."

How any of it is relevant to realities of Maoist insurgency and mass killings is left to reader's imagination. Talking about corruption and Amabani's it seems that author was one of those "journalists covering the company were made part of the family". PR department of Reliance Industries could not have written a better profile of Mukesh Ambani.

For all the harsh words, I enjoyed reading the book. It broadens your horizons and shows you a different way of looking at things. Overall a pretty decent book.

Low Tech Office Aquarium

I recently read a book on aquarium ecology - Ecology of the Planted Aquarium by Diana Walstad. It's a pretty interesting book, filled with scientific tidbits, informative though more like scientific notes of a person, rather than a book. Anyway, the book review is for another day, whatever my cribs about it, its should be a definite read for anyone trying to keep planted aquariums or trying to recreate a system closer to natural aquatic world.

She proposes a "low-tech" aquarium, sans all the expensive equipment and specialized additives that I was familiar with. The idea intrigued me, the book convinced me that it could work, and Google search turned up various posts and pictures of the aquariums setup using her methods. To try it out, I decided to set up a 5 gallon aquarium for my office. She claims that an aquarium set up like this needs minimal maintenance - water change once in 6 months! Only regular maintenance required is plant pruning. Low maintenance works perfectly for an office aquarium.

Here is a great post on how to set up the aquarium with step by step pictures. My short setup:

1. 1 inch of potting soil, mixed with a handful of dolomite to neutralize the acidity. Crushed Oyster shells would have been better, as they are less reactive, but I could not find any at short notice.


2. Put a layer of small gravel along the edges about 1 inch think.


3. Plant as many plants as you can in the soil, put a layer of gravel around the stem.


4. After all the plants are in cover remaining open soil with gravel.


5. Slowly fill with water using a small bowl taking care not to stir up the gravel. If water is very cloudy siphon it out and refill.


6. Clamp on light fixture from hardware store and 23 watt full spectrum CFL bulb.


7. Bunch of floating plants, java moss etc.


8. 6 Red Cherry Shrimp.


9. A small submersible power filter - I used smallest that I could find, you do not really need a filter, just something to make the water move around, so a plain power head will do too.

Two days in, water is yellowish, from all the DOC (Dissolved Organic Carbon - read the book) from soil. One of the Shrimp has molted, may be two have. It's fun to try to find them while my code compiles. The experiment is on lets see how long the shrimp survive.

Callousness

Anand Giridharadas in India Calling on why its so easy to harden yourself to the misery around you

"The dependency scares you, as a needy lover's demands scare you, for it suggests a bottomless pit of giving that will devour you if you give in just slightly and allow yourself to care."

Orson Scott Card: The Homecoming Series

Long, preachy, repetitive and unsatisfying. A shadow of Ender.

I just finished reading the The Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card. It consists of 5 books, and is a bit preachy and biblical. Biblical should not be surprising as the books is heavily influenced by the Book of Mormon. The story is set in far future on a planet called Harmony. The humans on earth had killed each other some 40 million ago and made the planet inhabitable. The last remnant humans had migrated to Harmony, and set up a computer, called Oversoul, to rule over them, and make sure they do not kill each other again. The computer rules by making people stupid when they think of some technologies that might lead to planet wide wars. Its an interesting thought, the community has computers but no wheels. By all accounts, it was a good idea, humans on Harmony have lasted 40 million years, while humans on Earth only lasted 8000. In any case, the computer is now wearing down, and wants to go back to Earth, and recruits a family to make this happen.

The plot of the story revolves on the members of this family, some are "good", and some are "evil", and continuously working against each other and trying to subvert the will of the Oversoul. This is the theme through the 5 books, how the evil stays evil and and tries to subvert the good, and how good prevails against. There is an interesting twist provided by "Keeper of the Earth" which is like oversoul, but on Earth, and an order of magnitude more powerful. The first four books deal with the original family, and the recurring theme is the repeated cycle of jealousy and anger and bitterness, yes I get it that people are bad, I really do not need four books to get the point. The fifth promises to be more interesting, since the Keeper of the Earth is putting humanity to a final test, but the final denouement left me unsatisfied. Yes it solved the immediate crisis, but there was no lasting change to humanity, nothing to indicate that humanity can live in harmony for next 40 million (or even 100 years) in peace.

