Humility is one of my best traits

Due to an excellent suggestion from Ms. Lchin, another function of this weblog will be to give advice to supplicants. Any who wish to bask in the sheer amazingness of my wisdom filtering down to the masses is free to email me with requests for advice (just a note: that's a throwaway address, so if you know another email of mine, please use that).

The origins of this idea are enshrined in the following conversation:

02:22:04 Lchin: you'd be a good advice columnist
02:22:11 Lchin: the subtle undertones of all your replies being
02:22:22 Lchin: "Ender wiggin does not give a fuck."

Thanks also go to ManCandy and Dave Eggers for a weblog description that truly does me justice.

The critics are raving, "Three shots and a joint!"

Some friends and I were watching Coach Carter tonight (which, incidentally, was an enjoyable if formulaic film), and we devised a more interesting film rating system. Nothing with stars or thumbs or articles, or silly stuff like that. Rather, we were rating the previews by how intoxicated/etc. we'd need to be in order to see the movie.

Some were just, "Well, we'd rent it when we were slightly tipsy." Others were straight out "wasted." Yet others required us to be stoned on anything ranging from marijuana to heroin, and one even rated ManCandy to say he'd need to be "drunk, stoned and comatose" to be willing to watch.

I think we have a winning idea, here. *grins*

(I should mention that to my knowledge, no one in that group has been anything more than moderately drunk, and has never abused another substance other than caffeine and sugar. But it was an amusing idea, regardless.)

Uhmmm.... right, sure

One can learn the oddest of things in conversations with people you thought you knew.

There's an acquaintance of mine in one of the conglomerated Tech buildings at my school (she works on the same floor as one of my jobs). We normally exchange a few pleasantries, and go on our separate ways. A few days ago, though, we happened to be standing together waiting for our respective tasks to complete themselves, and she started talking to me about this wonderful book she was reading. It was called "Talking to Heaven" by James van Praagh.

This man is a "medium", and, according to James Randi, a fraud.

The woman in question is a scientist. And she believes this shit.

Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over. Anyone care to explain? Believing in things that can't be proven is fine; I do it myself. But believing in things that can actually be disproven... that just seems silly. I'd love to understand this.

A better solitaire

I've never understood the fascination people have with playing solitaire on computers. It's a ridiculously simple game that requires little in the way of cleverness. A much more interesting (and addictive) card game is Freecell.

Yes, that Freecell. The game that comes packaged with every copy of Windows, yet inexplicably few people actually play. The game requires quite a bit of forethought, ordering of objectives, and prearranging of card locations. One must carefully think out *each* move, so you don't end up one space short of being able to win the game.

I used to be decent, but not really good at Freecell. A year or two ago, though, I decided to make a concerted effort to play the game well. As a result, my win percentages have gone up rather nicely. One trap I've fallen into, though, is fatigue. After a few games of Freecell, my brain gets lazy, and I stop rigorously checking every move to make sure it will work. Eventually, this catches up with me and I lose a game. Hence, my modest-yet-still-decent 85% win record.

More importantly, this fatigue factor limits the number of Freecell games I play. I know that people can play Solitaire indefinitely, wasting away large chunks of time. Freecell's fatigue factor makes it an ideal "blow off fifteen minutes to play a few games", but not a black hole that will suck up hours of time.

Integration as a double entendre

I've always been amused at profession- or subject-specific humor. Some of the jokes, such as lawyer or priest or engineer jokes, tend to have a grain of truth, and are amusing to hear. The best ones, though, are those that only make sense to people who have studied a specific field. A couple of examples from my current applied PDEs (for the numerically challenged, that's partial differential equations) class:

When discussing the sifting property of the Dirac Delta function, my professor mentioned, "Well, now you'll ask, what if t0 is at one of the limits of integration? Uhm... well, applied mathematicians like to say that in polite company, we don't discuss that possibility."

(...Which is hilarious if you know about the trouble in defining the Delta function, as heuristic definitions have gaping holes that are inconsistent with normal mathematics, but full definitions are hideously difficult to understand.)

