Grim up North Heath

Tag: dailyprompt

  • Margin calls and Trading Places

    Margin calls and Trading Places

    What’s something most people don’t understand?

    The stock exchange scene at the end of ‘Trading Places’ confused me for many years. I learned, many years later, just what was going on and how stock trades aren’t linear in the same way shopping is.

    The set up

    Trading Places is a 1983 comedy film starring Dan Ackroyd, Eddie Murphy and Jamie Lee Curtis. These younger actors get first class support from Denholm Elliot, Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy.

    Ackroyd plays Louis Winthorpe III, managing director of Duke & Duke Commodity Brokers. The Duke brothers (Ameche and Bellamy) are capricious millionaires who only care about money.

    Mother said you were greedy

    She meant it as a compliment

    Street hustler Billy-Ray Valentine (Murphy) enters the scene and is arrested after a misunderstanding between him and Winthorpe. The Duke brothers decide to run an experiment, to investigate nature versus nurture. They bet on this for “the usual amount”.

    They ruin Winthorpe by planting drugs on him. After his arrest he loses his job, his house, his fiancée and has his assets frozen and credit cards cut up. Ophelia (Curtis), a prostitute released from the police station at the same time, lets him stay with her while he gets his life in order.

    Ophelia and Louis meet outside the police station.

    The Dukes give Valentine a job (Winthorpe’s job) and a house (Winthorpe’s house) with a butler, Coleman (Winthorpe’s butler, played by Denholm Elliot).

    At a Christmas party at Duke & Duke, Winthorpe – dressed as Santa Claus – tries to frame Valentine for drug use. This fails. Security eject Winthorpe, but not before he manages to steal a side of salmon to hide in the beard.

    Winthorpe has reached rock bottom. Trying to eat a side of salmon through his fake beard on a bus.

    In the toilets, Valentine overhears the Dukes discuss their bet. They declare the nature v nurture debate settled and the bet is paid. All $1 of it.

    Winthorpe has hit rock-bottom. His suicide bid fails when the gun he traded his watch1 for fails to fire. He takes an overdose of the drugs he used to frame Valentine and passes out in Ophelia’s bath. When he recovers, he finds himself back in his own home, reunited with his butler and less than pleased to see Valentine. Valentine explains how the Dukes did this to them for a $1 bet. The pair seek revenge.

    Revenge is ours!

    Since the only thing the Dukes care about is money, they decide to ruin them. They give the Dukes false information that the orange harvest will be poor, which leads them to decide to corner the market in frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ).

    The final scene is where the confusion lies. Trading floors in the early 80’s were high-tension environments. We see traders asking about each other’s stomach ulcers and hypertension before going into the bear pit that is the high-stakes world of trading frozen concentrated orange juice.

    The high-stakes world of frozen concentrated orange juice trading.

    The Dukes, confident that the price of FCOJ will rocket because of the bad harvest, start buying FCOJ futures. This creates a speculative bubble and drives up prices. Winthorpe then announces that he will sell 30 April futures, each of 15,000 lbs, at $1.42 a pound. They are mobbed, selling to everyone. The price drops and the Dukes watch in horror as they face ruin.

    The Duke brothers realise something is amiss.

    After an hour of frantic activity the true crop report is broadcast. This forecasts a normal harvest. The price of FCOJ plummets and panic ensues. When the price hits 46c, Winthorpe starts buying from everyone except the Duke’s broker. The final price is 29c a pound.

    At the margin call, when all trades have to be settled, Winthorpe and Valentine see the Dukes. They also had a bet; Valentine bet Winthorpe that they could ruin the Dukes. Winthorpe pays up.

    Winthorpe pays up on the bet he had with Valentine.

    Exchange officials confront The Duke brothers. They must pay $394 million (over $1 billion today) to cover their trading losses. This exceeds their assets, and the brothers are bankrupt. Even at the end while one of the Duke brothers collapses with a heart attack, money is first and foremost.

    Official: Mortimer, your brother is not well. We better call an ambulance.

    Mortimer: Fuck him2! Now listen to me! I want trading reopened now!

