General Archives - Page 34 of 66

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.

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.

Power supply so good; and then so bad

I don’t know if it’s just my end alone but of recent the electricity supply from PHCN has been pretty good. In fact too good to be true. But who can satisfy Nigerians? Trust that I still need to gripe about it. Why? Well, it is a bit complicated. I use a prepaid meter and the non-stop electricity supply is zapping my “credit” so fast you could think that the utility meter is a stop watch. To get me even more annoyed, government announced that they are upgrading the prices to N25/KwH soon. Why do we always benchmark cost to other countries but we never do same for minimum wage or roads or rails or [*insert your gripe here*].

The following table shows the price of electricity per Kilowatt Hour across different countries. This should serve as a quick reference to what other guys pay in these countries.

Country	$/KwH	N/KwH
Kingdom of Tonga	0.4570	73.12
Denmark	0.4289	68.62
Italy	0.3723	59.57
Netherlands	0.3470	55.52
Germany	0.3066	49.06
Philippines	0.2880	46.08
Sweden	0.2734	43.74
Ireland	0.2389	38.22
Spain	0.1950	31.20
France	0.1925	30.80
UK	0.1859	29.74
Croatia	0.1755	28.08
Singapore	0.1734	27.74
Portugal	0.1639	26.22
Nigeria (Proposed)	0.1563	25.00
Hong Kong	0.1230	19.68
Iceland	0.1161	18.58
Belgium	0.1143	18.29
Perú	0.1044	16.70
South Africa	0.1015	16.24
USA	0.0928	14.85
Malaysia	0.0742	11.87
Australia	0.0711	11.38
Finland	0.0695	11.12
Nigeria (Currently)	0.0625	10.00
Canada	0.0618	9.89

^{This data is for comparison only. The validity of the data is not guaranteed.}
^{Naira to Dollar exchange marked to N160/$1.}</
^{Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing}