Mararthons

 

Go The Distance

And I won't look back, I can go the distance
And I'll stay on track, no I won't accept defeat
It's an uphill slope
But I won't loose hope, 'till I go the distance
And my journey is complete, oh yeah

Is going the distance winning? or an initiation?

If you have any interest in marathons, e.g. the Boston Marathon, can you tell me the winner of the most recent Marathon? I bet you can’t. But I bet that you will be able to tell me those who you know that completed that marathon, i.e. went the distance. That is because a marathon is not a single race. A marathon is an initiation, a rite, a ritual, as much as a Bar Mitzvah. The podium positions do not matter as much as knowing who completed the marathon, …went the distance. That is why there are thousands of entrants for a major marathon. There may be only one winner but winning is NOT the point. Going the distance, completing the marathon, is the point.

That is also why a baseball season is called a marathon, not a sprint. Moonlight Graham, in real life and in the movie Field of Dreams, or Roy Gleason of the 1963 Los Angles Dodgers, are considered to be major league players. Moonlight Graham had a single plate appearance and hit. In the movie his pain was eased because he became a marvelous doctor and saved the protagonist’s daughter. Roy Gleason played for the Dodgers and after a single plate appearance and hit, he was drafted and sent to Viet Nam where he was awarded the Purple Heart. They both went the distance and were initiated as major leaguers, even though they only stayed for the proverbial cup of coffee. They may not have been elected to Cooperstown, but they went the distance. Winning is not everything, playing the game the right way is. Fans didn’t follow the Cubs or Red Sox during their respective decades long droughts only because they expected to see a winner, although as a Red Sox fan the 2004 season was sweet! But I was in the stands before 2004 because I saw players who went the distance.

The playoffs are nice, and making the playoffs is exciting, but the playoffs are more important to the owner’s ego than to the hardcore fans. To borrow a phase, it is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game…. go the distance. Second place is not first loser. Second place, and every position including last place, still went the distance.

Truth II

 

Battle Hymn of the Republic

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

WHO can’t handle the truth?

"I believe that college actually erodes the best our country has to offer," Charlie Kirk, president of Turning Point USA, told Breitbart's Alana Mastrangelo, detailing his belief that college is "bankrupting our country," "brainwashing our youth," and is "a multi-trillion dollar enterprise that is designed to try to turn children against their parents." and ""The College Cartel" is no better than Mexican Drug Cartels"

Are you kidding me?  Charlie Kirk, who never graduated from college, has a warped idea of college. In 2015, Kirk told The Atlantic that he was taking part-time online classes at The King's College, and he was taking classes at Harper College, a community college near Chicago, but dropped out to pursue conservative activism.  He should ask for his money back.  The purpose of college is not to brainwash anyone.  It is to try and train students to discover the truth for themselves.

Sometimes you might be offended by what they discover to be the truth.  But your truth is NOT the only truth, no matter how “woke” it is. Can we all say sour grapes!

Little (?) League

 

Take Me out to the Ballgame

Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack,
I don't care if I never get back,
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.

Amen!

Thoughts while watching the joy in the faces of Little Leaguers when they lined up for autographs of the Red Sox and Oriole players, when Red Sox Manager Alex Cora spoke in Spanish to the team from Puerto Rico, and when watching the Red Sox and Oriole major leaguer players  joyfully slide down the hill on cardboard at Volunteer Field during yesterday’s Little League World Series game.

"They'll come to Iowa Williamsport, Pennsylvania for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.

"Of course, we won't mind if you look around," you'll say. "It's only twenty dollars per person." They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it. For it is money they have and peace they lack.

And they'll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game, and it'll be as if they'd dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they'll have to brush them away from their faces.

People will come, Ray.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.

America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.

This field, this game -- it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.

Ohhhhhhhh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come."

Thank you W.P. Kinsella for the novel, director Phillip Robinson for the movie, and James Earl Jones for the performance in that movie. Veni, Vidi, Vici.  Come, see, and get a victory for yourselves.

Currency

 

Garden Party

But it's all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone
So you got to please yourself

What lessons have you learned?

Monopoly as a board game, is indeed the board game that your little sister is most likely to upend in frustration, but it was originally intended as an economics instruction game. Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game, created by Lizzie Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy that rewards individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth and to promote the Henry George's economic theories on taxation. And despite its current use as primarily an entertainment game, it is actually serving its original function.

One of the lessons that Monopoly imparts comes from a strict interpretation of the printed rules versus the “House” rules as they are often played. (For example, in the printed rules, fines are NOT placed in the center of the board and given to the player who lands on the “Free Parking” space, but this is often the case in “House” rules.)  Strictly according to the printed rules, there is the opportunity to create a housing shortage. This happens when a player, such as your annoying little brother, buys all of the houses and refuses to turn them into hotels. Thus, when you want to buy a house, the bank has nothing to sell you.