    The film ends with Winthorpe, Valentine, Ophelia and Coleman on a beach, trying to decide whether to have lobster or cracked crab for lunch.

    What I don’t understand…

    How trading works is at the centre of this scene. In the world of brokerage buying and selling aren’t necessarily linear. You can sell things you haven’t yet bought. If you think the price will fall, you sell as many of a thing as possible with a promise to supply at an agreed time. Then you have to buy the thing and if the price has dropped, you get profit.

    The Dukes think that a poor harvest will mean frozen juice will be in demand. So they think that the price of FCOJ will be high in April. They tell their dealer to keep buying, no matter what.

    Winthorpe sells 30 contracts, each containing 15,000 lbs of juice for $1.49 a pound – that’s $639,000. This is a promise to sell that juice in April at that price. How much he eventually pays for the juice is not the buyer’s problem. A poor harvest would indicate that this could be a good price. No wonder they get mobbed.

    The real crop forecast is released after an hour’s trading. Winter storms have not affected the harvest, so the value of the frozen juice plummets. Panic ensues, the FCOJ price tanks until it reaches 29c a pound. Winthorpe and Valentine start buying the juice that they will sell in April at a much reduced price. Nobody will want frozen juice in April when there is plenty of fresh juice.

    Had Winthorpe and Valentine only done that first trade they would have made $508,500 by buying at 29c and selling at $1.42. but they did many more trades than that – it’s never clear how many, but it’s a lot.

    On the other hand, the Dukes are in the hole for $394 million. They bought a huge amount of stock at the high price and couldn’t sell it before the end of trading. They need to pay for the juice they bought at $1.42 a pound.

    If only the Dukes weren’t so greedy. But then, if they weren’t there wouldn’t have been a moral for this story.

    1. A Rochefoucauld, the thinnest waterproof watch in the world. Retails for $6955. Bo Diddley gave him $50 for it. ↩︎
    2. Don Ameche apologised to the crew for swearing. ↩︎

  • Easier and faster but more demanding research

    How has technology changed your job?

    I’ve only been in my current job for a year. My previous job, science research, changed considerably over the thirty-plus years I did it.

    Back in the old days

    Science and research relied on manual methods when I started in science, doing my undergraduate degree at Loughborough from 1989 to 1993. In the university library there was a mix of card indexes and a new computer system.

    The Pilkington Library, Loughborough University. The unusual inverted pyramid design is not an accident, we were told. I’m not so sure.

    Finding the book you wanted meant being familiar with the library layout and knowledge of the Dewey Decimal system. I spent a lot of time in the 540s (Chemistry) and later, in particular, 541.35 (photochemistry) for my final year project.

    What neither the card index nor the computer index could help you with was looking for a journal article. If you knew the details of the article, from another article, for example, then it was easy enough. Locate the journal in the library and hope that the volume you want is available. Otherwise it was the dreaded Inter-library loan (ILL), which cost money and took weeks.

    If you didn’t know the particulars of the article you wanted, only that it was written in the mid-1970s by PF Morgan in one of the American Academy of Sciences journals, you were pretty stuffed.

    Web of Science

    With the advent in the 1990s of the Web of Science in the 1990s, you could search for a term. This meant that you could search for Morgan, PF and add search terms ‘silicone dioxide’ and the year range 1972 to 1978. And bingo! You found that article you were looking for five years ago and can no longer remember why you wanted it. Mainly because you were investigating photochemistry in 1992, but in 1997 you are working in a geology lab.

    All this seems pretty lame by today’s standards when we are all search-engine savvy. But it was a revelation at the time and exactly what computers are for.

    This means you can find a reference in a journal you don’t have in the library. And furthermore, now you can download the journal article often for a hefty fee. Last I looked the top fee was $60 for access to a single article. This does not encourage the flow of knowledge.

    The flip side of easier research is that expectations are higher. When I had my PhD viva (in 2002), the external examiner was keen to point out that I’d missed what he considered a vital paper on the subject. He had published it in 1978, and I could only apologise and accept his comment that I shouldn’t have relied on computer searches. I checked afterwards. The article hadn’t been cited since 1985. No wonder I missed it.

