log entries of timotheus

Did anyone see this story? Apparently, John P. “Pat” Philbin, FEMA’s former external affairs director, held a fake press conference last tuesday regarding the Southern California fires, complete with FEMA staff members posing as reporters..

No genuine journalists attended, although they were given a conference call number they could use to listen in — but not ask questions. A half-dozen questions were asked at the event — by FEMA staff members posing as reporters.

“At the end of the briefing, questions were asked. I should have intervened and I didn’t,” Philbin said.

Philbin said he may have asked a question at the very end of the briefing because, at that point, “the ships had sailed.”

“We’ve worked really hard over the past year to improve our transparency,” Philbin said. Philbin took over in March, as FEMA was going through a major reorganization because of its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “I feel absolutely horrible that this happened,” he said.

“I think it was one of the dumbest and most inappropriate things I’ve seen since I’ve been in government,” Chertoff said over the weekend.

I don’t know who is doing the PR for polar bears, but it doesn’t get much better than this.

Polar Bears playing

So cute!

I just found out that Dwarfstar Games allows you to download them for free.

I’ve heard good things about these tabletop games (Star Viking!). I should take them down with me next time I head to Berkeley..

I was reading Jack McDevitt’s excellent Infinity Beach several days ago, and ran across a really neat idea. He said it in passing, and I had to re-read the passage at least ten times before I grasped the awesomeness of it.

Ok, so we know that light travels at a certain speed (2.998 X 10^8 m/s in a vacuum). There are stars in the heavens that we see every night, stars that are actually dead. They’ve burned out, but they are so far away we’re seeing the light that was emitted from them hundreds of years ago. It’s neat.

What I never really thought about is that the opposite is true. Alpha Centauri is a star that is 4.37 light-years away. So the pinprick of light we see as the star, actually left on its journey 4.37 years ago.

Here is the kicker. If I was in a starship orbiting Alpha Centauri, and turned my powerful optical telescope to see my home planet of earth, I would be seeing 4.37 years IN THE PAST. That is, the image of earth I’d be seeing actually left earth 4.37 years ago. In a sense, it’s looking backward in time.

Think of the implications of this. I have a starship, and I travel to a point 515 light-years away, I could stop, train my telescope to earth, look out on the Atlantic ocean and witness the voyage of Columbus discovering the New World. (2007 – 515 = 1492)

In the future, will historians make travels to far off places, to specifically take advantage of this trait of light?

An interesting story from the New York Times regarding the parallels in how we define our “torture that isn’t torture” in prisons, and how the Gestapo utilized nearly the same wording.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Madness you say?!

View flickr images here.

Start with the first image, then work around. I have my steps written there. I think it’s pretty good myself.

Hardest part? Flipping the whole egg at once. That is tough, unless you have crazy experience with it like Kimi.

Picking companies to invest in is a tricky thing. Assuming you don’t just pick stocks randomly, choosing a company that will take your money and turn it into more is hard. Back in my folly-filled youth, I thought it was easy. This was because it was the dot com era, and basically everything went up. It was the way people thought about real estate now. (or now() – 180 days) Unfortunately, that is not the case when things go bad.

But I digress. I’ve been saving up my hard earned moola for a while now, and I decided to invest some of it. Now, investing your money is something that holds a special place in my heart. I’ve always been fascinated by it. When I took a finance course at CSUS, I changed my major to finance, to better understand this magical ideal. I mean, it’s earning money for doing nothing. Who wouldn’t like that??

I graduated with my B.S. in Business Administration, with a Finance concentration. I say this not to make you all bow in submission to my investment powers, but to let you know I at least was PRESENT in lectures on investments. (Minus the four classes I could miss without losing points.)

I can reduce my cornucopia of investment knowledge into several bullet points.

• Pick a company that isn’t wallowing in debt. Makes sense right? It’s a personal thing; I don’t want the company being too agressive and risky in trying to make the company grow. The quick way to check it to look at the Debt-to-Equity ratio. The Debt-to-Equity ratio gives you the total debt of the company divided by the shareholders equity (what all the shares are worth). For example, Bobs Bean World owes $500 in loans, but all the shares in Bobs Bean World are worth $1000, then the ratio is 0.5. I don’t like the Debt-to-Equity ratio to be much more than 1.0 in a company I look to invest in.
• Pick a company that makes money with the money it has. I want to know that the managers of a company are making good use of the money they already have. For that, I look at the Return On Equity ratio. The ROE (as we savvy investors call it, hah) is the net income of the company, divided by the shareholders equity. I like to see over a 15% ROE every year for the last 10 years at least.
• See that it’s doing better than other companies in the same industry. So if there’s two clay making companies you are interested in, which one consistently makes more profit? Initial scan says to pick that one.
• Day-trading is stressful. I’m picking stocks I will hold onto for a long, long time. They are companies I believe in, and who I think will continue to be profitable and make the world a better place. I’m not looking for a quick 10% growth then sell. I don’t have the time for it, plus I already have grey hair.
• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, AKA diversify. Putting all your money in different companies that are all in the computer hardware industry can be a bad thing. Putting all your money in just one company is a risky move. I like to have at least nine stocks in my portfolio, touching at least four different industries.

