I just spent 691 dollars at the vet. My two dogs needed boosters for their shots. We have a lyme disease problem here so they got that. Then there is rabies (lots of bats have rabies around here). Then there was distemper, which I bailed on for one dog as it is a dog-dog transmitted disease and getting 3 shots at once can have some bad side effects. We'll get that one later.

This all cost about 270 bucks. I then bought enough heartworm preventative medicine (interceptor) to last 2 years for both dogs. 320 bucks (or so) for this. Ow!!!!

According to this site in my area (north east US) there is a very low incidence rate of heartworm, between 1 and 5 cases per clinic per year.

Here is a pretty comprehensive description of heartworms, symptoms and treatment. The little worms are delivered into your dog by mosquito (damn things). But the symptoms are visible and treatment costs around 300 dollars.

Why the hell would you spend 80 bucks per year per dog to prevent heartworm? First off, in the northeast, where we have lyme disease, we use advantix (unless you also have cats!), that keeps off ticks, fleas AND mosquitos!

While I wont tell you what you should be doing... I'm going to return my 320 dollars worth of heartworm medicine.

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Now back to what is pissing me off:
Looks like the EPA is following suit

"White House spokesman Tony Snow said, adding that 'We are doing a better job of reducing emissions' than Europe."

This is what he is basing that on: "The White House said Snow was referring to figures from the International Energy Agency that from 2000 to 2004, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion grew by 1.7 percent, while in the European Union such emissions grew by 5 percent."

Here is an analogy: Gas prices in Lapland are 10 dollars per gallon. While in Elbonia they are only 6 dollars per gallon. Lapland raises their gas prices by 'only' 1.7%, while in Elbonia they have risen a whopping 5%. Can it truly be said that Lapland has done a better job of controlling their gas prices? No! of course not. What a stupid thing to say!

The White house has decided to totally ignore the fact that were are pumping 40% more CO2 into the air than all of the EU! Keep in mind that the EU has over twice the population and a higher GDP. So each person is doing a better job of controlling their energy consumption and the economy doesn't suffer due to CO2 controls.

The right wing nuts will repeat their mantra over and over again. "The economy will be ruined if we start limiting greenhouse gas emissions". They contend that the the economy is so good (is it really?) only because we allow our corporations energy companies to pollute without regard to the effects of CO2.

If this was the case then we would expect to see that the economies of countries that try to take care of their emissions (like those using a carbon trading scheme, and those who signed up for the Kytoto Protocol) to have worse economies than ours. Well this is clearly simply not the case as we will see.

Here is a table I made (from WTO and IMF data) of various countries GDP. I also found the CO2 emissions by country (for as late as only 2003).

GDP



CO2 Emmisions


RATIO


Clearly those countries that have decided to be responsible for their CO2 emissions have not had a bad impact to their economies, even when you take an economic powerhouse like the EU as a whole.

Turns out someone did this exact exercise on Wikipedia. Similar results. The point is: It is a total farce to claim that capping CO2 emissions will hurt the economy. The data is against that argument.

It is clear that we need to start thinking about getting power of alternative sources. I'm all for solar, waves and wind. But I am also all for nuclear. Best yet, lets start getting biodeisel from algae and refining it with this process.

Here is some further discussion of this that I found entertaining.

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This is what pissed me off:
Bush claiming credit where none is due

But before I get to that, please bear with me. I'll get back to it in the next post.

No blog is complete without it's mention of global warming. I'm not going to bother linking the thousands of sites that discuss global warming. Clearly the Earth is heating. I don't think this is disputed any more.

The dispute is about whether or not people are causing that by dumping CO2 into the atmosphere or if our CO2 dumping is just a drop in the ocean in terms of atmospheric content. There is plenty of data out there to describe this pro and con.

To sum up the 'other side'..here is a nice video. [EDIT: this link is dead now, it seems that The Great Global Warming Video is no longer viewable for free] It nicely summarizes all the aspects of the naysayers. The science is only 38 minutes of the entire video. The rest of it is nonsense about conspiracy theories about funding and a truly offensive implication that GW advocates are causing strife in Africa, which I just have to answer like this: Please show me a single bill from any 1st world nation requiring African Nations to get energy from renewable resources instead of fossil fuels. Secondly, the reason a clinic in the bush has a solar panel is because its incredibly expensive to run a power line out to it. If they don't have enough power with that panel, it is still cheaper to get another panel than to run a power line out to it. The implication in this movie is truly sinister. One more dumb thing in the video. they try to connect Temperature with economy. No climatologist says economy causes GW, its CO2, and there has never been a drop in CO2 production in 150 years.