The series is classic Card. It has a lot of themes from the Enders saga. The same all powerful God-like computer, the nature of God, human will, control. How is a genetic change that makes you susceptible to commands of a computer any different from the same behavior caused by an innate faith in God. I just wish he made his point in three books rather than five.

Picture of the Day

Nikhil & Shailja's Aquarium

Panda Cory and Dwarf Gourami

Aquarium seems to be maturing pretty good. Ammonia/Nitrite levels are all zero. I discovered 5 snails today, they seem to be growing pretty fast, though with very thin shells. Harlequin Rasboras laid some eggs, but they all disappeared couple of days later. Aquarium is started to get run over by algae. This happened because I delayed adding the cleaner fishes for so long. The two Otocinclus that I added on Sunday are valiantly trying to clean it up.

So today we decided to add some more fishes to our aquarium. Shailja does not like Otocinclus much so we are not adding more of those. I used to have Cory cats, and enjoyed them so we decided to get one of the varieties of these. Our local pet store had a bunch of different kinds, and we settled on Panda Corydoras since they seemed most active and comical. As a plus they were the smallest, and in general I prefer getting small fishes and watching them grow. We got three of these. I think 5 bottom dwellers is enough for our 30G aquarium.

Panda Cory

Second fish that we got today was a Dwarf Gourami (Colisa Lalia). Only a male was available in store, I will probably add a female if I ever run into one. Its a beautiful blue and red color, and likes to hide in the plants. Its such a marked difference looking at the behavior of a "character fish" like the gourami compared to a schooling fish link the Harlequin Rasboras.

Dwarf Gourami

We are getting pretty close to fully stocking the aquarium. Current plan is to get two or three Angel Fishes and a pair of Blue Ram or Bolivian Ram or Kribensis. I am partial to Kribenses, since those were the only fishes that I have kept that had fry's in my aquarium that survived though the Rams are simply spectacular to look at.

Kribensis Mother with Fry from the old 55G aquarium.

Adding more Fishes and a Stupid mistake

So bad three days. Of the three Harlequin Rasbora that I got three days ago, two are dead. One I am sure died because it was sick when we got it. Second, I am not sure if it died because of stress - since these are schooling fish and two are too few. Or if they died due to Ammonia poisoning. Ammonia tests showed very slight level of Ammonia, less than the lowest level the kit was designed to measure.

I suspected stress as the cause of death. The two fishes seemed scared and not at all at home in the aquarium, so today I decided to get 4 more of them to make the remaining one feel more at home. It seemed to go well, all 5 are now together and so much more active than before.

Now the stupid part. I also saw that all the plants were showing signs of dying, lots of leaves turning brown. I think this is because there is not enough nitrate in the water, so they are starving. The plant food only contains Potassium since Phosphorus and Nitrates come from waste. A new aquarium does not have waste. So I decided to add a little bit of 20-20-20 orchid fertilizer to the water. Bad Bad idea, ammonia shot up to 2 ppm. This is really bad for the fishes. I changed about 12 gallons of water. Lets see if they survive the night. At least for now, they seem to be happily swimming around.

Harlequin Rasbora

First fishes - Harlequin Rasboras

Its time! It's 9 days since I first poured water in the tank and Ammonia/Nitrite levels are both zero. I put some fish food and other junk in the aquarium so that it can rot and produce Ammonia, but since the levels are still stuck at zero, I think the cycling is complete. I am not sure because usually these levels shoot up before returning to zero. May be the Fluorite gravel already had a colony of bacteria (it was wet at least).

In anycase, we decided to get our first fishes today. First fish in are going to be a schooling fish. Schooling fish in general do not have individual personality, and I personally do not find them very interesting to watch. They are still good to have as they add a lot of motion to the tank, and they also help other fishes to feel more comfortable. Local Petsmart/Petco did not have many options, the standard tetras and barbs. I used to have neon tetras before, and wanted something different this time. One interesting fish was Threadfin Rainbow. The problem with all rainbows is that they usually show there colors only when water quality is excellent and they are extremely comfortable. In stores, they are usually too stressed out are are quite dull. They looked dull in the shop, and Shailja wanted color and we settled on Harlequin Rasboara. I wanted to get 6 of these, but the Petsmart fish guy convinced us that since we have a new tank, we should only get 2 and not 6. I did not like that idea too much since these fishes are supposed to be schooling fish and must be kept in large groups. We settled on 3 with reservations.