Cornering the market on a commodity is bad for the game, or the economy. My father worked for Gorham Silver and that business was ruined when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the market on silver in the late 1980s. The Hunt brothers intended to make a large profit by forcing anyone, such as Gorham, to have to come to them if they wanted to continue using silver. In reality what they did is to drive up the price of silver for everyone and lose a tremendous amount of money for themselves  in the process.

But back to Monopoly. It is considered a dirty tactic to create a housing shortage. It creates an impasse in the game. But the actual rules say that it is allowed. The “House” rules find a way to create more houses so that there is no shortage. This may involve forcing your little brother to turn his houses into hotels, or using chits for houses. There is a lesson here.

When the currency is a commodity, it is possible to corner the market on that commodity/currency. We do not currently have bank runs or a collapse of the economy but this is what happens when a commodity/currency becomes concentrated in the hand of a few and the economy tries to respond. The alternative is a fiat currency, which is what the US dollar has been since the 1930s. But there is a problem when those issuing the chits, fiat, get carried away such as the Confederacy, Weimar Germany, or post Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Having too much currency is just as bad as having a shortage of currency. The Confederacy and Weimar Germany actually printed too much currency. Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela did it unintentionally by price controls such that there became a surplus of currency because you could earn currency but not spend it

The strict rules can often bring a game to an impasse. The “House” is NOT interested in the outcome of the game, but the continuation of that game. The "House", the group, can, and should, change those rules that cause an impasse. But it should be careful in how it does that. Its intention should only be to continue the game, not to change its random outcome.

Newton

 

Good Advice

Sir Isaac Newton came around to my house one day
His face was all sunburned and red
He said he didn't want to sleep in the shade of a tree,
Because an apple might fall on his head
I said, "Sir Isaac, you dumbbell, take my advice
Go right back there and sleep beneath that tree
And if you let that rotten apple fall down on your head,
Why you'll discover gravity"

Maybe Newton only APPEARED to discover gravity!

Newton’s Laws of Motion are:

Law 1. A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force.

Law 2. When a body is acted upon by a force, the time rate of change of its momentum equals the force.

Law 3. If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions.

These laws describe the motion in a flat, Euclidean, spacetime.  If the universe is hyperbolic, and Einstein’s General Relativity is considered, it should be :

Law 1. A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line along a geodesic in spacetime, unless acted upon by a force.

Law 2. When a body is acted upon by a force, the time rate of change of its momentum equals the force.  If a body moves along a geodesic to decrease its energy, it may appear in a Euclidean frame of reference that a force has changed that body's momentum.

Law 3. If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions.

This has an implication on the Lorentz Factor that governs time dilation, T=T₀*γ; length contraction, L=L₀/ γ ; and rest mass, M=M₀*γ.  The Lorentz Factor is typically given as

γ=1/sqrt(1-(v/c)² ).

where 

sqrt    = the square root operation;

v        = velocity, and

c        = the speed of light.   

This has the problem that there is a discontinuity, it is undefined, at a v/c of 1.

In hyperbolic spacetime, this factor would be

γ=1_ln(cosh(v/c)±sinh(v/c))

where 

ln    = the natural logarithm function, a logarithm with  a base of e

This does not have a discontinuity of 1 at a v/c of 1.  At a v/c of 1, the factor is zero. 

It also means that Gravity is NOT a force in hyperbolic spacetime.  It is an apparent force, unlike the other fundamental forces:

• The strong nuclear force: the force responsible for holding quarks together to form hadrons, and holding neutrons and also protons together to form atomic nuclei. The exchange particle that mediates this force is the gluon.
• The electromagnetic force: the familiar force that acts on electrically charged particles. The photon is the exchange particle for this force.
• The weak nuclear force: a short-range force responsible for some forms of radioactivity, that acts on electrons, neutrinos, and quarks. The W and Z bosons are the exchange particles for this force.

The difficulty of including gravity in a unified field theory, and the inability to discover a graviton as the exchange particle, is proposed to be a consequence of the hyperbolic shape of the universe, spacetime.

Newton Law of Gravity, which is from a Euclidean frame of reference, states that the force of gravity is

F=G*(M₁*M₂)/(d₁₂ )²

where:

F             = The force of gravity,

M₁            = Mass one,

M₂            = Mass two,

d₁₂            = The distance between mass one and mass two, and

G            = The Gravitational constant, 6.6743 × 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2.

From a hyperbolic, non-Euclidean, frame of reference there is no force, and the movement of the two masses to a center of mass is a consequence of entropy maximization and the objects moving from their initial positions to their center of mass along a geodesic.

 

F'=G*M₁*M₂*exp (-1/2*d₁₂ )

where:

F’            = The apparent force of gravity,

exp         = the exponential function,

M₁            = Mass one,

M₂            = Mass two,

d₁₂            = The distance between Mass one and Mass two, and

G            = The Gravitational constant, 6.6743 × 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2.

Growth II

 

What Do I Know?

