I had the great fortune of being in the evil empire on the 3rd of April 2010. It was a searingly hot day with no clouds. I walked across a long bridge in a rather pleasant manner. Eventually I came to a cafe where I was to meet three friends. I was soon exposed to the most majestic of scenes. The three of them had iPads. I was handed one and told to play with maps. zOMG. I had been totally wrong. This slate of goodness was a complete bag of win.
Within five minutes without any effort on the part of my friends, purely by experiencing the reality of the device I had been utterly convinced not only that I must acquire one with all haste, but that this was a clear turning point, a clear arrival of something I had completely lacked the foresight to anticipate but now seemed inevitable in retrospect. I hurried down to the shop, burst through the door and started waving liabilities of the US government, and a card capable of converting liabilities of the European Central Bank into liabilities of the US government, at the various men of industry present, hoping to entice them to surrender one of the devices from their great warehouse. I was in luck, and gushed vigorously about my own lack of prescience as the payment was handled.
On paper the iPad is crap. Its hardware is too slow, it’s a rubbish laptop, it’s a media player that doesn’t fit in ones pocket, it needs a device running a full blown operating system to sync with etc. On such a basis I dismissed the concept before encountering it in person as some sort of fools adventure, where some visionary with no grounding in reality had lead a design team down the path of constructing a solution in search of a problem. It is so rare to find such a device where the end result is so vastly greater than the sum of its parts.
In actuality the device is a far superior media consumption device than say a PSP, iPod touch or some other device with a crippled screen. One must experience it to understand. Having watched my own blu-ray rips of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children on my PSP and iPad, both encoded at recklessly high bit rates, I can say the experience on the PSP is an utter joke compared to the iPad. To be able to hold such a magnificent window into the universe in ones very hands, to be able to carry it anywhere and gaze into the viewing delights it provides, it now invokes almost a feeling of revulsion in me when I see scrawny characters stooped over the screen of a small device attempting vainly to “experience” something through a tiny keyhole.
One can read a whole library of content at leisure using the iBooks app, every page turn an immensely satisfying visual experience. My eyes have never tired using the device and I can report no real crippling issue or even annoyance. Again, compared to trying to read something on any other of those numerous small devices, one just has a whole new paradigm, a whole new exponentially superior ease of existence. Even listening to music is a more pleasant experience, one having a proper interface through which to select the desired tune.
While it is said by some that the iPad is a crap laptop, it might be more accurate to state that any laptop taken outdoors is a bloated, poorly designed iPad with numerous inconveniences and stressful annoyances, and any laptop remaining indoors is but an expensive box of compromises relative to a desktop computer with most of its advantages counting for naught in such an environment. To show a friend some pictures one need only pass the iPad in a simple motion and the friend is free to physically manipulate the device with the utmost freedom and intuitively browse through the picture collections, sharing with others various moments by merely twisting their wrist in the direction of the individual they seek to share with. Contrast this to lugging out the battleship laptop and passing it over, trying to not poke out the eye of anyone nearby with one of the edges as they clatter and wallop off various obstacles. The thunderous weight of the device requires an annoying effort for all who physically manipulate it. Browsing through the pictures will be slightly more difficult owing to the lower suitability of a trackpad and keyboard for the task. While I may be accused of gross exaggeration or outright whinging, it is only the reckless rationaliser who will try to pretend that there is no difference in the pleasantness of using these two devices for this task.
An iPad is a much neater and easy to carry device than all but the most crippled laptops. Unless the laptop is huge and horridly inconvenient, the viewing experience on an iPad for much content will be almost as good, with reading a book arguably being much superior on an iPad. It seems a strange and perhaps unintended effect, but the iPad seems to have made laptops a somewhat less attractive choice in general. For an iPad and desktop do both the tasks of a laptop in a superior manner. In fact I dare say I will never buy a laptop again.
