Blog Theft!

Technically, this isn't a Blog Theft!, because it's not actually from a blog. But it is a theft and I wanted to keep my brand theme rolling. Anyway, aleptu.com features the "coolest gadgets and cell phones," and they just did a story on the 12 Coolest Geeky Shoes. The one below is pretty cool, but you should definitely click here, and scroll down to the CD-ROM shoes and the Nintendo-themed ones.


Adidas Smart Shoes
These shoes called the Adidas 1 use a 20-megahertz microprocessor implanted in the sole which collects readings from the shoe’s movements and adjusts the fit of the shoe accordingly. You don’t have to think about how fit the shoes might be, just wear them and they will adjust the fit themselves. The shoe knows when you are walking, jogging, running and standing still and adjusts the Shoes in a way that makes the feet most comfortable.

Something I Read Somewhere

It was tough growing up with the name Guay. To start, I was made fun of on the first day of class, because my teachers didn't know how to pronounce my name. Then, when the pronunciation was corrected, I was made fun of for the correct pronunciation. On top of that, because I have an older brother and sister, I was one of "the Guay kids" in high school. Anyway, I thought this article, from www.metro.co.uk, was funny.

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Britain running out of Cocks

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Britain is suffering from a lack of Cocks

The number of people in Britain with amusing surnames like Cockshott, Balls, Death and Shufflebottom has declined by up to 75 percent in the last century - as people with silly names either fail to pass them on to the next generation, or leave the country entirely.

A study found the number of people with the name Cock shrank to 785 last year from 3,211 in 1881, those called Balls fell to 1,299 from 2,904 and the number of Deaths were reduced to 605 from 1,133.

People named Smellie decreased by 70 percent, Dafts by 51 percent, Gotobeds by 42 percent, Shufflebottoms by 40 percent, and Cockshotts by 34 percent, said Richard Webber, visiting professor of geography at King's College, London.

Wangs, however, have experienced dramatic growth.

One of the Perks of Living in DC

Monday morning, I walked into my office a little bleary-eyed, probably around 9:15. I go through the same routine everyday.
1. Walk into cubicle and turn on computer.
2. Place bag on chair and hang up coat.
3. Take lunch out of bag and tuck bag under desk.
4. Log in to computer.
5. Fill up water bottle at water cooler.
6. Check e-mail.

What? There was an explosion? I suppose if I were a little less groggy I would have realized that it was only a "Simulated Explosion," and it wasn't going to happen for another two days, but whatever. After I realized there wasn't, in fact, any explosion, I thought it was cool; I never got any e-mails like this in New York or Connecticut. Then again, I did see a Bomb Squad van outside my window when I lived next to the United Nations. Who knows if that was simulated.

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From: *********
Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 9:36 AM
To: .DC-Everyone
Subject: Simulated Explosion

Please review this important notice:

NOTE THE FOLLOWING IMPORTANT MESSAGE.
For the filming of a TV pilot, there will be a simulated explosion on Wednesday, March 25 between 9:30 a.m. and noon near Key Bridge in the District. The explosion will produce a 20 to 30' fireball that will last for approximately 2 minutes.

Please pass along this information to others appropriate. The Department of Homeland Security and D.C. Police and Fire departments have been notified, along with the Washington Airports Authority. The Virginia State Patrol and Arlington Police Department will be contacted. If you have additional questions, contact Kathy Hollinger or Burt Warner with the DC Film Office at 202-727-6608.

The explosion will take place on the Potomac River just north of the Key Bridge and Jack's Boathouse (K / Water Street, NW under the Whitehurst Freeway). In the scene to be filmed, there will be six (6) sculling boats on the Potomac River and one of them blows up.

CBS Paramount television is filming a pilot titled "Washington Field." This is a new television series about the elite Washington field office of the FBI and a team of agents with exceptional and diverse skills who are called together for only the most critical cases.

Jeanne Saddler
Director, Office of Public Affairs
Metropolitan Washington
Council of Governments

Where the Wild Things Are

The trailer just came out today. Unfortunately, I could only fit the small version in my little blogger post. If you'd like to see a larger version (which I recommend), go here.

