Enthusiasm for Prizes

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Kevin Drum asks why conservatives like prizes so much?  Which makes me wonder, is it more popular with conservatives?  To me, they are just a tool.  It’s clear you can organize them in ways that are very productive and constructive [1, 2]

Winners tend to like contests, since having mostly won they think they are fun.  But I don’t see any reason to argue that conservatives are more likely to be winners.  Leaders on both side of the political spectrum are probably winners.

Contests; as a contracting device, pay for outcome rather than labor.  I.e. contests are piece work. The left is more sympathetic to labor.  All the risk is left with the contestants.  A contest sponsor can write the rules in ways that are highly advantageous for him.  Netflix’s search contest did that.  While Google’s android contest did not.  See my previous posting about NASA to offer prizes.  The question is always, do you trust the house.

Shangri-La Diet

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I lost about 25 pounds on the Shangri-La Diet before my attention wandered to other hobbies.  But I still keep an occational eye on that community.  One of the most impressive results is this chart showing various reports from folks on the diet.

This data is tainted by the how it is self reported, but none the less it is amazing.  The other day Seth reported some fun data for one dieter, who lost about a pound a week for two years!  He wrote a nice posting a while back about the fun he is having with his little community of users.  And this is a nice research result that makes complete sense given the diet’s punitive explanation, i.e. that standardization make food more fattening.

Traveling

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On the road.

While you can buy a very wide range of pretzels in Allentown PA, avoid the the cheese pretzels.

In Ithaca NY you can buy a tee shirt that says “War is UnIthacal.”

The Chicago Bean rules.

The Sauerbraten at Berghoff in the Loop in Chicago is just fantastic.

A friend passes along (thanks) this fun little hardware kit for doing Conway’s Game of Life.  I wrote a lot of versions of Life years ago, often in assembler.  I was sad a few years ago to read about a faster way of coding it up than I’d every thought of.  This hardware widget makes me thing about they way fireflies sometimes synchronize.  I’ve imagined a flock of umbrellas with blinkers along these lines.

Quake Evacuations

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Someone pointed out that yesterday’s posting had a mistake, the death toll currently stands at 70 thousand, not 20 thousand.  In running down the current report lead me to this graphic.

15 Million people were evacuated!  The entire New York Metropolitian region is 18 Million!

I certainly hope that some large percentage of those will get to go home again if and when the risks of floods is mitigated.

Landslides and Translations

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The recent Chinese earthquake (70 thousand dead) took place in a mountain range that abuts a densely populated (600 people/sq mile) plain.  Many rivers flowing out of those mountains are blocked by numerous landslides, which according to landslide expert David Petley are very tenuous.  The loose soil damn creates a lake behind, soaks through and collapses or it over-tops and fails or another landslide into the lake creates a wave which over-tops the damn and it fails.  At that point a wall of water heads down stream destroying further landslide damns as it goes along with everything else it encounters.

A huge landslide damn and lake in China unwound over the last few hours and amazingly the Chinese appear to have managed to orchestrate it’s collapse so the worse case scenarios were avoided.  It’s been amazing to watch the story unfold on David’s blog.  Reading between the lines over the last week I certainly got the impression that he was extremely sanguine about their ability to pull this off.

Watching this situation develop I’ve been reading Chinese new accounts, with the help of Google’s translation service.  I highly recomend it.  I have a little bookmark I use; very simple javascript:void(location.href=’http://translate.google.com/translate?u=’+location.href); Which you can play with by draggint this to your browser’s tool bar: Translate! No doubt there are more sophisticated versions but that one works for me translating pretty much any foriegn language page into English.  Here’s an example page: silly bizzare fish stories.  There is a lot of nutty tabloid news out there.

Cold Pack

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Mark Twain provides a disclaimer in the introduction to “The American Claimant”

No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather. It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood.

Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of delays on account of the weather. Nothing breaks up an author’s progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather. Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.

