We Can Be Randomer
Stray thought from the other day:
There's all sort of little stories or little elements of stories or ideas floating around in the general category of "time travel could be a mechanism for creating wealth." As in, your knowledge of the historical monetary value of a stock or some collectible item, or the outcome of sporting events, can be used to continually and dependably realize huge profits on relatively small wagers. What inexplicably popped into my head (I wasn't even especially thinking about time travel) is that this basically only works one way. If I'm based in the timeline that, well, I'm actually based in (born in 1982, a young man in 2008), I can (setting aside all issues and paradoxes and what have yous stemming from the time travel itself) hope to travel into the future, find out the 2009 NBA champion, and put a lot of money on that and wait to collect. Or travel thirty years into the future, find out what stock was to the 2010s and 2020s what Apple and Microsoft were to the 1980s and 1990s, get in on the groundfloor and wait to reap the benefits.
What I can't hope to do is travel backwards from my base-timeline and win money by betting on the Mets to win the world series or buying a 1959 Gibson Les Paul and bringing it back to the present day when I could sell it for 100x the original list price (not adjusted for inflation, but still). I could do it on the very short term (go back and bet on the Celtics to win the 2008 championship, e.g.) except that would start raising paradoxical issues. But I really couldn't go back to 1986 or 1959 or whenever to make any money, because I'd have no way to pay for anything. Currency design keeps shifting and old designs are intentionally sifted out of the market. If I go back to 1959 no one would recognize my cash as legit legal tender; they'd think I was a particularly inept forger. Credit cards would be declined and checks, if they don't look too different, might be successful as long as I made sure to get out of town before the thing bounced - which raises an ethical wrinkle as well, since I'm now not only depriving someone else of the chance to honestly make the remunerative decision that I'm making with the cheat of hindsight, but then I'd also be actually stealing. The only way to work it would be to take something back in time to sell or pawn, but then you start having to do the math of what you could take back from 2008 that would be sellable in 1959 *and* which would allow you to turn a profit when flipping back and forth between FY1959 $ and FY2008 $. There are potential workarounds or you could do them in stages, but they'd all take a lot more work than just finding out that FutureTech stock is going to be worth $150 a share (in FY2008 $!) in 2020, and take away from the elegance of the idea.
(One possibility that just occured would be to do things in stages. Go back in time and get enough local money to hop around buying up comic books that will be valuable in the future, jump forward to the late 80s or early 90s and sell your small but highly desirable collection, roll that money into something else that'll escalate in value, and keep going. The problem with travelling back for massive sports bets or winning lottery tickets is that you need an excuse or mechanism for turning the money into cash - or buying something else again - before bringing it back to the present. Bank accounts get us back into the various paradoxes I was trying to avoid by examining the simple mechanisms of how you'd try to make money.)
So if you ever wondered "Hey, what's some of the stuff Medrawt thinks about that he'd randomly share if he were in my presence but since he's usually alone just vanishes into the ether?" well, there's an example. (Although I've actually already told someone this particular idea, but I'd also already decided to blog it when I did so.)
Other random thing: I flipped through the latest Popular Science in a Walgreens because the cover promised a piece on baseball pitching, which is a subject that fascinates me much more than baseball itself. The piece was a lame dud - it diagrammed the mechanics that go into throwing serious heat without getting into any of the business that mystifies and fascinates me. Yeah, it puts ridiculous stress on the tendons in your elbow, but why is the ability to do that 100 times every few days so rare, and why is the ability to do that with pinpoint accuracy so much rarer, and what exactly is going on in the arm of guys who can hack it in the Show vs. someone like me? I'm undersized for a prototypical modern MLB pitcher - guys in the Clemens/Schilling/Beckett mode, 6'5" hosses - but I'm a bigger guy than not, and if I'm not especially strong at the moment I certainly could be (will be?!?!) if I lifted weights more regularly. Forgetting accuracy, there's no way I could throw a baseball half as hard as an MLB pitcher; I doubt I could generate the sheer physical power to come close. (And that's half of what fascinates me about pitching; pretty much every other impressive sporting activity is, beyond a relatively low physical threshold, more about skill than raw physical potential [until you wrap around to the people who do physically impressive things while engaging in impressive sporting activity]. Anybody can hit a ground stroke as hard as a pro tennis player, but few can hit it that hard with the accuracy and spin of a pro; anybody in shape who's 6'3" should be able to dunk [and plenty who are shorter can as well] but running a pick and roll in the NBA requires ball control, court vision, and decision making-at-extreme-speed beyond most people who aren't already running pick and rolls in the NBA, not to mention the purely physical requirements.)
