Txting and commuting

Why are text messages limited to 160 characters? This LA Times article has the answer, and other tidbits such as:

U.S. mobile users sent an average of 357 texts per month in the second quarter of 2008 versus an average of 204 calls, the report said.

It's illegal in California to text while driving, so what else do we do? According to Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us),

Anonymity in traffic acts as a powerful drug, with several curious effects. ... the inside of the car itself becomes a useful place for self-expression. This may explain why surveys have shown that most people, given the choice, desire a minimum commute of at least twenty minutes. Drivers desire this solitary "me time" - to sing, to feel like a teenager again, to be temporarily free from the constricted roles of work and home. One study found that the car was a favored place for people to cry about something ("grieving while driving").

Goats and jury duty

Besides talking about the Sierra Remote Observatories, some of us were also talking about using goats to get the 100 foot fire clearance in the foothills. Hard to believe, but goats eat poison oak and star thistle, even at its nastiest.

Speaking of nasty, Eric Slye really didn't want to do jury duty and let the court know. Yikes. It's not that bad.

Finally, although it is a self-selected sample, the Wakoopa data on what apps people are using, and when, is pretty interesting. I particularly liked this Tufte-esque diagram showing usage through the day (both work days and weekends).

I'm also still pondering this nugget from the Covert Comic: "There are no passengers on spaceship earth – we’re all sky marshals."

Magic, storm tracking

The most recent Wired is really good, besides an article about the Georgia henge I talked about earlier is one about Penn & Teller. The latter is a coauthor of an article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience "Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research". It reminds me a little of Tog's classic "Magic and software design" that I've talked about before (he's also recently posted part two of a discussion about inclusive design). Speaking of inclusiveness, we've been emphaizing captioning of videos. Here's a little spoof that was going around today for you Woodstock fans.

Some bonus things:

• Mike Oz at the Fresno Bee continues his "Worst flyer of the week" selections.
• A couple of people asked me recently about the Sierra Remote Observatories in the mountains east of here.
• I was looking at a street-level weather map here.
• and finally, a story via Steve about rebooting.

Face recognition, weed whacking, Sunday comics

Three things:

Interesting demonstration of "face mining" from video. I watched a Star Trek episode ("Where no man has gone before") last night on television and today found that it is one used for the face mining demo. They get Scotty wrong, but pretty impressive anyway.
• Also a Sunday cartoon caught my eye. The cartoonist must not like Charlie Sheen's sitcom much :)
• Finally, is there actual evidence that increasing vegetation clearance around mountain structures from 30 to 100 feet is cost effective? This is a real pain (I was mowing today) since area goes up by the length of the side squared: from 900 ft^2 to 10000 ft^2, eleven times as much to clear! Grrr. Where is evidence-based fire fighting when you need it :) I guess we should be grateful, some insurance companies were requiring more than 100 feet. The law now addresses that in section 51182 item 3 :)

Headlines

I dont' watch Jay Leno much, but occasionally I see the funny headlines that people send to him.

I was reminded of those this morning while I was Googling for something else. I saw this on page 5 of the August 2008 The Territorial Review Monthly (you can read the whole issue here). Anyway, I like this headline: "Healthy Communities Free Movies In the Park Proves Popular" -- from the looks of the picture there must be at least a half dozen people there. I guess it's all relative.

Civic duty

Today was Day Three of jury duty. Big excitement on Wednesday was the lunch cart outside the courthouse was robbed (but the perp was caught).

Note to self: Don't rob lunch carts with zillions of cops around.

While you're at the courthouse, you might as well walk half a block to the mall and find the Renoir. Or, buy the penthouse apartment at the old Security Bank building.

Making vacation plans for the summer?

Can't afford Europe? Take a trip to Georgia and see a henge, well, guidestones. While you're driving around the southeast, don't miss the giant peanut in Plains. That's only one of the many giant peanuts -- and pecans -- to see on your trip.

You could also go to the Coral Castle in Florida. You can prepare yourself by touring the local underground gardens.

Bonus: Lots of strange stuff to think about while you're road tripping: unsolved ciphers, and even some solved ones like the San Jose semaphores that were on top of the Adobe building.

Finally, a big vacation requires big things. This might be the place. They have the perfect hat in case you stop in Iowa on the way back.