Of course weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience. That is conceded. But it ought to be put where it will not be in the way; where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative. And it ought to be the ablest weather that can be had, not ignorant, poor-quality, amateur weather. Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article of it. The present author can do only a few trifling ordinary kinds of weather, and he cannot do those very good. So it has seemed wisest to borrow such weather as is necessary for the book from qualified and recognized experts-giving credit, of course. This weather will be found over in the back part of the book, out of the way. See Appendix. The reader is requested to turn over and help himself from time to time as he goes along.

I, on other hands, will get right to the weather.  It is a damn sight too hot here.  They plan for tomorrow to be worse.  On Sunday I had to sit in the 95F degree sun for a few hours in celebration of one of my off spring’s graduation.  The heat was compounded by numerous cliche sightings: “the best years of your life”, “life’s journey”,  and uncountable mentions of dreams, and potential.

The police department provided an honor guard at one point in full dress dark heavy uniforms.  This got me wondering if they have those magical cooling vests used by  athletic  mascots.  I like the idea of extremely local heating/cooling; and I got to wondering if they make an  analogous  vest for motorcycle riders based on the principle of a swamp cooler.  This is a step in that direction.  We had brought along some blocks of ices, frozen into 2 litter bottles, which we kept on our laps.  It’s amazing how much you can cool the body if you can get your hands cold.

This morning my laptop decided it was hot and it disabled one of the processors.  I have this cute little MacBook Air now, and it transmits more heat to front of than the old machine.  So I broke out the ice pack.  I love this trick.  I keep these ice packs in the freezer, and when the machine get too hot, or the fan starts to bug me, I slip one under the machine.  The best part, I discover, that with this new machine the chill runs thru the machine and keeps my hand cooled.  That’s great.

Oh, and note that this trick demands a lap desk.  We have two schemes.  One is to make the lap desk out of foam core board.  The other is to use this amazing stiff 1 inch think  corrugated  cardboard I picked out of a dumpster at MIT.

Stay cool!

Advertising Templates

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From “The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads” (pdf).

  1. Pictorial Analogy
    • Replacement
    • Extreme analogy
  2. Extreme Situation
    • Absurd alternatives
    • Extreme Attribute
    • Extreme Worth
  3. Consequences
    • Extreme consequences
    • Inverted consequences
  4. Competition
    • Attribute in competitition
    • Worth in competition
    • Uncommon Use
  5. Interactive Experiment
    • Activation
    • Imaginary Experiment
  6. Dimensionality
    • New Parameter Connection
    • Multiplication
    • Division
    • Time Leap

Time Machine – ouch

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This morning my Mac’s backup (time machine) reported that the backup disk (a sparse bundle on a time machine) was read only and it couldn’t backup.  A bit later I noticed the error was more serious: “The disk “Backup of Pra…” was not repairable by this computer.  It is being made available to you with limited funtionality.  You must backup your data and reformat the disk as soon as possible.” (sic).

So I fired up Disk Utility; hit open; browsed to find that sparse disk image.  Found it.  But, it wasn’t available to open;  grayed  out.  Browsing the web I found the suggestion that I should drag the image into Disk Utility’s window – that opened it.

At that point I tried letting disk utility try to repair the sparse image.  No luck “Invalid sibling link.”  Argh.  I found a posting that implies I can buy a more potent disk repair utility ($50), but instead I’m just going to discard the backups and start over. 

This, and reading various postings about the problems people are having with their Time Machine backups is quite distressing.

 

Better data, fewer customers

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Here’s an amusing business tactic: lock out the customers. You know the drill. You visit the website, log-in, and the vendor inserts an extra page forcing you to provide your missing zip code, or what ever. “Our data quality is more important than your time.”

So this company, a health club, locked their patrons out of the club. If they went to the desk they were told that their account was missing their email address.

It’s always good to keep things neat and tidy, but it’s impossible to get across how much this kind of thing drives customers away. Particularly because it drives off the most lightly connected customers. The ones that are hardest to model. The ones you desperately need going forward. There is probably some deep design principle here. You need to design the system to maximize the amount of chaos in your data. Homogeneity is a false God.

Meanwhile, if you enjoy keeping account data tidy you might want to drop by the Useless Account web site. Sign up! Edit your account profile to your hearts content.