Category Archives: Oscillating Mind

Category with no specific purpose. Surprisingly, my goal is simpler now.

On Financial Education

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I invested in the share market.

It is a kind of courageous statement for someone who had a painful answer to a rather curious question: how can I be rich? The lessons from my stock market investments have been too costly for me to venture getting the complete answer. But over time, I have learnt that investing is not necessarily the best way to learn the trade. There are other sources too! And frankly, in the kind of financial complexity that we live in, I think one needs to be aware of various investment opportunities and how they might fare well before putting in their money. Thanks to the recent developments I went through; my boss, the head of the department has recently been trained by SEBI, India to deliver such awareness sessions, and he had done one of his first few sessions in our college itself. I would not call it a complete guide to financial investing, however, it at least sets up a platform from where I can plan further.

Recalling, there were times I said, I will never again invest in stock market. Perhaps it is time for me to revisit that line and see if it is worth sticking in my head. At the moment, I just wish as I am about to experiment again, that the financial systems offered to its consumers, a way out of complexity through straight talk.

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Here is one website I have recently stumbled on, Loans.net. On the face of it, it was hard for me to identify what this was all about. But soon figured out that this was one system that integrates financial instruments for various organisations and offers the one that best fits the customers’ need. It also has lots of content that talks about different kinds of loans. Perhaps, this is one kind of place where I want to begin–draw money, and then invest. ;)

Math of the mind

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Since Edwin May gave me his line, “Don’t always believe what you think’, my life took different twists and turns. The best of all, I think I am working on science now. Discussions with him showed me how amazingly stupid human beings can be, especially when we fight with our beliefs against the realities of our programmed animal-like behavior. It feels painful, even to me, to acknowledge this; but lets do it first, because only then would we make any meaningful effort to understand how we think.

Let me present one example, for which I could collect pieces of literature that could lend strong support. Have you ever thought about how we estimate lengths, distances, colors and contrasts, or sounds for that matter? If you have not already done that, just ask yourself if you could be accurate in estimating the differences in intensity of light or sound. You need not be computer precise, but even if you think you can roughly estimate the difference, I would say, you need to read some more about how our perception works. The fact of the matter is this: Our senses don’t work on linear scales, but they work on logarithmic scales. What does this mean? It means we need really significant change (perhaps in exponential steps) to be able to perceive difference in anything we sense. Actually, the  unit of sound, Decibel, is a logarithmic unit.

You don’t believe me! You can read these:

  • Fechner Law states that subjective sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus intensity. Later on, there were developments and controversies over the general applicability of this law. And in came, Steven’s Power Law which holds that the magnitude of perceived intensity depends on the magnitude of the physical intensity raised to some power (which is still no comparison to linear scales). A more recent study also points out the limitations of human perception.
  • This page here gives a reasonable account, through of which scale suits our senses best, linear or logarithmic.
  • This paper here neatly summarizes the common principles that govern all our senses, and how all of them might actually be plotted on a logarithmic scale.
If you still think you can identify linearly occurring differences in physical reality, you need to come out of your dogma.

When green is not green

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I wake up every morning and see the hills far from my house. It is a pleasant sight to begin the day, usually. Today was a little different, because my eyes caught something more fascinating. These hills, I know, would be lush green if I went close to them. But they were looking rather hazy, more blackish and greyish in patches, with an overall impression that sufficiently convinces us that there is more green (or perhaps, we are convinced because we know it has to be green!). I set out to find the answer.

I had this initial hypothesis that perhaps the atmosphere is serving as some kind of a lens that is hampering my vision. So my search was for ‘atmospheric lens’ and words similar to it. After reading a few pages I realized I was reading more photography and optics[1,2,3]. I sensed that my hypothesis could be proving correct. While I have not yet exhaustively tested my ideas, I think I have come up with a reasonable explanation to the phenomenon observed.

For starters you can read about how a human eye works here [4,5]. Eye captures the light and converts the optical signals into electrical signals before the optical nerve carries them to the brain where an image can be perceived. This indicates that the quality of light affects the quality of vision. This is the reason why objects which are close to us can be seen more clearly while objects at a distance lack detail (objects too close to the face also cannot be seen clearly which takes us into another technical detail. In summary we are talking of focal length. You may read more about it here).

I am loving it. What I have just done is to recall a concept that slept safely in my ignorant brain, Optics. Refreshing! You think this is trivial? I would bet you did not know the answer was so simple when you read the question. ;)