HotShot Blog

I hosted a barbeque this weekend at Tracy's apartment complex. On the menu were grilled veggie skewers, Indian chicken, Indian kebabs, burgers, hot dogs, ice cold Wegman's soda, and a Warsteiner mini-keg. Good food and good fun. Fifteen or so of Tracy's friends came.

It was my first time grilling with charcoal. Not too difficult, but it takes a lot longer than gas grilling. The charcoals were relatively difficult to light. Once they got going, it was a nice warm fire.

Yesterday I played two rounds at Mosholu Golf Course, a public 9-hole facility in the Bronx. It was a beautiful day - partly cloudy, 80 degrees, great breeze. For the first time, I kept fairly strict score. I shot 99 on a par 60 course. For those not in the know, that's about as good at golf as someone who just learned long division is at math. It's quite pathetic, but also fairly average. Less than 1% of amateurs actually shoot par.

So why am I so terrible? I broke up my score into shots approaching the green and putts.

My putting was poor, but there wasn't too much I could do on that front. The greens were often in disrepair, with more dirt than grass. Hole #9 in particular had almost no grass, which meant the ball kept rolling past the hole on a miss. Still, I putt most in 2 or 3 - I wouldn't expect better from a novice golfer.

What really killed me was poor approaches. I need quite a lot of work on chipping. Many times I hit over the green or short of the green. Hole #6 was brutal. Weeds completely surrounded the green, making chipping incredibly difficult. I wasted at least 7 shots on that alone. In fact, if I had reached the green in one stroke less than par on each hole, I would have shaved 15 off my score, bringing me to 84 and a 24 handicap. I could live with that.

Of course, in the long term I will also need to learn how to putt well. Even if I had two putted each hole, I would have shaved 11 off my score.

Go hang a salami. I'm a lasagna hog.

Figure it out folks.

Today was the first day of class. Technically, classes started last week, but since I missed the first Probability Limit Theorems lecture, today was the first day for me.

I'm auditing two courses this semester: Probability Limit Theorems and a seminar in derivatives. Limit theorems is all the Ph.D. level probability theory you would ever want to learn (and the theory you would never want to learn).

So today I found out that for probability measures, convergence in measure (ie convergence in probability) implies convergence almost everywhere. Of course, for general measure spaces, this is not true.

Consider the example f_n (x) = 1 on [n,n+1] ; 0 otherwise

This function converges to 0 for every x, ie f_n (x) -> 0 as n->infinity. But the integral of f_n is 1 for all n, so f_n does not converge in Lebesgue measure.

Time to celebrate ye landlubbers, that be. Tis Talk Like a Pirate Day. Gyarrrrr. Hand me a bottle of rum or I'll send ye off to Davy Jones' locker!

I didn't get to blog on it earlier, but on Tuesday, September 20, 1980, the cutest girl in the world was born.

Happy Birthday!

Last weekend I went to homecoming at Cornell. I got to march in the marching band, and I even managed to convince Tracy to march with me. She finally admitted that marching band was in fact fun -- something she was loathe to say during our four years at Cornell.

We actually won the homecoming football game, which I don't recall winning in the past. Not only did we win, but we clobbered Georgetown 57-7. It was complete humiliation.

Food was another highlight of the weekend. Despite being dragged to the fish and vegetarian Moosewood restaurant, I had a good meal. On Saturday, however, we went to the Boatyard Grill, one of my favorite restaurants. Their dishes are much tastier than 90% of the supposedly fancy food I've eaten in New York City, and much more affordable to boot.

The only downside to the weekend was the weather, which was very Ithaca-like. On Saturday we experienced brief spurts of rain. At one point, it was even pouring hard while the sky directly above us was deep blue and the sun was shining. Physically impossible, except in Ithaca.

Today I had a monumentally important third-year paper presentation in front of the faculty. It was important largely because it is a first impression of how well I can do research. The faculty do talk about us amongst themselves and word gets out if you're stupid and/or lazy. Hopefully, that was not the message I conveyed.

Anyways, after the presentation and subsequent talking to professors, I took a walk over to the Halloween parade on 6th Ave in the village. As usual there were some very elaborate costumes. A few years ago, I saw a full Cinderalla getup complete with a pumpkin-shaped chariot covered in lights.

This year I didn't see anything quite that elaborate. But there were some very interesting highlights. My favorite float was the z100fm float. They had some dancers on the float that were, shall we say, "well dressed." I have a picture I took on my cell phone camera, although I have to admit it's terrible quality.

My favorite costume had to go to this group of people that held up mock "gates." I thought it belittled the monumental waste of money in the name of art that was "The Gates." I'm glad they are gone from the park. Good riddance.

Today was a good day for me. So good that I had to blog about it.

Nothing major happened, but a lot of little things went well today. I started off by having a good day in LORD. My character was able to defeat a player above me and pick up a huge chunk of experience points. In addition, I got a 24 gem castle event and increased my charm by 6 points. The only thing that could have made it better was a bank double, but my luck was good even without it.

