WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

phaefele's comments

phaefele | 8 years ago | on: The Hardening of Consciousness

In the qualia / physical world distinction, I wonder if there are good reasons we see things the way we do.

Take colors: colors map to wavelengths of light. I wonder if there is a good reason for our perceptions of color to have red be lower frequency and indigo be higher frequency. I guess what I'm wondering is if our brain mapped these differently, it would be suboptimal in some way - perhaps the 'mixing' of colors would work out less 'well' (e.g. red+yellow=orange wouldn't work in the new layout as well.) If so, then perhaps one could use evolutionary selection pressures as an explanation to lead us to the qualia we have.

Or have I perhaps just missed the whole point?

phaefele | 9 years ago | on: A cure for pain

Did you try an inversion tableÉ I went from shuffling around with lower back pain to fixed in about 6 weeks.

phaefele | 9 years ago | on: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

Most of those floor traders is running a small business (2/3 guys/girls) based on past contacts and trader know-how (such as it is - some better, some worse.) It's really more of a 'bazaar' for small, likely well connected, trading firms rather than anything else. It has been 'hard' for them in recent years as order flow has moved to the largest, too-big-to-fail brokers (GS, JMP etc). But certainly the NYSE gets a lot out of the media coverage, but the brokers themselves are not owned by the NYSE.

phaefele | 9 years ago | on: America at the Atomic Crossroads

'Between 1946 and 1958, the equivalent of more than two hundred million tons of TNT was detonated (on the inhabited Marshall Islands by the US Military) — like a Hiroshima every day for almost forty years.'

...

The local language grew full of horrible expressions for birth defects: “jellyfish” (babies born without bones), “grapes” (spontaneously aborted clumps of tissue), “turtles,” “octopuses,” “apples,” “devils.” The Crossroads tests were the beginning of one of the more disturbing American nuclear legacies—a trade of flesh for knowledge.

phaefele | 10 years ago | on: The K Language

Has anyone looked at SciDB (http://www.paradigm4.com/) as a replacement for KDB. Seems like it would fit the bill and has a community edition. I do see some usage in the financial markets.

phaefele | 11 years ago | on: Norway Wealth Fund Outsmarts Flash Boys as Algorithms Abandoned

Content free - there is really no information in this article outside of the fact they say Norway's Sovereign fund use "Block Trades" which is really what dark-pools are supposed to be all about. Dark pools and block networks have been around for at least the last 5 years, and introduce their own set of issues (not getting your orders filled, showing Goldman Sachs your order on their promise that they won't don't anything with that information :-)

phaefele | 12 years ago | on: Summingbird – Streaming MapReduce with Scalding and Storm

After building a large Hadoop simulation environment and contemplating how to use the same codebase in a streaming fashion, Summingbird seems like an exciting answer. I am concerned that I don't see much discussion around its use online and wonder what its adoption is like. Are people using it? I wonder if the usage of new terms like "moniod" scares people away.
page 1
more