Then let’s say a few months down the line they’ve decided to change their strategy, having come up with a new idea about what will really get the best return, this time forecasting they’ll do even better based on the models they made before. So now they want more money to put into this new strategy.

Oh, but now they think they want to change strategies again, maybe even to something that’s actually opposite of what they were doing before in some ways. Let’s put more money into that!

All this while they’re so busy buying and selling and adjusting the models based on various hunches they have, they haven’t actually paid much attention to how much the portfolio is actually worth.

When you ask how the changes they’ve been making have impacted the portfolio, and whether anything they’ve done is actually getting to that 20% goal, they say they haven’t really paid much attention to it because they know the new models are going to be even better. Are you going to give them another million?

What to do, what to do…

I am in my office, looking at my to-do list. Things I’ve done today: went to a meeting, went to a lecture, taught for 3 hours, got my bike repaired, met with my undergraduate student, and submitted a tech support request when he and I couldn’t get something to work. Yet somehow I haven’t done anything today. I have an arbitrary deadline tomorrow and I’m not even sure what would constitute meeting it. This is the nature of my work. There is always something to do and nothing ever gets done. Even worse, things that were working last month will never work again when you need them.

I just went on a little internet detour to look up the meaning of the Coleman-Liau index that is being displayed underneath this textbox. It is currently at 6.5. I still haven’t crossed anything off my to-do list.

I really wonder how other career paths will compare to this one. Flexibility is one of the great advantages of being a graduate student, but also a big opportunity for failure. I love that I can budget my time as I please, but sometimes the lack of structure, like this deadline that is so ill defined it will never be met, creates this feeling that no progress ever gets made.

If I publish another article in the spring, as is the plan, that will be great, and will make it that much more likely that I will actually finish this program. Meanwhile I fantasize about other careers, without actually knowing what careers I might enjoy. A friend mentioned that this is one of the big red flags that indicates you might not be suited for the job you have. It doesn’t say what you’d actually should be doing in its stead, but it does say you shouldn’t be doing this.

Well it’s not. Science as a whole and viewed from afar has a lot of exciting stuff in it, but the nitty gritties of doing research is not exciting. Deal with it.

For me the best parts of the winter games are hockey and curling, but neither of those really struck a nerve the way, say, speed skating or nordic skiing did. The gold medal hockey game between Canada and the US was fantastically exciting, but it just made me want to watch more hockey, not play it. Same thing with curling, which is something I’ve always wanted to try (and now I’ve put it in my calendar for the beginning of next season).

But the speed skating. The nordic skiing. Something about them really makes me want to get off my ass and do something. I bet it’s in no small part due to the fact that those guys actually look athletic—you’d have to in those outfits—and the endurance they must have speaks more directly to athleticism than a game like curling or hockey. (That’s not to say that those sports don’t require athleticism, they just don’t show it off the same way.)

Part of my current feeling is also coming from the fact that I’ve been in a bit of fitness limbo lately. I’ve been going to the gym regularly but don’t feel like I’m getting much out of it. I’m certainly not being pushed the way I was on the rowing team in Montreal. I think I’m still looking for that same kind of high. The Olympics have reminded me that it must be out there somewhere. I just need to find it.

I had fun hacking together various parts of this site, but it made it very difficult to keep current. This was especially true when it came to moving more and more content to WordPress. I customized so much with my theme and various plugins that it became impossible to keep up to date. WordPress upgrades itself automatically quite wonderfully, but it doesn’t upgrade all my code. I began to get worried that my hacks would start to break as WordPress changed.

And besides all that, I was wondering what the point of it all was. Nobody comes to this site and browses around, so all the navigation tools and indices of content and whatnot were useless. I had things promoting content on other parts of the site. All this stuff is useless. When people come here, they typically do it for one article they found from Google and that’s it. And that’s fine, because I never actually intended this to be some kind of destination. There’s no social networking here. This isn’t a high traffic blog. I don’t have a dedicated audience or even a well defined subject.

And that’s fine for me. I’ve said all along, that this site is for me. It really is more like a personal journal that I come back to read once in a while than anything else. And if people find useful or interesting things written in here, then that’s great too, but I’m not going to try to dedicate this site to an audience that doesn’t exist. What I got by doing that was a half-breed kind of site. Something that was pretending to be something it wasn’t.

And so I’ve reworked the site’s design. Yes, writing my own theme doesn’t solve much of the first problem of keeping code up to standard, but at least I’ve written it in a more recent standard. In a couple years I’ll probably be ready for a change again anyway. The goal is, and will be, to keep it simple. One of the best sites I’ve ever seen was also the simplest. I’m aspiring to that. The content is still all there, but I’m not trying to throw it at every body who browses by. You get what you ask for: the one page you ask for, and nothing else, unless you really poke around.

It’s much more personal this way.

However, this precession of the signs does not necessarily mean that astrology is complete nonsense. One can imagine a world in which astrology really did work, despite the fact that the signs don’t match up anymore. It’s not hard. In fact I’ll do it right now.

It’s not hard to imagine that the time of year of one’s birth actually did affect one’s behaviour. Maybe our gestation period was more heavily influenced by ambient temperature, such that a developing embryo’s body chemistry was altered in specific and predictable ways. Isn’t there some species of reptile in which whether you become a boy or a girl depends on the temperature at which your egg develops? That’s what I’m talking about here. Even less crazy would be that a child’s first few months of development influence their behaviour. You might imagine a person born in December would be tougher than someone born in May because of various environmental things. I think there have even been proper studies on this kind of thing. Early childhood psychology and the like.

People would notice this kind of predictor. Except instead of noticing that the changes in behaviour are correlated with seasons, they notice that they’re correlated with the position of the sun at birth. These are really pretty much the same thing, and it seems like seasons would be an easier connection, but hey, everybody loves astronomy, right? So, instead of saying “babies raised in the first month of winter tend to be tough and have a high threshold for cold” (or whatever) they say “people who were born under Capricorn (Dec 23 to Jan 19) tend to…” etc.

And this system works. The people who have worked it out have just made a mistake in assuming that correlation equals causation (which it does not). But that doesn’t really matter since their mistake takes many lifetimes to become obvious, and by that point astrologers have stopped bothering to check if the Sun is in the same place it’s been in for the last hundred years. Another simple mistake.

But before you know it, the Sun has moved quite a lot, and the constellations don’t match up very well anymore, just as we see today. The seasons that caused this whole mess, on the other hand, are still right where they were before. People born in the first month of winter are still tough and cold (or whatever), and that still matches the description of Capricorn even though the Sun isn’t in Capricorn anymore. The system still works, we just have an outdated naming scheme.

So the claim that astrology is complete rubbish because the names of the signs don’t match up with the sun anymore is fallacious. You might as well claim that modern electronics can’t possibly work because current actually flows the other way. Unfortunate naming conventions don’t invalidate the thing they describe.

However, all of this is not to say that we live in a world where astrology is true. There are, I’m sure, dozens of other reasons why your newspaper horoscope can’t possibly be true, but I’m not going to address them here. The point is, astrology may be nonsense, but it’s not necessarily a priori nonsense.