Note:  I ramble a lot in this post, and I’m not sure I agree with everything I said, but I’m starting back to work today so I don’t have a lot of time to muck with it and I’m trying to get content out, so… you’ve been warned.  If you want some interesting reading on the topic, here’s a few links:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/12/news/international/short_selling_ban/

http://arstechnica.com/apple/guides/2011/08/does-this-metric-make-my-company-look-big.ars

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/the-4-scariest-economic-graphs-ive-seen-this-year/242997/

http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/12/markets/high_frequency_trading/index.htm?eref=mrss_igoogle_business

http://efinance.org.cn/cn/aboutme/cmx3.pdf 

….

I just entered West Virginia.  This is because I’m on a trip and driving to the beach, having spent the night and dropped off a couple of dogs in Kentucky (with people [well… family], not just anywhere you know), we’re now safely ensconced in a Jeep Liberty, the four of us (two real people, two seventeen year olds) enjoying the extra space the dogs left us.  Traveling this way means that you see a lot of countryside and inevitably have random conversations with family members you never see about politics and economics.

In particular, since the world economy has taken a bit of a dive lately, I figure it’s time for my personal rant on the topic.  Let me start by saying that I’m not fond of economics, at least not formally.  This stems mostly from an unfortunate economics teacher in college and my background in not-being-stupid.  In one of our early classes, the professor drew an x-y axis on the chalkboard, placed a single data point, and after only a few moments of discussion drew a very attractive wavy line through it and called it a “supply-and-demand” curve like this:

Anyone that is not very upset by that chart should stop reading now, so that I do not offend you, and immediately go unfriend me on Facebook or put me in your “icky” circle on Google+ or something.

Here’s the math 101 short course for anyone that ignored my previous paragraph:  you can’t draw a curve through only one point of data, because you don’t know which way the curve should go.  It takes two points just to make a straight line, and at least three points to make a curve (and normally lots more unless you’re sure what shape the curve has).  Is it a one-humped camel, or a two-humped camel?  Or a sea-serpent?  You get the idea.  My relationship with formal economics went downhill from there.

Now that’s just the taste in my mouth – I admit it’s hugely important to study and understand how economies work.  I am currently undergoing a microeconomic experiment by having just given the aforementioned 17 year olds $100 apiece to buy their own stuff for this trip so they won’t bother me and will hopefully learn the value of a dollar.  Already they have passed up $7 slices of pizza to save money, so we’re learning something.

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I’ve been a Sprint user for over 10 years, at least according to Amanda, who cheerfully explained to me why my cell phone bill never makes sense but that they appreciate my loyalty anyway as she sold me my new phone a couple of weeks ago.

My new phone is the HTC EVO 3D, but enough about that for now. First, it’s important to talk about my PREVIOUS phone, which was the very underrated Samsung Moment.

The Moment was a very early generation Android phone which managed to hit just about all the design elements I wanted. Despite being a bit too slow (Angry Birds never played quite right) and missing out on simple things like multi-touch which Samsung apparently left out to get it to market quickly and inexpensively, it was one of my favorite phones. My Moment was a replacement for a Palm Treo which dutifully kept by my side for several years (forever in smartphone land).

The Moment was a wide slide-out keyboard styled phone. If anyone is reading this that designs phone keyboards, go pick this up and play with it — it’s the best. The keys are clearly separated and slightly raised so that touch-typing, such that is is on a teensy-weensy keyboard is actually possible. I wasn’t quite able to bang out entire novellas without looking, but I could get pretty far into a decent text message with minimal mistakes while watching Netflix. The keyboard rocked.

Moreover, the Moment set aside the typical 4-button Android interface (Home, Menu, Back, Search) that seems prolific, instead opting for the three required buttons (Home, Menu, Back), and two buttons dedicated to phone operation (Pickup and Hangup, where the Hangup button also acted as a power button for the overall phone). Most importantly, though, the phone had a tiny touchpad that depressed as a select button. I haven’t seen better cursor control on any smart phone, although the Palm and the Blackberry dedicated rollerballs and rockers are fairly close.

The HTC EVO 3D with which I now entertain myself boasts none of this coolness. The more-than-4-inch screen is gorgeous, responsive (the phone is wicked fast), and I’ve whittled down the on-screen keyboard options to a few that I like (I’m currently using SwiftKey X which has a curious habit of predicting words when nothing has been typed — it currently assumes that I want to say “I am a beautiful person.” if I don’t give it any other starting letters). But it’s not as cute or cuddly as the Samsung Moment.

But, and this is very important:

IT TAKES 3D PHOTOS!

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Since no one has yet taken it upon themselves to write my unauthorized biography, it falls to me to make the following piece of information available to the public: I like to bake.

Breads and pies mostly — I’ve got a couple of recipes posted here, including a pie crust that I’m pretty happy about, and a few things I’ve borrowed from other people. I’ve made a few rhubarbs lately that really turned out quite well.

One thing I recently attempted, was a Marbled Rye. This isn’t a terribly difficult bread to make — there are recipes everywhere. I was mostly pleased with it, though — I didn’t have any Caraway seeds, which add a lot of flavor, but the bread looked nice and better than a lot that I’ve made lately.

One thing I experimented with, though, was yeast.

Yeast is one of those things I don’t really understand. This is because the most I remember about the biological classification taxonomy was that everything was an “Animal”, “Vegetable”, or “Mineral” — I have no idea which one a yeast would be. This was a problem for biologists as well, so in 1990 they changed the top three domains to be “Archaea,” “Bacteria,” and “Eukaryota,” which has helped me in no way whatsoever because not only do I still not know which one yeast would be, but I no longer know which one I’m supposed to be, and I much preferred back when I was an Animal and the world made sense.

Anyway, yeast are largely responsible for the existence of Bourbon, which automatically qualifies them as A Good Thing™ no matter what biologists call them. Baker’s yeast, which makes us happy, is “Saccharomyces cerevisiae” (note the interesting comment in Wikipedia about Crohn’s and Colitis on that page — I never knew that), and lives everywhere, so it’s pretty easy to get hold of. You can leave potato-starch filled water out for a while and yeast will just show up. All it does, really, is convert sugar into bubbles and alcohol. In breads, the bubbles (Carbon Dioxide) make the breads rise… in alcohols, the alcohol well, makes the alcohol alcoholic. Yeast is glorious. (more…)