    Today, there really would be no excuse for missing even a very old article. The web of science is everywhere. However, I don’t know whether non-English articles get pulled into the web of science.

    Statistics and computers

    One other thing that is now much easier with the use of computers is statistics. In 2019 I completed a Masters in Quality by Design. This technique for improving the quality of manufactured goods relies heavily on a variety of statistical methods. To say this would be difficult, tedious and prone to error without fast computers would be an understatement.

  • Flames… on the side of my face

    Flames… on the side of my face

    What movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times?

    I know someone who never re-watches films or re-reads books because they know what’s going to happen. I told them they were missing out, because good writing rewards a re-watch. Subtleties, callbacks, brick jokes, references you missed first time because you were following the plot. Also, things you didn’t understand because you were twelve the first time you read Lord of the Rings (for example) and at fifty you have a much better sense of the world, how plot works, and you realise Sam is the real hero after all.

    Some candidates

    There’s few things I’ve seen as many as five times. They’d need to be quite old because, despite what I just said, I do think rewatching too frequently is not rewarding. And I think to qualify I’d need to have watched the whole thing.

    This latter disqualifies Red Dwarf. I’m sure I’ve watched most of the first five series many times, especially when I was a student back in the early 90s. But from series 6 onwards there was a drop-off in quality and laughs. I watched 7 (I laughed once), some of 8 and haven’t seen much of any of the latter series.

    I watch Taskmaster regularly, (and blog about it, and make t-shirts too) but I’ve not seen any of the episodes more than three times. There are nearly 200 of them, and they keep making new ones.

    Spaced (1999-2001)

    The TV series I’ve probably seen five times is Spaced, a sitcom centring around two 20-somethings, Daisy and Tim, who share a flat in a house alongside Marsha, their permanently sozzled landlady, and the artist Brian. We follow them as they learn to share a flat, cope with each other’s friends and fail to get their act together. This was two series, first shown in the early 00’s. Starring Jessica Hynes and Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the series with direction from Edgar Wright, saw the series as a reaction to the perfect ‘friends’ sitcoms that were prevalent at the time. A somewhat surreal series, the episode are dense and full of visual and verbal jokes, cultural references and call-backs.

    The main cast are supported by some surprising one-off guest actors. The third episode Art features David Walliams as the conceptual artist Vulva1, a former artistic partner of Brian. This was the highlight of Walliam’s career.

    David Walliams as Vulva, the conceptual artist whose latest production ‘Come’ features in the third episode of Spaced.

    We also get two-offs of Bill Bailey as Tim’s boss Bilbo Bagshot and Peter Serafinowicz as Tim’s love rival Dwayne, plus John Simm as a brief love interest of Daisy’s in the Matrix-inspired first episode of the second series. Reece Shearsmith gives a memorably unhinged performance as a Robot Wars rival, providing the only link between Spaced and Taskmaster.

    Clue (1985)

    This is the only film I’m sure I’ve seen at least five times. I’d have thought Star Wars (1977), since I saw it twice when it came out, but I’m sure I’ve only watched it through twice since then.

    I may have seen Kind Hearts and Coronets many times, but I can’t be sure how many. This is a joyous film about the gentle art of murder, and I highly recommend it. Likewise, I may have hit the watch-count on Galaxy Quest and everyone’s favourite Christmas film, Die Hard.

    So, Clue. Based on the board game Cluedo2, I first watched it in the 80s on telly. It’s a film with three endings, which I thing is unique. My memory from the first watch is that my dad loved it, especially ‘Ending C’, famous for the ‘Flames on the side of my head’ speech, and for the final line delivered by Michael McKean3, which absolutely tickled my dad.

    Watching again a few years later, the cast and the ensemble performance grabbed my attention. Yes, that’s Tim Curry4. And Christopher Lloyd. We also have Lesley Ann Warren as Miss Scarlett (she was a late replacement for Carrie Fisher), Eileen Brennan giving a masterclass in how to waffle onscreen5 and a very brief appearance by Jane Wiedlin, who later featured as Miss Of Arc in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

    Watch count is at least five, going up to six at the weekend. Youngest child doesn’t know who Tim Curry is, and this is the most family-friendly film we have of his.