Later, a group of third year Ph.D. students and I had lunch with our program director. He wanted feedback on how the first two years were structured. He also told us we need to propose our dissertations by January or February at the latest, which means I will have to nail down a topic very soon.

Lunch was excellent. I had my favorite, chicken parmesan. It was quite tasty and had a slight twist to it. The chicken was covered in a layer of eggplant on which the cheese rested. The eggplant gave it an added meaty flavor.

The best event of the day came in the afternoon. I finally finished coding up some empirical work and the preliminary results were great. My paper predicts that momentum traders earn better returns when volatility is low. Using portfolio holdings data from mutual funds, I found today that the average return on funds that use momentum strategies is strongly negatively correlated with market volatility. The result is exactly what I wanted, and helps out a lot with my paper.

To top it off, I found this pleasant news. An ABC News/WaPo poll found that a solid majority of Americans want Democrats to regain power next year. According to the poll, registered voters would vote 52% to 37% for a Democrat over a Republican for Congress. This is a big deal. These generic polls do actually predict votes close to the election. Of course a lot can happen between now and a year from now, but the fact is that Democrats now have majority support of the country. This is something that we have not seen since the Clinton era.

It's been a couple of weeks since I last blogged. I was busy frantically finishing up schoolwork for a while, and then Tracy and I went to Killington to ski. The slopes were great, as long as you didn't freeze to death going up the lift. It was 5 degrees on one of the days we were there. We had to keep going in the lodge every 2 hours.

Anyways, now that I'm back, I hope everyone had a merry Christmas (and happy Hannukah for my Jewish friends). I had a good time. A large chunk of my extended family came over to our house for Mom's oven baked chicken, fried fish, and biryani. Tracy stayed through Christmas as well, which was very much appreciated. She even got to play Monopoly Junior with my 6 year old cousin Deepa.

My best present this year was a new Skagen watch, given to me by Tracy. It's a great titanium analog watch with a date display. The only problem is it ticks too loudly. I can't sleep in a room with a ticking clock, so I have to hide it in a drawer at night.

I'd like to know what other people got. Post your best presents in the comments.

Ah, Brokeback Mountain....the Oscar-nominated, critically acclaimed film chronicalling the tale of two cowboys who discover a forbidden love....that nobody wants to see with me. Yes, Abhishek, I'm talking about you. How frusting - I know Abhishek isn't homophobic, like me, he's a huge supporter of gay rights - so why won't he go see Brokeback Mountain with me? Well, apparantly, it's not just Abhishek. Last night, at a gathering a friends, I heard an overwhelming consensus from the males that they were indeed very uncomfortable during certain scenes of Brokeback Mountain, and that almost all of them went under female pressure. How strange, I thought. After all, us ladies are exposed to many many examples of lesbian onscreen love, but nobody seems to consider that it may make US uncomfortable. Of course most of the lesbian love portrayed in the movies isn't actually love - it's just two hot chicks who are getting it on for the titillation of the male (and lesbian?) audience members. And what exactly do they think is going to happen? Is Heath Ledger going to jump out of the movie screen, grab the unwitting male audience member, and announce in a deep manly baritone, 'Now I am going to make you my lover.'??? All the men at our gathering last night managed to make it through Brokeback Mountain (and one of them even got some nice heterosexual action from his grateful fiancee afterwards), but they still expressed some residual discomfort. Which is why I'd like to bring everybody's attention to this wonderful article.
The straight mans guide to surviving Brokeback Mountain. In it, I found out that not only does it feature more heterosexual sex scenes than homosexual sex scenes, it also features lots of 'naked hot chicks'. So everybody who's afraid of seeing Brokeback Mountain, read the article, and COME SEE IT WITH ME!!! I'll even shield your eyes during the gay stuff.

On Friday I made a trip to 23rd St and 5th Ave for a occupational drug screen. After I got out, I walked over to Madison Square Park, which is a lesser known but wonderful small park. The park is filled with plants and flowers, a few interesting sculptures, and some nice trees. I sat down on a bench and felt for the first time in New York City that I was breathing in oxygen. It was very relaxing and soothing.

Except for one part: the dog run. It seems about every park in New York has a space where dogs can be unleashed and run amok. I understand the need of dogs and dog owners to have such a space. But I really can't stand them. I go to a park to relax, enjoy the scenery, and pretend I'm not in the city. This scene is more than negated by the stench of the dog run, which permeates an area far larger than the dog enclosure itself. Not only is the smell unpleasant, it reminds me of the fact that I am in a city where you need such a place and of the dogshit that lines the streets in many parts of the city. It's disgusting and repulsive, not what I would like when I go to a park.

In honor of our diligent bloggers imminent 24th birthday, I decided to devote a blog entry to his fascinating life story.

Shortly before his birth, Abhishek's parents moved from India to America. However, Mrs. Mistry returned to India to have Abhi. Why? Well, the theory is that the relative that was sponsering the Mistries during their immigration was a closeted conservative, and via some special skill (some would call it political gaydar) could tell that the ripening fetus would turn out to be a raging liberal. So he requested that Mrs. Mistry temporarilly return to India to have her baby, thus eliminating the frightening possibility of a future President Mistry.

