Ruminatrix
getting technical
And life takes another turn. Two weeks ago I started a new job, which is once again taking up time otherwise available for posting.
The firm makes software for financial institutions running mutual funds, pension funds and the like. Clients use it to model investment portfolios and to create strategies for neutralizing various forms of market risk. I can't describe anything in detail here -- and your eyes would glaze over if I did -- but the architecture of this strange vessel in which I work is a flowchart: databases, engines, modular bits and other thingummies behind a shiny graphic interface.
New components are being added all the time: position-loading is being transformed into XML; yield curves are described; scenarios (or sudden market shifts) modeled. Then another computation engine handles the analytical processes: comparing portfolios to benchmarks, calculating the effect of assorted changes users wish to make to their positions.
I'm just responsible for the docs: the user manuals, support and help screens and other technical materials. Translating engineer-speak and (some) financialese into something less arcane. It means using language that is
- precise
- unambiguous
- terse
- affectless
In the evenings i'm not much good for more than a little browsing and lurking. But my hope is that the daily discipline of writing the technical material will get me back in the habit of producing other stuff. Anyone have a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance around?
Wednesday, Sep 17, 2003
where the time goes
I just can't believe it's been a month since my last post. My bar job at M0rrell's (now mercifully at an end) was a big drain on my mental resources and my physical energy. I felt tired all the time. And for some reason it made me feel perpetually hungry too...
But now I'm working days and Theo's room (a construction zone for the past three weeks) is just about put back together again, so it's time to resume posting. Gotta hit the post button now now now. Aaaah, I feel better already.
Wednesday, Aug 20, 2003
cui bono?
Whoever blew up hotel housing the United Nations' Baghdad HQ yesterday did something cleverly nasty. Attacking U.N. personnel rather than soldiers challenges the US military's claim to be fully in control of Iraq, to be the "controlling authority". Earlier attacks blowing holes in pipelines and water mains posed no more than an inconvenience to a population which has survived both embargo and invasion. Persuading the U.N. to pull its personnel out, on the other hand, could be a major setback to U.S. efforts to legitimize the new regime it wishes to sponsor. Opposition to the occupation does not appear to be tailing off, pace Mr Wolfowitz.
Of course it's impossible to tell who did it, but my money would be on anyone except the Ba'athist remnants -- it looks much more like outsiders' work. And Iraq has pretty open borders all around.
Speaking of Mr Wolfowitz (who famously finds the post-1945 history of France to be an apt model for the present political development of Iraq), I'm currently reading Robert Gildea's Marianne in Chains, a study of West-Central France (the lower Loire valley in particular) under the German occupation of 1940-45. At the mouth of the Loire lies St Nazaire which was an important base for the Kriegsmarine's U-boats, like La Rochelle further south. Towards the end of the war, both cities were encircled in "pockets" which lasted until the fall of Berlin, but weren't really attacked either.
Enough time has now elapsed for the myth of constant shortages, repression and ardent resistance to give way to a more nuanced view of everyday wartime life, and collaboration of all types. For example, it's long been known that most resistance activity until the summer of 1944 was organized by PCF (i.e. Communist Party) militants known as FTP, who were hostile to the London-based Gaullists. The Catholic majority of the population (most ardently anti-communist) agreed with the German occupiers that such acts constitured "banditry" and "terrorism." They blamed reprisals such as the shootings of hostages on the resisters themselves, especially if the hostages were Jews or Freemasons. Gildea, (a disciple of the late historian Richard Cobb) discovers in the archives the stories of public officials who played very morally ambiguous roles, quite incompatible with the myth of heroic resistance and evil collaborators... I'll post more on the book later.
Saturday, Aug 16, 2003
service interruption
Sounds of the big blackout, likely soon to be forgetten: the explosive silence I heard at 8 Friday morning when a loud generator, the only one in the neighborhood, suddenly cut out and died; and the rolling cheers of unseen voices all around as the juice came back on at 9:03 last night. Laughter and the sound of guitars, during our backyard cookouts the last two nights.