to summarize the video and the 'other side':

• The earth heats due to the suns cycles (not disputed)
• some say sun cycles are the sole cause of our current heating (very disputed)
  
• The earth cools, when cosmic rays makes clouds and reflects the sun (and the solar input recedes at the same time)
• CO2 is a result of rising Earth temperatures, not a cause
• Satellite data does not support CO2-GHG theories
• Adding a tiny bit extra (not defined) of anthropomorphic CO2 to the natural sources is not significant. Natural sources being the ocean, permafrost, volcanoes and cow farts.
• Water is the most pervasive green house gas, and compared to that, CO2 is nothing
  

OK, Nay Sayers have I got that right? These are the same points brought up 10-20 years ago and are truly unchanged and tired. They were excellent points back then. However anyone still using these points are sadly and terribly not up to date with their data.

I am on the side that humans cause global warming. Here is why. Lets start with why CO2 has lagged temperature in the past.

1. The earth gets heated by a variety of cosmic events, solar cycles, cosmic rays, cow farts or whatever. These are natural forcing functions and have always been there and will always be there. some are cyclical some are not.
2. For the past 650,000 years (unless you are a bible thumper in which case its for the past 6000 years), the earth has heated due to these forcing functions. This heating releases CO2 from the ocean and other CO2 sinks.
3. CO2 goes into the atmosphere and what can be seen is that the cooling (presumably once the forcing function is over) is far slower than the heating. Every Single Time. (historical temperatures go backward to the right on this graph). It's also why GHG theory allows for the earth to cool when solar input diminishes, it just doesn't cool as fast or as much as it would have without the CO2

So... the question is: where is the lag now? It is critical to note that there is no lag between CO2 levels and earths average temperature any more. If fact, for the first time in the history of the human species, CO2 is now leading temperature rise.

Second question: If CO2 does not effect the temperature, why does the earth cool slower when the CO2 concentration is higher after the forcing function is gone?

Third question: if CO2 is leaving the oceans like it always has, why is the CO2 content in the oceans increasing even though the temperature of the Earth is rising? (if CO2 leaves the ocean when the temp rises the Ph should rise too)

Fourth question: why don't you know that the previous satellite data was wrong and the newest data actually shows that the CO2-GW theory is actually supported by satellite data (because the troposphere is actually heating, while the stratosphere is cooling)?

Fifth Question: For as long as we have been measuring cosmic rays, why has there been no correlation between them and earths temperature?

Sixth Question: if sun cycles are causing our current heating why is there no correlation between the sun cycles and the earth temperature and why is the earth heating when the solar input is currently decreasing?

Last question: If human activity adds so little CO2 to the natural sources (actually the amount is an extra 5%), why are the current CO2 levels higher than at any time in history even though the earths temperature is not as high as it has ever been?

Further, and to me the most important. At no time in the history of earth has the temperature risen as quickly as it has in the last few decades. It is not really scary that the average temperature of the globe is hotter than it has been since we have been recording temperature. The earth has been this hot lots of times. The scary part is that it has never risen this fast. So in all the cycles, cosmic rays, sun spots and whatever other theories that right wingnuts want to put out there, there is no getting around the fact that this rate of temperature rise has never been seen before.

And finally, you cant expect to dump 14 000 000 000 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere every single year and not expect some sort of negative response.

Of course the GHG theory explains all the data that is inconsistent with the movie.

One more quick note on water. Yes it is true it is a green house gas. however the atmosphere is 99.99% saturated naturally with it. Human beings literally can not add to this amount of water in the atmosphere even if we burned all the fossil fuel on the planet. However, we easily can add to the CO2 in the atmosphere (and we have). Further, this saturation has always been there, it doesn't explain atmospheric temperature shifts. However, not all greenhouse gases are the same. CO2 absorbs light at a different wavelength than water does. So by changing the amount of CO2 in the air, we are actually absorbing a different set of wavelengths than water alone. Its important because its the same set of wavelengths that radiate off the earth when the light hits it an heats.

These things lead me to believe that CO2 is causing the current temperature rise. Think of this: If I put a wire in a box filled with something thermally conductive, lets say water, the heating elements will rise to some temperature X, perhaps a few degrees. but if I change the media around the wire to something far more insulating like air, the wire will heat to potentially thousands of degrees! The element in a 20 watt bulb is thousands of degrees not because 20 watts is a lot, but because the vacuum it is in is a great insulator.

