So this post will be rather long as I've missed a few due to my busyness. Friday, though, was unremarkable, staying late to finish anecdotal report cards and pulling grades out of thin air, just because. That did not go over that well, though I suppose that even though I was with Joephet and Bark Missada we did not merit serenading from the off-key mariachis, though the Grudge I found worth my $10, which took us to 2am at least, which was ballsy because...

the next day I had a test, nothing special, just a teacher cert thing. But the thing with that is that it was at St. John's and wouldn't you know it, it was a Queens weekend--the N got stuck outside Queensboro, the 7 decided it was too good for Roosevelt Avenue, so I ended up in Flushing catching the Q44 (past Joephet's middle school of a law school) to Union Tpke followed by the Q46 flipward, making it by a mere 2 minutes. And of course I spent more time in transit than in the testing room, almost half again as much. Still, that I made kendo and snuck in a Joephet snuggle made the busing worthwhile enough, and I think Sensei wasn't watching us because he suggested that we look into bogu. Sunday practice would bring another little kid, this one a halfie of the usual sort, but at least he's not some fat white kid. We'll see how long he lasts--and now we have a spectrum from talkative bebogued niplet all the way to chubby-and-silent marshmallow wrapped in a blue tortilla chip with much-scolded undershirt. Of course Riceriver Sensei the younger (who is unbearably cute) says that when he was younger there used to be an entire cohort of kendokiddies. Wonder what they're up to now.

Speaking of imperialist miscegenation, Lostin and I are currently negotiating a running tug-of-war gamble. We have set the value of every Asian-man/white-woman couple we see on the street at $1 for normalization purposes (teehee). We are currently taking bids for the value to be assigned to every Asian-woman/white-man couple we see on the street. I have suggested $0.05, but Lostin claims this is not sporting. Suggestions? We want to make it interesting, though we think that the white-man will outperform the S&P500.

Speaking of shrewd business practices, I have been thinking about rounding quite a bit. So when they calculate the number of shares you have bought they divide of course the purchase price (a whole dollar amount at least $50) by the daily closing NAV (Net-Asset-Value), and then round to the nearest mil (one-thousandth, or one-tenth of one cent), and in practice this would mean that since the roundings-up and the roundings-down about average out you get what you deserve. But it is a cute application of number theory that lets you maximize this rounding error. Let P=purchase price in dollars. Let N=closing net-asset value in cents. Then, the number of shares in a real world would be 100P/N. But this is rounded, which can be done by taking 100000P/N and examining the decimal part. That is to say, the decimal part will be R/N where R is the remainder upon dividing 100000P by N. So the theoretical best that we could do would be to approximate ceiling((N+1)/2) and then calculate P, which will be some answer modulo N. This just amounts to calculating the inverse of 10 modulo N (assuming coprimality!). And then doing a lot of multiplying, fast. This is optimal, but owing to the fact that sadly most of the time N is at least a three-digit number optimizing might well mean buying a shitload of shares you don't really need.

This sort of application excites me way too much, even when I realize that the (strict) maximum gain from such a transaction would be 0.5 mil shares, which for a NAV in the neighborhood of $10 is only around half a cent. It's probably better to just wait for the NAV to go down. So, kiddies, study your number theory!