There are about 200 restaurants within a 2 block radius of my office, including two malaysian places and two “House of Kabobs”.   Five Guys Burgers is the rough equivalent of the Varisity in Atlanta.
Food in general is quite expensive, but there are several places where it’s fairly cheap, if you hunt around a bit.  Hot Dogs and Empanadas FTW!

Lots of walking, obviously, being a downtown area.   The weather has been very cooperative, up until the last couple of days, but I’ve been carrying an umbrella around for just this contingency.

It’s weird, thinking about the fact that this is one of the two most likely places that a terrorist nuclear  bomb would go off.

There are lots of political jokes used in advertising, which is quite a striking difference from the other places I’ve lived.

This is definitely a “Who do you know” kind of town. Unfortunately most of the interesting people I know in person are all on the west coast or down south. I read a few interesting blogs in the DC area, and I am looking forward to meeting them.

FreeRice.com - A vocabulary game where the more obscure words you know, the more rice the site donates through the UN to hungry people.

I peak at 43, and maintain 41-42 pretty consistently.   Most recent failure - dipsomniac.

• Democrats have built their own lobbying machine on K street (2 streets down from where I work)
• At any given time, 14% of female sailors are pregnant

On the second topic, in the population as a whole, there are 6 million pregnancies per year, so assume 4.5 million at any given time.  This is out of a total population of 60 million fertile females.

Which means that 7.5% of the childbearing-age female population is pregnant.  In other words, female sailors are almost twice as likely to be pregnant.    The message is clear: Women, if you want to improve your chances of conceiving, join the Navy!  

If you’re uninterested in a thread of conversation, but it just keeps coming back, try this:

Open up one of the messages in the thread, and hit ‘m’.   You’ll be transported back to the main view, and up top it will say “This conversation has been muted”

CoyoteBlog is skeptical of stories of the Giant Trash Island.

Snopes is silent on the subject.   Wikipedia has some details.

In any case, we can learn something interesting by doing some specific calculations.   3.5 million tons, spread out over twice the size of the State of Texas:

3.5 million tons == 7 billion pounds

7 billion pounds == 3.2 billion kilograms (you’ll see why I converted later)

Texas is 268,601 square miles.  Twice that is 537,202 square miles.

That means that there are 5,956 kilograms of trash per square mile. Let’s call it 6000.

6000 kilograms per square mile sounds like a lot.  Except

There are 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile.  That means that there are

0.000021522 kilograms of material per square foot.  Now, we multiply by 1000 to get grams:

0.215 grams of material per square foot.   ( a paperclip is about one gram )

Which explains why you can’t see it from satellite photos.  It’s far too dispersed to be seen in any conventional sense except when you are right there in the middle of it.

Reg Braithwaite has a very strong case for being more open-minded in your programming research/learning.

Having said that, this is probably the difference between the Myers-Briggs INTP and INTJ subtypes.  INTJs (which is very common amongst programmers) are prone to judging and rejecting information that they disagree with.   INTPs less so.

Having said that, I’ve certainly made this mistake on more than one occasion (and quite possibly blogged about it as well).   But now that I’m thinking about it, I suspect I’ll make it less often.

It all started when I realized that my younger son was struggling with reading.

Not with the letters, or the words, really, but with his own expectations. He didn’t like making mistakes, and didn’t like that his older brother didn’t make many mistakes.

So he refused to read, because he wasn’t good at it.  Catch 22

Pondering this for a while, I thought - maybe if he had something to read that was really interesting, it would motivate him.

And so I wrote Bookr - http://www.undefined.com/bookr - a Flex app that lets the reader choose which characters will be in the book, and makes it more “just for them”, which I hope gives them a reason to want to read it.

I started with Star Wars characters, and have since added characters from the Nightmare Before Christmas and Disney princesses.

So far, I’ve discovered two things:
1. It does seem to work - my son loves the stories, and was very interested in making up fun combinations.
2. Because you can play the same book with different characters, there’s a fair amount of reinforcement.

If you have younger children who are thinking about reading, feel free to give it a try. You can even write your own Bookr books, and I’ll include them in the library.

Tutorial here: http://www.undefined.com/ia/bookr/

Comments and feedback are welcome.

Hat tip - NoodleFood

My coworker Paul jests that Ron Paul would win in a landslide if our MMO characters could vote.

He’d certainly get my, er, 23 votes.

How long should I wait before I kill an NPC?

Priceless.   If you’re into that kind of thing….

In keeping w/history, this review of Escape from New York is quite good, but I think the author missed one detail.

At the end, when they’re “neutralizing” the explosive charges in Snake’s neck, the timer has already expired.

In other words, there never were any explosive charges in Snake’s neck.  He was never actually in danger.

Yet another reason this movie is so great

It took me just 1 minute to opt all of my Verizon phones out of this data sharing service.   It’s not the most obnoxious service ever, but hey, it only took a minute!

Some people see the woman spinning counter-clockwise, others clockwise.    With effort, you can see her reverse directions, sometimes haphazardly.

But this isn’t a computer gimmick - I had multiple people in my office, and they saw her spinning opposite of each other at the same time, which means it is perception based, not a trick.

