A creek springs up in Garfield

My neighbor had some old 55-gallon drums of used motor oil. In high school I did this science experiment where I put motor oil in soil and observed that corn in the oil soil grew much faster than corn in regular soil. This was not a big discovery, considering that fertilizers have long been petroleum based. Anyhow, I remembered this scientific result and spread the oil all over my clay bank:

Just kidding. That oil is actually silt, which I harvested from the alley after redirecting my new stream because a stream is good enough for me -- I don't also need a pond.


The source of the water is mysterious. I contacted the Pittsburgh water authority about a week ago, and they had guys working on it Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and maybe more, so I suppose that by now they are getting fed up. They dug a big hole trying to chase the water to its source.

Ideally they will give up and I'll have a nice creek to irrigate with. I made dam on the alley to keep the water away from my off-street parking.

The silt harvest was bountiful. I got only about half of it, after nearly 3 hours trucking it up the hill with a 5-gallon bucket.

Sun Lamp

Truckonomics

I am considering the pros and cons of buying a 4x4 medium-compact 8ft-bed pickup truck.

Pros as measured by counts of yearly use:

• Hauling soil and mulch to my funny farm: 10
• Being Mr. Helpful whenever a friend is moving or just needs to borrow a truck: 8
• Projecting a manly handyman image at certain social events: 4
• Hauling big things home from stores times per year: 2
• Enabling crazy off-road camping adventures: 1.5
• Being Mr. Helpful at some family gatherings, if Mr. Handsome happens not to be around: 1
  
• Traveling roads too icy for bike or car: 1
• Unknown interesting projects I'd get myself into that require a truck: 1
  

Adding up the uses, it looks like I'd get about 25-30 uses out of it per year. But what are the costs?

• $3000-5000 upfront (used)
  
• $500-800 annual maintenance
• $250 additional annual insurance (Geico quote)
• $500-1000 gas assuming 5000 miles per year (high)
• hassle (registration, inspections, etc) valued at $200/year

Assuming the truck lasts 5 years, the average annual cost is around $2650, or about $90 per use. By contrast, renting a U-haul pickup for 24hrs with no extras (but including insurance) cost me about $140+ hassle a few months ago. I guess it just depends how bad I need a truck.

Blueprint for Restaurant II

My first blueprint for a restaurant never quite took off, though it might just need a bit more time to ferment. But I can't wait for the food services industry to finish stewing on that one because I have a fresh idea in my cooker.

Name: Food Cave

Product: Unprocessed foods. The only processing allowed is washing, chopping, boiling, drying, and roasting.

Theme 1: Escape from modern industrialization. Interior decoration includes cave paintings.

Theme 2: Standard look-at-me-I'm-so-green! features such as big windows, power supplied by windmill on the roof etc.

Location: Any educated middle-upper crust neighborhood.

Food list: Every veggie that can be eaten raw, all kinds of nuts, raw grains, whole milk of cow and goat, small steaks seasoned only with salt, boiled beans, hard boiled eggs still in the shell, mushrooms, a variety of greens, all kinds of fruit, and fresh hot roasted yams and potatoes and squash of every kind.

Layout: V-shape. Food is on the left. Cashiers are in the center. Crude tables are on the right. In the food section, which is about as large as the seating section, a cook is behind the food in full view chopping and boiling and roasting and answering questions about the food because it is mostly unlabeled. The food is divided into three categories: $7/lb for specialty items (berries, nuts, meats), $4/lb for mid-range things like fresh washed radishes, and $2/lb for cheap things that sell in large chunks, like unchopped carrots and roasted potatoes.

Freakwenter high risk fund: quarterly report

Six months ago I started a project to evaluate the worth of emotional-technical analysis on the stock market. Emotional-technical analysis is a phrase coined (ka-ching!) by me as far as I know, but what it refers to is nothing new. It refers to consciously allowing emotions to get in the way of "smart" investment choices. While some number crunching is allowed, it is mostly based on developing an intuition about where markets will go based on a broad array of clues, drawing from the news, simple economic theories, savvy friends, and (most importantly) gut feelings.

I think there could be something to be said for allowing emotion/intuition to guide investment choices. The big market swings of the last few years left open opportunities for arbitrage so large as to make a mockery of the efficient markets hypothesis. My brief-but-growing experience as a statistician tells me that mathematical market models are useful, but they can not account for much of the variability in prices, because variability stems from such a wide array of sources: the overall direction of the economy, the environment, political stability, technological innovation across different sectors of the economy, changing demographics and values, mob behavior, and on and on. Of course, agreeing that the mathematical models are incomplete is not the same as saying that emotional-technical analysis can fill the gaps, but it at least opens up the possibility.

Many practitioners of emotional-technical analysis are also into voodoo, superstition, or are otherwise mentally unstable. I am not. I am not out to prove that this analysis works, and in fact I believe the number of people who could make a lot of stock-market profit this way must be very small. Early indications suggest that I won't get rich off of it.

Product Review: JOE the Multi Tool

My new Cathys Concepts Multi Tool with Flashlight is quite a toy. It is a pliers:


And a knife and poker thingy and screw driver (for miniature Phillips screws) and a bread knife (or a cracker knife, at this scale). The blades are much like butter knives, safe for children at a younger age than other more fearsome blades.


It's too big to swallow, but not much bigger than that:



Oh yeah, and by the way I named it JOE. You can bestow upon your multi tool a three-letter name when you order it. I like Joe.


Joe is a bright one. He has this tiny little battery that produces a surprisingly bright beam for his size.

Graffiti II

The wall of my favorite bathroom stall was cleaned off over the summer, but it is coming back to life:

I sat here broken hearted,
tried to poop but only farted.
Then one day I took a chance,
tried to fart and pooped my pants.

Infomercial Teaser Post

CSN Stores will give me a $45 gift certificate and I'll buy something and then review it here soon. I'm drooling with anticipation. Maybe I'll get a knife for my kitchen or a telescope for the deck. They wanted me to say something about the amazingly divine and stylish bar tables and stools that they offer, and I would love to buy these of course, if only my house wasn't already the model of perfection!