Symmetric people

I think Ancient Greeks, as seen through their representations in stone and bronze sculpture (other materials didn't survive), were more beautiful and symmetric than the people I meet on the street.

Fluctuating asymmetry is of course a measure of health and intelligence, so humanity is less perfect today that then. The Woodley Effect, as measured by fluctuating asymmetry, shows over 160 years (6.4 generations) 0.16 IQ points drop/decade.

Pic.: Zeus

Synecdoche

Meditate on Shelley's synecdoche in his poem Ozymandias:

“Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them.”

“The hand” in the above lines refers to the sculptor who carved the “lifeless things” into a statue.

“Mocked” in Shelley’s context means, “made, fashioned” rather than “derided.” The sense of the word originates in the German “machen (gemacht)” and survives in engineering usage today in terms like “mock-up” for a crude prototype.

Or "The hand" refers to Ozymandias?

The Other Cryptos

New ways of encrypting information are emerging. The IOTA is one of them. It is based on sensor generated information (internet of things). It is an European startup, for a change. The message of IOTA seems to be that no information is worthless.

Emergency phone line for depressed Palestinians

Trump declaration that Jerusalem is Jewish caused widespread depression in the Arab world. We should establish an emergency phone line for Palestinians with suicide thoughts. Why waste good ammunition on them?  Alternatively, we could buy ads on Ramallah Times: "How to connect correctly the wires of a suicide vest". Pic.: Wired.

Beta Decay

We are approaching the end of the tax year and I rebalanced my portfolio. My goal is to balance my losses with my gains, in order to cover my tax debts on the winning shares with the tax credits of the losing shares. Since tax here is 25%, the relation has to be one to four.

Since this year I had few losses, now I am thinking that the whole exercise was useless. It had been better to pay full tax and not to try to rebalance. Why? The first issue is beta slippage. 

The  second issue is the high cost of selling and buying stock through the bank.  Several times in the past I demanded and received a reduction of the percentage taken by the bank, yet it seems to silently return to its former shark bite share. The Poalim bank is the most expensive, and of course, also the most profitable bank in this country. I cannot change banks because of my managing partner, Giveret j. (aka wife).

On the other hand, it is important to meet the banker at least twice a year, because his job in the bank depends on the work he does, that is giving advice to the clients of the bank. It is good that he profits from my relationship, so he may be inclined to help me when I need him.

Another Project

                                                                                                Working hard on a new project. Yesterday on site.

James Flynn on Cognitive Decline

"There was a wonderful study by the OECD where they gave a test of working memory – what a pity it wasn't a test of analytical ability, but it wasn't – and they divided the countries into those like France, where 80% of people retired between 55-65, and those like Sweden and Switzerland, where 80% were still in work, and the loss on working memory in France for that age was twice as great. Which tells us that, if you kept exercising your brain at work, your working memory held up better."

I am much older than the subjects tested. But I keep working like a dog and blogging daily.  And I enjoy it. Most healthy old people in Israel I know is working.