But there is one caveat to all this: The iPad is useless for productive people. Or rather, it is useless for all those who are productive outside of “base”. The road warriors, war drivers, programmers who take off at full speed doing real work once the seat belt sign is turned off, basically men who still create when non-stationary, shall find little in the iPad. For the iPad is a device that enables the best possible mobile consumption experience. It is a magnificent window through which one can consume the works of others with the least of physical inconvenience. In this sense it is the opposite of a laptop, which is a poor mobile consumption device but an excellent mobile production device.
I find myself as one who only really produces when at home in my bunker. There are too many distractions, inconveniences, uncomforts in the outside world to set oneself in the mood for production, and since I leave my oasis relatively infrequently, even if I was of the mind to engage in productive endeavours, the opportunities to do so would not justify the tradeoffs in using devices suited to mobile production. So for me, when I do find myself travelling or otherwise in the outside world, I only wish for a device that relieves me of some of the tedium of travel, or allows me to easily share with others some content, such as emails, pictures or videos. For this the iPad is ideal and far more suitable than a laptop. Back in the bunker, a desktop then has a clear advantage over a laptop, as the laptop scores no points for allowing mobile consumption, while it makes sacrifices in price and components to fulfil the restrictive needs of full mobility. So I find myself coming to the conclusion that, at least for those who do the vast majority of their productive activities at “base”, the iPad has the curious effect of making the desktop far more relevant in 2010 than it was 2009.
Having acquired an iPad and greatly desiring to program it, while simultaneously tiring of trying to use programming languages much inferior to that of Objective-C in other endevours, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to purchase a Mac mini. While waiting and hoping for an update of the hardware I frequented macrumors.com. I was amazed at the amount of people who had almost the exact same “story” as me, that is, “dumping my laptop for an iPad and Mac mini.” Once the device was updated I purchased it and a wireless keyboard from Japan as it was cheaper there than in Ireland, it allowed me to get a Japanese keyboard and my friend’s parents who were visiting him in Japan were kind enough to be bring it back for me. While it may sound as if I am some sort of Apple fan or enthusiast from these actions, I must say that it is only with a new found sense of productive pragmatism that I purchased these devices. The Mac mini provided the most superior means to write programs useful for both work and play in a beautiful language and environment, it provided a means to program the iPad itself, it is very power efficient and space efficient (significant concerns as I will likely be living in quite a small apartment in the future) and has a most beautiful design. OS X 10.6 is arguably moderately more pleasant to use than Windows 7 aswell.
And in the spirit of pragmatism and lack of irrational love, I can name many things I significantly dislike about my two new delightful devices. The lack of inclusion of a blu-ray drive on the Mac mini is backwards and almost embarrassing. Apple is engaging in a juvenile reality denying exercise trying to force people to buy recklessly compressed 720P pseudo-HD shite off iTunes by crippling its own computers. This is a prime example of how different divisions of a large company can cause anti-synergy. The fear of competition with its direct download iTunes model has lead Apple to gimp its own hardware. If these two sections of the company were separate businesses this destruction (or rather, deliberate uncreation) of wealth would not occur. Blu-ray has succeeded, has been universally adopted across the consumer electronics industry, offers far higher quality than direct download and is the only choice possible for those who have poor internet access. Apple is trying to leap to a medium-less future far too early, before the necessary infrastructure is in place. This just needlessly cripples the present experience, and won’t make the medium-less future come any faster as it is dependent on huge factors outside of Apple’s control. And if Apple really believed that the medium-less future is here today, then why do they not drop DVD and CD support aswell, which unlike blu-ray actually are at the point of being realistically made obsolete by the internet. In the end it all comes down to trying to shovel that low quality iTunes crap, but crippling my Mac mini isn’t going to make me pay for that rubbish.