No university, no degree, but lord knows
Everybody's talking 'bout exponential growth
And the stock market crashing in their portfolios
While I'll be sitting here with a song I wrote
Sing, love could change the world in a moment
But what do I know?

You probably know more than you think!

Any exponential growth function can be expressed as a compound growth function. Compound growth functions have a constant and continuous growth. Exponential growth functions have a continuous but not constant growth. However any compound growth rate can be expressed as an exponential function.

If the growth rate, in demand, is 10% per period, then the compound growth formula would be

Future value=Present value*(100%+10%)^x

where x is the number of time periods from the present to the future.

At infinity, this will have a value of infinity. But this assumes that the time periods are also infinite. It is possible for the Future value to consume all of available supply before an infinite time unless the growth in supply is also 10% per year. If it is less than 10% then the future value in demand will exceed the future value in supply long before an infinite number of time periods have been reached. In other words, in compound growth you will approach infinity in a finite period. In exponential growth you will only approach infinity only after an infinite period.

The rich have a disparaging comment about the poor that they are poor because they live off principal instead of living off interest. Doh, if the present value, principal, is zero then it makes no difference what the interest rate is, the future value will always be zero. The ideal is to have enough principal that you CAN live off the interest. But if your living expenses are higher than the interest on your principal then your principal gets reduced and the next Future value will be smaller because the Present value in that next time period is also smaller.

An exponential growth can be made from this compound growth

Present value*(100%+10%)^x=Present value*exp(λx)

 if

λ=ln (110%)

In fact any compound growth rate, r%, can be made into an exponential growth if

λ=ln (100%+r%)

If λ is negative, less than zero, this is said to be a decay function, for example a radioactive element decay function, and λ can be converted into a half-life. Long half-lives are stable, good, and short half-lives are radioactive, unstable, bad. When λ is positive, greater than zero, this is said to be a growth function. But λ can still be converted into a time, say a doubling period. But while this will be the inverse, the qualifications are still valid. A long doubling period is good and a short doubling period is bad. Short doubling periods have lots of energy but expire soon. Long doubling periods have less energy but they last longer.

Given that, what should the best growth rate be? The question should be what is the growth rate of a market? The best is arguably an example of the Lake Wobegon effect ( “all the children are above average”) or the Yogi Bear effect (“smarter than the average bear”). If the population is normal, then the maximum, "best", of the crowd should be twice the average of the crowd ( e.g. the Z-score of 99.9% is approximately 2.)

Sustainable growth should thus be twice the growth of the market ( yes a  firm could grow by 10% if the market only grows by 2%, but eventually that firm will have 100% market share.)   The maximum sustainable growth  should not exceed twice the growth of a market. Twice is only sustainable if the average  IS the maximum ( which is only true when the standard deviation is zero, but then that is no longer normal.)

Should that firm enter other markets? Absolutely, but that growth still should not exceed 2 times the growth in its combined markets ( the original market plus the new market). If the best growth rate is compared to the revenue from the original market, the growth in  revenue will appear to be greater than the growth in the original market. But this is only because of the choice of the dominator in that growth rate.

This also defines the size of the new market. If a firm wishes a growth rate, r, that is more than twice the growth of its market, it should pursue new markets whose value, V, is larger than its current market according to.

Proposed Growth Rate=

2*(V_{Old Market}*r_{Old Market} +V_{New Market}*r_{New Market} )/(V_{Old Market)} +V_{New Market})

This also explains why you should pursue new markets.  If your old market is buggy whips and you don't go after any new markets, then the best growth rate you can expect have is twice the growth rate of the old market. Having 100% of the buggy whip market will still mean a growth rate of 0% since the buggy whip market is not growing.

Monkeypox

 

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp)

Wait a minute, it stopped hailing,
Guys are swimming, gals are sailing.
Playing baseball, gee that's betta,
Mudda, Fadda, kindly disregard this letter!

Patience you must have, my young padawan.

If your time period is truly short, like the one day in this song, you can have a quite different impression than if you look at a longer time period. There is a difference between weather and climate; between revolution  and evolution; between winning a battle, tactics, and winning a war, strategy; etc. Confusing these is NOT good. There is also a difference between risk and likelihood. Risk is the product of likelihood AND consequences. If the consequences are low then the risk is probably acceptable, regardless of the likelihood. If the consequences are high, then the risk can be unacceptable even when the likelihood is low.

This came up during a conversation on the risk of monkeypox if you have already been vaccinated against smallpox. Smallpox was eliminated and the vaccination against smallpox stopped in 1972. The LIKELIHOOD  of getting monkeypox if you have been vaccinated against smallpox is 15%. The likelihood of successfully filling an inside straight in poker is about 8% so if you think that 15% is acceptable, can we play poker please???

The CONSEQUENCES of getting monkeypox are considerable, so that the risk of getting monkeypox might be unacceptable even if the likelihood of getting monkeypox is low. Don’t be confused.