The Iron Yuppie

Nytimes Puzzles via Chooky

Chooky's Puzzles via Chooky

My girlfriend gave me a puzzle a few weeks ago which I absolutely loved. She said "I bought something today, I paid 99 pense for it". In a lot of ways, this was the perfect puzzle for me. It gave the absolute minimum of information yet was incredibly rich. First, I had to figure out what was cheap enough but still worth her mentioning it to me. Second, I had to remember it was in pense meaning bought from a country that used the pound (is there another form of currency that has pense as a denomination?). Third, because we don't use pense locally, I had to conclude that it was an Internet purchase (or phone purchase, but that seemed unlikely considering how cheap it was). Then I had to compare the date and what her interests were to try and get a union on everything. I still ended up stumped. (Turned out it was the new Coldplay single)

What is it about puzzles that are so engaging? I absolutely loved being challenged in this way... my major problem always comes down to the fact that I over think these things and then get into a perceived dead end... then I jump to the answer. I should force myself to work them through more often.

D

I've been reading the recent series on class in America in the NYT and have been really pleased with what I've been seeing. One thing that is particularly interesting is how different we are than the Europeans. Here, we have a sense that there are no classes, a person can move up if they are smart and work hard and the poor and middle class (through churches and other charities) to fund the majority of social services. In Europe, there are explicit classes, you're given that class from birth and the rich fund the majority of social services through progressive taxes. What is it about getting the goods from birth that would make a society more likely to support their least fortunate? I think I'll do some more digging on this in the coming weeks. Fascinating!

D

Going for Broke

Look, I'm the first to say that I am horribly bad at predicting the future of ... well ... anything. But Cringely is so far out in left field with this one, it isn't even funny.

A: Even if Intel LOATHED MS, I would wager they still make the VAST majority of their money selling PCs that happen to run Windows. The thought of them turning on that relationship is not something that you do on a whim. They have a lot more hope of success going with Linux than with Apple, considering Apple (just like Intel) makes their money selling hardware and therefore are going to be competitive more than they are complimentary.

B: Cringely seems to be missing public disclosures already made:

OS X 10.4 -- Tiger -- is a 64-bit OS, remember, yet Intel's 64-bit chips -- Xeon and Itanium -- are high buck items aimed at servers, not iMacs. So is Intel going to do a cheaper Itanium for Apple or is Apple going to pretend that 64-bit never existed?

Mr. Cringely apparently missed the announcement, and shipping, of the 64-Bit Pentium 4s.

The fact is that Mr. Cringely does not realize that the chip is totally irrelevant to the Mac. All they have ever cared about is faster, better, cheaper (though the same argument could be made about all PC users). If Apple is able to deliver the same product (done) running existing applications (done) running on hamsters in a wheel in the middle of the machine (tbd), the users won't care! As long as a user is able to run the application they care about in the same way they do today and faster without having to buy a new copy, they'll be ecstatic. Compability layer? Possibly, you could dual boot or you could run it in a virtual machine, but OS/2 tried that and everyone just ignored the OS/2 APIs and programmed for Win32.

As far as Mr. Cringely is concerned, I don't know why I keep reading his column; he hasn't been right for years.

Myscreencast.com via Joi Ito's Web

In my continuing attempt to try and encourage people to share what they know and get it out on the web, allow me to pass along something very cool... Screencasts! This is a recording of someone doing something on-screen. Let me tell you, this is INVALUABLE. I cannot tell you how difficult it is to follow instructions/how-tos/etc, even if you know what you're doing! Here, the person is doing exactly what you want right in front of you. I really like it.

One on the scary side is this:

Cracking WiFi in 10 minutes

You know, I thought it was easy, but yeesh. This is practically brainless. Time to get on WPA folks!

Lack of testing 'threatening stability of Linux'

This is a bit strong, but it never fails to amaze me the difficulty of doing things with computers that are seemingly really easy with real life.

You want to build a bridge (real life edition)? Pile some stone up. Measure the sheer, tension, torsion strength of the stone. Now you know how much the bridge can hold.