Another one is involving his "motivation" for why we're even bothering to study PDEs (although most of us needed no motivation, seeing as how we've taken some combination of advanced fluids, heat transfer, quantum mechanics, etc.). He said, "So, where do differential equations come from? I suppose this is sort of like teaching sex ed for differential equations." To which I promptly whispered to a classmate, "When two variables love each other very much..."

*chuckles* I'll spare you the rest of the horror that I cooked up in my head, but it used a lot of horrible puns and made-up euphemisms. Math is fun.

India break Lima, India, Victor, Echo, over

One fun past-time is to look up all of the various radio "alphabets" that have been used over the years. The sheer variety - even evolutions inside large organizations (typically military ones) is fascinating to observe. The most commonly used alphabet is this one:

Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima Mike November Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango Uniform Victor Whiskey Xray Yankee Zulu

But the variations are truly astonishing. Often small groups make up their own... seemingly for fun, if nothing else. C'mon, go ahead and try it. It's rather difficult, actually, finding 26 different words that sound distinct, are short, and start with 26 different letters. (For an additional challenge, try doing the same in a different alphabet/language.)

Solutions?

*Sighs* As I'm sure everyone is aware, a horrible tragedy happened today. Roughly 10,000 people died in seven countries as tsunamis swept through Southeast Asia from an extremely large earthquake in the Indian Ocean. The numbers will likely only rise.

Much as this news is horrifying, it is not exactly unique. Nearly every year, there is often some sort of major natural disaster that kills hundreds to thousands indiscriminately.

This is unacceptable.

Therefore, the question remains how to minimize or eliminate damage from natural disasters. I can see several avenues of approach:

The first is avoidance. If we could make sure we worked and lived in places unlikely to suffer killing natural disasters, we could sharply reduce our risk. However, this is not exactly feasible. For one, nearly every section of the world is prone to some sort of natural disaster - for example, even Chicago is at risk for tornados and flooding (not to mention our sitting on a rather major fault line, despite its relative lack of activity). Another problem is that some people simply don't have a choice about where they live - I'd wager that most of the people killed in the tsunamis today lived where they had grown up, had little funds to move, and were possibly even dependent on the coast (eg fishing, shipping).

Okay, so let's hit the next step. If we can't avoid natural disasters, can we prevent them? Heh, not bloody likely. There have been theories about how to, say, "defuse" a hurricane (though the chances one takes in doing so are horribly risky), but we have no *clue* about how to prevent earthquakes and the like (which are probably the deadliest killer, along with volcanoes). Tectonic activity can't be dealt with that easily, though some far-fetched ideas have been proposed.

So, we can't prevent them. Can we predict them? This would give people opportunity to move away from the worst area or damage, get to shelter, etc. Well, this we're getting better at as our understanding of the world improves. But sometimes there still is not enough time to prepare, and though we may save many lives, there will be horrible amounts of damage to property, wildlife, etc.

If we cannot warn people ahead of time, can we make structures and such resistant to natural disasters? This works, to an extent, but extremes will always surprise us. Also, some types of disasters (eg tsunamis) do not seem that easy to protect oneself from. Lastly, poorer countries will not have the funds to support that sort of protection.

Once a natural disaster hits, then, can we implement better search and rescue operations? Hundreds may die simply because they were trapped and waited too long for medical attention. This we *can* improve upon - both in the response of the world to such disasters (faster mobilization of aid, etc.) and the response of individuals and countries to a disaster (reducing panic/chaos, quickly bringing a local, then regional response to help sort things out, adequately training rescuers, etc.).

*sighs* Unfortunately, this seems too little to do anything. Do any of my readers have ideas for other directions to take? I'd welcome any suggestions.

Horribly inefficient infrastructure repair

The joke goes like this: There are two seasons in Chicago. Winter, and Construction.

Ha ha. I'm such a wit.