    Now all we need to do is find a way of connecting the DVD player to the new telly…

    1. Her real name’s Ian. ↩︎
    2. Which is called Clue in the USA. ↩︎
    3. Who starred in another frequent watch, ‘This is Spinal Tap’. ↩︎
    4. I’ve only seen Rocky Horror three times. ↩︎
    5. Something Jessica Hynes is also brilliant at. ↩︎

  • I learned it’s called a shock mount

    I learned it’s called a shock mount

    What is the last thing you learned?

    I’m learning all the time, but this is the most recent thing that’s been kind of useful.

    I can’t now remember why I was watching the video this still is from. It’s about The Beatles and I am having one of my periodic bouts of listening to Les Quatres Fantastique1 a lot.

    Blogger David Bennet inspiring a t-shirt design.

    What struck me was the image of the presenter’s t shirt with the mike in front. It looked like he had a microphone print on his top. Would there be a market for such a design?

    The only way to find out is to do it.

    So I had to find a good image of this thing to act as a reference without knowing what the cage thing around the mike is called. After a bit of searching on the Google I found out: it’s a shock mount.

    Its purpose is to absorb knocks and bumps and so reduce noise while recording. There’s a metal or plastic cage and the mike is held in a cradle of elastic to keep it in place. Hooks keep the tension in the elastic and reduce movement.

    So it was into Blender I went to model the shock mount and a microphone. I’d made a microphone before for Steve the stand-up orc. This mike is a simpler design, it’s the mount that’s the interesting bit.

    One of the models I made in Blender as part of a course. This is Steve the orc, moonlighting at the Mordor Improv.

    I think it took me an hour to get the shapes done and looking satisfactory. Not bad. Then shading was fairly simple, block colours except the mike sponge2 which has a noise texture added to the displacement to give it some texture.

    How the sponge texture is added to the sponge bit. A bit of noise is added to the displacement (how far each bit is from the median surface) to create the effect of a sponge.

    The final version needed a background. If it’s printed as a dark object then it won’t look good on a dark t-shirt, so I added a plane behind the microphone and worked out how to give the plane a blue colour in the centre and fade to transparent at the edge. That way there’s a colour behind the mike whatever colour the t shirt is.

    How the microphone looks in Blender. The flat plane is there to make a vignette effect in the final render.

    I’ll probably do a couple of other colours as background. The brown on the original presenter’s t-shirt might be a good option, as used in the featured image.

    Shader settings for the vignette effect. The ‘Alpha’ in the Principled BSDF controls how transparent the object is. The rest of the nodes control where the object is opaque and how see-through it is.

    It’s up on RedBubble as a T-shirt with the blue background. I’m adopting the motto ‘real artists ship’, so I don’t sit on designs hoping they might mature and improve.

    RedBubble Shop
    White t-shirt
    Microphone design on a white t shirt.
    1. As they’re known in France. ↩︎
    2. Also known as a pop shield or spoffle. ↩︎
  • Things happen

    Things happen

    Do you believe in fate/destiny?

    I don’t think fate or destiny are real. Where you are in life is subject to so many variables that to believe is fate is egocentric. You are where you are, things could be better and they could be worse.

    This is a very British atheist view of life. It might be comforting to believe in fate and be helpless to its whims, but that abdicates responsibility and it’s no better than believing your horoscope. There are also many factors outside your control, billions of people and many millions of things that can fail, fall or fuck around with your life.

    Could things be better? Yes. We could have a bigger house that’s less of a mess and more money because we worked harder or we took an opportunity that we missed. We could also still be renting a grotty flat in Bootle because that’s as far as our ambitions and opportunities took us. Or Mrs S could have got into Bristol Old Vic – which would have been a big win for her – and we’d never have met.

    How to explain it? Through Terry Pratchett, of course.

    Terry Pratchett’s gods

    The Discworld is ruled over by gods who are at a loss to know how to pass a wet afternoon. Fate is real in this world. In Lords And Ladies the wizard Ridcully suggests to Granny Weatherwax that if they’d stayed together then their life would have been very different. What if they’d settled down and had children, grandchildren. She responds:

    What about the fire? … Swept through our house just after we were married. Killed us both.