How do I start looking for companies to invest in? I start by using a stock screener. It lets me make some simple guidelines to start out with, like “find me stocks that are in the medical equipment industry, that have an average ROE of 15% or greater, Debt/Equity ratio of 1.0 or less, etc”. It returns all the stocks that fit the criteria. Here is an image of the settings I use in my stock screener of choice. (Which is MSN Deluxe Stock Screener. It only runs in IE, which is evil I know, but it’s the best one I’ve found.)

It is a handy way to quickly find companies that fit your criteria.

Once I have a company that I like the look of, I get financial reports on them, to look at their ROE and other items in detail. These are not free. I do my trading on scottrade.com, which gives access to reports to their users. 90% of my info I can find on different investment sites, but I haven’t found any place that shows you ROE’s broken down by year, except for financial reports.

Anyway, here are the different companies I chose to invest in. All of them meet my criteria, for the most part.

• STX – Seagate Technology
  • Seagate has been making Hard Drives and Storage options for forever. They’re darn good at it.
• GRMN – Garmin Ltd.
  • Garmin deals in GPS technology. All the ‘good’ GPS goodies is made by Garmin
• FLIR – FLIR Systems Inc.
  • FLIR Systems is “engaged in the design, manufacture and marketing of thermal imaging and infrared camera systems.” It’s my guilty pleasure. Yes, they do some military application, but honestly being able to see in the dark is just too cool.
• DNEX – Dionex Corp.
  • Dionex “designs, manufactures, markets and services range of liquid chromatography systems, sample preparation devices and related products that are used by chemists to separate and quantify the individual components of complex chemical mixtures in many major industrial, research and laboratory markets.” They’re one of my Biotech/Science helper companies I picked.
• SIAL – Sigma-Aldrich Corp.
  • “Sigma-Aldrich Corporation develops, manufactures, purchases and distributes a range of biochemicals and organic chemicals. These chemical products and kits are used in scientific and genomic research, biotechnology, pharmaceutical development, the diagnosis of disease and as key components in pharmaceutical and other high-technology manufacturing.”
• CSCO – Cisco Systems Inc.
  • Cisco is the King of Routers, and other Internet related hardware.
• SYK – Stryker Corp.
  • “Stryker Corporation (Stryker) is a medical technology company with a range of products in orthopedics and a presence in other medical specialties. The Company’s products include implants used in joint replacement, trauma, craniomaxillofacial and spinal surgeries; biologics; surgical, neurologic, ear, nose and throat (ENT) and interventional pain equipment; endoscopic, surgical navigation, communications and digital imaging systems, as well as patient handling and emergency medical equipment.” People are always going to be breaking bones.. Plus the name sounds so impressive.
• DCI – Donaldson Company, Inc.
  • Donaldson Company makes air filtration systems and filters, on an industrial scale. As emissions gets more and more regulated, these guys will just have more business.
• SOPW – Solar Power Inc.
  • Solar Power Inc is a local solar panel company. They’re putting up retail stores, which is a really good thing, and will be putting them all over the world. This is a little bit of a gamble, the stock just came on the market in September. It has the potential to be massive though.
• NALFX – New Alternatives Fund
  • New Alternatives “invests most of assets in companies that provide a contribution to a clean and sustainable environment. It usually invests at least 25% of assets in common shares of companies which have an interest in alternative energy. The fund invests in U.S. companies as well as foreign ones without limitation on the assets allocation. It is a social responsible fund.” This is my only fund in my portfolio, but I think it’s a fairly stable, responsible fund to own.

Invest at your own risk, I am just giving you this info to maybe introduce some people to the exciting and dangerous world of investments..

This week I took the money I’ve been saving up and invested in the stock market. I’m working on a post that highlights all the companies I just invested in, and why I chose them. I’m hoping this might be a really simple intro into the investing world for people.

People who don’t want to be Gordon Gecko.

Ok my experiment with polyphasic sleep didn’t work out so well; I could never wake up afer my short “core sleep” cycle.

My reason for wanting to try polyphasic sleep is that when I arrive home from work, I’m tired. I eat, exercise, and then it’s 7ish. It’s not bedtime, but I’m worn out from work, so don’t work on my projects I have or whatever. Instead, I either read or watch anime or play a game. Those aren’t bad activities, but it’s a cycle I want to change.

However, I might be over thinking this. Tonight I’m going to try and take a nap tonight around 7ish, after dinner and exercising, when I’m normally entering my tired state. I’ll sleep for 90-100 min, which is the average length of a sleep cycle. Then I’ll get up around 8:30, and see how I feel, and stay awake until I feel tired again. I’m thinking I’ll try to get the total amount of sleep I used to get. That means I’d just need another 4.5hr nap or so before work.

I hope this works. Either way though, it’s fun to approach sleep like an experiment.

I found this theme, which I like. I changed the banner to a pretty image I found off Flickr, by the user Damian 78. Update: I didn’t notice until after I had cropped the image that it was ‘No Derivative Work’. I emailed Damian asking permission, and he said it was fine! Communication is cool.

I’m in the process of utilizing LibraryThing. I’m making a database of the books I own, read, or checked out from the library to read. There’s a plugin like thing on the right there, showing you the books I’m currently reading. At the bottom is a link to the books I’ve read. It will get much longer than it is, I’m sure. I thought it was nifty though to show other peoples what I’m currently reading. Clicking the image link will take you to the book on amazon, and clicking the text will take you to the LibraryThing entry on it.