Adedeji Olowe

Genome on demand

The human genome was cracked some years ago by some mad hat scientists. That adventure took about 10 years although the completed map took another 3 years to show up. Guess what, same hack would take just a week if we are doing it today.

That was in 2000. Using the same extrapolation, your genome could be hacked and analyzed (and probably backed up on a USB drive, Lord helps you if it gets virus infected) in 19 minutes by year 2022 and 2 seconds in 2032.

Actually, those figures are wrong. I think at the rate at which we are going, our genomes could be analyzed online real time in 7 years. And with human models being simulated by some smart folks, vaccine and drug development would leave the realm of the lab into pure algorithms.

Maybe we would finally conquer cancer, engineer immortality, figure out teleportation and finally do away with work. My vacation ends in 24 hours and I wonder why anyone hasn’t figured this out. Sad.

Introduction to fuel subsidy

Found the most interesting calculations about this fuel subsidy brouhaha at boso.me.uk (http://www.boso.me.uk/2012/01/arithmetic-of-fuel-subsidy-by-wale.html). Quite a read.

Subsidy Removal: Comparison of Gasoline Pump Price

Subsidy removal is the latest front burner of public discourse in Nigeria today and there is no shortage of facts to back either argument. Too bad many of these arguments ain’t backed by reality.

I have mashed data from World Bank and CIA Fact book about the average price of a liter of gasoline across different countries. The exchange rate used at the time of computation at the World Bank was N147 to a Dollar.

The table below shows the prices at the 18 cheapest locations too bad I can’t just drive there for a fill up:

Country Name	$ 2010	NGN 2010	Output bbl/day
Venezuela	0.02	3.40	2,375,000
Iran	0.10	14.33	4,252,000
Saudi Arabia	0.16	23.64	10,520,000
Libya	0.17	25.11	1,789,000
Qatar	0.19	28.07	1,437,000
Bahrain	0.21	31.02	46,430
Turkmenistan	0.22	32.50	202,400
Kuwait	0.23	33.98	2,450,000
Oman	0.31	45.80	867,900
Algeria	0.32	47.27	2,078,000
Yemen	0.35	51.70	258,800
Brunei	0.39	57.61	159,400
Nigeria	0.44	65.00	2,458,000
United Arab Emirates	0.47	69.43	2,813,000
Egypt	0.48	70.91	662,600
Ecuador	0.53	78.30	485,600
Malaysia	0.59	87.16	664,800
Sudan	0.62	91.59	514,300

Back to blogging

Two things got me off blogging over the last 2months+.
First I divorced my previous web host because they got too cranky, nagging and wanted things I couldn’t give (more money!) despite the fact that their performance was just marginally better than a Russian Lada car raising a dust storm on a back road in Western Sahara. Along the line my bro hooked me up with another host but didn’t kind of fancy her (or it?). It lacked the pizzazz to make my blood sizzle. So like what boys do, I went searching for that fancy host. Found one, paid top dollars and guess what, absolutely rubbish! Too bad, premium wine down the basket, so back to the host I spurned – the one from my bro. maybe elders do know what is good for us after all.
Then I got into another function at work that practically sucked all the time I have. In fact, the few minutes I could eke out each day are spent thinking of how I could invent a time expander. Since Einstein said that time is relative, maybe I could find a way to get more minutes per hour, especially between 12 midnight and 5AM in the morn.
On a serious note, I’m actively considering my interest in ColdFusion. I have stick this for so long but I think Adobe is too greedy and too shortsighted that in 5 years, only dinosaurs would know how to write CF. Getting a decent hosting for a CF site is like asking for a pink elephant with wings. I could search forever.
Time to start punishing my friends with those crazy posts!

Download Nigerian Stock Exchange Historical Stock Price Dataset

Some months ago I was trying to do some data analysis on historical equity data with Geek Impressario, Femi Aluko, but we practically ran into brick walls: no data. There wasn’t any easy place to get daily prices in one single place.

I turned to a friend who had one but then due to some vague business secrecy, I was told to hug an electric pole (told in a nice way that I actually looked forward to that shocking experience).

So like what geeks are known for, our impresario sat down and cooked some codes, helped with a generous dose of caffeine and bush meat and presto, a scrapper was born to scour the web for fragments and we built a database of the stock prices from January 1, 2000 till date.

But we won’t be asking you to hug the next shocking thing you can lay your hands on, we have decided to give out part of the data to anyone who needs to download and use for any type of analysis or financial weapon of mass destruction that can be cooked up.

The data is available for download in CSV from Google Docs. The data we have made available ends at December 31, 2010.

By the way, download and use this data at your own peril. We make absolutely no claim that this is not more than a collection of numerical junks.