We have added 37% more CO2 insulation to our atmosphere in the last 150 years. This is not disputable. There does not need to be a change in the heat input to make the global temperature rise. Any changes in the heat inputs (say a solar cycles) will be exaggerated (in the hotter direction) due to the increased insulation.

There is tons more data out there about how CO2 and other GHGs are warming the earth. Most of the nay sayers arguments have been put to rest (cosmic rays causing clouding, solar activity, troposphere temperatures, etc etc). Don't bother posting these tired 'alternate theories' in the comments (if anyone reads this at all).

Here is a nice little remark on the outdated information in the video. Its sad that the naysayers have to keep their data restricted to before 1980, in order for it to be cohesive. Here is another point by point argument against the movie. And here is another nice rebuttal.

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I like to get through the hype of companies. I spent most of my time with fuel cell companies recently. You can see what I have for data concerning the Medis junk. Mechanical Technology (MTI microfuel cells) has also made news about focusing on a low power system. At some point in the future I will go about showing how a fuel cell in a portable device is a dumb idea. Im not alone. not alone here either.

Creating a model that shows this is a big task and it may take me a while to do it. Until then, I'm hoping for some suggestions on some companies to analyze. For example, my attention was recently pointed at some ridiculous claims made by Eagle Coatings (in particular the last page has a truly misleading diagram). So I will do an entry on that. So please, if you would like a quick analysis on some hype that a company puts out, please forward it to me in the comments section.

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I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about why the Medis power pack will be a non starter. It isnt becuase of the technology. Its because of the market.

When looking at a new company to invest in, it is important to look at the technology (or the viability of the product if it doesnt require new technology), the market, and the managment.

We previously looked at the technology (see prior post) and found that it is not better than the incumbent alkaline battery technology. It is difficult to know about the managment of anycompany if you do not know the people personally (unless they have a history with other public companies). In this case, we are talking about a company that has been trying to introduce new technologies for 15 years, unsuccessfully.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. There are TONS of R&D companies around that go from technology to technology without focusing on any in particular. Medis however has now spent tens of millions of dollars developing their power pack and claims it will be on the markets in the beginning of 2007. So how will it do? Lets Look.

I found a number of charger products on the market today. I also can compare then to the 6xAAPP I made in the previous post. These products are:

the 6xAAPP (not a product, i made it)
The Medis Power Pack
CellBoost
Clipper Gear
TurboCharge
Instant Power
Mfuel
Zap Power

There are three main groups here. Emergency chargers that provide very little talk time, these are the Turbocharge and the Cellboost. Then there are the energy camels that last a long time like the Mfuel and the Zap device. These provide long discharge times and can be recharged. Then there are the products in between. Im not sure what market they are targeting, as we will see.

Im sure there are other devices on the market. This is what I was able to find. To be clear: I have not tested ANY of these expect the one i made. All my data following is based on the manufacturers claims. So there is a large source of error here, for example the turbo charge says it can provide 2 hours of talk time from a single AA battery. Seems pretty incredible. Someone on the Medis message board claimed that a turbo charge was tested and only provided 22 minutes of talk time (for me its hearsay). However these two sites claim pretty good performance from a cellboost and a Clipper device. So take my data here with however many grains of salt you give to a manufacturer.

Here is the raw data (click to make larger)







Using this data I extrapolated cost vs run time. For example, the 6xAAPP cost for the first run would be about 10 bucks including batteries. But the second run would only cost $3.60 more becuase only the batteries would have to be changed. Conversely, a Cellboost only costs 6 dollars to start, but another 6 dollars for the next one.

I did my best to get the right data here. I had to infer some of it based on lithium ion data from say ultralife to extract energy density data and apply to the big devices. So until I see some real test data, this is what we have to go with.

So here we go:














The X-axis is total run time in hours. I went to 10,000 hours becuase the Zap and Mfuel can be recharged 500 times which leads to about 10-20K hours of use.


Its pretty clear that if you plan on using external chargers for many hours the CellBoost is not an economical choice. It really is best if you are in an emergency, and only very rarely. The high rechargables are only economical if you plan on using them for their whole life. Its the plethora of other devices that are interesting.

While the 6xAAPP scores the best over time for the middle range, this product doesnt actually exist. The closest the the Clipper which only uses 4 AAA batteries, so its initial energy is smaller and requires a new set of batteries faster.

