Recommendation

You should watch the A Scanner Darkly movie if you haven't, and if you like remotely similar sorts of things to what I like.

If Only I Had A Thailand-US Power Converter

Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.

-- some dude

Unreadable

In 1958... psychologists let groups of four people brainstorm about the practical benefits or difficulties that would arise if everyone had an extra thumb on each hand after next year. These people were called "real groups" since they actually brainstormed together. Next, the researchers let "virtual groups" of four people generate ideas around the "thumb problem", but they had to brainstorm individually, in separate rooms. The researchers combined the answers they received from each [virtual group] individual and eliminated redundancies... They then compared the performance between real groups and virtual groups...

To their surprise, the researchers found that virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups.

-- Franz Johansson

-- Marc Andreessen

p.s. How do you like flattened double quote? Maybe the badnesses cancel out.

On Quotes

I purposefully dislike quoting quotes while blogging. I would rather obviate intuitive classification of the text and force the reader to come to their own understanding of both my stance and what is the truth.

-- George W. Bush

Kindness

That is the first commandment, perhaps the only one. That is why I had to pan that new play, in my column yesterday. That play lacked essential kindness.

-- Ellsworth Toohey

It's Learning

I'm strook in this conversation.

Magneto1: 請問點樣可以升級?
NightE: 捉棋
Magneto1: 係
NightE: 同勁過你既人捉win左
Magneto1: 我升唔到
strook: 樣請勁升
Magneto1: 但係一直停左...
strook: 係?
Magneto1: 係呀
Magneto1: 唔信你睇睇
Magneto1: 我都好想升...

At least the ideogrammatic question mark roughly expresses my feelings.

When Do We Want It

A few picketers gyrate and dance while chanting: "What do we want? Fair wages. When do we want them? Now."

Although their placards identify the picketers as being with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters, they are not union members.

They're hired feet, or, as the union calls them, temporary workers, paid $8 an hour to picket.

-- from some snail news source

Mailbag

I have received a complaint, that mailing books to other people via BookMooch is wasting the world's resources, and I should just recycle the books instead.

If you agree with the complainer please leave a comment on this post. If you think this complaint is economically illiterate just do nothing. I'll just count hits to figure out the vote.

Dangerous Ideas

I figure about half of these are true.

The New Finance

I think marketing is the new finance. In the 1960s and 1970s [we] got interesting data, and a lot of analytic fire power focused on that data; Bob Merton and Fischer Black, the whole team of people that developed modern finance. So we saw huge gains in understanding performance in the finance industry. I think marketing is in the same place: now we’re getting a lot of really good data, we have tools, we have methods, we have smart people working on it. So my view is the quants are going to move from Wall Street to Madison Avenue.

-- Hal Varian, from a WSJ article

Resistant to Outsourcing

A minstrel in the court of Henry II of England, Roland had an annual Christmas Day engagement with the king and his fellow revelers. Roland's act consisted of a dance that culminated with his trademark forte: a synchronized jump, whistle, and fart. Though accounts are sketchy, they indicate that Roland's remarkable trifecta was performed simultaneously

Fanboydom

45% of ipods auctioned on ebay go for higher than the "buy it now" price.

Landfillbane

Being a single molecule, a tire can't be melted down or turned into something else. Unless physically shredded or worn down by 60,000 miles of friction, both entailing significant energy, it remains round. Tires drive landfill operators crazy, because when buried, they encircle a doughnut-shaped air bubble that wants to rise. Most garbage dumps no longer accept them, but for hundreds of years into the future, old tires will inexorably work their way to the surface of forgotten landfills, fill with rainwater, and begin breeding mosquitoes again.

Taken from Marginal Revolution's taking from some book.

Rodrigo y Gabriela

We saw these guys at Bonnaroo. Pretty sick, especially considering they were street musicians for four years.

Watch Gabriela's strumming style.

Please

...put ordinary native command of spoken English to on.

Thailand Scariness

I've been randomly reading Thailand- and other-southeast-Asia-related tidbits in advance of my trip.

One encouraging sign - they really care about grammar there.

"The proposed TV system will give a suitability rating to every TV program that goes to air. Ratings will then be used to specify what time of the day the show can be aired. A show designated as content requiring parental guidance will only be allowed to screen between 9am and 4pm on weekdays and 8pm to 5am on weekends and public holidays. A program will be assigned a PG rating if it shows "people speaking with wrong grammar."

No mercy. Remember, if our culture exalted grammar, we would never have gone to war in Iraq.

;-)

A Datum

In the last month this blog passed a milestone.

I have now gotten my first hit from Yahoo search!

In comparison I get about 1.5 hits a day from Google, 1 hit every other day from bookmarks, and 1 hit every two weeks from Google from searches for the phrase:

famous illusion where the magician slides the girl's middle out to the side (the zz girl).

A new toy

I recently heard of BookMooch. The idea is you enter what books you have, get points by mailing them away, and then use your points to have people send you books.

Sounded great to me at first. I have a problem that's been growing over time, because I read about 2 or 3 books a week. My input has been Amazon and my output has been buying more bookshelves. My drawers at work are stuffed with books, the awkward extra plank above our pantry is now stacked with books, and it's only a matter of time.

Unfortunately BookMooch has such an awkward user interface I had to abandon it. Then I went to a talk by John BookMooch, founder of the project, who convinced me to give it another try. Now I just mailed off six books and am expecting a few in the mail myself. It's like ebay in the sense that the site can be absolutely terrible, unusable, flash yellow and purple at you, pop up irrelevant questions, and yet still be great if it provides a service that isn't available elsewhere.

Speaking of ebay it might be easier and less expensive in the long run to just sell off my old books. Already one popular paperback I mailed to a book store. :-/ Although I have heard the argument that if all you want is to get a good book into the hands of someone who will read it, you're best off leaving the book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble.

It makes some sense. Certainly the recommendations I press upon my reluctant roommates have a low rate of uptake.

;-)

Should I?

Quit ___________ ?

You fill in the blank.