ANYWAY
the pitching "article" was a dud but there was this fascinating / frightening bit on research into the inhibition of the protein myostatin. Myostation itself acts as, I guess, a limiter on muscular growth; when it was inhibited in lab mice they doubled in muscle mass. Myostatin absence is also apparently a naturally occuring mutation in some cases - there's one human toddler, a few breeds of cow, and Whippets. The article in Popular Science did me the service of informing me about the existence of Bully Whippets. Go here (not the Popular Science article) if you want to read more, or just to look at what a Whippet - which normally has the physique of a dog deep in the throes of cocaine addiction - looks like when it's born with the body of a steroid abusing weight training Rottweiler. Further down the page there's also a picture of a spookily muscled cow. (Also, people in comments seem to think these photos are faked - or there's straightfaced joking I don't know about since I've never seen that site before - but basically the same photo of the same dog showed up in what I assume is still a reasonably respectable national publication, so I'm working under the presumption that there's credibility here.)
No one knows what happens to the development of a human brain with this condition - as the article linked to here points out, we traditionally think that the brain requires a reasonable amount of fat to develop, and if everything stays the same the kid in the article will wear his teeth to the bone trying to eat enough food for his metabolism to allow him to store any fat - but so far he seems like a healthy kid. (I mean, he's a freakishly "healthy" kid, but you know what I mean.) What I wonder about but amn't going to do the research on is why this doesn't appear to be a progressive condition; the muscles experience a massive development over what they normally do, but only to a point, unlike many instances of gigantism, where the individual in question keeps growing until what we'd consider a premature death.
Maybe I should travel to the future and check out what companies developed mysotatin inhibitors as a safe performance-enhancing supplement, and then come back and buy their stock.
There's all sort of little stories or little elements of stories or ideas floating around in the general category of "time travel could be a mechanism for creating wealth." As in, your knowledge of the historical monetary value of a stock or some collectible item, or the outcome of sporting events, can be used to continually and dependably realize huge profits on relatively small wagers. What inexplicably popped into my head (I wasn't even especially thinking about time travel) is that this basically only works one way. If I'm based in the timeline that, well, I'm actually based in (born in 1982, a young man in 2008), I can (setting aside all issues and paradoxes and what have yous stemming from the time travel itself) hope to travel into the future, find out the 2009 NBA champion, and put a lot of money on that and wait to collect. Or travel thirty years into the future, find out what stock was to the 2010s and 2020s what Apple and Microsoft were to the 1980s and 1990s, get in on the groundfloor and wait to reap the benefits.
What I can't hope to do is travel backwards from my base-timeline and win money by betting on the Mets to win the world series or buying a 1959 Gibson Les Paul and bringing it back to the present day when I could sell it for 100x the original list price (not adjusted for inflation, but still). I could do it on the very short term (go back and bet on the Celtics to win the 2008 championship, e.g.) except that would start raising paradoxical issues. But I really couldn't go back to 1986 or 1959 or whenever to make any money, because I'd have no way to pay for anything. Currency design keeps shifting and old designs are intentionally sifted out of the market. If I go back to 1959 no one would recognize my cash as legit legal tender; they'd think I was a particularly inept forger. Credit cards would be declined and checks, if they don't look too different, might be successful as long as I made sure to get out of town before the thing bounced - which raises an ethical wrinkle as well, since I'm now not only depriving someone else of the chance to honestly make the remunerative decision that I'm making with the cheat of hindsight, but then I'd also be actually stealing. The only way to work it would be to take something back in time to sell or pawn, but then you start having to do the math of what you could take back from 2008 that would be sellable in 1959 *and* which would allow you to turn a profit when flipping back and forth between FY1959 $ and FY2008 $. There are potential workarounds or you could do them in stages, but they'd all take a lot more work than just finding out that FutureTech stock is going to be worth $150 a share (in FY2008 $!) in 2020, and take away from the elegance of the idea.