The initial price of the turbo charge makes it not a good choice unless you use it often.

The two interesting things that really make me beleive that Medis has it all wrong is:

1) There is no point on this chart where the medis pack is the compelling choice

and

2) The manufacturer of instant-power device (which truly scores best here), has stopped making these becuase the market couldnt support it. This company was Electric Fuel. It appears that someone still sells these devices though, but i dont know if they are still being manufactured.

It appears that in order for medis to have a compelling product they will have to bring down the initial cost of their device and make it refillable, with the refill charges costing less than 3 dollars.

I expect that CellBoost and Turbocharge will still outsell the medis device (and even the 6xAAPP device if it were real) because they are so small and convenient to use. They are light weight and install directly to the phone.

Well thats my rant for the day. I'll be happy to answer any questions or comments about this data.

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This will be a long post. Followed by another long post. Sorry.


If anyone reading this (I dont expect its many people) invests in stocks, then you may have been on a message board or two. Yahoo! has them, Google has them, and there is Raging Bull. These generally have two parties, Pumpers and Bashers, otherwise known as longs and shorts. The long beleive in the company, be it the technology, the management, the market, or whatever, and the shorts simply dont for whatever reason.

I recently got involved on the Yahoo! board for MDTL, a company called Medis. Of all the message boards I have been on, this is one of the most entertaining with quite a cast of characters. I reccommend going there and taking a look. I am impressed with the logic presented by some, the faith presented by others, and the total lack of racism, or any sort of predjudice that is to common on other boards.

Some people do get frustrated and start calling people names and mock their intelligence (mostly people who are low in that resepct). But it is still rather fun.

Anyway, Medis has spent many tens of million of dollars developing a power pack. They claim this power pack will be better than anything out there. Some on the board claimed it would be "dozens" of times better. That would be pretty amazing.

Here is a graph of how much energy they were able to suck out of one. It shows that when they discharged it at a constant rate of .65 watts, they were able to pull out 15 Watt-hours. First, some notes about this graph.

I suspect that they picked 0.65 W as a baseline discharge rate because there are many articles such as this one, that say cell phone draws 180 mA on average and a capacitor is used to smooth out the spikes in current. A Lithium Ion battery runs at around 3.6V for most of its life (It starts at 4.2 and can go down as far as 3V, not in a linear fashion). So this means that a cell phone uses .65W. So they chose a good number for power draw.

However, then they choose to use 5.6V as the voltage to run at. No cell phone will tolerate this (The Li+ battery should not be exposed to voltages over 4.2V), which means a DC converter would have to be used which will reduce the total energy out since it will provide ineffeciency in the conversion. Lets say that this is 10% inefficient, so the real energy output is only 13.5 Wh.

Lets also look at this graph. They took the entire energy output and counted it towards the total. An underpowered cell phone will drop a call. It wont work below 0.5W average. Looking at their graph, this takes you to only 13.5Wh, then take of the 10% again and you are down to 12.1 Wh out of their device. BTW this Medis Power Pack (MPP) device is slated to be 12 to 20 dollars (this number changes with time).

One thing to note, by their data, it looks as if you could make a 17 hour phone call. This is cetainly better than the battery in the phone!

But lets compare to the incumbent technology, alkaline batteries. Lets get rid of all the problems with their data and just assume the 15Wh is correct. I set up an experiment:

From an idea someone on the Yahoo message board had, I took 6 AA batteries, hooked them in series and discharged them first at constant current, then at constant power (or best I could)

Cost to me for this power pack was
6 AA batteries 60 cents x 6 = $3.60 (test 1 and 2 used 4 year old batteries, test 3 use new)
2 battery holders 1.50 x2 = $3

If it were a real power pack there would a a DC convertor circuit that probably would cost about 2 dollars in quantity. I think it is safe to say that if a 6xAA device were made in quantity it would cost way less than 10 dollars to make.