Another complaint is the price of the device, which is clearly unreasonable for the hardware contained. But one can justify that by the value of the software in allowing the user to better get real work done, which was certainly the judgement I made when deciding to buy it. As for the iPad, while I of course consider it a revolutionary device, it is only the start of good things to come. Web browsing is annoyingly slow (at least by my standards) and syncing with iTunes is a disaster if one ever changes computer and it can be a colossal pain having to setup everything in the way iTunes wants. One cannot just drag and drop a video onto an iPad, it has to be copied into the iTunes library (and often converted to an iPad friendly format before this) resulting in numerous duplicated files and inability to use an iPad to transfer data to and from computers that one does not own. The more I think of it, iTunes seems to be the source of all my woes. Such a terrible piece of software, in fact I’d go as far as to say iTunes as a whole represents a terrible design philosophy I most wholeheartedly detest.
On that miserable note I end this article of praise for two excellent devices.
Tue, July 13 2010 @ 05:07 » Hardware » 2 Comments
I got this manga last December. It’s called 「月夜のフロマージュ」 which translates to “Moonlit night’s Fromage”. It’s about a boy who plays alot of bishoujo games getting transformed into one of the girls in the games by a “dream eater” girl, who also transports him to her world by accident in the process. A beautiful table of contents:
I really love the style this is done in. The characters are like fragile dolls, so perfect that one is almost afraid to touch. The Japanese in this is really easy, reading it gives me an incredible ego boost. There are just enough words I don’t know in it to pleasantly note down for future learning without killing the pace or getting too bogged down with a dictionary.
As this is the first manga in this series, much of the stories involve the main character getting used to the new world he lives in…and dealing with the complex emotions from getting transformed into a beautiful girl. Basically the girl, called Meari, who brought him to this new world survives by eating the pleasant dreams of humans. The main character (Miu) was dreaming about a girl from a game he was playing. When Meari ate his dream, something went wrong and he melded with the girl from the game in his dream and got sucked into Meari’s world. Meari is trying to find a way to send him back, but also tells him that for the time being she will take responsibility for ensuring he becomes an “Exquisite lady”. So she gives out to him for walking like a guy and buys him clothes that are so cute as to make him horribly embarrassed to go outside.
While the plot may sound a bit off the wall, there was actually some wisdom etched in this manga. In this scene, Miu complains about Meari insisting that he wear fashionable cute clothes. But she bursts out, basically along the lines of “A flower’s life is only short! If you’re not going to wear fashionable things now, when will you!?” People only really have until their early thirties to really shine out full blast, and I found myself feeling very thankful that Japanese people take their appearance so seriously and give us such wonderful eye candy in public. One should not squander opportunities when young, or a life of slow decay and regret will follow…
Anyway on to the obligatory swimsuit scene:
In this scan Meari and her friend Fiyu (who Miu has falled head over heels for, much to the chagrin of Meari) are both trying on swimsuits to help Miu decide which one to buy, though in reality he doesn’t want to go to the beach at all as it’s mortifying.
Here Fiu and Miu are talking about Meari. パンツ！This drawing style really is just beautiful, though no doubt there’d be moral hysteria if something like this was released in the West owing to the depiction of “underage” people in a “sexualised” manner. Oh the outrage, oh the irrational panic! I can see the lynch mob nailing me to a cross. Anyway, the failure of the west aside, back to beautiful things:
和ロリキターーー！！Here is an example of how the Japanese continually cycle out new embodiments of their own culture (often also infused with their own interpretation of aspects of foreign culture) in a timeless and continuous manner. This girl is wearing a garment that is a sort of fusion between a Yukata, a dress and maid clothes. This traditional Japanese inspired goth-loli infused fashion is known as wa-loli, with wa meaning “Japan”. I love this stuff. Such elegant harmony.
As for the girl herself, she is another type of non-human, but her kind hunts Meari’s kind and claims to be protecting humans from the dream eaters. She attacks Meari but then gets a fever from being out in the rain, so they take care of her for awhile. After this she calls Miu “Master” and decides she wants to stay with them.