It was for this reason that on June 18th, 1982, in the city of Navsari, Gujarat, Abhishek Mistry entered this world. Navsari is apparantly a decent sized city by indian standards, but it seems like a pretty small town from the photos I've seen. Anyway, Navsari got its name from the fact that the women there wear a special type of sari, called a Nav-Sari. The men wear Nav-Dhotis.

Once baby Abhishek recovered from the gastrointestinal diseases that seem to accompany a visit to India, Mrs. Mistry decided that it would now be possible to take a long plane ride to America without having to change her baby's Nav-Diaper every 2 minutes.

This is how Abhishek came to America. I don't know much about Abhishek's early childhood. I do know that he lived in a little dinky apartment in Long Island, and he had a toy phone that he liked to play with. I also know that he was very developmentally advanced (I guess those Indian gastroenteritises do some good after all) and he was reading and doing long division way before he was potty trained.

Eventually Mr. Mistry got a job at IBM and the whole family relocated to Kingston, New York. Kingston is in the part of the country where people consider wagon wheels to be an attractive and upscale ornament for their front yards. It is a rural city full of white people and the occasional black person. When Abhishek started school in Kingston, he was the only brown person there. He said that because he was brown, nobody wanted to be his friend. Luckily, the coolest kid in his class did want to be his friend, so he was happy. Despite being friends with the coolest kid in his class, Abhishek didn't become cool until he was a senior in high school. Even then, it was debatable. But Abhishek suffered from an affliction that even his Xtremely cool friend Dave couldn't have saved him from - enormous dorky glasses.

Abhishek's glasses were so big and powerful that they enabled him to read even the smallest of details on the blackboard, quickly propelling him to the top of the class. Throughout his childhood, Abhishek worked diligently to get ever-increasing prescriptions, spending tireless hours in front of the family television thoroughly engrossed in his Nintendo Entertainment System. He eventually aquired a few more friends to play Nintendo with, and there in the glow of Mario and Zelda, he grew into a man. Well, actually, he just grew into a fatter kid, but you get the picture.

Pets are considered dirty in India, and Abhishek's parents would not let him get a dog, a cat, or even an iguana. But, when he was seven, they gave him something even better - a brother! Now Kingston had two brown kids, and Abhishek quickly lost his novelty status.

Abhishek attended Saugerties High School, home of the Sawyers. But instead of their mascot being that hot shirtless guy from Lost, it's actually just a cross between a redneck and Yosemite Sam. In high school, Abhishek really stood out. He did cross country, ski club, Magic: the Gathering Club, marching band, Model Congress, and was captain of the .. MATH TEAM!!! And when he finally traded in those enormous glasses for contact lenses, the girls couldn't help but notice . . . that his eyeballs popped out of his head, Ricky Ricardo style, whenever a hot blonde walked by. Despite this rather unsettling phenomenon, Abhishek managed to get a nice hot blonde to go to his senior prom with him, and even date him for a little while. Turns out, she thought his trumpet skills were pretty sexy. After graduating as Valedictorian, Abhishek went on to Cornell University where he would discover, 'wow, Ithaca really IS gorges'.

At Cornell, Abhishek studied diligently, building a resume that would make mere mortals feel incredibly dumb and lazy. In fact, looking at his resume makes me feel dumb and lazy. So you'll have to ask him yourself about all the wonderful research and leadership roles he took on at Cornell. But it sure is impressive.

Not content to graduate Cum Laude like most of the overacheiving students, Abhishek graduated Magna Cum Laude with degrees in Economics and Computer Science. He also was inducted into some genius frat called Phi Beta Kappa. I accompanied him to his induction ceremony, which consisted of a bunch of people telling them how much smarter and better they are than anybody else. Needless to say, all the friends and family members there who didn't qualify for PBK (myself included) were firmly put in our place.

Determined to fulfill his family's dreams, after graduating from Cornell, Abhishek decided to become Dr. Mistry. Unfortunately, a finance PhD was not the kind of doctor his parents had in mind. But I can tell you, that monetarily speaking, I think he's better off getting the PhD :p

Choosing the perpetual student route is tough, especially when you see your friends out having real lives and careers. Abhishek's group of friends from home have been very sucessful - one's a hip-hop DJ, another is a software engineer with a house and a bus, another leads a platoon in Iraq, one is married with two kids, the list goes on and on. But Abhi isn't doing so bad himself --

Three years into his finance PhD program, Abhishek has blossomed into a successful young man who looks really good in a three button suit (a vital skill in the business world). In this next year, he will have the opportunity to live out two of his greatest fantasies (no, NOT wrestling with a thong bikini-clad Heather Graham and Helena Bonham Carter in a vat of Astroglide!!) -- working at a big banking firm, and having people finally call him 'professor' without any sarcasm.

So please join me in wishing this amazing young man a very happy birthday. In just 24 years, he has gone from a house on a dirt road in India to being a 'professor' in International Finance in Manhattan...and there's a very good chance that we'll be calling him Dr. Mistry before he turns 25!

Congratulations on all your successes, Abhi and have a VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY!