The Market And Energy Page, T+223 -- August 31, 2017

Ludicrous: comparing Wal-Mart grocery with Whole Foods.

The fruit, vegetables and canned goods were all cheaper at Wal-Mart, with the exception of bananas, which cost 49 cents per pound at Whole Foods compared with 56 cents per pound at Wal-Mart. The biggest price difference was for boneless, skinless chicken breasts, which cost $1.99 per pound at Wal-Mart and $5.19 per pound at Whole Foods.

Whole Foods sells only natural products that are fully compliant with animal-welfare standards, while Wal-Mart sells a range of groceries that don’t all meet Whole Foods’ lofty standards. Still, it could be tough to persuade cost-conscious shoppers to pay $1.99 for a can of Whole Foods corn that they can get at Wal-Mart for 68 cents.

Two other independent surveys found that prices at Whole Foods had barely budged since the Amazon takeover earlier this week. A Whole Foods in Princeton, New Jersey, reduced prices by an average of 1.2% compared to a week earlier.

A separate review of prices at a New York City Whole Foods by Telsey Advisory Group determined Whole Foods prices remained higher than those at Wal-Mart and Kroger despite Amazon’s cuts. And Amazon has also raised prices: the cost of the salad bar at at least one location in Manhattan jumped from $8.99 a pound to $9.99 a pound this week.

I'm not sure why the writer would "combine" fresh produce (fruits and vegetables) with canned goods in one sentence. But having done so, it surprised me. Whole Foods will never, never, never beat Wal-Mart on canned foods except as loss leaders. Fresh produce? It's a toss-up.

But look at chicken: incredibly more expensive at Whole Foods. And that won't change.
Canned corn? 68 cents at Wal-Mart. Almost $2 at Whole Foods.

By the way, at our neighborhood Aldi grocery store, boneless, skinless chicken breasts are even less costly then Wal-Mart: at $1.69 / lb at Aldi.

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Housing Sales for July, 2017

CNBC:

• Forecast: up 0.4%.
• Actual: down 0.8%. 
• June's sales revised downward
• fourth monthly drop in five months 

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A New Kind Of Science

Stephen Wolfram

c. 2002
DDS: 500WOL

Background: the author was born in 1959. Born in London, educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltch. He received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1979, at the age of 20, having already made lasting contributions to particle physics and cosmology.

He says that he "can trace the beginning of [his] serious interest in the kinds of scientific issues discussed in this book rather accurately to the summer of 1972, when [he] was twelve years old. [He] bought a copy of the physics textbook [pictured] on the right [Statistical Physics], and had become very curious about the process of randomization illustrated on its cover."

The result was this book and a "new kind of science" based on what he called "cellular automata" (to be discussed later).

Almost immediately he "discovered" something completely unsuspected: from simple rules, one could develop a "complex result."

He goes on:

In the early years, I did as I had done before as a scientist, and published accounts of my ongoing work in the scientific literature. But although what I wrote seemed to be very well received, I gradually came to realize that technical papers scattered across the journals of all sorts of fields could never successfully communicate the kind of major new intellectual structure that I seemed to be beginning to build.

So I resolved just to keep working quietly until I had finished, and was ready to present everything in a single coherent way. Fifteen years later this book is the result. And with it my hope is to share what I have done with as wide a range of scientists and non-scientists as possible.

Cellular automata.

Take out a piece of graph paper.

Color in the very top center pixel solid black. Leave everything else white.

Now, write a rule for the next line; that rule will be the rule for the entire "thing" that follows.

Let's say the rule will be: on the next line, every pixel will be the same color as the pixel directly above it.

Obviously one ends up with a straight, black vertical line running down the middle of the page.

It turns out, interestingly enough, it seems to be a coincidence (but I'm sure there's a mathematical explanation), there are 256 rules that one can write resulting in 256 patterns. Some patterns will repeat, interestingly enough (in other words, there may be 256 rules, but there will be less than 256 unique patterns). Some patterns will be simple; some very, very complex and chaotic.

From Wolfram on the web:

The number above each image is the "number of the rule" that generated the pattern. There are 256 rules.

Wolfram argues that it does not take a complex set of rules to "describe" the complex nature of the universe (human life, for example). Or, I guess another way to say it, there may not be a complex set of rules (or the need for a complex set of rules) underlying the complexity that seems to permeate the universe.

The text of the book is 846 pages long.

In addition:

• a 6-page preface
• 9 pages of general notes
• 337 pages of notes by chapter
• 63 pages of index