| Tuesday, May
20, 2008
The word I was looking for yesterday is Plasmacytoma.
Today I need to get some work done. Walk in the morning, get some work
done on writing up the new computer, then go upstairs and stare at
Janissaries for a while. Perhaps I can get started on that.
==============
1350:
Slept in until 0900, took our walk, came home and crashed. I seem to be
up and about and ready to get some work done. I hope. I'll try to get
to work now.
==============
In
my last column I illustrated the wild swing in Yahoo stock by saying
"any day trader who had a Yahoo buy order at 20 and a sell order at
24 could have made a fair amount of money on Monday."
I was also careful to point out that day trading is a very risky
business. A bit later a reader informed me that Yahoo never got as low as
20. That may well be true: I picked the number off a chart on my iPhone, and
that is not a terribly accurate source of information. He came up with a
different buy/sell combination, but then said there wasn't enough
information and it was all too risky. I can hardly disagree with that.
Actually almost anyone able to take advantage of that negotiation would
probably have had to have inside information, and that, as I understand it,
is illegal.
The whole point of the story was that there was a wild swing in the stock
price; and once again, looking at the day's volume trades, there were spikes
somewhere near 20 (probably slightly above) and at 24. All this was hardly
relevant to the point of the article, and I said "it hardly matters".
So, a week later, I get this:
Jerry,
"It Hardly Matters" ??
This is what I meant when I said, in my last
email, that elites use 'self serving', incomplete data gathering and
analysis to make their points.
It seems to me that you put in the part about day
trading and the buy and sell orders you mentioned so that you would
APPEAR knowledgeable about something you know nothing about.
I'm disappointed. This is hardly worthy of a PLUS,
much less the FIRST PLUS.
For the record: I put in the remark about day trading and
buy and sell orders to illustrate that there was a wild swing in the Yahoo
price. I took the data points off the iPhone stock chart, and made no
attempt to verify their accuracy to the nearest point, nor did I think it
important to do so.
For the record: I don't claim to know much about day
trading, and the only people I have known who tried it have got out of the
game for fear of black swans. I am sure there are people who make money at
the game, but I don't know any, and I certainly wouldn't advise anyone to
try it without a great deal of investigation, training, and confidence in
their abilities. If I were to attempt day trading in a serious way I'd do a
year's dry run (keeping scores in a notebook or Excel spread sheet and not
actually putting up any money) with several strategies and see if any of my
strategies actually produced a positive result.
For the record: I don't care whether or not I appear
knowledgeable about day trading and never did. I was writing a piece about
the Microsoft Yahoo negotiations, I thought I made a point, and it never
occurred to me that I was being an elitist pretending to know any more about
the subject than my readers do. I have books on the subject, and if I had
said anything that might actually affect readers I would have taken the
trouble to verify the accuracy of the stock price swing. As I recall, the
numbers I used came from a Wall Street Journal article and I was actually
doing a bit of fact checking by using the iPhone to call up the Yahoo stock
history, but I freely confess I didn't think it mattered much. I still don't
think it matters much, because I can't see how anyone would have been misled
by my column. Certainly my irate correspondent wasn't.
I do tend to be careful with facts that matter, particularly
in the columns. And I don't really need to put on airs. On the other hand, I
have often said that in addition to doing lots of silly things so you don't
have to, I pretend to know everything for a living.... In case anyone
wonders, I got that line from Isaac Asimov, and I told him I was going to
steal it if I outlived him...
===============
And now to try some real work.
============
Jerusalem post
Jerry,
Per the Jerusalem Post (nods: Drudge headline):
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/
Satellite?cid=1210668683139&
pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%
2FShowFull
'Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his
term'
<snip>(An) official claimed that a senior member of
the president's entourage, which concluded a trip to Israel last week, said
during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the
opinion that military action was called for.
However, the official continued, "the hesitancy of
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice" was
preventing the administration from deciding to launch such an attack on the
Islamic Republic, for the time being.<snip>
We can hope that sanity will prevail. Hope springs
eternal...
===================
And I have found this article. CRF =
Cancer Related Fatigue
Although CRF is most prevalent
during active therapy, a sense of fatigue may persist in cancer
survivors for months or even years after treatment discontinuation
[12,14,23,40,43-53 <http://www.uptodate.com//online/
content/abstract.do?topicKey=genl
_onc/14991&refNum=12,14,23,40,43-53> ] . A minority of
patients who are presumably cured of their cancer are so debilitated by
fatigue that they are still unable to work or regain their premorbid
lifestyles years after completing cancer treatment. Because of the lack
of objective findings, many have problems maintaining disability status,
causing additional stress and anxiety for both themselves and their
families.
I should count my blessings. I
have managed to get SOMETHING done during these spells of what I guess I
should call CRF, and thanks to the subscribers I don't have to claim
disability -- not that I want to or know how, and actually I suppose at my
age it doesn't even apply. Writers never retire. We do slow down sometimes.
Once again, let me thank those who have subscribed and/or renewed over the
past few months. That has kept us going without my having to make decisions
about capital assets. And now I really am going to get some
real work done. I expect to get a column out this week, then do some work on
Janissaries. I have notes on the next chapter of Janissaries,
and I know what the next action scene will be. It only requires writing it.
And I have decided to update the world of High Justice--Exile to Glory
(soon to be available from Baen in one volume, Exile -- and Glory!)
and use that as background for LisaBetta, my next solo novel. I will
probably also pull in elements from the Sheffield and Pournelle Higher
Education as part of the background. I'm working on that now.
So CRF is not going to stop me! It takes a bit of determination to get going
-- I will admit that being angry over that letter in the first part here may
have helped get me moving -- but once I start I tend to keep going.
Excelsior! ====== It's astonishing how many
articles on plasmacytoma one sees...
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