Emptying out the mailbag and clearing the history #12

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Other mailbags can be found here. Keep in mind a lot of this is email conversations, comment replies, or some random interesting things I’ve found. By their nature they are not as thorough or complete as a post on one topic.

Here’s what’s covered in this installment:

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–Joe Montana’s non head issues in post-NFL life. This is the stuff not getting talked about enough. It can only compound whatever head issue(s) there may be.

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-Cool fan made Tesla video:

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-Highly recommend The Big Short. Book and movie. One of the rare times the movie isn’t a drop off.

One of the main characters, Michael Burry, personally made $100 million, and $725 million for his investors. After fees, a return of 489%. (Before fees 726%!)

Despite this, afterwards not a single customer called asking for his services. None. Most of his investors pulled their money out. After making $725 million! There is a line in the book, “Michael Burry was right, and the world hated him for it.” He closed up shop and now personally manages only his own money.

You can be this right, and still have issues. One theory for why the lack of customers is he has Asperger’s, didn’t like communicating with his investors, and apparently was fairly brief when he did, which would only happen through email.

To one degree, who the hell cares if your goal is solely making money? Which is what investing is to most. To another degree, this shows how important communication can be. “I don’t care you just made me X amount of money, or can benefit me Y amount. You’re kind of weird and mean.”

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–Midlife exercise blood pressure, heart rate, and fitness relate to brain volume 2 decades later.–

Exercise can lead to a bigger brain. Something I hit on two years ago in Worried about dementia? Stop thinking and start moving.

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-This wild stuff:

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-This crazy shit:

I have a couple posts about automation and personal training / exercise coming.

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–Differential activation of scapular muscles, during arm elevation, with and without trigger points–

This statement in the abstract is misleading:

“Latent Myofascial Trigger Points (LMTrPs) are defined as certain pain- free hyperirritable spots in a muscle taut band which lead to muscle activation pattern alternation in both loaded and unloaded conditions during scaption.”

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–The chips are down for Moore’s law

–An end to scaling: Intel’s next-generation chips will sacrifice speed to reduce power

If unfamiliar, Moore’s law is the reason behind the digital revolution. Why things have gotten so much smaller, yet so much cheaper. An Apple computer was thousands of dollars 30 years ago. Now you can have a way better computer, the size of a phone, for $700. Why 15 years ago it seemed like you had to buy a new computer every two years, because it was already outdated. (It felt outdated within 6 months, but by two years you couldn’t even use the thing anymore because no new software could run on it.)

As alluded to in this post, this has seemed to be slowing one way or another, e.g. I’ve had the same laptop for over five years, and have had no problems.

But now the semiconductor association, and Intel, are formally announcing their plans to stop this speed of progress. With Intel saying they will shift their focus on other metrics. In other words, they can’t keep this pace of progress up. It’s gotten too hard; too costly.

That doesn’t mean digital progress will halt, but it has to mean something. What I’m most interested in with this is many out there predict these panaceas. Machines which are able to compute our entire genetic code. Artificial intelligence which can figure out anything. In the least, if the exponential progress slows, which it looks like his happening, these things are much, much further out than it looked like. If ever. As the computer power assumed to be available / needed for these things doesn’t appear it will be as easily achieved.

If you’re curious, one reason the increase in power is becoming so hard is due to issues with heat dissipation. Produce more power = produce more heat. Which may end up being the real problem with climate change; not CO2.

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–Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness– I read this after watching The Aviator with Leonardo Dicaprio. I came away from the movie thinking “man, what an awesome dude.” It propelled me to read the book and find out more “how did somebody do all this?” I came away from the book thinking, “uh, this guy kind of sucked.”

I highly recommend watching the movie, then reading the book. (Whereas with something like The Martian, and most books to movies, the other way is better.) I was really let down by how the movie portrayed Hughes, compared to what he really was. Maybe the book was biased, but a lot of the numbers were public record, and he seemed horrendous at business. However, because he had the never-ending capital to take never-ending (millions of dollars of) losses, due to his father’s business which was given to him, and run by someone else -he was never even around the place- he could get away with it.

The only thing he apparently excelled at was avoiding taxes. In fact, he would often make terrible business decisions just to avoid taxes. He started a medical charity…to avoid taxes. He made a lot of money off the government.

He is lauded in history as a genius, industrialist, womanizer. Based on the book, he was barely any of it. Even with women, he had his aides pick them up for him. If he didn’t have the money he did, one wonders if he had any game at all. Perception seems strongly not reality with him.

How often does this hold true for the people put on a pedestal by society? Where their best skills may be merely luck and public relations. And the people who really did the cool stuff, like Hughes’ engineers, are barely known.

To Hughes’ credit, in a few circumstances, like some of his record setting flights, he significantly credits his engineers. Maybe he wasn’t so much the problem. Maybe it’s more disturbing a guy like this would be held in such high regard by society. Where we’re the problem.