More bonus points here for the girl on “girl” borderline behavior. This first volume closes on this happy note, though the author kindly leaves us more fan service with these two pullout illustrations:
The second volume was released last February I believe. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it. Asides from being entertaining, the level of Japanese is just right to assist in study.
Sat, July 10 2010 @ 10:07 » Japan, Manga » No Comments
I am doing some research on stock options at the moment as part of my Masters thesis. Specifically, on the performance of options on the Nikkei 225 index. Rather than being options to buy or sell a particular share, these options are to buy or sell the “basket” of 225 shares represented by the Nikkei 225 index. They therefore offer an opportunity to speculate on the direction of the Japanese share market as a whole, rather than any one company.
Some information about options for those of you not familiar with the concept: An option is a contract that provides the right, but not the obligation for the holder to buy (or sell, depending on the type) a certain amount of shares at a certain price until a certain pre agreed time. There are two types of options, puts and calls. Put options allow one to sell shares at a certain price. They thus act as a sort of insurance/downside protection. If one held 100 shares of Toshiba which were trading at ¥100, one may be able to buy an option that allows one to sell those shares at ¥80 for the next three months. This means that even if Toshiba drops to ¥70 in two months time, one will still be able to sell the shares for ¥80.
Call options give the right to buy shares at a certain price. If one held a call option on Sumitomo group shares with an agreed price (know as the strike price) of ¥200, then no matter how high Sumitomo group shares rose, one would still be able to buy them for ¥200 each within the agreed timeframe.
Obviously, as these options act as a sort of insurance against future changes in share prices, they can have significant value. So when one buys an option from someone else, in order to induce that counterparty to take the risk that these “insurance” contracts may be used in the future, the counterparty must be compensated with a premium. This is the price of an option, and it varies according to many different things, such as interest rates, the underlying asset type, “fear” in the market, length to expiration of option etc..
It has been documented in several academic papers that options, particularly put options, on share indexes have tended historically to be “overpriced”. Meaning that those who sold these contracts made profits disproportional to the risk they were undertaking. There are numerous theories as to why which I won’t go into in this post.
Anyway, as there seems to be some evidence that index options and especially index put options are overpriced, I thought it would be good to analyse their return in the Japanese market. Japanese shares have performed poorly for the past 20 years, and since put options tend to do well when the underlying asset performs badly, it would be quite a rigorous result if selling put options still turned out to be profitable in such a market. Unfortunately I was only able to get the data on Nikkei 225 options from March 2006 to the present. Data is available from the middle of 1989 onwards but it would cost around ¥230,000. I can’t afford that at the moment, though should I find myself in a more secure financial position I would be happy to purchase such data to more rigorously test my theories.
But even taking the subsegment of March 2006 to the present, the Nikkei index itself (like most of the rest of the world’s share indices) has performed poorly. Thus it should be a reasonably strong test of options selling strategies. In this case one would also expect call selling to be profitable, as call options do poorly in falling markets.
So when deciding to sell options, even when one has decided the type (put or call) to sell, one is still left with the issue of which of the many strike price and expiration date combinations to choose. The strike price is the price that the option seller agrees to accept/pay from/to the buyer of the option for the share in question, regardless of the market price of the share. The buyer has the option to force the seller to do this transaction, but the buyer does not have to execute the transaction if he does not wish to do so. Obviously he will only execute the trade if the option strike price is better than the market price. The option will also expire at some agreed date, and all else equal, it will lose value as that date approaches. Some options can be exercised at any time between purchase and the expiration date, whereas some can only be exercised on the expiration date. In the case of options of the Nikkei 225, they are of the latter type.
An option with a strike price that is currently “in the money”, meaning that for a put the strike price is higher than the market price, or for a call the strike price is lower than the market price, will be priced significantly higher than an option that is “out of the money”. Why would anyone buy an option that has a strike price less favorable than the market price? Because the option still provides a level of insurance until the expiration date that even if the market price of the underlying security moves unfavorably, one’s losses will not exceed a certain level.