I was in midtown at work when the electrical failure hit us Thursday afternoon around 4:15. We had a few stressed-out folks stop in to get some shade and water, but the crowds of commuters started their long walks home within a half hour, as if people just knew what to do, even with cell-phone networks down. We put stuff into fridges, locked up, hit the streets.
It's the third time I've been in huge crowds of New Yorkers in the past two years (9/11, February's chilly antiwar march, this) and people are used to getting on with things. Pedestrian traffic shared the streets with cars, with surprisingly little fractiousness or impatience despite the lack of traffic lights. On the walk home in the East Village, car radios were on, providing the only source of information on the scale of the failure. Autonomous power systems mounted on rubber tires -- how clever!
The vibe was even warmer on Clinton -- LES residents really know how to hang out on the street. Everyone was happy not to be stuck underground or in a high-rise elevator. Some kid had a monster sound system blasting merengue from the back of his trike.
Yesterday MB drove Theo out to Long Island (she's going on a camping trip with her cousins Derek and Deedee) so I went along for the ride, a fix of air-conditioning (!) and to hear some radio news. There wasn't much to hear -- the causes are still obscure, but it wasn't triggered by excess demand. No solutions were being suggested, but the grid was being brought back slowly online.
However if this outage does lead to improvements in the supply network, it does seem ironic that this most anti-big-government of Presidents would oversee a project requiring massive public spending and even energy price re-regulation.
As others have noted, it would be good practice to have one of these power outages once in a while. I found it useful:
- --to be reminded of the need for unmediated human contact and conversation;
- --to see how much we depend upon the electric grid (and just how little I know about the way it works);
- --to show me how little I really need some other things: TV, cell phones, DVDs, devices that require more than four batteries...
- --to be reminded that some problems are quite unrelated to the endless War on Terror.
We now resume regularly scheduled programming...
Tuesday, Aug 12, 2003
..And Back
Weather forecasts threatening continuous rain and thunder-showers kept us from wandering far from Shelter [Island]. The actual weather, even if overcast, was delightful (breezes 10-20 mph), so we could have taken Blue further than we did. Why does the Weather Channel turn every threat of precipitation into a potential calamity requiring constant monitoring? Just to keep us glued to the tube, I suppose... Me, I'd rather get wet.
Meantime, Theo, back on the water for the first time in a year, got her sea legs back and did excellent service as dinghy captain.
Friday, Aug 08, 2003
Out
Off to sail for three days with Theo, a short passage: Shelter Island NY to Newport RI. Hope we get some wind between the thundershowers of August!
Thursday, Aug 07, 2003
Global warming good for wine-growers
Acidity versus ripeness: if it's not quite a paradox, Asimov argues the case for the beneficial effect of the warming trend -- unless you're making eisswein, growing gruner, or other cool-climate varietals:
Global warming is a fearsome proposition, dredging up visions of rising tides engulfing shoreline cities, and other cataclysms. For winemakers, especially those in historically cool grape-growing regions, the changing climate has already markedly affected their lives and wines.
"This has been great, no doubt," said Johannes Selbach, speaking by telephone last week from Zeltingen, Germany, where his family has grown grapes along the Mosel River since the 17th century. "Just look at the row of fine vintages we've had. From 1988 through this year it has been strikingly warmer than any time I can remember. Everybody talks about it here."
Monday, Jul 28, 2003
Milestones
My grandfather Jerzy Casimir Pajaczkowski turned 109 last week -- belated birthday greetings to dziadzio. This week my parents will mark the 50th anniversary of their own marriage. I can't be there to offer my congratulations in person, but my sister Claire is marrying her partner Barry in a civil ceremony on the day in question, which seems very appropriate. They have two sons, the oldest already ten.
