Sometimes I like to imagine a conversation with a great philosopher of times gone by where I explain the miracle that is modern flight. It goes like this:

"We have these machines we call planes, great metal boats—"

"Wait, metal boats? That would never work. They'd sink, and besides we barely have enough for our knives."

"—that fly."

And then there's nothing I can do to convince them. This is clearly impossible. If it happened it must be an act of God.

---

Almost everyone I know hates flying. The cramped seating, the TSA, the crying kid who always manages to be in the seat next to you. I often fall victim to this mindset, too. 

What I want this post to be is an invitation to look from a different perspective. For you to _see_ what I see every time I'm on a plane that takes off. That whatever might be happening on a micro scale, on a macro scale what we — a bunch of overgrown apes — have built is nothing short of a miracle.

- - - 

At takeoff of every flight I listen to the New World Symphony by Dvořák. I'm actually listening to it right now. It's obviously inspired by the New World in an American sense but after so many flights to me it's almost an anthem of modernity. This, like everything else, is a matter of perspective. 

For example: you could be afraid of planes, think they're dangerous. Or you could realize that passenger planes are perhaps the safest form of transport mankind has ever invented. We have access to all of human knowledge in our pockets. We control the weather in our homes. You can tap a few buttons and someone will drive you basically anywhere. I mean even the produce aisle: I could get pineapples in Denmark! Denmark! Nothing grows there.

This is not to say things are all getting better: The TSA is worse than useless, we can't build housing, politics, algorithmic slop feeds, etc. But maybe every once in a while look from a different angle, zoom out. It would be a shame if you saw a cathedral and only focused on the part under construction. Sure it needs fixing, but you can't lose sight of the whole project, and sweet Jesus is it beautiful. 
- - -

So next time you're about to fall asleep on a flight and grumbling about the lack of leg room, remember: our ancestors looked up to the stars and dreamed of such things, now we just dream in such things.


On miracles

Planes!

Books 2026


IN the bible, Goliath challenges the Israelites to single combat to determine the outcome of the war. Goliath is, of course, a mountain of a man. Nine feet tall, the very height of historic warriors. He challenges the Israelites to single combat for 40 days, they cower in fear, etc. The Israelites are told that "The king will greatly enrich the man who kills him and will give him his daughter and make his family free in Israel" (I Samuel 17:25-26). David walks up and hits him with a rock from a distance. David and Goliath is now the basis for an entire subsystem of morality. This feels insane.

First of all, single combat is an excellent way of settling a war. Especially compared to what war actually is. Which at the time was mostly just peasants getting murdered by people with actual weaponry. Actually, cut the "at the time." It's always been peasants getting murdered by those with actual weaponry. Goliath, in offering single combat, is clearly doing something beneficial.

Second, Goliath isn't even the underdog in the story! Sure, David is a sheep farmer and Goliath is a nine-foot-tall professional warrior, but David has an omnipotent god on his side. It isn't even fair. Also, ranged weaponry is just superior.

Third, why do we give a shit about the underdog. It's a perversion of excellence and leads to so. much. bullshit. There are countless examples of obviously superior sports teams claiming to be "doubted". It drives me insane every time I hear it. I don't care if it's motivating, it's just lying to fit yourself into an ancient narrative that didn't even make sense in the first place. David's only the hero because of the side he's on! If Goliath had been an Israelite this would've been a tragedy.

Look, am I massively misunderstanding the foundational text of many major religions? Yes. Will I die inside next time the NBA champions talk about how no one believed in them? Definitely. Guys, you're seven feet tall, embrace Goliath a little. God knows, he also had issues finding shoes that fit. 


Someone's gotta stand up for the big guy

In Defense of Goliath


While sometimes I worry about anthropomorphising machines, I just as often worry about mechanizing people. Here's an incomplete list of place I see this happening. If you have more examples, email me.

- I try to learn similar to Reinforcement Learning
  - Basically there needs to be a tight feedback loop
  - Does taking lessons from machine learning and applying them to human learning make you less human?
- People write like ChatGPT
- We have self censorship on tiktok
  - i.e unalived, seggs, corn

Mechanized Humans

Cities

> If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything
> 
> — Ronald Coase

## Introduction

After long hours considering Max's statements on stock trading I came to the realization that I had one piece of information wallstreet could not dream of... attendance data for Prof. Morawski's CMSC320 lectures. So as every sane human being would I used Yahoo finance's API to fetch the closing price history of 726 of the most commonly traded stocks and searched for correlation with attendance data.

## Monday Wednesday Stock Correlations

I(pandas) went through each of the 720 stocks mentioned above and the stock with the highest correlation to the Monday/Wednesday class was Tesla with a correlation of 0.963. Here's a chart of both of their trendlines normalized so that each of their starting values is adjusted to 1.

![Tesla vs Monday/Wednesday Attendance](/images/stocks/TSLAvsMW.png)

Here's an STL Decomposition of the data for the Monday Wednesday Class. As you can see there's steady attendance then a drop then a slow downward trend.

![Monday/Wednesday Attendance Decomposition](/images/stocks/MWAttDecomp.png)

## Investment Takeaways

As far as I see it there are three main ways to view this: one is that the CMSC320 students in the Monday/Wednesday are TSLA options traders who go to class based on stock performance, the second that the price of the worlds most valuable car company heavily relies on class attendance and the third is that this was just random chance. Since I have faith that my fellow students are only motivated by their education the only real option is that the students are unwittingly more important to Tesla's stock price than Elon Musk.

## Tuesday Thursday Stock Correlations

Unlike the Monday/Wednesday class, the Tuesday/Thursday class had a negative correlation as its highest absolute value. In this case SSR Mining. Here's the trends compared.

![SSR Mining vs Tuesday/Thursday Attendance](/images/stocks/SSRMvsTH.png)

Here's the STL Decomposition for the Tuesday/Thursday class. As you can see, for this class the downward trend is more steady with most of the drop off happening earlier.

![Tuesday/Thursday Attendance Decomposition](/images/stocks/THDecomp.png)

## Adjusting for Trends

A common response to the above takeaways might be that these comparisons are dominated by overarching trends, which is fair. However, interestingly enough after applying a linear detrend to all data, the highest pearson correlation for the Monday/Wednesday class continues to be an electric car company. In this case, Lucid motors.

![Lucid Motors Correlation](/images/stocks/Lucid.png)

For the Tuesday/Thursday class the highest absolute value correlation after detrend is a negative correlation with ACADIA Pharmaceuticals Inc which is not as interesting.

## Methods

I got the stocks from [Nasdaq's stock screener](https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/screener) and then data from Yahoo's API. Stock/attendance correlations were calculated by creating date indexed dataframes on the dates where attendance data was available. Then I just used pandas .corr() method and took the highest.

![Stock Scraping Code](/images/stocks/stockScrape.png)

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*For legal reasons this is not investment advice*

& Goliath

Writing

Planes!

Books 2026

In Defense of Goliath

Mechanized Humans

Cities

CMSC320 Students and the Stock Market