Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

A certain muggle has asked that I divulge to the world my middle name. But little does the muggle know how big a challenge this is.

Why, you ask? Because to know the name of a Ninja, is to know him for who he is. And if you knew who he is, then he is no longer a Ninja because, well, you know who he is.

Stealth is a Ninja’s only true friend. And if a Ninja loses his stealth, he becomes very vulnerable. To little kittens who may nibble on him. To the vagaries of the stock exchange (speaking of which, is it me or does anyone else think that Fox Business News is run by Ninjas?). To private equity monsters.

To this man. Or this woman.

My middle name, my friends, is Michraphangelatellardo. Lardo for short.

L is for the L that’s not in Ninja. Or my name.

A is for Yet Another Ninja. Or me.

R is for, well, Rhinoceros (variety and all that). Or Raptors, who are outside your house right now.

D is for Deadly Ninja. Or me.

and O is for “O! It’s a Ninja!” Turn around!

And now, you all have made me vulnerable to the most dangerous things known to man.

For a Ninja, one is many and many is one (which would explain Rajnikanth, who is secretly a Ninja). And one nut is the same as many nuts. So, Mr. Almonds, I nominate you.

Recently, the United Nations ruled that tasers are a form of torture. According to the UN’s Committee Against Torture, “The use of these weapons causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture.” And given the increasing number of taser disasters and deaths in the US and Canada, it was long due that someone took attention of this.

Now let’s think about this for a second. The moment you give a non-lethal weapon in the hands of someone, they are more likely to use it than a lethal weapon simply because it is non-lethal. And with everything else, you run the risk of abuse — when something is non-lethal, the abuse is likely to be more frequent.

For instance, a cop is less likely to shoot someone who is abusing him or her but a lot more likely to tase someone because he or she knows that the weapon is non-lethal and therefore, can be used a lot more frequently without (deadly) consequence. As a result, we have a lot of people who would otherwise not have used a gun use a taser.

So what does this mean for TASER International? I remember seeing a recent Wallstrip where they talked about how TASER International is trying to get into the regular consumer products industry.

One of the two points that they brought up was the potential for lawsuits when tasers start replacing the pepper-spray. It’s one thing for cops to use them — but it’s quite another when everybody and their brother starts using them. Imagine that frat party, with tasers thrown in for fun. Or imagine kids getting hold of them from their Mom’s handbag.

The other point was of course the NRA — they are perhaps one of the most powerful lobbies in this country, and having tasers replace guns in the home-protection market is probably not in the NRA’s best interests.

A quick look at TASR’s stocks tells us that they are a long way off from their 2004 high of $31.65, trading currently at $13.04. So, this UN ruling is probably not going to help them, either. After all, imagine a consumer product that’s deemed a torture device by the UN.

Of course, for all we know, it may have no bearing whatsoever on how the stock ends — everyone knows that cigarettes cause cancer, but that certainly hasn’t put a serious dent in tobacco sales around the world. Right?

Here is a 3d Julia fractal with a Mandelbrot pattern that I whipped up in POV Ray. I’ve done some 3d quaternions before, but I figured I’d try creating patterned ones and this is a starter piece.

And here is the starter piece on which I patterned this Mandelbrot from POV Ray’s documentation.

I do think that it needs a little smoothening and that there are some points that are disjoint from the central piece.

That’s the question that Vogue asks, because apparently paying $20 for a good pair of blue-jeans should result in a loss for at least someone.

Not that fashion designers are known to be the brightest kids in the block, but you’d think that they’d just stick to what they know and not make fools of themselves by spewing forth rubbish in economics.

Quite obviously, these guys aren’t really keeping up with all the progress humanity’s been making in automation and process improvement.

I was having a conversation earlier in the day with BPSK on one of the articles from today’s WSJ that talked about correlations between the Japanese Yen and investor confidence. It’s a rather interesting article, and the topic of VIX came up.

For those that do not know what VIX is, it stands for Volatility IndeX and is a measure of the volatility of the S&P 500 options.

I was trying to recount the disadvantages of using a single index but could not go beyond the criticisms that Wikipedia raked up, namely –

• It depicts the overall volatility for options and not for any one. Therefore, how much it may apply to specific options is debatable.
• The fact that the VIX only applies to a 30-day period could mean that it could be temporarily exploited by futures traders to artificially drive up the volatility.
• The applicability and correlations between what drives volatility of index options to what drives equities options is questionable.
• The amount of liquidity available in the market for specific types of options varies based on the specific option in question; an overall index is too simplistic.

Of course, there are probably other reasons why the VIX works or does not work. And I most certainly do not know enough about the options industry to comment upon it, except cursory knowledge.

So, do any of you finance gurus out there have any further thoughts on this topic?

I’ve been looking for various tools for Quantitative Analysis in finance. I stumbled upon QuantLib.

It’s an Open Source tool written in C++, but it is written with an open object model such that it is has been ported to work with several other languages.

If you are interested, you can download QuantLib and play with some of their examples.