I was right, and three was too few. When we got home, one of the fish seemed sick, it hung out near the very top separate from the other two. The other two were usually together but looked stressed out, hiding in the plants or behind rocks and trying to remain stationary. Two of them died over the next few days

Harlequin Rasboras

First Plants and Fish stock planning

Finally the replacement bulb arrived. Kudos to Big Al's Online for great customer service and hassle free shipping of replacement bulb. Now that we have the lighting, its time to add the first plants. LFS (Petsmart/Petco) do not have much of a selection. Also they tend to sell off terrarium plants as aquarium plants (bamboo!!?). Anyway, the only two options that they had were Green Cobomba and Egeria Densa (Anacharis). We also got a pack of assorted plant bulbs.

Its also time to start planning the fishes. Aquariums have three distinct habitation zones. Bottom, middle, top. For all practical purposes, fishes living in one of these zones will rarely interact with fishes in any of the other zones. Number of fishes depends on the biological capacity of the aquarium, which depends on number of plans, kinds of fishes, how frequent and how big the water changes are, etc. Basically how much shit the aquarium can breakdown and process without turning the water toxic.

For Bottom dwellers we plan to have a few Otos and Corydoras. Otos are nocturnal and Corys are diurnal, so its nice to have 24/7 cleaning crew. For the middle region I used to have Kribensis before and might get those. Another good option is Bolivian Ram or Blue Ram. All three are varieties of small peaceful chichlids. They are good parents, and take care of their fry and so are very fun to watch. Rainbow shark is also a bottom-lower level fish that I want to keep. Its slightly aggressive and territorial so iffy if it can live with the Krib/Ram.

For the top level, we will have a couple of Angel fishes as centerpiece fish, and a school of small tetras or barbs. Its nice that both of these varieties almost never go towards the bottom of the tank, so you do not have to worry too much about how they will interact with the bottom dwellers. From what I have heard, I can keep at most 3 Angels in my 30G tank. But interestingly enough Takashi Amano has some tanks in his book which are sized about 30G but with 10 Angels. That seems wrong, but then who am I to question Takashi Amano.

A good place to start the research on your stocking is at AquaHobby.com and FishProfiles.com

Setting Up a New Aquarium

I used to keep a 55 gallon aquarium many years ago. Here is an old photo from Oct 2004.

55G Aquarium from Oct 2004

I had this aquarium till about 2006 when I had to move, and could not take the aquarium with me. Aquariums are very different from other pets that people keep. You are not attached so much to an individual fish, but to the aquarium as a whole. An aquarium is a complete living system which as a whole is healthy and happy, or sick and sad. As a fish keeper, your goal is to keep the aquarium, the ecosystem, healthy, not so much an individual fish. As such, an individual fish dying occasionally is expected and not too distressing. What is extremely distressing is a mass death or mass sickness of fishes in your care, because that signals that the system as a whole has crashed and that is terrible.

Anyway, after a four year hiatus, I have decided to keep an aquarium once again. I intend to keep a log of its progress in this blog. The posts will be backdated to track the progress of the aquarium. All posts will get tagged with aquarium.

Long Walk To Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Just finished reading this excellent book. In Indian minds African anti-apartheid struggle has a special place, because it was in South Africa that Mahatma Gandhi first experienced the injustice of colonialism and took his first steps towards fighting against it. As an Indian, we were always taught that this was an important incident in both South African and Indian history. From reading this book, apparently not so for South Africa. It may have been a transformational moment for Mahatma Gandhi, but not for African National Conference. In fact, at least Mr. Mandela was slightly anti-Indian in his early attitudes, fearing that they would usurp the blacks in the African freedom struggle.