Acronyms versus Initialisms

The 10 April Grammar Girl podcast is useful information for tech people since we live with many abbreviations. I am a GG fan from way back, but Strunk & White? Not so much.

Geoffrey Pullum "celebrates" S&W in "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice", published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I liked it -- good advice for tech writers about what is or isn't passive language. Pullum was also featured on today's Talk of the Nation.

Bonus: Bertrand Meyer (father of Eiffel, and one of my profs at UCSB) and his co-authors make a good case that computer science and software engineering research is not published in the same way that research in other fields are. In fact, some of the most prestigious and influential venues for CS results are conferences, not archival journals:

In the computer science publication culture, prestigious conferences are a favorite tool for presenting original research—unlike disciplines where the prestige goes to journals and conferences are for raw initial results. Acceptance rates at selective CS conferences hover between 10% and 20%; in 2007–2008:

* ICSE (software engineering): 13%
* OOPSLA (object technology): 19%
* POPL (programming languages): 18%

Journals have their role, often to publish deeper versions of papers already presented at conferences. While many researchers use this opportunity, others have a successful career based largely on conference papers. It is important not to use journals as the only yardsticks for computer scientists.

They also point out idiosyncracies of the academic world that ignore some of the most important venues in our field, and that authorship order in CS publication is generally not significant.

Anyway, I still think that Bertrand's "design by contract" emphasis is one of the best practical software development ideas ever.

Men in (silver and) black

Raiders fans out there -- or folks from So Cal -- probably remember Todd Marinovich. His former NFL dad raised (engineered?) him to be the perfect athlete. He played briefly for the Raiders, but his tale is really one of drugs ruining his life. He might be the only pro quarterback who's thrown ten touchdown passes in a game while going through heroine withdrawal :) Since the article was published this month, he's been arrested yet again. It's a sad but surprisingly interesting story:

For the nine months prior to Todd's birth on July 4, 1969, Trudi used no salt, sugar, alcohol, or tobacco. As a baby, Todd was fed only fresh vegetables, fruits, and raw milk; when he was teething, he was given frozen kidneys to gnaw. As a child, he was allowed no junk food; Trudi sent Todd off to birthday parties with carrot sticks and carob muffins. By age three, Marv had the boy throwing with both hands, kicking with both feet, doing sit-ups and pull-ups, and lifting light hand weights. On his fourth birthday, Todd ran four miles along the ocean's edge in thirty-two minutes, an eight-minute-mile pace. Marv was with him every step of the way.

Well, from Silver & Black to black ops: I was googling for something else tonight and was reminded of a crash in the mountains east of Bakersfield about in 1986. Amazing that after a secret airforce clean-up (it was a F-117 stealth aircraft before they officially existed), adventurous hikers were still finding pieces (scroll down toward the bottom, and try not to let the red text on black background get to you).

There are people whose avocation is finding crash sites of experimental planes. It's amazing the X-15 debris they found years later -- (including a big piece of a horizontal stabilizer, and an information plate) -- after a crash where the X-15 was descending at 166,000 feet per minute!

A man does not wither at the thought of dancing. But it is generally to be avoided.

NPR interviewed a mariner about what it is like for the pirates and kidnapped captain in the lifeboat. It sounds grim. The guy being interviewed is from Morro Bay and has an interesting blog "that brings the tools of Web 2.0 to the Professional Mariner".

Another public radio thing to listen to is a UC Davis professor's proposal to create a cabinet-level agency to foster innovation. It is techier than I thought it would be, and mentions how critical DARPA funding was to establishing Computer Science departments, and Xerox PARC, among other things. Lessig was also a recent guest, talking about an "innovation commons".

From the urban legends department, is this true? This afternoon I was trying to find the differences between the CRJ (used by United Express) and the ERJ (used by American Eagle) and ran across this. A couple of years ago a baby was run through the x-ray machine at LAX, but I can't find anything more about the Vanuatu security screeners.

Speaking of airlines, last week I was on one of the last 767s American from the west coast to Hawaii, booooo. The flight attendants aren't happy either, and it makes American not competitive with United, who is still flying 767s and 777s from LAX to the islands.

The title of this post is from "What is a Man?" Bonus: "31 Things Every Man Should Own".

