I was looking for some new individual stocks to buy and I came across Motley Fool CAPS for the first time. I think it is a pretty good way of doing a prediction market for stocks. I’m not sure if I agree with how they calculate ratings, but I’m sure they have smarter people than me and they’ve spent a lot more time thinking about it than I have.

We were on a vacation in Phoenix for a few days since Wednesday night and then on Friday I got an email that my brother’s mother-in-law had just died. So I arranged a direct flight from Phoenix to NY and then another flight from NY home. My sister-in-law and her mother were very close so I thought it would be nice for me to attend the ceremony and help out with their 3 kids. So I am taking an extra day off and I’ll fly back tonight. She lived a full life and has had some health problem for a few months.

Unfortunately it’s been pretty hectic with the jet lag and I think I might be coming down with a cold now because I didn’t bring anything heavier than a T-shirt when I came to NY and it’s been pretty cold here.

It’s articles like this that make me wonder how kids are making ends meet these days, especially here in the Bay Area where housing is so expensive. I saw something else which said a mortgage on a median house here would cost about %70 of a median salary. That’s crazy.

I hope I can provide Lucas a cushion so that he can through college and then some. But I honestly wonder whether college is worth it anymore. Spending $100-200k+ to go to college if you want to be a writer making $50k/year just doesn’t seem that valuable. It feels like you’d be better off saving that money and honing your skills elsewhere. The more technical professions benefit a bit more from a traditional 4 year degree. I think the only career where you have to go to college is if you want to stay in academics.

The technical colleges and for-profit schools have a pretty bright future, I suspect. Maybe I’ll buy some University of Phoenix stock.

We took Lucas to Half Moon Bay yesterday and Tracy took him to Filoli Gardens. Today we went to a park in Foster City and I did some swimming. There’s some pictures up on http://lucaschen.shutterfly.com

I try to get white socks in large batches. It’s a simple problem really. Finding a match for a sock is a function of the number of matches out of the total pool of socks. If a you buy a large batch of identical socks, then each sock matches every other sock, and finding a match is a simple constant time operation of O(1). This is both average case and worst case. If every pair is unique then you have an operation which is O(n) with average time O(n/2) and worst case O(n).

If you’ve got 100 socks and a sock matching test takes 1 second you’re saving 49 seconds every time you need to find a match. Realistically, it’s not quite that bad because you are frequently sorting as you go(and most people should do much better than 1 second per match test). But a full sort is still an O(n^2) operation so you need to avoid that whenever possible.

Looking at it from this standpoint the most algorithmically efficient solution is clear: buy only identical socks. How can fashion override basic principles of math and computer science?