Something I Read Somewhere

$125

Price per person for a two-day, one night border-crossing experience - including simulated Border Partrol gunfire - offered by the Eco Alberto Park in Mexico.

-Details magazine, April 2009

Nothing to Do in New Zealand

Actually, I'm not really sure this takes place in New Zealand. In fact, I'm not really sure how to describe this video at all. You just have to watch it.

Blog Theft!

Here's a post from today's New York Times Blog:

When Losing Leads to Winning
By JUSTIN WOLFERS
Here’s my favorite new fact about N.C.A.A. basketball: teams that are behind by one point at halftime are actually more likely to win than teams that are one point ahead. This striking finding comes courtesy of a terrific new paper by my Wharton colleagues, Jonah Berger and Devin Pope. Their findings are summarized in this graph, which collects info from 6,572 N.C.A.A. basketball games since 2005:


The first dot (on the bottom left) shows that among those teams behind by 10 points at halftime, only 11.8 percent won; the next dot shows that those behind by 9 points won 13.9 percent, and so on. The line of best fit (the solid line) shows that raising your halftime lead by two points tends to be associated with about an 8 percentage-point increase in your chances of winning, and this is a pretty smooth relationship.

But notice what happens when we contrast teams that are one point behind at halftime with teams that are one point ahead: the chances of winning suddenly fall by 2.4 percentage points, instead of rising by 8 percentage points.

Berger and Pope are two of the brightest young behavioral economists around, and they posit a behavioral explanation. Losing can lead to winning because of the strong motivating effects of being close to your goal. You can link some of this to Prospect Theory — loss aversion suggests that you may be willing to work harder to avoid a negative outcome (a loss); the leading teams, by contrast, aren’t focused on the losing domain. And in fact, most of this “catch-up” occurs in the first 10 minutes after halftime.

But how can we tell whether this is the losing team working harder, or the halftime leader easing up?

Here, they move from field evidence to the Wharton behavioral lab, setting up a very simple experiment in which their subjects were challenged to a trivial task — how many times they could type “a” then “b” in half a minute. The subjects were told that if they beat their opponent, they would get a bigger payout. After the first round of competition, some were given feedback, and others weren’t. And here’s the key to the experiment: they randomly told some folks that they were a long way behind their opponent, others were told they were a little bit behind, or exactly tied, a little ahead, or even a long way ahead. Those who were randomly told they were a little bit behind improved their performance dramatically, while the other groups improved by about the same amount as the control condition (that is, the same improvement as those given no feedback at all).

It’s an intriguing finding: being behind by a little yields the greatest possible effort. And while these researchers measure these effects on the basketball court, or on pounding keyboards, their implications for the rest of our lives are even more intriguing. Want your workers to work harder? Tell them that they are running a close second in the race for promotion.

Intrigued? See their write-up in Sunday’s New York Times, or the academic version, here.

Excel Functions of the Day

Some of the formulas I came up with at work today:

=ROUND(IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(A565,'[Active and TV RIAs 7-1-08.xls]renderReports'!$G$8:$AB$166,22,FALSE)),0,
VLOOKUP(A565,'[Active and TV RIAs 7-1-08.xls]renderReports'!
$G$8:$AB$166,22,FALSE)),2)

=IF(DAY(L564)=1,12*(YEAR($I$1)-YEAR(L564))+(MONTH($I$1)-MONTH(L564)),12*(YEAR($I$1)-YEAR(L564))+(MONTH($I$1)-MONTH(L564))-1)

(The first one looks up some number in a completely different file and places it in the file I'm working on; the second one counts how many whole months there are between two dates, which can be tricky if one date is in the middle of the month and the other is at the beginning of the month.)

I'm learning so much!

Minced Fish?

I don't even know what to say

Do cats really copy?

On the one hand:
I was writing up a memo at work today. No need to go into details except to say that it had to do with some pension fund's unattributable liability. And when "unattributable" popped up with a little red squiggly line indicating that it was misspelled, I wasn't entirely surprised. Because for one, "unattributable" is as hard to spell as it is to pronounce. For two, no one ever really uses the word "unattributable," so it's probably not in every dictionary. And three, is it really even a word?

