Paffman - musings on life

Australian Stock Market Movement By Month

nospam@example.com (Matt Paff) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:03:28 -0500

I am currently reading the book by Matthew Kidman - "Bulls, Bears & a croupier". Its basically a sales pitch for getting people into buying shares.

After a few questionable share trades in recent years I have been on the sidelines and the book has me motivated again, with the idea of informed, researched investment being front of mind.

I had a feeling that in general, January was a bad time to invest - "on average". So I did some googling. The following seemed to confirm my suspicions: Stock Returns By Month

Over the last 10 years, January and February have trended down, picking up in March...BUT that is the US stock market. How about the Australian All Ordinaries? I found this on the ASX website: ASX closing All Ords by month

I banged it into Excel, subtracted the month's close from the previous month's close to get the month's movement and then worked out a percentage movement based on the previous month's close. I overlaid a pivot table and a graph and ended up with this:

I think I might hold off investing until late Feb or early March...

Planning for the long-term

nospam@example.com (Matt Paff) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:10:10 -0500

I could raise the argument that too much focus on the long term causes more harm than good. If one is hell bent on getting somewhere down the track, one can loose sight of the now and even if one obtains their ultimate goal, they may not have enjoyed getting there and thus may actually resent achieving the goal. Or heaven forbid, accident, trial, tribulation or act of God may intervene and render obtaining the goal impossible. What then? What becomes of the effort and sacrifice? If the focus has been too long-term as to forget the present goal of enjoying life, long-term planning becomes an evil to be avoided.

But let us look at the opposite end of the scale. What if one abandons long-term goals for day-to-day, fly by the seat of your pants, present day life enjoyment philosophy?

If your lucky you maybe able to live by this philosophy for your entire life. But only if you’re lucky. At some point though your likely to wake up one morning and have run out of ways to enjoy yourself. Maybe you run out of money, perhaps ideas or maybe even friends. You stop, look back on your life that you’ve enjoyed so, and you think what have I really achieved? What now? Where to next?

Without planning for the future you can end up so far from where you would like to ever be that you may never find a way back.

But, waking up one morning and finding yourself lost certainly isn’t only the domain of the day-dreamers, the day-to-day enjoyers of life, the no hopers. It also besets the over-achievers, the well established, the long-term planners. Someone who has worked hard and built themselves up based on achieving goal after goal, suddenly wakes up one morning and like the day-dreamers says where am I? What has all this achieved? Call this the mid-life crisis, though I wouldn’t as it set upon me long before middle age, call it what you will, but avoid it like the plague because it is a horrible feeling to think that you have wasted all or even part of your life.

We all only get one life. One go at living, one go at making something constructive of your life. To know you have wasted any part of your life is the worst possible feeling you can inflict upon yourself.

So how do you avoid it? How can you live life, enjoying it and managing to achieve something at the same time, so that in the end, when the man at the pearly white gates asks: are you happy with the life you have lived? You can answer without fear of contradiction, of course I am! How do you do this? Well I hope that by taking the middle ground, setting long-term goals, broad long-term goals that allow me to enjoy the path to those goals is the solution. Achieving and enjoying. Creating memories that you enjoy and achieving goals that enable future enjoyment and memory creation. Making the path so enjoyable that even if I don’t obtain my goals it doesn’t really matter, because I enjoyed trying to get there. At least I hope this is the answer. Ask me in 50 years.

Existential Quandary Ramblings

nospam@example.com (Matt Paff) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:04:55 -0500

Are we suppose to believe that life is all there is to existing? To exist is to extrapolate upon life, in the same, individual existence involves looking at the universe outside as well as the confined enclosure which encompasses ones life.

Existing involves two unequal parts, living ones life and pondering why one has life. Living ones life is that which we do day-to-day. It is the life which we try to improve upon. The life that others judge and ourselves most harshly. The life which involves capitalism, communism, fascism, racism, homophobia, homosexuality, sexuality…The life that involves building towards ones retirement and what is retirement? Is it anything but the acceptance of life’s end, is it not the final waiting period before death? Life is but a novel, poem, film, musical or anecdote. It builds toward the final chapter/scene, and what of that final chapter? It’s just the part where you wait for the end? And what of the end? Well no one knows. Probably no one alive will ever know! But to ask this question, to ponder ones existence and ultimate death is to me, existing.

I think therefore I am, but why do I think. Perhaps I am therefore I think, but why am I, the eternal existential conundrum. I am because my mummy and daddy’s zygotes made me. But what made them? Their mummy and daddy’s zygotes and they came from their mummy and daddy’s zygotes and this all came from the evolution of life from the freak electricity assisted, chemical reaction between certain inanimate molecules. Well so we are led to believe.

Was there existence before life? If a tree falls in the forest and nothing is there to hear it or record it, does it really make a sound? Was there not rocks, sound, water, heat, gravity or colours before life? If life wasn’t there to see it, feel it, touch, smell or hear it did it not exist?

Before life so amazingly spontaneously generated from a chemical reaction of inanimate molecules there had to be existence. For if the inanimate molecules didn’t exist there would be no existence of the chemical reaction that created life, and thus no life.

So the argument follows, where did these inanimate molecules come from? Have they always existed? Perhaps there is no need for everything to have a beginning. Perhaps some things transcend time, transcend everything else in the universe in which absolutely everything has a beginning and an ultimate end, even the universe itself, or perhaps not.

Perhaps there was a time before molecules existed, before the universe was born. Perhaps there was a time when there was nothing that existed, nothing but the existence of nothing. Is nothingness, empty space something that exists or is it lacking in existence?