In general, it has been found that “out of the money” options tend to be overpriced, while “at the money” or “in the money” options are more of a toss up. In my testing program that I wrote I am able to test strategies at varying levels of “moneyness” and in general I found those conclusions to be correct.
I also tested the relative profitability of selling options with different amounts of time left until expiration. 1, 2 and 3 months to expiration were tested. 1 month to expiration seemed to consistently be a far superior selling strategy than either of the other two.
In addition to testing put selling and call selling strategies, I also tested selling both at the same time. This strategy is know as a strangle (or a straddle, depending on the strike prices involved). It has the interesting property, that if one sells both an out of the money put and an out of the money call with the same expiration date, at the expiration date one of them will always expire worthless, and it’s possible that both of them will. This significantly reduces the volatility of the strategy, as the infrequent but often massive one off losses that occur when selling out of the money options are attenuated by both the premium received from the other option that expires worthless and by the fact that one is selling only half the amounts of each option relative to a single option based strategy.
My first graph includes the performance of the Nikkei and the 3 option selling strategies. Each option selling strategy is the average of 11 different strategies based on different levels of moneyness (all out of the money, but to varying degrees). I could’ve cherry picked the most profitable level of moneyness for each strategy, but I thought it would be fairer to show the average performance of a wide array of out of the money strategies. Just to be clear, all of the 11 individual option strategies that make up each of the average strategies (33 strategies total) in this graph were profitable by themselves (i.e. I am not averaging them as an attempt to mask massive levels of volatility and differences in performance between them.) The time period in question is March 2006 to June 2010. Click on the images for full resolution.
As can be seen, one would be much better off selling options, of either type or both, than investing in the Nikkei itself. After 4 and a third years one would be up between 16% and 21% depending on the option strategy taken, while the Nikkei was down around 38%. Selling puts was actually more profitable than selling calls, despite the overall downward trend in the index. Selling both was almost as profitable as just selling puts. The huge drop in the performance of the put selling strategies occurred when Lehman brothers was allowed to go bankrupt in the latter half of 2008 which caused the massive worldwide market collapse. Interestingly the premiums paid for options exploded after this, allowing the put strategies to recover quickly and the call strategies to make huge gains. The later huge drop for the call selling strategy occurred after the market bottomed out and turned up in March 2009.
Notice that I have written “no leverage”. When selling options one needs to hold a cash reserve so that if the position moves against oneself, there will be sufficient cash at hand to payout to the option purchaser. In the case of put options, I defined a no leverage strategy to be one in which one held enough reserves so that if the index fell to 0 on option expiration date, one would have enough cash to payout in full. The index going to 0 is the maximum potential loss scenario for a put seller.
In the case of call selling it is actually impossible to define a “no leverage” level of selling, as there is theoretically no limit to how high an index can rise. So I arbitrarily defined a “no leverage” strategy as holding enough cash to be able to payout even after a 100% rise in the index.
In either case protecting against a 100% move in the index every month is a most conservative strategy. I tested the strategies with reserves enough to cope with a 50% move:
Note the scale on the left increases with each graph.
A less conservative approach increases the volatility of the options strategies but allows for significantly higher returns. Interestingly the strategies that involve selling both types of options have overtaken the put option selling strategies, benefitting from the “spike moderating” effect I described earlier.
Reducing the reserve level to 35%:
Here we see that although all three sets of selling strategies have increased their returns, the strategies involving selling both have benefitted to a much greater extent. The put selling strategies have now fallen behind the call selling ones as the hit after the Lehman failure exerts an increasingly disproportionately destructive effect.
Reducing to 25%:
Amazingly selling both types of options would on average earn a 97% return over the period. Increasing leverage is making the performance of the put selling strategies worse however, they now return less than when no leverage was used at all. The call selling strategies only note a very small increase in return, being close to the point where massive one month losses begin to overwhelm the benefits of additional leverage.