I looked it up online to make sure. Merriam-Webster.com. Indeed, it is a word. I didn't read the definition (though I suppose I should have, since I was writing a memo about it), but I was happy to see that I had not, in fact, misspelled it even though I wasn't sure it was a word in the first place.

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On the other hand:
It is common practice in the company to jot down "Doer Notes" as your tasks unfold. It helps other people who look at your results to understand what you did to come up with them. Also, since we generally repeat the same tasks on a yearly basis, it helps us to remember what it was we did a year ago. Some people take it more seriously than other, writing down every step, "First, I labeled the files. Then, I created a folder on the M-drive, which I named 2009. Then I created a Word document..." Some people are less specific. "Basically, I did what we did last year. The data was kind of a mess." And some people like to insert unnecessary comments, "First, I labeled the files. Then, I created a folder on the M-drive, which I named 2009. Oops, sorry about that coffee blot. I bumped my mug."

Anyway, generally speaking, I am moderately serious about my Doer Notes. I try not to be overly specific, because there isn't anything I can do that anyone else in the office can't do better and more quickly. I mostly just make notes of strange occurrences, like, "Everyone who retired last year was between the age of 57 and 65, except Frederick Buddy who retired at 48."

A lot of times though, the quality of Doer Notes are greatly affected by the amount of time we have to do them. The fact of the matter is, sometimes we need to get a project finished, typed, reviewed, typed again, final reviewed, and sent to the client before the end of the day. So there isn't much time for extensive note-taking.

More to the point, lately I have been occasionally throwing in made up words. When I'm trying to get a point across and all I can think of is how my assets aren't matching my liabilities, I have trouble getting the right words off the tip of my tongue. So I just make something up. Why not? It's just an internal, unofficial compilation of notes. It doesn't even qualify as a memo.

And that's why I wrote, "I basically copycatted last year's data log." Nevermind that I couldn't think of the word, "copied". I figured whoever was reading it would know what I was trying to say, and I had to get my results and memo out by Noon. The thing that got me though was that "copycatted" didn't have that red squiggly underline, but "unattributable" did! Nevermind the deadline, I had to look the word up on Merriam-Webster online.

"Copycatted" is a real word! Before, I got the red squiggly when I used the word unattributable, which while I didn't know the definition, I was pretty confident was a real word. Now here I am completely making up a word because I had fallen on a few seconds of near complete vocabularilessness (not a word, I checked), and it turns out it's a word after all.

Which means a sequence of three things:
1) A term that I've always assumed to be a child's term, "copycat", became a commonly accepted noun.
2) Then, somebody, probably American (because American's have a way unlike any other culture for bastardizing their own language) started using copycat as a verb, and it became accepted.
3) And naturally, as a verb, it must have a past tense, so it became acceptable to use the word, "copycatted."

That's my guess anyway. (Upon further research, it turns out it's not a child's term, and it's been around since the 1800s.)

And seriously, what do cats copy anyway? Cats are too independent; they do their own thing. Chimpanzees copy. Parrots mimic. Dogs sleepwalk. Cats don't copy.

Just a thought.

Holy Matrimony

I think it's funny how many things are so ingrained in our common vernacular that we've never really bothered to consider the meaning. Like, *incredible*. Like, "That was a fantastic catch. Just incredible!" Or for that matter, *fantastic*.

For the record, *incredible* doesn't mean good, or even exceptionally good. It describes something that is not credible. Something implausible. Something that cannot be believed. So when you say, "That was incredible!" you're kind of actually saying, "That was not credible! That thing that just happened cannot be trusted!" You know? I mean, in practical terms, it makes sense. It's the same as "I can't believe it." But it's an exaggeration. When you say "incredible," most of the time, you don't actually mean *incredible*.

And *fantastic*? Same, but different. Again, fantastic doesn't necessarily have any relation to the word "good". It means, like a fantasy. So, when a teacher writes, "A+ Fantastic!" she's really saying, "This must be a fantasy! I must be imagining this! You can't possibly be that intelligent!"