Proof that airfares make no sense

What's wrong (or right :) with this airfare sale?

Fresno, CA to Kona, HI                $191 4/17/09-05/22/09 
Fresno, CA to Lihue/Kauai, HI        $191 4/17/09-05/22/09  
Fresno, CA to Maui Kahului, HI        $185 4/17/09-05/22/09 
Los Angeles, CA to Kona, HI           $207 4/17/09-05/22/09 
Los Angeles, CA to Lihue/Kauai, HI    $207 4/17/09-05/22/09  
Los Angeles, CA to Maui Kahului, HI   $202 4/17/09-05/22/09 
San Francisco, CA to Kona, HI         $246 4/17/09-05/22/09 
San Francisco, CA to Lihue/Kauai, HI  $246 4/17/09-05/22/09  
San Francisco, CA to Maui Kahului, HI $244 4/17/09-05/22/09

This happens occasionally, it is cheaper to go to Hawaii from Fresno than from LAX or SFO, even though you have to change planes in either of those two places.

Trivia: back in the day ... must have been before 1987-ish when Delta bought Western Airlines, there was briefly weekly nonstop service from Fresno to Honolulu, I think.

The magic of YouTube

Some creative stuff on YouTube from talented people with too much time on their hands:

• The Star Wars opening in the style of the Dallas TV show.
• The Star Trek opening as Love Boat and as Hawaii Five-O.
  
• 100 names in 100 seconds

Bonus:
Shatner on Richardo Montalban here, and probably the best imitation of Kirk: Kevin Pollak, who played Joe Shay in From the Earth to the Moon.

Don't fail to miss it

Spinal Tap is on tour again, this time Unwigged and Unplugged, NPR's Talk of the Nation interviewed the three surviving (i.e., not drummers) band members yesterday.

Talk of the Nation today had a more serious topic: whether the workplace should be colorblind. Interesting topic, but I couldn't get the link on the Exploring Race blog to the journal article to open. I think this is it: Is Multiculturalism or Color Blindness Better for Minorities? If you're a Fresno State person you should be able to get the PDF here.

What if your genes don't fit anymore?

This column from the NY Times reminded me of a couple of things: studies of identical twins, and a recent author who spoke at Reedley College and the Reedley Peace Center. First a quote from the NY Times column:

In one study, women whose identical twin suffered from depression were significantly more likely to have been assaulted, lost a job, divorced, or had a serious illness or major financial problems than people whose fraternal twin was depressed. ... These bad events did not occur because the women were depressed, as the correlations persisted even when women who were currently depressed were excluded from the study. Thus, genes can act on the same disorder by making people more sensitive to stressful environmental events and by making these events more likely to occur.

And for those of you "getting older", read the penultimate paragraph of the column.

The author I heard talk was promoting her book Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend. She gave almost the exact talk as she did on BookTV (even where she made a slight mistake in delivery), but if you watch the BookTV talk skip the introductions since the audio is terrible. It cleans up when she starts talking.

One thing that was in her Reedley talk but not on BookTV was a bit of a slam of Zimbardo's prison "experiment". I think that was a little unfair and is probably the result of an engineering professor's (her) definition of "experiment" compared to a social psychologist's view. She did made a good point that Zimbardo's prison experiment suffered from selection bias:

Also, it has been argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results. Researchers from Western Kentucky University recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with and without the words "prison life." It was found that students volunteering for a prison life study possessed dispositions toward abusive behavior.

Anyway, after she started talking I realized that years ago I'd read her book about being an observer/translator on Russian fishing boats, as part of a US-Russian joint fishing effort. Interesting book.

Amish furniture

Admit it, when you can't sleep you've been tempted to buy a genuine electric Amish heater. Of course, it's an "'Amish' Heater the Amish Couldn't Use".



This is not to be confused with the Electric Amish band and their hit songs.

What I learned from tonight's Thomas Jefferson Hour

He had a pet mockingbird named Dick (at the end of episode 760 "Felons and ipods") that used to fly around the White House.

From the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia:

The mockingbirds Jefferson purchased in the 1770s came with only a stock of songs from the woods and fields of Charles City County. He must have provided additional musical instruction himself. If he in fact carried a bird to France in 1784, it may have added to its repertoire some sounds common to mockingbirds imported from America. After their month-long transatlantic voyage they interspersed their first European performances with long imitations of the creaking of the ship's timbers.