    This is Pratchett’s ‘trousers of time’ multiverse theory, where you go down a different leg and there’s continuinuums all over the place where everything and everyone bifurcates1. I’m not sure I believe that, either. That would mean there’s a universe for every decision everyone ever made. There’s loads of them – where do they keep the ones we’re not using?

    I suppose it could be that there’s an omniscient and omnipotent controller who guides the destiny of us all. That’s a cop-out, or perhaps extreme solipsism if you think only you matter. I believe there’s one universe and I don’t believe in any gods.

    Celebrate your wins, be annoyed at what goes wrong if that helps. Don’t sweat the missed opportunities. And remember, you can’t control other people.

    1. The trousers of time have more legs than a centipede dry cleaner’s. ↩︎
  • Sour sweets and dark chocolate

    Sour sweets and dark chocolate

    What’s your favourite candy?

    I’m using the definition of ‘candy’ to mean anything in the confectionery aisle of the supermarket.

    Current favourite sweet is probably Tesco’s sour rings. They’re sherbet coated fruit jellies, and even though they’re a supermarket own brand, they do hit the spot. I’ve tried various Haribo and Bassets sour sweets but they don’t pack the same punch. They also hide cherry flavoured sweets in there and that’s something I don’t want.

    Current favourite sweet.

    Dark chocolate is my favourite. Green and Black’s dark mint, Lindt dark mint or chilli, Hotel Chocolat’s various dark offerings… all good. Saying that, I’d not refuse a Double Decker or Mars Bar.

    Green & Black’s minty dark chocolate.
    Spicy chocolate! It was a surprise the first time I had chilli and chocolate together how well it works.
  • ‘Tinterweb

    ‘Tinterweb

    The most important invention in your lifetime is…

    I am just older than the internet. The first linked computer system (ARPANET) went live in October to December 1969, when I was a few months old.

    All the trouble started here.

    As a tool for spreading information and knowledge the internet is up there with agriculture, written language and the printing press; I might be old but I post date both those things.

    I first encountered the web (invented in 1989) in 1993 when I worked at Liverpool University. I think I knew of it, probably from Tomorrows World, but had never used a web browser. I used it mainly for research since the original users of the web and internet were academic and military.

    There have been many other great inventions in the last few decades; some of the advances in medicine are frankly astonishing. The invention of MRI and DNA fingerprinting and the continued development of computer storage and quantum computing spring to mind.

    But the fact of the internet and the ease with which ideas can be shared and communication can occur has enabled these advances in the same way that the printing press ushered in The Enlightenment.

  • Food, science & architecture

    Food, science & architecture

    Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.

    This day is a patchwork of highlights. I don’t know if there is any one place that this could really happen, but ‘ideal’ has to be able to include the impossible.

    Mrs S is with me throughout, the kids join us for lunch then do their own thing after dinner.

    Wake up about seven, in a big hotel room with a massive en suite.

    Full English breakfast – local butcher’s sausages, back bacon, two fried eggs, black pudding, fried potatoes, toast, coffee. Or steak and potatoes if FEB isn’t available.

    Walking tour including local architecture, industrial, religious and civic. A lot of pointing at ceilings and mulling over the fact that we’re lucky we don’t have to work in those conditions at the mill/ mine/ factory/ farm that is now a working museum.

    Lunch is fish and chips by the sea, where the kids have joined us after a morning shopping. There is a magic seagull exclusion zone so we can eat them undisturbed and the chippy has saveloy for Mrs S.

    Afternoon at a bookshop where you can get lost among the shelves, the type Terry Pratchett described as ‘a genteel black hole that can read’. Someone magically comes and takes our books and other purchases back to the hotel for us.

    Coffee and cake (fruit cake or tiffin) to tide us over.

    Evening session at an observatory or other science museum where we will again do a lot of pointing at stuff and talk about science and the like.

    Late dinner. Italian restaurant overlooking a scorched valley in Tuscany, the evening has cooled enough that we can eat comfortably, but a cold Peroni or three is welcome. I’m not driving, so what the hell. A selection of charcuterie to start, then something involving gnocchi, a spicy pizza and gelato for dessert.