Setup
Here are some pictures of the setup

The power pack
(used Energizer MAX batteries)



















The circuit





















I used a Blue Earth BE485 microcontroller to gather data. These are quite versatile and feature packed. Check out Blue Earth. The BE485 can only measure voltage between 0 and 5 volts. So I used a potentiometer to reduce the battery voltage down to that range and scaled the readings in the program.The scaling was 9:5 (9 volts on the 6AAPP was scaled to 5 volts)



















Here is a picture of it in its interface board and the computer setup taken some time into the first run:



















In order to compare apples to apples as much as possible, I am going to assume that this device (the 6xAAPP) should run at the same power as the MPP. In order to do that, it would require a step down DC-DC convertor. Here is a datasheet for one that shows you can get up to 90% efficiency doing that. Lets assume 85%. So, if my load is at 3.6V and 180 mA= 0.65W, then the 6xAAPP would have to run at 0.8W to accomodate the expected 15% loss. The average voltage as a AA battery discharges is 1.3V. So the correct current through a stack of 6 AA batteries is 0.8W/(1.3V*6)= 120 mA.

RESULTS

Here is the result of the first run (click to expand):












I was able to extract 16Wh out of the batteries. This phone would run for 18 hours. This result includes presumed DC-DC convertor losses. It also ran a bit high in power, the average power here is 0.85W. It is clear I had some noise on my lines I was sampling. The microcontroller imparted most of it as they are prone to do. Since the current is shown on the right axis, it looks magnified. I also had a bit of trouble in the beginning with data collection (lost connection between BE485 and computer) and there are some gaps, but battery discharge never stopped.

I ran the same test at 180mA. This resulted in less energy taken out of the 6xAAPP. Only 13 Wh was extracted but it was run at 1.3W! This means this device could work on even highly featured devices like a Treo. It ran for 10 hours at this power.

I then ran the same test again (brand new batteries), but this time I tried to do it at a constant power draw as the DC convertor would do. I didnt have any DC converter chips around so i did it by hand (poorly) by adjusting the current through the 6xAAPP to a level based on its voltage.













It is pretty obvious where the places are where I made adjustments. The average power here is 0.77W. Assuming the same 85% efficiency, that would provide 0.65W of power to a device. Also I lost some energy in the calculations becuase for a new battery the voltage converter was no longer set to show the true voltage on the battery. so while it shows 9V its was actually as high as 9.3V!

Here I got 16.4 Wh. The extra bit could have been because of the different dicharge profile, or it could have been becuase these were new batteries. It doesnt really matter. The key here is that at 0.77W, this device ran for 21 hours!

One more little thing to note is about the size. Here are the two sizes compared to each other

AA power pack Medis Power Pack
1.9"x2.5"x1.4" 3.7" x 2.6" x 1.4"

While there is no DC converter in the 6xAAPP, there is space between the two battery packs for a surface mount DC-DC convertor, so I think it is fair to use the measured envelope size.

So it seems that the 6xAAPP is cheaper (expecially when you go to buy the second one!), smaller, and lasts just as long or longer.

In the next post i'll go into why these are not the reasons I think that the company will not work out. Its a market matter, not just the fact that this device isnt technically superior to the incumbent technology. Yes, you can consider me a 'basher' for this stock. When the time is right I do plan to short it.

I will be happy to answer any questions or comments.

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Just to keep this blog going (for no apparent reason) while my current project finishes, I'll put up some more data I collected a few years ago.

While not a whole hearted democrat (I would have voted for McCain), I am one of those people who truly felt that electing Bush to office would truly degrade American quality of life, liberty, safety, education, environment, etc etc. Unless, you actually feel safer, your kids are better educated, and you are better off, I'm guessing you may agree with me. If not, you probably are high up in a big corporation (drug, oil, insurance, whatever). When he was re-elected I couldnt fathom the reason. Failure after failure, proven issues with scientific censorship, continued harm to our economy, world opinion, trade relations, educational performance, and yet, he was elected again.

While its true I have calmed down now, I still cant get over the fact that it happened. How is it possible that despite all the data that showed his programs are not helpful to our country, and possibly detrimental, and many simply morally wrong, he was elected again. Political spin? Mass hypnosis? I have no idea, except for the power of faith.

I dont just mean religious faith. I mean faith in authority, faith in you party, faith that an elected official will tell you things as they are (despite the data). Faith is one of the most powerful human traits there is. People will do things becuase of faith, even in the face of contrary facts. Its quite an amazing (and disturbing) phenomenon.

In my frenzy I took year 2000 census data that gave me the educational level of the population of each state, I compared this with the states that voted for bush and those that voted for Kerry (who by the way, I certainly didnt think was a panacea by any means). Anyone is welcome to repeat this exercise. I would post the excel spreadsheet, but I dont think this will let me post files.

Here are the results :















For you statisticians out there: These two groups are statistically significant with a confidence of 95% (alpha = 0.05).

