Opedian.com

A Market Forecast That Says ‘Take Cover’

WITH the stock market lurching again, plenty of investors are nervous, and some are downright bearish. Then there’s Robert Prechter, the market forecaster and social theorist, who is in another league entirely.

Tami Chappell for The New York Times

If Robert Prechter is right, one market analyst said, “we’ve basically got to go to the mountains with a gun and some soup cans.”

Mr. Prechter is convinced that we have entered a market decline of staggering proportions — perhaps the biggest of the last 300 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear friend,

Did you know that Washington is considering unfairly targeting Social Security benefits for cuts?

Social Security didn’t cause the budget deficit, so our retirement shouldn’t be put at risk to fix it!

I just signed AARP’s petition to protect Social Security and keep it strong for generations to come. Please click on the link below to join me – it will only take a minute.

http://action.aarp.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&id=779

Thanks for standing with me to keep Social Security strong.

The two volume series MUSIMATHICS (MIT Press, 2006 and 2007) are must reads for anyone interested in music and mathematics, or math in general. Here is a recent review: The sad thing about this series is that the keywords that invite readers to stop by, hide the fact that these texts go far beyond music, to USE music as a gentle introduction to extremely complex, relevant and timely math concepts. The best teachers use four paths to explain a math concept: verbal, formulaic, algorithmic and pictographic. These help the brain comprehend the topic regardless of our learning modality. The authors here are simply MASTERFUL math teachers, and clarify everything from Eulers Law (relation of e, the base of the natural logarithms to pi, the base of the trig functions) to Fourier Transforms, in a way that a bright High School student will get. If you’ve been out of math (any math) for a long time, and want a masterful review of math concepts and techniques, this series is THE place to start. You can then extend that foundation to many other applied areas, from signal processing to physics, voice recognition, etc. Fourier transforms (and their more recent spin off in Cepstrums) are being used in too many fields to list today, from radar and electronic engineering, to whale songs. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like nobody does deep analysis anymore. When we analyze chess, military strategy, psychology, math or music, we try to go 20 moves forward and backward. For example: the bank collapse destroyed oil prices and also crushed job creation and also precipitated a recession and also stopped Russian destroyers on the way to South America and also… Can deep analysis give any silver linings or ominous signs in the oil spill, beyond the obvious ecological agendas for less oil use, or strategic agendas of less foreign dependence? The effects are far reaching… as in decades, and as in global, yet the analysis seems to focus on the near term blame game. What, for example, will it do to the UK economy, and how will that affect a teetering Europe, then the Middle East, and then Iran? The planet is a powderkeg; how does each news story we read contribute to sparking or dampening, and why?

I was reviewing the Love of God article on Wikipedia mentioned in a previous article, and this link came up: WhyLoveGod.org.

Please visit our sponsors on the left of the page…