Something else that I liked about the book was the detailed descriptions of how the non-white Africans were repressed in day to day lives. The book gives great insight into how an organization like ANC works, the nitti-gritty of the day to day management and organization of protests and rallies. This was a contrast from the Indian independence books and histories. Looking back, I do not really know exactly how the British repressed Indians. We all know of the few big highlights, like Jalllianwala Bagh massacre, but not so much about day to day lives of Indians under British rule. Also missing is the organizational details of Congress. We all know how Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement, but we have no idea, how the message was conveyed to all the people all over India about the movement in absence of 24 hour news channels.

Long Walk To Freedom is rich in all these details, the shocking and unbelievable attitude of Afrikaners (the white ruling class of South Africa) towards blacks and repression, till so late in 20th century when it seemed all the rest of the world had left these things so far behind. Given all this, its even more amazing that Mr. Mandela espoused reconciliation with the former oppressors, and was even successful at it.

The book is also very personal, and traces the personal growth of Mr Mandela from a fiery youth who cared more about who got credit for a campaign rather than the results, to the great selfless statesman that the world knows now. From the person who started the military arm of ANC and was its first commander in chief, to the noble peace prize winning first president on South Africa responsible for the only country in Africa to peacefully integrate former colonist into the new black dominated order.

Overall a very educational book.

Book Review – Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy

I decided to read Freefall (by Joseph Stiglitz) after seeing a talk by the author. In the book Stiglitz promises to peel back the layers of causes responsible for the recent financial market collapse. When asked why the collapse happened most people will respond by saying banks were giving out mortgages to people who could not pay back. But Why? Because the incentives of the mortgage originators and bankers were flawed. But then the question is why did the market not respond to those flawed incentives and encourage firms that had the right incentive structure. Stiglitz frames the economic collapse in context of larger debate between Keynesian's and Monetarist's. His central claim is that since late 1970's Monetarist thought has been gaining the upper hand and the current crisis is the result.

The book starts off very crisply. Stiglitz invites you to listen to the story of the crisis and keeps you engaged even while going over parts of the story that you have already heard. He gives a comprehensive account of the crisis and I learned many things even though I considered my self well aware of the events. He castigates the political administrations starting from Regan's for dismantling the regulatory system which was ultimately responsible for the crisis.

While he is extremely critical of the bankers, regulators and politicians he seems to give the homeowners who took mortgages they could not afford a free pass. He never quite gets around to explaining how the american family who took the zero percent down, non recourse mortgage was the victim when they could just walk away from the home that they had no business owning in the first place. He seems to see no difference between the hardworking Americans who save for a down-payment and only buy homes they can afford and those who get the biggest house they can with nary a thought to finances.

He also latches on to ARM's as unequivocally bad and predatory which is not really true. He mentions them multiple times and faults Greenspan for encouraging them in a lecture. In an otherwise crisp and insightful narrative I felt a dissonance reading the simple minded rhetoric on ARM's. In an ARM the borrower takes on the interest rate risk and in return gets a lower cost for the loan. These mortgages are pretty common in many countries (like Canada) and they work as well as the fixed rate mortgages used to in America.

The above faults aside Stiglitz is spot on in his criticisms on how the stimulus has played out. Banks and their shareholders got too sweet a deal. He explains how all the reasons given on why banks and their shareholders are entitled the the tax payer largess are flawed. The Obama administration policies have failed to stop a crisis like this from recurring. The banks are still too big to fail, and thus enjoy the implicit government guarantees.

The only problem with the book is its length. After about half way through, I started feeling that the arguments and examples got repetitive. It felt like someone who has been ignored for years has finally been vindicated and now cannot stop saying "I told you so".

Overall, I would highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the financial crisis. It pairs really well with The Big Shot

OVO: The colorful world of insects

Cirque du Soleil are visiting the bay area with their show OVO. We went to a showing in San Jose, and were wow'ed by the spectacle. The show's theme is the world of insects, and all the acts are based on the life of an insect, a butterfly growing inside a pupa, coming out, spreading its wings and dying. A spider dancing on its web. Ants running up and down a vertical wall. Without going into the details of the act, they are all classic Cirque du Soleil quality.

