Today I received the following email from Amazon:

Dear Publisher,

We noticed your blog (listed below) has not updated for more than 60 days. Kindle customers expect to receive frequent updates for blogs and news feeds to which they subscribe. Because blogs should update at least once per month, we are cancelling blogs that have not updated in more than 60 days. Accordingly, if you do not publish new updates within 7 days, we will remove your publication from the Kindle Store.

Blog Title: MobKool | Blog ASIN: B002IKLLRG

Sincerely,
Amazon Kindle Team

Of course, by publishing their email, i dodge the bullet.

The other book I read this weekend was Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. This book explores some of the themes of loss, commitment, and Catholicism that later show up in The Comedians, but it’s less mature in many ways. The story is less believable, and the rushed ending is irritating. Overall, though, it’s a an extremely moving account of love gone badly wrong. Many people group Greene with fellow Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh, and After the Affair is often compared to Brideshead Revisited. But, Greene was temperamentally far better equipped to realistically write about sex than Waugh, and this book shows it. There are some hauntingly beautiful passages in the book, particularly the diary excerpts that constitute the center of the book’s plot. My favorite quote, though, is the following passage on unhappiness and happiness:

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem to be aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egoism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace. The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace. It is odd to find myself writing these phrases as though I loved what in fact I hate. Sometimes I don’t recognize my own thoughts. What do I know of phrases like ‘the dark night’ or of prayer, who have only one prayer? I have inherited them, that is all, like a husband who is left by death in the useless possession of a woman’s clothes, scents, pots of cream . . . And yet there was this peace . . .”

For my thoughts on The Comedians, see my post Let Us Go Up to Jerusalem and Die with Him

“We proceed in step-by-step discussion from inference to inference, whereas He conceives through mere intuition. Thus, in order to gain insight into some properties of the circle, of which it possesses infinitely many, we begin with one of the simplest; we take it for a definition and proceed from it by means of inferences to a second property, from this to a third, hence a fourth, and so on. The divine intellect, on the other hand, grasps the essence of a circle senza temporaneo discorso (without the use of the profane reasoning) and thus apprehends the infinite array of it’s properties.”

– Galileo quoted in An Introduction to General Systems Thinking (Silver Anniversary Edition).

What Galileo discusses in this quote is the human inability to conceive of two properties at the same time. Similarly, we are incapable of thinking about two causes acting simultaneously. Instead, we are forced to break them out and think of them one at at time. Incidentally, this was a primary factor in my dissatisfaction with history. By our nature, humans are incapable of writing a coherent history of any event. Instead, we can merely contribute one of many complementary views. But God, as Galileo notes, is defined by his ability to conceive of a thing as a whole; rather than by a sequential consideration of properties. Now, what Galileo defined as Godly, will soon, I believe, be true of computers. One day, machines will have a richer view of the world than humans do, and will think of it in ways we cannot.

I used to play this song over and over and over. Come to think of it, I still do.

I am a huge fan of Nassim Taleb. I think his books The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets are essentially the last word on economics, life, and investing. Despite that, I have recently been pursuing an investing strategy that is fundamentally at odds with what I have learned from him. In his books, he derides common option strategies as “picking up pennies in front of steamrollers.” By this, he means risking a huge loss in return for making small, regular returns. So, how does this apply to me?

While I have been on vacation, I’ve been logging in to my online brokerage, and if the market starts going down, I buy short financials or real-estate ETFs. At the end of the day, I sell them, and I pocket a 1 or 2 percent return for the day (those are the pennies). Now, objectively, this strategy is senseless. If I had simply bought and held the ETFS for two weeks, I would, by my calculations, have made 50% more. Moreover, I ran the real risk of having all of my daily gains, and more, wiped out by an unexpected rise in the stock market (that would be the steamroller). Given that I knew all this, why did I still pursue this strategy?

First, I wasn’t risking much money. More importantly, though, the strategy makes psychological sense, in that it provides the kind of small, regular reward that we all enjoy. Which illustrates a major point of Taleb’s: that humans thrive on small, regular reinforcements of worth, but unfortunately the world is not built that way. Instead, for the most part, we get irregular, large rewards (and blows). Vacations should be a refuge from that irregularity, and a time of small rewards and disappointments. Having said that, I wouldn’t recommend this strategy to anyone. Eventually, you will get burned.

UPDATE: Today, I got run over by the steamroller

The Jana group has officially given up their proxy fight to install a new board at CNET. They’ll thank CBS for the money and go home. See Silicon Alley Insider for the details.