Finally, taking it to a 20% reserve level:
Many of the put selling strategies were completely wiped out at this level, so they couldn’t be included. The call selling strategies now only return about what they returned when the “no leverage” strategy was pursued, having reached the damagingly volatile level of leverage that the put based strategies reached in the previous graph. The spectacular rise to 5 times the initial investment only to fall off a cliff, losing on average 3.5 times the initial investment in only one month is rather nauseating. The selling both strategies managed to still improve returns, now finishing with a 124% average return.
Beyond this level of leverage the call selling strategies quickly all collapse. Some of the both selling strategies start to deteriorate in performance and eventually they start to collapse around a 15% reserve level.
In the end I am left with the conclusion that selling 1 month to expiration out of the money strangles on the Nikkei 225 seems to be a most scandalously profitable activity, at the very least worthy of significant further investigation. The nature of the strategy results in much lower volatility than selling puts or calls alone, allowing the seller to hold much lower levels of reserves and therefore make much greater profits. I would be able to make a more authoritative conclusion had I access to a longer dataset, but the current findings are most positively suggestive.
Tue, July 6 2010 @ 03:07 » Economics, Japan » 2 Comments
Some of the stuff I planted has been growing reasonably well…
This tomato plant was grown from a seed in an Aldi bought tomato. I much prefer trying to grow stuff from the “industrial” varieties found in supermarkets, rather than some “local” variety or ones bought in seed packets. Through my own foolishness I left this tomato plant inside a plastic mini-greenhouse on extremely hot days when it was a mere seedling and managed to burn off half of both its first leaves. Amazingly it managed to pull itself together and keep going, even when many of the other plants exposed to those conditions gave in. I have high hopes for some decent yield off this guy. He has started to flower:
I have another Tomato plant derived from the seeds on an Aldi tomato. This is a good example of the “positive non-interventionism” gardening philosophy! In general I try to avoid excessive intervention to artificially protect my crops from the woes of the world. A certain level of stress will encourage stronger and more rigorous growth, by activating defense mechanisms and outright killing the weakest of plants, preventing them from passing on their genes which are unsuitable for the conditions in which I grow them. For instance, when tomato plants are exposed to strong winds they build up thicker stems to resist being blown over. These are also useful later when they set fruit as the tomatos themselves can be quite heavy. If a plant was kept under sheltered conditions the stem would be much weaker and if ever exposed to more severe conditions would run a much higher risk of snapping.
But in this case the wind exposure proved too much for one of my plants. His stem snapped at the bottom during a particularly windy day. The market fundamentalists would at this point argue that as a failed institution, the tomato plant should be left for dead to be liquidated by his creditors (it might be fair to imagine the Earth or at least the soil as the ultimate creditor, with the insects and bacteria being the bankruptcy lawyers or other officials who manage the liquidation process). But one must look at the real consequences for the system as a whole from these actions. Since I have only two tomato plants of this variety, it is difficult to really say whether it was genetic weakness or some other factor which caused this plant to fail and the other to survive. They were both in different locations and different sized pots. If I had twenty of these plants and only a few snapped, one could more reasonably assert that it would be quite likely that in culling the ones that snapped, one would be at least somewhat bluntly selecting for a more wind resistant future variety. In any case this debate is somewhat moot as these tomatos nearly always self fertilise, meaning that there will be no genetic recombination among their offspring. So the seeds of the snapped tomato could just not be planted and one could rest assured that because of the inbreeding nature of these plants, the snapped tomato would not have contributed it’s genetic material to the offspring of other tomatos through fertilising the flowers of those plants with its pollen. As I have noted, even if these plants were outbreeders, it would perhaps be unreasonable to draw much conclusion about the genetic weakness of a plant to the wind when there was only two plants in the sample.