(One possibility that just occured would be to do things in stages. Go back in time and get enough local money to hop around buying up comic books that will be valuable in the future, jump forward to the late 80s or early 90s and sell your small but highly desirable collection, roll that money into something else that'll escalate in value, and keep going. The problem with travelling back for massive sports bets or winning lottery tickets is that you need an excuse or mechanism for turning the money into cash - or buying something else again - before bringing it back to the present. Bank accounts get us back into the various paradoxes I was trying to avoid by examining the simple mechanisms of how you'd try to make money.)
So if you ever wondered "Hey, what's some of the stuff Medrawt thinks about that he'd randomly share if he were in my presence but since he's usually alone just vanishes into the ether?" well, there's an example. (Although I've actually already told someone this particular idea, but I'd also already decided to blog it when I did so.)
Other random thing: I flipped through the latest Popular Science in a Walgreens because the cover promised a piece on baseball pitching, which is a subject that fascinates me much more than baseball itself. The piece was a lame dud - it diagrammed the mechanics that go into throwing serious heat without getting into any of the business that mystifies and fascinates me. Yeah, it puts ridiculous stress on the tendons in your elbow, but why is the ability to do that 100 times every few days so rare, and why is the ability to do that with pinpoint accuracy so much rarer, and what exactly is going on in the arm of guys who can hack it in the Show vs. someone like me? I'm undersized for a prototypical modern MLB pitcher - guys in the Clemens/Schilling/Beckett mode, 6'5" hosses - but I'm a bigger guy than not, and if I'm not especially strong at the moment I certainly could be (will be?!?!) if I lifted weights more regularly. Forgetting accuracy, there's no way I could throw a baseball half as hard as an MLB pitcher; I doubt I could generate the sheer physical power to come close. (And that's half of what fascinates me about pitching; pretty much every other impressive sporting activity is, beyond a relatively low physical threshold, more about skill than raw physical potential [until you wrap around to the people who do physically impressive things while engaging in impressive sporting activity]. Anybody can hit a ground stroke as hard as a pro tennis player, but few can hit it that hard with the accuracy and spin of a pro; anybody in shape who's 6'3" should be able to dunk [and plenty who are shorter can as well] but running a pick and roll in the NBA requires ball control, court vision, and decision making-at-extreme-speed beyond most people who aren't already running pick and rolls in the NBA, not to mention the purely physical requirements.)
ANYWAY
the pitching "article" was a dud but there was this fascinating / frightening bit on research into the inhibition of the protein myostatin. Myostation itself acts as, I guess, a limiter on muscular growth; when it was inhibited in lab mice they doubled in muscle mass. Myostatin absence is also apparently a naturally occuring mutation in some cases - there's one human toddler, a few breeds of cow, and Whippets. The article in Popular Science did me the service of informing me about the existence of Bully Whippets. Go here (not the Popular Science article) if you want to read more, or just to look at what a Whippet - which normally has the physique of a dog deep in the throes of cocaine addiction - looks like when it's born with the body of a steroid abusing weight training Rottweiler. Further down the page there's also a picture of a spookily muscled cow. (Also, people in comments seem to think these photos are faked - or there's straightfaced joking I don't know about since I've never seen that site before - but basically the same photo of the same dog showed up in what I assume is still a reasonably respectable national publication, so I'm working under the presumption that there's credibility here.)
No one knows what happens to the development of a human brain with this condition - as the article linked to here points out, we traditionally think that the brain requires a reasonable amount of fat to develop, and if everything stays the same the kid in the article will wear his teeth to the bone trying to eat enough food for his metabolism to allow him to store any fat - but so far he seems like a healthy kid. (I mean, he's a freakishly "healthy" kid, but you know what I mean.) What I wonder about but amn't going to do the research on is why this doesn't appear to be a progressive condition; the muscles experience a massive development over what they normally do, but only to a point, unlike many instances of gigantism, where the individual in question keeps growing until what we'd consider a premature death.
Maybe I should travel to the future and check out what companies developed mysotatin inhibitors as a safe performance-enhancing supplement, and then come back and buy their stock.
Labels: Bodies, Sports, The Random
posted by medrawt at
22:45
<< Home