And two days ago we attended the funeral of Walter, my father-in-law's younger brother. His interest in genealogy led him to trace his own ancestry back to the Middle Ages through extensive email correpondence with parish archivists in Norway. Walter encouraged Theo's own sense of history, drawing an elaborate family tree of her Nelson/Nielsen forebears. Of course he found there were Norwegians and Swedes taking Polish princess-brides back around the first millennium. Back then Norsemen or Vikings were skilled at combining raiding with providing what we would now call "security services." More sedentary peoples such as the Franks bought them off with land (the Duchy of Normandy) and money. They had sailed their longboats around the strait of Gibraltar to create kingdoms in Sicily and Apulia, contested by Fatimid caliphs in North Africa. As the Varangians they were professional bodyguards to the emperors of Byzantium. Trading up the Black Sea coast, and up and down the Dnieper, Volga and other rivers they became the "the Rus" for whom Russia is still named. They engirdled Europe and almost certainly "discovered" North America but I suspect they couldn't find enough booty to make it worth staying on. Walter wandered less far afield, moving from Bronxville New York to Long Valley New Jersey, but was a great explorer in his own way.
Closer to home our own Theo (b 1993), who is not descended from the circus entertainer who married Justinian and became Empress of Byzantium (d 548) -- at least not as far as we know -- has her first sleepaway camp upstate this week. Cell-phone communication is making the separation both easier and [a little] harder.
Friday, Jul 11, 2003
It's about oil
It sounds impossible (or oxymoronic) but there's a very interesting piece by John Cassidy in the New Yorker on the Iraqi oil industry -- past, present and future. In the print edition only, unfortunately (what is it with these people?):
Critics in Europe and the Arab world suspect that [the Bush Administration's] agenda includes encouraging Iraq to leave OPEC, thereby challenging the oil cartel's power to set prices. Attempting to undermine OPEC would be a big snub to Saudi Arabia, America's most important ally in the Arab world, which dominates the organization. But some people in the Administration seem willing to countenance such a move. One of them is Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, whom the Pentagon flew to Iraq during the war. "We have a new ally in the Middle East -- one that is secular, modern, and pro free market," Francis Brooke, an American political strategist who has been Chalabi's adviser for almost a decade, told me. "It's time to replace the Saudis with the Iraqis." Since the war ended, Iraq has missed two OPEC meetings, raising further questions about its relationship with the oil cartel...The Iraqi Republic (founded in 1958) had only a few years of unalloyed prosperity (1972-80) before Saddam's ten-year war with Iran (and other ruinous arms races) drained profits. That war in turn severely damaged the Rumalia oil fields in southern Iraq, engendering the crisis that led to the invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent UN sanctions. So what are the odds of prosperity and peace under the new order?
Cassidy estimates that with a population estimated to be about 30 million in 2010, and $55bn/year in oil revenues, Iraqis would each earn around $5 per day. While this is above the current World Bank poverty line of $2 per day, Iraqis would still be much poorer than Kuwaitis or citizens of the Gulf Emirates. "If Iraq is to prosper during the decades ahead, it will have to diversify its economy and other sources of income, something that will only be possible only if Iraq is transformed into a peaceful, stable land with an effective and stable leadership."
The alternative is long-term civil war, as in Angola, Congo, Indonesia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone: "developing nations with valuable natural resources, [where] violent internal conflicts are the norm."
Wednesday, Jul 02, 2003
Fun in the sun
A new issue of New York Review of Books features: Norman Mailer on GWB qua male model and model of masculinity. There's also Luc Sante on Arthur Kempton's book Boogaloo from the gospel roots thru George Clinton to Tupac on down; and some Elizabeth Hardwick Russian litcrit. (The print edition also has an excellent piece on Iraqi Shiites, plus Misha Glenny on murders and the mafia state in Serbia, by the way).
Though why you'd want to read when it's gloriously sunny outside I don't know. Find a shady tree.