Idle Chatter -- May 29, 2018

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I see that the market is down about 300 points today. Alibaba (BABA)  is up today and flirting with a 52-week high, now trading over $200.

My dad's second largest holding in his quite remarkably-performing portfolio is Alibaba. His cost basis for Alibaba is less than $90/share. That suggests he bought shares in Alibaba in 2016 or before. In 2016, my dad was 94 years old. He was living in an assisted nursing home. For the past thirty years or so, his only financial news available to him was a day-old Bismarck Tribune that simply had a list of 50 or so ticker symbols with latest price, day's high, day's low, 52-week high/low, P/E, and dividend. There may be some hyperbole there, but not much.

He did go talk to his "broker" every day; in person if he could catch a ride, or by telephone.

At 94 he was a better investor than I was at age 54. Or 64. Or 44.

I don't even know if he knew what Alibaba was. He never mentioned Alibaba to me. I'm not even sure what Alibaba really does.

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Starbucks

Five people in the restaurant, which is about as many as it has had all morning. The drive-through line never seems to stop and it seems there is always an order or two or three waiting to be picked up by folks who have ordered on the app and will come in to the restaurant to pickup their order. No millennials as far as I can tell.

Scott Adams thinks Starbucks will open more homeless shelters with more bathrooms. My hunch: Starbucks will open more kiosk-drive-through coffee shops with no inside seating and no bathrooms. Just saying. Certainly in urban areas.

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A Note for the Granddaughters

Galois

Galois is pronounced "/ɡælˈwɑː/;" according to the wiki entry.

Évariste Galois, 25 October 1811 – 31 May 1832) was a French mathematician.

While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem standing for 350 years.

His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra, and the subfield of Galois connections. He died at age 20 from wounds suffered in a duel.

The river Oise is pronounced "the River Was."

From the ACM Digital Library, security for the Internet of Things:

This paper investigates the feasibility of a unified processor architecture to enable error coding flexibility and secure communication in low power Internet of Things (IoT) wireless networks. Error coding flexibility for wireless communication allows IoT applications to exploit the large tradeoff space in data rate, link distance and energy-efficiency.

As a solution, we present a light-weight Galois Field (GF) processor to enable energy-efficient block coding and symmetric/asymmetric cryptography kernel processing for a wide range of GF sizes (2m, m = 2, 3, ..., 233) and arbitrary irreducible polynomials. Program directed connections among primitive GF arithmetic units enable dynamically configured parallelism to efficiently perform either four-way SIMD 5- to 8-bit GF operations, including multiplicative inverse, or a wide bit-width (e.g., 32-bit) GF product in a single cycle.

To illustrate our ideas, we synthesized our GF processor in a 28nm technology. Compared to a baseline software implementation optimized for a general purpose ARM M0+ processor, our processor exhibits a 5-20 x speedup for a range of error correction codes and symmetric/asymmetric cryptography applications. Additionally, our proposed GF processor consumes 431μW at 0.9V and 100MHz, and achieves 35.5pJ/b energy efficiency while executing AES operations at 12.2Mbps. We achieve this within an area of 0.01mm2.

My very closest friend when growing up in Williston tried to explain this to me. I lost him at "energy-efficient block coding and symmetric/asymmetric crptography kernal processing for a wide range of GF sizes ..."