So I ordered a decisive and rigorous government intervention to bail out this tomato! A quote on positive non-interventionism is in order! “Haddon-Cave goes on to say that the “positive” part means the government carefully considers each possible intervention to determine “where the advantage” lies, and although usually it will come to the conclusion that the intervention is harmful, sometimes it will decide to intervene.”
I drove a massive stake into the ground right next to the plant and tied him upright right against it. The goal was to prop up the plant while it tried to repair itself. As the roots and leaves were now only connected by a thin part of remaining stem, it was not clear whether or not the support would be enough to allow the plant to survive. However it seems that the intervention was successful, with new leaves growing on the plant over the past week or so. In a somewhat unsettling move, the plant has started to flower:
This has given huge ammunition to the free market lobby who insist that the flowering of the plant is evidence that it no longer needs government support. They further point out that the cable tie between the stem and the wooden stake is damaging to the stem by being over tight, potentially restricting water and nutrient flow to the leaves. But to remove government support this early would be reckless in my view. The balance of risks is clearly skewed against such action. Removal of support risks another catastrophic collapse, destroying all that has been saved. Keeping on the support risks restricting growth and moderate damage to the location where the tie is wrapped around. I think that is a small price to pay for insurance against outright collapse. The time may come later in the season when support can be removed or at least loosened, but my hand will not be forced by reckless ideologues!
I also planted some seeds of Tomatos bought in Lidl:
These were planted significantly later than the Aldi tomatos, but have grown with the utmost vigor. I suspect they benefitted from not being placed in that disastrously over heated plastic mini-greenhouse that I mentioned earlier.
This chaotic tomato was grown from a seed in a packet of “cherry tomato seeds”:
He expands wildly in all directions, with his leaves often competing more with his own other leaves than the leaves of other plants. While perhaps counterproductive, I am starting to think this plant might make an excellent manager of the commanding heights of a communist economy, as he demonstrates an ability to create huge amounts of intra-organisation competition. I’m surprised at the amount of flowers he has created and since each flower will turn into a tomato, I am somewhat apprehensive that he may have gotten over ambitious and may not be able to output enough glucose to meet the demands he has placed on himself. He has the privilege of being the first tomato plant under my control to begin production of an actual tomato:
These next two tomato plants were given to me so I don’t have any idea how they will end up:
Interestingly when I transplanted these two plants, they were both around the same size but the first one had a much larger root system. As time has passed the first one has grown at an extremely quick pace while the second one seems to be limited by its inferior root system and has not grown nearly as much. What happens below ground is just as important as what happens above.
On that point it would be good to mention these two carrots:
I selected them both when they were young as my prized specimens to be raised separately from the others in case my patch was destroyed for any reason. The smaller of the two promptly rapidly slowed its rate of growth and was an utter disappointment. But the larger one grew at an amazing pace. I was worried that it might be unsustainable and sure enough it suddenly ground to a halt. When I decided to transplant them into this bigger pot I found that the bigger one had completely saturated the soil of the small pot it had been in with its roots and they had wrapped themselves around the inside bottom of the pot many times over. Root capacity constraint! It would seem that this was the cause of the sudden collapse in the rate of growth. The ability of the vigorous carrot to expand was initially limited by its leaf area but as that was continously expanded the capacity of the roots began to become the limiting factor. Eventually, without room to expand the roots, leaf growth could not be maintained and it entered a prolonged era of low growth. Sounds like the Japanese economy after the unsustainable bubble at the end of the 1980s. But despite transplanting it into a much larger pot, from what can be seen above ground, it does not seem to have grown much. It could be that the roots have been growing vigorously and that it will soon launch a renewed leaf expansion, but so far there has been no evidence of much progress. The smaller guy is a useless as always, big pot or small.
On to my potted onions…
These three were planted in pots as another sort of insurance against something disastrous happening in the plot. I don’t know if they got squashed by something or attacked or something else, but as can be seen things are not going well. This other guy is doing ok on his own though:
These guys are a mix of various alliums:
They haven’t done so well either and I’m at a loss as to why.