For everyone else, there is a statistically significant difference between these two groups. Meaning, people in red states, on the whole, have achieved a lower level of education than those in blue state.

Does this mean they are dumber? No way. (although others seem to think so). It could mean they are not as wealthy. It could mean they are given more incentive to go to work than to seek higher education. Statistics like this do not determine cause and effect very well. They can however correlate two things well or show relations between two things. All this chart shows that states with higher educated people in it tended to vote for Kerry. My reading of this is that people who are trained to examine, question, and research, tended to vote for Kerry. It sure doesn'tmean they were going to go out and sign up for the ACLU. But looking at Bush's failures, seeing past the painfully obvious spin the Bush campaign slandered Kerry with (and for that matter McCain also, in the previous election, go look up push polling), they chose to vote of Kerry.

I was told by someone that this is simply because those higher educational institutions are bastions of liberalism and they train their students to think liberal. Well, I went through a PhD and I sure dont remember any liberal brainwashing (perhaps it was in my sleep?). I would love to see any data at all to support that theory. My guess it that it has more to do with growing up with a certain type of parents and church than anything provided in college.

Like all statistics there are outliers, points that dont fit the groups. For example. Colorado has a very high level of education and voted for Bush. It was pretty much the only outlier.

update: Look like someone else performed a similar analysis
Update II: I have noticed that this remains one of my most commonly googled posts. I wrote this 2005. The mention of McCain was with respect to that election, not the 2008 election.

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Well since this is something I worked on recently I'll post it here. I went to a financial planner recently to try to see if they had some good advice. As I understand it, there are two types of people financial planners dislike working with Teachers and engineers. Im not sure about why teachers are one of them, but I know why engineers are the other. Im guessing Doctors dont really like us for the same reason. We question EVERYTHING they suggest looking for the reason why they make one decision or another.

Well I think we are justified in this. When I went there, they said I had enough money for them to give me this great service where they constantly monitor my portfolio, and guide the progress. I gave them a goal of providing 10% growth per year. I told them I didnt expect every year to be 10% but that at the end of 20 years I want to look back and find that my average growth was 10%. This is not an overly aggressive goal.

So he suggested 10 different mutual funds. None of the 10 were the same as what I'm currently invested in. So there would be fees and so forth upon buying all these. So I asked about why these ten and why not the 7 or so i already had. He gave me reasons about small cap and large cap amd balancing it all out and so forth. Of course I pressed on it. Isnt it the job of the fund itself to provide the growth? Why would I pay 1.5% extra to have this planner provide another layer of management on it? He said to take a look at the growth of his suggestions and that I would see the value he is providing. So I did.

The funds I had are pretty much a random smattering of funds. No real thought put into them. Someone suggested them, they had good morningstar ratings, so thats what I have. I am also invested in a few stocks (mostly alternative energy stocks, Texas Instruments, and Orchid Paper Products).

Well, I compared the growth of my present portfolio for the last 5, 3, and 0.5 years and the growth of the proposed porfolio.

Well this wasnt really a suprise to me (sorry about the 4 decimal places on the Y axis, thats dumb)..


The two portfolios performed essentially the same, mine is a little more volatile. Both had high rated funds in them. I realize this picture is small. It shows the growth of 100 dollars over the last 5 years with the two portfolios. The little box says that 5 year returns averaged to about 7%, 3 year returns came to about 19.5% and 6 month returns came to about 30% (these are annualized returns). While my current portfolios performed better in each case, I dont think I would say its a significant amount.

While this is certainly not a statment about the financial planning business in general, nor is it right to say none of the planners are particularly more acute than others, they just are not for me.

They are probably best for people who dont really want to get into the nitty gritty, but just want someone to trust to do it for them. Like having someone do your taxes. Im not saying I am qualified to be a financial planner, just that I suspect that they are not needed, you would be better served by doing a marginal amount of research and buying things on your own. Even as little as I did for these funds, I simply took high rated funds.

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Some people play sports, some collect stamps, some have a garden. I have a lab. I play in it by making little electrical and mechanical circuits that show something can be done, or how well (or badly) something can be done. Sometimes I'll talk about non electromechanical things, but I'll still provide data. I guess I like generating and collecting data.

Sometimes I'll tell people about something and they wont believe me. Sometimes I'll hear something and I wont believe it. What better way to work through it than to try it out and see what happens.?

Well thats what you can find here. May bore the hell out of you, or maybe you'll find something useful here..... maybe not.

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