Author: James Vornov

I'm an MD, PhD Neurologist who left a successful academic career on the Faculty of The Johns Hopkins Medical School to develop new treatments in Biotech and Pharma. I became fascinated with how people actually make decisions based on the science of decision theory and emerging understanding of how the brain works to make decisions. My passion now is this deep explanation of what has been the realm of philosophy, psychology and self help but is now understood as brain function. By understanding our brains, I believe we can become happier, more successful people.

Most Disingenuous

The Motley Fool: How I Lost $200,000:

When you lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, primarily because of your own stupidity, there isn’t much solace.

I was a contributor to the Motley Fool in the early days when they started on AOL. When they “professionalized” their staff, I stopped. I owe a lot to the Gardner brothers, both for what they taught me about investing and about life. But I became disenchanted with their approach during the tech bubble as it became more and more clear that valuations were out of whack. They had a great approach to evaluating businesses, but they consistently ignored value. It was the only way that one could participate in the hot market of the time- you had to ignore what you were paying in order to keep playing.Once I realized that the party was over, I sold most of my holdings and manage to preserve much of the gains I had from the period. Others, like Selena Maranjian who authored the article remained true believers and held on until the bottom. The Fool had to abandon their founding principles in the end because their real money portfolios which had outperformed the markets during the rise had returned to earth. Now they push community and most shocking to me in a way, is they now promote mutual funds. They send out emails trumpeting short term gains in selected stocks which I generally ignore.This article bugs me as Selena seems to be blaming herself for not putting value into the equation and selling during the bubble. I think it would be more honest for the Fool itself to come clean about its mistakes during it’s growth period. They lacked a sell discipline. It’s something every investor needs. Knowing when to sell is much harder than knowing when to buy. In general, one should sell when the reason for buying is no longer present. In a liquid market with relatively low transaction costs, every day that one holds an investment, it is as if one is buying it anew. At least if we ignore tax considerations which can create value in selling stocks held at a loss and penalties in stocks held at a profit.

Hello world!

Welcome to On Deciding . . . Better 3.0. This is the continuation of a weblog begun in 1998 on Dave Winer’s EditThisPage community. I migrated to a Blosxom system in 1992. It’s time to adopt yet another weblog content system, this time WordPress.

Several posts from the old weblog have been successfully imported. I hope to move over more. The Flickr links are being moved as links, not images so they’ll require some repair as I move them over.

In the Marais, Paris

I’m just back from a week’s worth of travel to Paris and Berlin. Icaptured about 500 images, so there should be a steady flow as Ipostprocess them. I shot just about exclusively with the Nikon D80 andmy 24mm f2.8. I’ve realized that with Nikon’s CRC design, I can shootcloser with the 24mm than I can with my 50, so it works well both forthese kinds of street scenes as well as my urban fragment images.This was captured after dinner in the Jewish Quarter in the Marais. Ihad a fine Shwarma platter and was experiementing with artificial lightstreet shooting.

Mom

I think the only portraits that I’ve posted here have been a few of my mother. In her late 80’s, she sits for the camera with patience. The rest of the family seems to treasure it’s privacy.

The Wall Was Contained by the Fence

Another XP-2 image shot with the Leica. These are the roots of my colorstyle. With the XP-2 images I’ve been doing much less post processing,just contrast and levels in Aperture. I have a solid flow of images, soshooting and posting are taking precedence over the creation of fineprints.Ilford’s XP-2 is an acceptable substitue for Tri-X. It has the snap whenscanned that I look for. The Noritsu scans from National Photo, a locallab, are full scale. It’s not an inexpensive workflow and if it weren’t for the equipment, I’d be shooting directly in digital. I like therendering of the Summicron and film.

We Hid From the Light

Another XP-2 image with the 50mm Summicron. Another chronicle ofsuburban nature.I’ve got a new MacBook Pro on order. 15 inch 2.2 GHz with a glossyscreen. I ordered it with the upgrade to a 160 GB 7200 rpm hard drive.Unfortunately it seems that Apple won’t have these drives for another 4to 6 weeks so I’ll be continuing to use this trusty AlBook.

Where the Light Was Is Now a Pipe

Another new workflow today. I shot two rolls with the Leica M6ttl onIlford XP2, an ISO 400 C-41 process black and white film. The Ilford isdeveloped like color print film, but yields a black and white dye basedimage. These are the first two rolls I tried in quite a while. I shot afew rolls of the Kodak equivalent, BW400CN, but wasn’t really taken bythe image quality. The Kodak scans were very creamy, not at all suitedto my usual style. XP2 was said to be closer to Tri-x and I think thisimage supports that idea.A local minilab told me they would do develop only for a good price-$4.50 for a 36 exposure roll. They also said they’d cut the film instrips of 6 which would make my scanning faster. When I got there, I sawthat I could have Noritsu scans made for $9.99 a roll. The result are3090 x 2048 scans saved as jpegs compressed about 6 to 1. Given the ISO400 and grain quality, this 6 megapixel equivalent is actually fine. Ifit were Velvia, I’d want some higher resolution. Having the scanningdone does run the price up from $8-9 dollars for film plus processing tonear $20. But they are adequate scans and they preserve the film feelquite well.For convenience, price and quality, the D80 with my trusty 24mm is farsuperior in quality. Given that I can handhold the Nikon down to 1/30thand ISO 800 has way less noise than XP2 has grain, there’s no low lightadvantage to the leica. The Leica just has that modeling that I feel islost somewhat with the D80 which is flatter in it’s rendering.

It Was Buried Under the Leaves Near the Creek

A break from the Italian photos. I had a few film rolls from the winterkicking around and I finally had them developed. I got out the scannerand decided to simply scan the full rolls at high resolution. It takesabout an hour per roll, feeding the negatives on strip of four at a timethrough the Minolta Scan Dual III. I could speed up the process with abetter scanner like the Nikon CoolScan 5000 and ensuring that thenegatives are cut into strips of 6 to fill the negative carrier on theScan Dual.Why? I love the look of the Leica and, here, Tri-X. I like shooting withthe rangefinder, using the exposure lessons I’ve learned with the D80 tocapture images with the simpler center weighted meter in the M6.With the camera loaded with black and white film, it takes a while tothink more graphically knowing contrast will come from shading only, notcolors. Having shot so many color images over the past 6 months andpushed the saturation and contrast in them, my eye tends to be attractedto color contrast. I believe that I can use black and white to becomemore sensitive to shape in compositions, filtering out the colordistractions.Why film at all? I’ve decided that the M8 is just a bit version 1.0 forme to sink US$5000 into it. That’s a lot of film and developing. I havethe Nikon for digital work, so I’ll keep the M6 for these tonalexperiments and perhaps on occasion as a compact travel kit, shootingcolor slide film.

The Old Mill Is Now For Rent

This is the “apartment” we rented while in Riomaggiore. It’s a convertedmill, with just two rooms- a kitchen sitting area and a bedroom. AtEUR450 for 5 nights, it was a reasonably priced retreat. I found it onthe internet, being part of the

Can’t Fake the Light

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It took me way too many big view captures to come up with this one. Iwas in a learning, exploratory mode, but I was generally more worriedabout capture the sky and the atmosphere. I should have been lookingmore at how the light was illuminating objects given how clear the skywas.In retrospect, I probably spent too much time capturing big views ratherthan documenting the village street, it’s connecting stairs and it’sgardens. I have some pretty good examples, but these images are a muchsmaller proportion of the captures.