How Stuff Works on Quantum Suicide

Quantum Suicide is a misnomer, however, because it doesn’t have to be you who pulls the trigger, the effect is the same.  In fact, there doesn’t have to be a human pulling the trigger at all - the machine that reads the quantum spin could check it at regular or irregular intervals on its own, and fire the gun.

It also doesn’t have to be a gun - it could be electricity, poison, lasers or sonic screwdrivers (Master variant).   It could also be meteors, drowning, heart attacks, strokes, guillotine, rope or explosive.   In fact, any source of death is governed by the possibility of “it happened, or it didn’t happen”, based on the interactions of atomic and subatomic particles.

If the Many Worlds theory is correct - you are immortal.   And, in my opinion, since your memories and cognitive faculties are what makes you you - you are also (most likely) protected from dementia, brain damage, alzheimers or senility.

Something to think about on a rainy afternoon

One of the questions I am pretty good at asking myself when presented with a conclusion is “what’s the alternative.”

The benefits of 80 million years without sex from PhysOrg.com

Scientists have discovered how a microscopic organism has benefited from nearly 80 million years without sex.

[...]

80 million years is quite a long time.  If you read the article, the benefit is that the organism can hibernate for years when it has no water to live in.  But what kinds of benefits might that organism have received from 80 million years of sexual reproduction?  I can think of at least one major order that has developed a tremendous number of new abilities and benefits over that timeframe.

I’m re-reading Taking the Red Pill - (thanks Rick and Marni) essays about The Matrix, and I’ve discovered that two members of my Blogroll - Robin Hanson and Peter Boettke wrote essays in said book.

How worlds collide.

This has been making the rounds in economic circles. Resulting in comments like “Humans act less in their self-interest than chimps”

But I disagree. If I’ve learned anything in my reading of persuasion by Richard Cialdini, I’d say it’s pretty clear that reciprocity and some level of fair behavior are the glue that holds civilization together. And as such, have some specific economic value.

That is to say, a human being confronted with an unfair distribution in the “all or nothing game” (read the original link) has a thought process (perhaps too quick to realize) like so:

I could take this offer, but it would damage the overall sense of fairness and reciprocity in our shared human civilization. That sense of fairness is critical to my own well being, as well as the well-being of my future offspring, who benefit greatly from a society that rewards fairness and punishes overt unfairness.

In other words - as a human being with an advanced, future-predicting brain, I can view self-interest with an eye to the long time horizon.

Civilization is a tremendous public benefit, and I don’t think it’s irrational to place significant value in maintaining it. There’s a reason we have the Internet, and the chimpanzees don’t.

It should also be possible to determine the fairness limit - i.e. in the all-or-nothing game, what’s the ratio at which the receiver balks and squashes the deal. Is it at a 55/45 split? a 60/40? a 70/30?

More importantly, does the actual dollar amount matter, and how much? For example, I’d forego 30 cents out of a dollar, just to punish the bozo, but I’m not sure I would forego $30, even if he did get to walk away with $70. But I’d definitely forgoe $40 if he got to walk away with $360. What a jerk!

It’s even more interesting at $1000/$1,000,000 - I’m not sure I’d take that deal, even though it would cost me $1000, because giving $1 million to someone that unfair is really hard to swallow. But I’d have a very hard time giving up $10,000, even if he got to walk away with $990,000, because $10k is a lot of money. At some point in there, the curve would probably go flat - I’d almost certainly take $10k whether he walked away with $10k, $20k, $100k, a million or even a billion dollars. Other people might be willing to walk away from $10k, and still others might not be willing to walk away from $1k, depending on their current lifestyle and financial situation

So, bottom line, as the value of the reward goes up, my tolerance for unfair distribution goes up as well. There’s probably a PhD thesis in here somewhere. Also, I know exactly where to do this test - inside a MMO. Money is fairly easy to acquire, and a few months of effort would accumulate a large bank account (plus, you could always buy gold/plat at very modest prices). But there are always new players as well, who are short of gold. So you could run this experiment a number of times and get a wide range of economic tiers represented, without having to use a significant chunk of real cash.

A fascinating article on a worm/virus/bot parasite thing called “Storm” that is apparently nigh-invulnerable and possibly unstoppable… (well, on Windows, anyways)

I thought it was a rather overwrought article at first, until I realized that it was written by Bruce Schneier.  Eeek.

My thoughts:

Worst case - the Storm takes over virtually every Windows computer on the Internet, extorts tens of billions of dollars out of Microsoft, and then wipes them all down anyways, causing a massive global catastrophe.

Best case - the Storm takes over virtually every Windows computer on the Internet, extorts a billion dollars out of Microsoft. Microsoft works feverishly to improve their security infrastructure, even at the cost of backwards compatibility. The criminals are found and Microsoft gets most of their money back and the world gets a much more secure OS.

Interesting article in the Harvard Business Review:  Manage your Energy, not your Time.

Summary:

• You’ll be more productive if you spend less time at your desk and more time renewing your energy
• You can renew your energy by:
  • Reducing unhealthy habits
  • Exercising more
  • Sleeping a decent amount each night
  • Taking walks during the day
  • Having more frequent, smaller meals

There’s more, but I’ll let you read it for yourself.

Do we have all the facts about the sinking of the Titanic?