Recent content by BWV

And

did you read my post? The point was IF a civilization developed the capability of interstellar travel and IF they placed a value on the survival of their species THEN an incentive would exist to expand outside their solar system

Outliving your home star appears to me the only economic argument for interstellar travel. A technological civilization capable of expanding to another star system would possess a strong incentive to ensure the survival of their species (assuming they placed a value on that). However, that...

Which comes back to the Fermi Paradox - if ‘angels’ ever evolved somewhere in the galaxy and developed the tech and willingness for interstellar travel - even with drones at say 0.1C - then where are they? Galaxy is old enough to have been completely colonized by self-replicating von Neumann probes

Oh sure, time series of financial ratios that normalize share prices are used all the time relative to log returns and other variables. FWIW E/P is easier to work with than P/E

The log return, which is the first difference, is mostly all the matters with stock time series. Stock prices themselves are not stationary (vol is proportional to price) so you cant do OLS on them. But that is true with most macro econ data as well, you cant do OLS on 50 years of US total GDP...

If traders can abnormally profit from asset prices with autocorrelation then autocorrelation will cease to exist. You can’t trade GDP or employment. Therefore one can safely ignore it in the returns of financial assets. Also why lognormal distributions work well enough

Simple regression is the norm for financial time series as autocorrelation is close enough to zero. Just need to take log returns to get a stationary series

Fritz Haber is a fascinating and tragic figure. On one hand, his eponymous process saved 2.7 billion human lives by some estimates. However he also led the German chemical weapons program in World War One and developed Zyklon B, which the Nazis used some 25 years later to murder his surviving...

Have a separate, cheap coffee grinder I use for spices. Have become enamored of middle eastern coffee, so been grinding cardamon and cinnamon in it and adding a couple tablespoons to the coffee in my French press

A planet with abundant peat that had been around long enough would have coal, the others do not scale. A living forest cannot compete with millions of years of dead forest as a sustainable energy source The US consumed 1,100 petajoules of coal in 1870 vs about 1 PJ of whale oil (source)...

A technological civilization needs a first, easily obtainable energy source. Another interesting wrinkle is that it took very particular conditions to create Earth’s vast coal deposits - plant matter in wetlands needs to be buried quickly in peat. A planet that developed without these...

Should someone call John and check his progress? It’s been a couple of years, he should have solved one by now.

If you have a long evening with nothing else to do

definitions are not always precise, generally serialism refers to applying 12-tone ordering an permutation techniques to not only pitch, but rhythm, dynamics and other aspects. Webern was the primary influence on Boulez, Babbitt and others who took this direction after WW2, so its a bit hazy.