    After dinner, stand up comedy at an upstairs cellar with acts I’ve never seen before but leaving me exhausted with laughter. The fortifying pint of Guinness at the interval will see me through.

    A couple of whiskies as a nightcap. Something floral for preference, a Speyside single malt or a selection of whiskies from around the world.

    Then bed.

  • Beef stew and dumplings

    Beef stew and dumplings

    What’s your favorite thing to cook?

    I love this dish, the smell fills the house when it’s in the oven. It’s also easy to prepare, although it does take a long time to cook.

    We have two versions in this house, I do a slow-cooked version with cannellini beans (recipe here), Mrs S uses a pressure cooker and her recipe features oxtail soup (must be Heinz).

    Both are delicious, with different textures and many common ingredients. Beef, onions, garlic, carrots for starters. I put potatoes in the stew, Mrs S does them separately. But the most important component of the stew is the dumplings.

    Uncooked dumplings. You don’t need to be very rigorous getting spherical dumplings, rougher dumplings will fluff up just the same.

    Dumplings are easy enough to make, as long as you use suet and self-raising flour you can’t really go wrong. A generous helping of dried herbs and chilli add some flavour. We give them 20 minutes steaming over the stew. This allows the dumplings time to swell and acquire the required soft texture and some of the flavour of the stew. It also means that some moisture from the stew is lost so the stew thickens a bit.

    Dumplings done, stew ready to serve.

    I’ve just noticed that there’s a very angry-looking dumpling in the middle of the picture. Just as well we ate it before anyone noticed.

  • Pet B

    Pet B

    Write about your first computer.

    There are two ‘first computers’ for me. The first one I used was when I was at Thurso High School. This was the school’s 8K Commodore PET that was available to book for lunchtime use. I was at the school from ‘81 to ‘82 before we moved to England. I don’t know that I learned very much; some programming in BASIC but no guidance, played a text adventure game and perhaps gained an awareness that computers were a thing that would feature in my future.

    Commodore PET from about 1980.

    The second was a BBC B that was a Christmas present to the family in 1983. Transferring data and uploading was a challenge using cassette tape recorder. It could take half an hour to load games, along with the clanking racket of data transfer and you’d come back from your tea to find the load had failed. Jealous of a neighbour (an engineer) who had a floppy disc drive and he could load a game in under a minute! He’d also expanded the BBC B’s 32K RAM to an unbelievable 128K.

    The power!

    Having a BBC C at home was handy, because this was the machine I used for ‘O’ level computer studies. In theory I could have transferred work between school and home, but data transfer wasn’t really viable and we only did a small amount of programming during the course.

    Inevitably games were played on the BBC at home, once we hooked it up to a spare telly. Elite was my favourite, a space adventure game with trading commodities and the occasional space battle. I also have fond memories of my dad playing ‘Estra’, a collect-the-pieces game that took ages to load. But while it loaded, it played ‘Entry of the Gladiators’1, which was fun.

    You can play Estra here, and listen in awe to the theme music.

    After O levels, I didn’t use computers much for a number of years. I first heard about email in 1990, when I was at uni in Loughborough. One of my tutors told us that he could send a message from his computer2 to a friend at Portsmouth and get a reply later that day. Much faster than letters and less intrusive than a phone call.

    Mrs S and I didn’t own a computer at home until about 2000, after we had bought our first flat. The mainly so that I could work at home on my PhD. I had to run an extension line right across the flat to get dial-up internet and it was honestly easier and quicker (and possibly cheaper given the cost of phone calls back then) to take a bus up to the university (from central Bath) and get journal articles from the library than it was to try and download them at home. But I did write my thesis on it, so it served its primary objective.

    I can’t remember the specs, but I do know it was quite an expensive bit of kit for us at the time. Given its cost, we shipped it over to Australia in 2003 and back again in 2005. We still have it in the loft, gathering dust and awaiting possible resurrection so I can play Quake III Arena again.

    1. The circus music. ↩︎
    2. He had a computer in his office! ↩︎
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