My thinking though is that in order for something to come into existence something must already exist in order to create it. So is my logic. My life exists because my parents created it by having sex. Humans exist because of the evolution of life. Life exists because inanimate molecules supposedly combined to create it. Inanimate molecules exist because?

This conundrum has plagued me all me life.

Maybe God exists and He created everything, but what created God?

The only explanation I have ever been able to arrive at is that time is circular. I believe the only explanation I will ever be able to arrive at is that time is circular with no beginning and no end.

Perhaps atoms came from the moment the universe began and that this is the moment that immediately follows the moment the universe ends.

Current theories suggest that the universe began with a “big bang” and everything emanated from the one point.

Theories also suggest that the universe will one day fold back in upon itself. Gravity will one day bring everything back into one point.

Continue reading "Existential Quandary Ramblings"

One

nospam@example.com (Matt Paff) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:39:49 -0500

The probability of me living again after this life has ended is one. For the non-mathematically minded I will live again.

How do I figure this? Well I use two major assumptions that no one yet has disproved to me, and which appears the only logical explanation available to me. Work with me.

Assumption one: Space is infinite, it has no dimensions and no boundaries. Is there any other possibility? Think of it like this: if there were a boundary what is on the other side? More space? I cannot be convinced of a boundary. Space, to me, must be limitless for what is it if it is not just endless nothingness?

Assumption two: Time is infinite. It has no start and no end, or at least no end. I cannot personally see time having a start or a finish. To me it is either an endless straight line or circular. Either way I cannot see how time can suddenly begin and someday suddenly end. I have heard theories that suggest that time did begin at the point of the big bang. I personally don’t believe this because something had to happen to create the big bang and that something involved time. So is my thought process.

Say I am wrong. Say time is a straight line with a beginning as some theorise. The question is will it ever end? I don’t think its possible. Even if all matter someday folds back in upon itself and disappears, time will still exist for there will be a moment one second later, and a time one million years after matter has disappeared. To me time has to be endless, infinite even if it had a beginning.

Whether time is circular or just an infinite straight line, I believe I will live again. If time is circular everything happens again, that is the nature of a circle. If it is not, it is an infinite straight line, which is the basis of my argument as to why I shall live again.

So knowing my assumptions, space and time are infinite, it is only a small mathematical step to my conclusion that I will live again after my current life has ended. I don’t believe I will know that I have existed before, as I will have no memory of any previous life, but the probability is that I have before and will again exist.

Now work through this with me. I currently exist. I think therefore I am. I am writing this at this moment, I must currently exist.

Science has convinced me that the reason for my existence is a massive amount of unlikely, extremely low probabilities occurred. My parents met. An extremely low probability. They liked each other. Another low probability. They married ate certain foods at certain meals, had sex at one certain unlikely time, on an equally unlikely day. One of dads sperm, one of millions, fertilized one of mums ovum that luckily was its turn to leave her ovaries. Just luckily my parents weren’t using contraception at that moment, or maybe they were and it failed. Anyway, against all odds the fertilized ovum successfully lodged in mums uterine wall where I grew to be born against all odds of miscarriage and mums mortality.

Going back further. My parents exist for equally unlikely reasons. As do my grand parents and great grand parents and great great grand parents… What if my ancestors didn’t emigrate to Australia, or if one of them had died of illness or accident prior to conceiving the bloodlines that led to my conception. What if Captain James Cook didn’t discover Australia but it was discovered by the Spanish, would I still exist? What if cavemen were monogamists and my ancestry grandfather didn’t impregnate my ancestry grandmother, his fifth wife. What if the meteorite had missed earth and the dinosaurs hadn’t become extinct? What if that meteorite was larger and it wiped out the entire earth? What if life never evolved at all? What if…

No matter how ridiculously unlikely my existence the fact remains that I do exist, therefore there is a mathematical probability for my existence. It may be totally and utterly uncalculatable. To print the fraction may take more ink than there could possibly be produced. There may be more digits than binary code in the world’s computers. But an exact probability there must be, for I exist.

Continue reading "One"

Significance

nospam@example.com (Matt Paff) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:38:51 -0500

Is it possible that even if there is a God, I am so insignificant that He doesn’t even know I exit?

Looking at things realistically, I am but one of more than 6.5 billion homo-sapiens on the planet earth at this moment in time and but one of many trillions that have lived in the past million years. Homo-sapiens are but one of many trillions of life forms that occupy earth and but one of many, many more trillions of life forms that have lived on the earth in the past 4 billion years. Earth is but one small planet of 9 orbiting our sun. Our sun is but one small star out of the trillions of stars in our immediate area of the universe. Space appears to be infinite, and therefore the possibility of other planets with an equally large amount of life forms appears certain.

So how significant am I really?

Looking at the universe, the mind boggles at the limitless possibilities the infinity of space offers. For example it is possible that one googolplex to the power of a googolplex light years away from the most distantly visible point in our universe lies a solar system like ours in everyway but on a scale exactly 100 million times larger. That is, the sun is 100 million times larger than ours, the planet 100 million times larger than earth and the creatures that inhabit the planet 100 million times larger than us. It is possible.

It is also possible that our solar system is one electron, in one atom of a grain of sand on a beach containing trillions of other grains of sand on a planet orbiting around a star that is but one of one trillion googolplex in an infinite universe. No one can prove that we aren’t. Its possible. There are so many other possibilities. Limitless.

So really how significant is my life?