This onion was found sprouting in a press so I planted him in the hopes of him flowering and producing some seed:
He seems to have stalled at this point though. Luckily I have these two heroes of the orient to do the job:
The guy on the left is an onion I grew from seed last year while the guy on the right is another one I found in the press. They are both “yellow” onions but different varieties. They’re sending up seed heads at the same time so it’s looking like they’ll flower together. This will be my first chance at genetic manipulation! Hopefully I can cross pollinate them and take the seeds with me to Japan for the next growing next season. What wondrous new variety shall emerge from this combination!?
And finally the great industrial farm:
There are several varieties of onion as well as some leeks and carrots planted randomly. Some have done much better than others, but on the whole growth has been much better than I anticipated. The transplanting process I put them through was brutal and reckless and I thought most of them would die. But perhaps only 10% have actually been killed since planting. I also put some more Lidl tomatos and some Lidl bell peppers at the back of the patch. The bell peppers haven’t grown all that much though.
The carrots are fattening up:
The garlics I planted out the front have mostly died down:
I might dig down and see if they have actually made any cloves, though I don’t dare to hope for much.
As for my experiments planting Japonica rice, they all ended in disaster. I’m not sure if it was trouble with the rice seeds I was using (could’ve been processed in some manner that damaged its ability to grow into a proper rice plant), or trouble with the soil they were in, or over/under watering or cold/cloudy spells killing them off, but they all died before exceeding much beyond 5cm in height.
Sun, June 27 2010 @ 00:06 » Alliums, Leafy Greens, Plants » No Comments
Had this bizarre dream last night:
Was high up in a mountain in Afganistan. So high up in fact that I could look down and see much of the curve of the earth and a clear distinction between the Earth’s atmosphere and space. (Love how stuff that looks awesome but is physically impossible can happen in dreams). I had been sent there as part of the Japanese envoy to central Asia. There had been talk of the “opening up” of the country and the privatisation of the local television service. While waiting to meet the local elders I mentioned causally to the man behind me that I was against the privatisation as the rights to the service would inevitably be bought up by a rent seeking private monopolist who would then charge the locals an absurd fee for a lesser service.
The man behind me announced that as a student of the right he could not but wholly endorse this privatisation as a step forward for the area and that as leader of the Swedish delegation, he would be arguing in favor of the privatisation with the village elders. I said that in this case a private monopoly would result in less real wealth being created but he became furious and said he couldn’t accept that.
Aside: Many many years beforehand there had been a great evil lord that attempted to overrun Europe with armies of demons. He was known as the “Doomking” wielder of the mighty Doomsword. He was assassinated while leading his army south but legend has it that his young son, who would’ve been but ten years old, escaped the assassination and disappeared into the night. He took the Doomsword with him and it was said that some day he would return to reclaim Europe. This was known as “The legend of the Doomprince.”
Later that day myself and the young Swedish man were admiring a statue when we were approached by a group of locals. They asked us to swear by the statue that we would do what was right for Afganistan. I drew my sword, a silvery, thin blade that could be split into two separate swords upon need, stabbed it into the ground and swore that I would do what was best for the country. The Swedish man drew a massive black blade, barely smaller than Cloud’s buster sword, and swore the same. They then asked us to swear that we would not advocate privatisation of the local service. I promptly pledged again, but the Swedish man refused. At that moment an older man, probably in his sixties, walked out of the shadows towards us. It seemed he was the father of the Swedish delegate. His son threw him over the black sword. As he caught it and continued to advance forward he announced, “I am the Doomprince, wielder of the Doomsword and heir to my fathers legacy!”
I split my sword into the two separate blades and prepared to fight this demon lord and his son, the endorser of disastrous economic policies! Unfortunately I woke up at this point.
Thu, May 27 2010 @ 02:05 » Uncategorized » 2 Comments
