Regruntled.com

1. Hillary’s original narrative was Destiny; she was the historically inevitable first female President, and this was her moment.
2. Obama countered with Change.  His Destiny as the first black President canceled out Hillary’s Destiny as the first female President, and he had none of her baggage.
3. Hillary lurched from narrative to narrative.  She tried to jump on Change, but was too late; Obama already owned Change.  She tried Experience, and went down in a hail of imaginary sniper fire.  Finally she settled on Regular Folks, drinking beer with steelworkers and painting Obama as a latte-swilling, arugula-eating elitist intellectual.  Too late.
4. Meanwhile, McCain went after Obama with War Hero and Experience.  Obama conceded War Hero, but countered Experience with Judgment.
5. Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate undercut Change but added some Experience.  With Hillary out of the picture, he regained Destiny.
6. McCain chose Sarah Palin for VP, diluting his own Experience and canceling out Obama’s Destiny again.  They’re offering Reform as an alternative to Change, and they still have War Hero and Regular Folks.  Palin is about as Regular Folks as you can get, being a non-bitter gun-toting, pro-life hockey mom.  (Has anyone else noticed how much she sounds like Principal Victoria on South Park?)

Where do we go from here?  I suppose it’s possible that the politicians could talk about the issues, but I suspect that things will settle down into two dueling narratives again.

Intrade changes the psychology of politics.  As a voter, I can participate twice, once in the primary and once in the general election.  I can show up at the prescribed time and place like a dog that comes when he’s called.  I can stand in line like a good little citizen, show my photo ID, and choose between the Red Team and the Blue Team.  It doesn’t matter who I vote for.  In a national election, I’m more likely to be run over by a bus on my way to vote than I am to tip the election one way or the other.

As an arbitrageur in a prediction market, I can participate early and often.  I can participate in both the Red and Blue primaries.  I can participate in the contests for Vice President.  I can participate whenever it is convenient for me.  I can participate sitting down, with a refreshing adult beverage by my side.  I can even participate in my sleep.  I woke up this morning and found that my short position in Rudy Giuliani got covered at a profit by a limit order.  So I shorted a few more Fred Thompson.

A voter sees an endless spectacle that tries to motivate him to vote for someone.  As an arbitrageur, I see more opportunities in taking positions against someone, simply because there are always more losers than winners.  I shorted 12 different VP candidates in all, including people I’ve never heard of.

It may not matter who I vote for, but it really does matter who I bet against.

My Intrade contracts for the Democratic nomination just expired (short Hillary Clinton and Al Gore).  Looking around for my next bit of edutainment action, I added up the bids for the top 8 Republican VP candidates and found that there was a 120% chance that one of them would be chosen.  Can you say “arbitrage”?  Sell all 8 for +120, lose one for -100, for a net of +20.

It’s not quite that easy.  With this many contracts, the commissions really add up.  In fact, they eat up about half of the +20, leaving me with +10.  I have to put up margin for all 8 contracts, even though at most one of them will lose.  This dilutes the +10 to a little over 1% return on investment.  It’s hard to get excited over a complicated trade that nets a 1% return.  On the other hand, these contracts will expire in about a week, and 1% in one week is 50% annualized.  Alternatively, I can think of this as “topping off” the Hillary-Gore trade with an extra 1%.

I’ve over-simplified the numbers a bit.  I make the worst-case assumptions on the commissions going in, then I try to improve on that in practice.  I also find that prices are volatile enough that I can trade against my position a bit.  I’m short 8 different candidates, but it doesn’t matter which 8.  All that matters is that 120 is more than 100.  If it’s suddenly advantageous to cover Mike Huckabee, for example, and short Fred Thompson, I end up with 122 being more than 100.  I’m having fun with this.  It’s easy to be decisive when you’re tweaking a sure thing.  As Nixon would say, I’m negotiating from a position of strength.

Update: the news about Sarah Palin is out, and it looks like I’ll be up almost 2%.  The short on Palin is a total loss, of course, but the gains on Romney and Pawlenty make up for it.

Null Hypothesis has an interesting piece about magenta not being a real color.  Magenta seems to be halfway between red and blue, but red and blue are at opposite end of the spectrum, so there is no halfway between.

The light spectrum has a colour missing because it does not feel the need to ‘close the loop’ in the way that our brains do. We need colour to make sense of the world, but equally we need to make sense of colour; even if that means taking opposite ends of the spectrum and bringing them together.

Instead of a linear spectrum, our brains perceive a circular spectrum like this:

While you’re thinking about that, stare at the dot in the image at the top of the post until the colors fade.

The BBC reports that cows are magnetic:

Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.

 

The scientists were unable to distinguish between the head and rear of the cattle, but could tell that the animals tended to face either north or south.

The Life of the Skies, by Jonathan Rosen, is subtitled “Birding at the End of Nature”. It is nominally about bird-watching, but really about a symbolic interaction with nature.  The author points out that birds are the only wild animals that most people ever see, which is not exactly true.  Squirrels are an easy counter-example, and depending on where one lives, one may see deer, or lizards, or whales.  However, birds can fly over fences and across borders, so the bird in your back yard may have come from thousands of miles away.  I think it would be more accurate to say that there is not much wilderness left, and migratory birds are the closest connection that most of us have with that wilderness.

And so the author touches on poetry, literature and philosophy.  He rambles from Thoreau to Whitman to Frost, from Audobon’s drawings to Darwin’s finches, from Adam’s naming the birds in Eden to modern birders with their classification, nomenclature and life lists.  In between the more abstract discussions, he takes us on canoe trips through Louisiana and Arkansas looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker.  And yet, even here the birds are symbolic.  The search is real enough, but the birds may or may not exist.

About the only the thing he doesn’t discuss is the symbolism of dreams.  For example, I don’t dream about birds, or about being a bird, but I do dream about flying.  Maybe I like birds just because they can fly, and it has nothing to do with a connection with nature.  Flying symbolizes freedom, as in free as a you-know-what. 

Well.  My review is all over the place, which is appropriate because Rosen’s book is all over the place.  It’s a fantastic book, but it’s not for everybody.  I hope I’ve either piqued your interest or warned you off.

The Koleas (Pacific Golden Plovers) are back from their summer breeding grounds in Alaska.  This particular bird, of course, may have been born in Alaska, in which case he’s not back, he’s here for the first time.  Being an early bird, one of the first arrivals, he had his choice of worm-hunting territory.  If he inadvertently staked out an area belong to another bird, he’ll have to defend his claim or move on.

In April, I took some photos of a Kolea just before he left for Alaska.  Same area, perhaps the same bird.  In April, the Koleas had their formal black and white plumage, and were bulking up for the flight.  In August, they’re wearing their casual feathers and are considerably thinner after the long flight.  If you think airline food is bad, try migrating under your own power.

See: Kolea for the April photos.

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