Here’s a guy attempting to read Tang Dynasty poetry in Middle Chinese.

Here’s another guy attempting to read some of the oldest written poetry from the Zhou era in Old Chinese.

Generally I find these unbelievable and unnatural, probaby due to a combination of reconstruction error and bad or exaggerated intonation. Nobody can speak like this. For Middle Chinese it has been argued that the rhyme book scheme does not give one speech pattern and in any case the reconstruction has severe survivor bias toward modern southern dialects. For Old Chinese, I’m just speechless… I don’t think this guy even knows how to read Zheng Zhang Shang Fang’s phonetic notation, so he produces hilariously impractical initial and ending clusters with bizarre tonal variations to boot. Anyway, it’s a start.

First time, mostly it was the concepts that amused me:
* Feeding fish with bird feather
* “The plummage don’t enter into it”
* The name “Polly Parrot”
* Throwing a dead parrot in the air to show it’s dead
* Buying a dead parrot on assurance and not noticing
* “Pining for the fjords”
* Parrot was already dead, only that “it had been nailed there”
* “This parrot wouldn’t VOOM if I put 4000 volts through it”
* “This is a late … parrot”
* Having to complain till “blue in the mouth” when basically the problem and resolution are obvious… (timeless commentary on so-called customer “service” that is generally not about service but skillful rebuffing).
* Suggesting a slug as replacement
* The cage still there in the Bolton shop
* The guy is so over-the-board gullible and likes complaining so much he goes to complain to the rail service
* The “brother” looks the same just with a mustache
* The guy is so gullible he believes the conductor too
* “It was a pun”
* The guy is so serious he analyzes the palindrome of Bolton

The second time, mostly phrases and details
* “What do you mean Miss”, “I have a cold”
* “It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it”
* “I got a nice cuttlefish when you wake up”
* “Due to it being tired and shagged out after a long squawk”
* “I took the liberty of examining that parrot” to discover an obvious fact
* “Does it talk?”

There is something to be said about the parrot purchaser’s mannerism — completely logical yet totally awkward socially… Perhaps a bit of humorous self identification there.

It seems like a nice idea, but something is off. Firstly, these are leveraged portfolios with forced daily rebalancing, so depending on the amount of daily price variability, there is a non-trivial loss of several percent a year on top of costs. If a long-term leveraged position is wanted, one may as well buy the appropriate derivatives that underlie these ETFs, if that can be done.

Secondly, leverage is not free. This WSJ article nails the fixation on returns …

Until recently, public companies, mutual funds and pension funds generally steered clear of such risks. But the lines between risk takers and mainstream investors are blurring. In part, that’s because stock-market returns aren’t what they were a few years back. Between 2000 and 2006, the average annual return on the S&P 500 stock index was 2.5%, down from 28.7% between 1995 and 1999. Using derivatives and borrowed money is one way to try to boost returns.

… but although the return is better, the risk-adjusted return is more useful to look at. With true 2x leverage, only the risk premium is doubled at best, not the total return. On the other hand, if true 2x total return is supplied as they say, the implied leverage, and hence risk, has to be much higher than 2x. That’s something to look out for. Granted, the amount of leverage can be adjusted by weighting with the 1x portfolio.

Utilization of divergent integrals and a new symbolism in contact and crack analysis
VI Fabrikant
Prisoner #167932D, Archambault Jail, Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, Canada J0N 1H0

Correspondence: Email: valery_fabrikant@hotmail.com

Received for publication 15 June 2006. Revision received 1 December 2006.

Abstract
The main potential function, used for the complete solution of the contact and crack problems for elliptical domains, is presentable as an integral of an expression comprising a logarithm of a distance between two points. These integrals were considered to be impossible to compute, though various derivatives of these integrals were computed in the past. The new symbolism, introduced here, combined with utilization of divergent integrals, allows us to compute these integrals exactly and in a closed form. It also introduces a dramatic simplification in the final expressions and restores some mathematical symmetry and elegance.

You can look up this guy on Wikipedia.

No? Oh it’s money, I see. Except it’s money promised in spam, and spam from the military. How did I get on their list, I wonder. Maybe because of this guy?

Sorry, fellas, but warm, soft direct-deposits from the NSF sounds a lot better, especially because I kind of like my unextreme unadventurous life. And life is the key.