The show starts a little slowly, but things pick up when a fly(?) comes carrying an ovo (egg) to this insect colony and falls in love with a lady bug. Follows a deep and spectacular dive into the colorful world of insects as they go about their world. We watch as red ants play with their food, juggling corn with their feet in synchrony. We watch spiders as they dance and float around on strands of their net. Towards the end there was a gravity defying act showing ants in their colony, walking up and down their ant hill taking care of the day's business. There was a lot more, but Cirque du Soleil are to be experienced, not described. We will never think of insects in the same way again.

The venue in San Jose, was a bit cramped. You probably do not want to take any eatables/drinkables in the show, as the seats are quite small without any arm rests. The audience sits in a U shape on three sides of the stage. We were sitting in the second row along the left arm of the U. The theater was not so big, so even in the last row you will get an excellent view of the stage. A small word of caution, there is trapeze act for which they hook up a big net. If you are sitting on either side of the stage the view is a bit less than perfect, but only a little bit.

Managing Your Portfolio.

I have been doing some reading on investment planning. Some great books that everyone should read are "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel and "The Intelligent Asset Allocator" by William Bernstein. Both of them advocate passive investing. Markets are efficient, you cannot beat the market, you most certainly cannot beat the market by being an arm-chair analyst. The most you can hope for is to not lose to the market. Read the first book if you do not believe me. A Random Walk also gives an excellent introduction to various investment vehicles and terminologies. If you do not know about mutual funds, expense ratios, capital gains, turnover rate, rebalancing, PE ratios, alpha, beta, read the first book.

So what is the intelligent investor to do? Decide on how much risk you can take, depends on what you are saving for and your personal appetite when you lose half your portfolio. The most important thing in investing is to stick to your strategy though bear markets, so it is essential that you design your portfolio keeping this in mind. Risk decides bonds to stock ratio in your portfolio, higher the stocks fraction, more the risk and higher the expected rewards. Now further divide each part into various sub components. For example, short term bonds and intermediate term bonds for bond part, and foreign stocks, large cap stocks, small cap stocks, REITs for stocks part. Assign percentage numbers to each of these and buy a index fund that tracks the corresponding asset class. You now have a portfolio! Every time you invest more money, invest in all of them in the proportion you decide. This part is important, you want to keep putting money in even when the prices are falling and you are losing money. Everything reverts to mean, buy low and sell high. The Intelligent Asset Allocator gives excellent advise on how to design a portfolio and analyze its expected return and risk.

Every year, rebalance. Sell off assets that now make a higher proportion of your portfolio and buy those that now make a smaller proportion than the target. This is by far the most important part. More important than the exact composition is disciplined regular rebalancing. Rebalancing essentially means selling your winners and buying your losers. Remember, assets revert to mean. Buy low sell high.

I designed a spreadsheet to track a portfolio, calculate how much off target it is, etc. Its is a very simple sheet, you can check it out here. You only need to fill out the grey cells, rest are all automatically calculated. It is pretty basic, I might add new features from time to time. If you find it useful, let me know. If you add some stuff to it, let me know. (Need less to say the numbers in the sheet are made up, the allocations should not be taken as suggested allocations).


Disclaimer: I am not a financial planner. You can bankrupt yourself by following this advise. All software is provided as it. You can bankrupt yourself by using the linked spread sheet.

Cool Entropy

So I ran into this problem on updating cups on my server. Whenever I tried to access the admin page, it will seem to hang with message generating ssl keys. Nothing happened. Google came to help, searching for "Generating SSL server key" got me this page. Looks like SSL needs kernel entropy to generate good random numbers which are needed to generate SSL keys. Now this entropy is produced by random events on a computer, key press, mouse movements, disk access etc. Since my server does not have a mouse or keyboard, and disk access is not very often, it did not have enough entropy! As suggested by Ross Burton, I ran find / (lots of disc access) and watch sysctl kernel.random.entropy_avail and indeed after a few minutes the entropy was high enough and cups proceeded normally. Cool!

Me: A Software Professional

Came across this random piece of information on Sarvjeet's blog.

Pisces (February 19 - March 19)

The people who are just meant to work only in groups. They are selfless and do as you require them to do. They most important thing to be put in them is the "focus" since they get out of doing something when they lose interest. All signs take advantage of Pisces for their work because they like all others to make use of their abilities. Though they are not intellectuals they are very broad minded and good thinkers. Very trustable as long as they are not abused too often by their colleagues.