At least two of the birds in the President's House, however, had already received singing lessons when Jefferson purchased them in 1803 - for ten and fifteen dollars, the usual price of a "singing" mockinbird. Jefferson's butler, Etienne Lemaire, was apparently proud of their serenades, which included popular American, Scottish, and french tunes, as well as imiations of all the birds of the woods.

Age, narcissism, and fish

MacArthur genius Robert Sapolsky is interviewed on NPR about "Does Age Quash our Spirit of Adventure" and how a 20-year-younger assistant's musical listening habits drive him crazy. That prompted him to figure out how radio stations target audiences: the heuristic is that what you listen to when you are about 14 determines what you listen to for the rest of your life, and that by age 35 most people don't care about new music "but you can sell Billy Joel to those people for the rest of their lives". Same kind of results for food and body piercing :)

Hmm, that upcoming Styx, REO Speedwagon, and 38 Special concert is lookin' real good to some of you right now, admit it.

Is this related? A Slashdot article about "Narcissistic College Graduates in the Workplace". Maybe it is all the fault of Mr. Rogers (who actually did live in my neighborhood when I was sabbaticalling at SEI).

What about fish? Yes, Sapolsky talks about Nebraskan sushi-eaters in the interview I mentioned above, but what I am thinking about is an article about the Nature Conservancy teaming up with Morro Bay fisherpeople to figure out how to bring back the fish. Pretty amazing quote:

Things didn’t work out for other Morro Bay fishermen, either. Once an active port with a thriving industry for groundfish — including rockfish and sablefish — by the 1990s the fishery was dying a very public death. Most of the fish processors blew town. The boatyard and boat mechanics left. Between 1990 and 2006, the amount of seafood that annually crossed the docks at Morro Bay and neighboring Port San Luis plummeted from 14 million pounds to 1.2 million.

Trivia: one of Sapolsky's MacArthur award colleagues that year was David Rumelhart, of PDP/neural network/connectionist fame.

Bonus: I still can't figure out if Juan Enriquez's TED talk makes sense. Even if it doesn't make sense it is amusing and some of his visual are funny, especially the one where the people in the swimming pool have a power strip floating in the middle of the water. Yikes.

Brain activity during television commercials

This takes a couple of clicks, but is worth watching. Go to http://www.sandsresearch.com/ and click on "Examples" and then "2009 Super Bowl Ads and Rankings", then click on one of the ads (the Potatoheads were the most popular). You'll see the ad play and six synchonized views of brain activity, as well as graph of overall interest? activity? I"m not quite sure what they are measuring, I think they are calling it "sustained power level"?

By popular demand

I've told a few people about this and it seemed popular, so here it is. IEEE Spectrum has an article about "The death of business-method patents", and the article's illustrations showed ridiculous patented ideas, so I googled, and they are real patents. One is about cats and the other is an astounding way of swinging.

And I found this patent application about jokes too, including self-referential ones :)

Bonus: The Yes We Scan movement is already bringing fascinating things to you, like this short video of the SR-71 :)

Metacognition: Buy the Two Buck Chuck Wine?

Jonah Lehrer talks at the Commonwealth Club about metacognition and neurophysiology. He talks quite a bit about brain functioning and decision making, and cites some of the same studies that Malc does in Blink, but in a more scientific way. Very interesting way to optimally make car-buying decisions about 51 minutes into Lehrer's talk :) He also talks about wine tasting studies (read about it here).

NPR's Radio Lab at the end of 2008 had a show on "Choice" featuring a discussion of "seven plus or minus 2", Jonah Lehrer, and Oliver Sacks (I've posted many times about him, this time he is talking about buying $1 worth of 72% chocolate daily). The "cake or fruit" experiment reminded me of Eddie Izzard's "cake or death?" sketch.

Lehrer also had a recent opinion piece in the LA Times about airline pilots' "deliberate calm" in emergencies.

Another Lehrer to enjoy is Tom (here signing a WW III song, more complete collection here). Good to see the new generation appreciating his songs (and others based on Gilbert and Sullivan, such as this one about Google :).