You want to build a bridge (computer program edition)? Pile some stone up. Figure out some automated ways to test the sheer, tension, torsion strength of the stone. Now you know absolutely nothing, because the second someone gets that bridge in real life you're going to have people driving boats into the pillars and throwing 65 million ton trucks on it and hitting it with tidal waves and getting pissed when it crashes because they weren't thinking of using it in the same way you were using it. Or, better yet, somebody will sit around and figure out the exact resonance frequency necessary to bring the thing down and then publish that. Or, even better, totally randomly someone will drive a car, the water will swirl and somebody 20 miles away will pound a jackhammer into the ground and, somehow, all these things will come together to cause a massive crack with no ability to predict it whatsoever.

It's my guess that it's this last thing that the Linux community will have the hardest time overcoming.

Half-Life 2 Domino

Baby Polycarp on Flickr

I love the new art that seems to be going on right now. Maybe because I could not draw a straight line to save my life, but it particularly appeals to me in that people seem to be using existing bits and pieces to create interesting work. The dominos (on the top) and the rendering of the history of the early church (bottom) are great examples of this. No, they are not the next Mona Lisa, but it's a great start.

PostSecret

Amazingly addictive/powerful/etc site of nothing but homemade postcards. I wish I could post them all here. I remember, back in high school, reading Shakespeare and thinking that it was not possible to compress that many references and meaning into such a compact form as sonnets and plays. I feel a bit like that reading these too.

While I'm at it, I might as well give a free link to another site with way too much meaning packed into an impossible small space.

Another Bubble Set to Blow Up?

I'm not exactly sure why this author thinks this is another bubble getting ready to burst. I have never been even remotely close to the financial sector, but I'm telling you I've heard people talking about making billions on the stock market at the zenith, at the nadir, and everywhere in between. The points this author makes are good ones; we, as humans, are remarkably BAD at evaluating exactly how good/bad our outcomes of any situation were, and we tend to always remember the best stories (I know Joe who made $6 M playing options!) vs. the bad (I know Bob who dropped his entire college fund on pork bellies!). But the fact of the matter is that for the past 75 years, the S&P 500 has returned ~11% y/y and the longer you hold onto it, the more likely you are to get that ~11% y/y growth. As far as an anonymous reader of his column is concerned:

"Boy, does this sound like a great way to make money in the stock market during my retirement years," he wrote. "The class only costs a few thousand. I'm thinking about signing up and playing with $50,000 of my retirement funds. What do you think?"

Uh, people have been acting irresponsibly with their retirement money/college money/mortgage money/medicine money/don't lose this or we will die money/etc. since the dawn of man, why would you think now would be any different?

Toggler Wall Anchor via Cool Tools

These are really nice... though the big problem I have with the site is that it doesn't tell you how much it can hold (weight-wise).

I was doing a ridiculous amount of closet work recently (well, ridiculous for me, who's general number of activities per day/week/month can be measured on your dick), and my biggest problem was a steel plate that was behind a piece of drywall at the back of the closet. I needed to mount the rail on which you hung the rest of the closet but, unlike the other walls in the closet, beyond the 5/8" thick drywall was 5/8" of space and then this 1/4" steel plate. all the other wall anchors I looked at required too much depth so I went on a three week long journey to find something that would work. I ended up coming up with this:

This worked out perfectly, and it turns out the problem was, as is almost always the case, that I did not accurately estimate the requirements up front. Each of these hold 50 lbs, I had 7 in the wall, that's 350 lbs. That's ridiculously more than I required... I should have just done that math sooner and saved myself the weeks of searching. Anyhow, it's up and hanging, but I'm a little surprised that The Closet Factory, or whoever that was from whom I purchased the stuff, hasn't seen this problem before.

start.com

Boy, everyone is doing something cool out there. This is the new portal from MS, and I love it. There are great inline stories, answers on the fly, and moveable parts. I have to say, Google's entry could learn a bit from this.