In Your Memory, there's an inference question: Which celestial
body besides the sun causes the earth's temperature to drop? Well,
first off, I notice that the sun delivers more energy to earth than everything
else combined, so it can't ever cool the earth (unless he allows a major change
to the current state of our solar system, or counts a lessening in received
solar output as solar cooling). So the author put that there as a hint to think
about what gets in the way of all that energy. The cool thing about the
question is that it caused a nice moment when I realized how dependent we are
on the sun, and how really convenient it is to have that large nuclear furnace
there, and how nice it is that large clouds of stuff will spin, cluster, and at
a certain critical mass will form a nuclear furnace, and how it's nice that
Jupiter is just shy of that critical mass. I mean, what are the odds?
According to Your Memory: A User's Guide (from 1982), my previous notion
of improving recollection can be done but not simply by practicing rote
memorization. It's better to link knowledge to various memories.
There are three kinds of memory: short-term, long-term, and sensory. Short-term
isn't understood well in 1982 and is just working memory. Long-term memory is
comprised of episodic memory (your personal daily happenings, incidents, experiences) and semantic memory (facts, formulae, tables, words and their meanings).
Sensory memory is the memory of sights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells.
People normally index memories by either sight or sound, converting data into
one format for indexing. Individuals with greater powers of recollection
typically index memories with multiple senses. Alexander Luria wrote about
Shereshevskii who has the following quote about a 2000Hz tone:
It looks something like fireworks tinged with a pink-red hue. The strip
of color feels rough and unpleasant, and it has an ugly taste - rather like
that of a briny pickle ... you could hurt your hand on this.
If you want to improve your memory:
- Pay attention!
- Reflect and Revisit memories
- Memories committed in the hours prior to sleeping (deep sleep) last longer.
- Memories are state dependent. If you want to remember something,
try to recreate the environment your brain experienced it in.
- Relax. Increasing stress reduces memory processing. Accident victims
rarely (read never) remember the moments before a major accident. Stress
after creating memories also has a negative effect.
This is not in the book, and is just my inference:
| Day Plan |
|---|
| Morning | Exercise |
| Lunch | Relax |
| Afternoon/Evening | Learn |
| Nighttime | Organize important memories of the day
Tie them to different senses
Write them in journal |
Of Permanent Value
is 1000+ pages long, but only has about 700 pages of text as most chapters are a page long. Regardless,
it has a bunch of very good info that I've not found elsewhere.
- Buffett has three classes of investments (from a letter to his partnerships)
- Generals - undervalued long-term holds.
- Workouts - securities with a time-table, usually arbitrage-based.
- Controls - take control of the firm, if mid-level management is ok with it.
- He doesn't like to pay more than 10 times earnings for companies.
- Business management consists of the dream, the execution, and the passing of the baton.
- Good people have integrity, intelligence, and energy.
- Good partnerships require people with equivalent amounts of integrity, intelligence, and energy.
The Money Masters
and The
New Money Masters are good overviews of the "major" investment ideas. The first book was brought out in 1980 and
the second in 1989.
Money algorithms (Jim Rogers is in The New Money Masters):
| Investor | Algorithm |
|---|
| Graham | Buy company at 50% of working capital, sell at 100% |
| Buffett | Pay a fair price for a great company (this isn't everything) |
| Fisher | Thing long-term prospects, buy and hold |
| T. Rowe Price | Buy growth stocks |
| Templeton | Go international for value |
| --- |
|---|
| Jim Rogers | Invest based on macroeconomics |
| Peter Lynch | Buy baskets of promising sectors, whittle as some firms succeed. |
This is not complete, I need to revisit the books to summarize the investors whose ideas I thought
not practical for me.
Interesting ideas from the books:
- Opportunity = Value - Perception
- All the investors read voraciously
- Buffett constantly asks questions: what's a good investment, how are your competitors doing?