There might be something to it, though, that applies not only to Chicago but to a wide variety of civic improvement projects around the world. My current pet peeve is at a street corner near my apartment in Evanston. For the last four years, this intersection has undergone massive construction efforts every single summer. The intersection is opened up, a few huge holes are dug, they futz around inside the hole for a month or two, then close it up again.

Well, that's not so bad, right? The biggest project seems to be a sewer repair, where there is obviously some difficulty in making repairs with high patency. True, that implies bad civil engineering and a certain stupidity in parceling out adequate funds for the project, but that's not unexpected.

What annoys me is rather that not *only* is there a sewer project, but there are also invariably gas, telephone, and electric utility projects at the same intersection, every single year. Big ones. These projects never think to coordinate how things are done... so when the sewer project is done, they fill up the hole, repave the intersection... only to have the intersection torn up again not a week later for a different project.

That level of inefficiency is simply irresponsible and infuriating. Government projects are never cheap, as bureaucracies have no incentive to lower costs. Yet this takes things to a whole new level of stupidity. There's already a friggin hole in the middle of the street! No need to repeat work so many times in the same summer.

I've heard interesting explanations for this phenomenon. A former civil engineer I know from Israel mentioned that many government projects over there are carried out similarly. Unemployment is a big problem there, and the number of skilled engineers/workers/etc. is actually quite high. So the government chooses to be inefficient, acting as sort of a Keynesian investment in the economy and helping employment levels (this doesn't make too much sense if one comes at it from a libertarian perspective, but most governments are not interested in that, so oh well).

Uncharitably, an alternative explanation would be that pork-barrel politics and rampant corruption mean that each project has a different pet contracter that is trying to squeeze out every possible bit of money from the government. *shrugs*

(Parenthetically, I read an interesting related piece about road repair in African countries. The article claimed that UN- or NGO-built roads were intentionally defaced/damaged/not kept up by the populace. The reasoning of the people using the roads was that if the roads fell apart quicker, they could more easily get further foreign aid. And said foreign aid need not go towards building good roads, which they viewed as optional, but to other government interests, whatever they may be. Interesting thought; don't know the validity thereof.)

The utility of games

Just a short thought. There has been a big ruckus in recent years about how American kids are wasting their brains away by playing games - whether they be video games, computer games, or just plain old games (e.g. cards, board games, etc.). Apparently, this is a sign of our approaching doom, or somesuch.

This controversy got me thinking: Why do games exist? Why do we play at all? Well, the obvious evolutionary/biological answer is that "play" is a way to train our youngsters in how to do things necessary for their survival. To evaluate the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the games children currently play, then, we'd need to assess how useful they are for learning useful skills.

I started considering a wide variety of games, and surprisingly found that a good chunk of them actually could be seen as teaching something worthwhile. A few examples:

• High paced video games (any of them, really): These develop dexterity, reaction times, and hand-eye-coordination. Seems pretty stupid, right? Wrong. My sister (a physician) has noticed that younger surgeons are much better at dealing with laproscopic surgery than older ones, as they already have learnt the skill of looking at a screen while your hands control what is occuring on the screen. Plenty of other examples where that came from.
  
• Minesweeper: Develops mousing skills, and extremely precise control over the hands (useful for any number of applications, again).
  
• Card Games (example: Set): Develops pattern recognition skills.
  
• RTS and simulation games: Strategy, long-term planning, resource management, balancing a variety of factors, ranking objectives, etc.

I could go on indefinitely about this, but I won't go into all of the details. Point being, modern games have the same purpose that olders ones had: masking the teaching of useful skills with a fun activity.

No, it wasn't profound. Deal with it.

Yes. I am here.

Okay, I cannot guarantee I'll go back to daily-ish posts, but I'm back. Sorta. Many of my readers know the reason for my absence; I won't go into it here. Suffice it to say, my life fell apart. I'm beginning to put the pieces back together, but that will take time. I'll have a few thoughts a week, I hope.

Thank you for your patience.