It's not really about the misuse of words. The thing is, we're not really using those words wrong. We're stretching their intended definitions a little, but more than anything, I think it's funny that we live with this language, but we don't really pay attention to it. It lives without us. All the time, new words and phrases are spawned; old words are reborn with new definitions.

Anyway, this morning, when Onaona and I were talking about the inclusion of certain religious elements in traditional weddings, I was totally confused. She mentioned, "Holy matrimony." And I was like, That's religious? Ohhh. Because it's holy. No kidding. I've heard that phrase dozens of times in my life and I always just thought of it as 'that wedding phrase'. I never thought it was religious.

And 17 hours later, I'm writing a blog post and I'm like, Wait, what's matrimony?

Sleep-walking dog

No Books in the Bathroom

I'd imagine it was a little less than two hours into my flight to LA. I'm only guessing. In reality, it felt like hour hours, but Secret Life of Bees was still playing, and since I've heard no one talk about this movie as, "Epic. A tour de force," I will imagine it is of the two-hour something mysterious happens, then something bad, then everyone feels good genre. Anyway, there's been a row of my fellow passengers lining up to use the one and only restroom in the back of the plane.

I wouldn't even have noticed this if not for the regular and inevitable bumps in the head I receive. Either this is the narrowest plane ever or EVERYONE has vertigo.

I managed to fall asleep for a while. This never happens on a plane. If I'm really desperate, I might bend over the tray table with the crown of my head jammed against the (reclined) seat in front of me, but I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've fallen asleep upright.

So, here I am suddenly awakened. Like, you're at home sleeping and you sense there is a stranger in the room. You awake with a start, but you don't want to jolt upright alerting the stranger to your consciousness, thus sending him into a murderous frenzy (I can't be the only one who's felt this before). So you open your eyes slowly, maybe one at a time, maybe while rolling over, feigning sleep, to verify that there is in fact no one else in the room.

Sitting there, in 22C, I opened first my right eye, then my left, and without turning around too quickly. Calmly, I determined who had been petting my head for the last ten seconds.

In fact, it was no one. Or everyone. Depending on how you look at it. For some reason, even though there was absolutely no turbulence, everyone was swaying as they meandered to the rear lavatory. Casually brushing against first the left, then the right, then left again seats along the aisle. My scalp was just an innocent bystander. [*On a side note, this never happens on the subway. The train might be jostling back and forth like a rope bridge in an earthquake, but personal space is law.]

But I've diverged. Significantly. I had intended on providing a much less interesting commentary on going to the bathroom.

It was only a few more minutes later that I was overcome by the power of suggestion. I'm not sure I genuinely had to use the restroom, but it suddenly seemed like a good idea. And besides, everyone was doing it. So I picked up my book and headed back to take my place in line. While back there, I might as well get a few more pages under my belt, but as it turned out, the line had disappeared. I only had to squeeze by the stewardess who sort of gave me the After you, sir-Olay-hand/arm gesture.

As I'm passing though, she says to me (I'm finally getting to the point), "No books in the bathroom."

Huh?

No books in the bathroom. Then she smiled, and I realized she was just really poorly delivering an already bad joke.

Oh. Funny. (Awkwardness ensues.)

Obviously, there's an implication whenever bathrooms and reading materials are combined. Now, I brought a book because I was anticipating a wait and not because I intended any in-bathroom multi-tasking. But I can understand what she thought she had the foresight to see.

I was going to poop. I wasn't really, but I was headed to the bathroom. And, I was holding a book. 1+1=going to poop. It only makes sense, and I won't fault her for thinking it. Or for her bad delivery. But I still don't quite understand the joke itself. Is poop implicitly funny? She essentially told me, by subversively telling me "No books in the bathroom," "Don't poop."

Incidentally, I might actually have laughed if she had just come out and said, "Don't poop." But that would have been less to do with the inherent comedy of poop and more to do with the wholly unexpected breaking of social norm by saying "poop" out loud while wearing a stewardess uniform on a commercial airliner.

But it got me thinking. I don't think it was a joke at all. It was thinly veiled as a joke but really it was a serious plea. She was asking me, please, don't poop. We, your stewardesses, sit back here. In 26C and D, right next to the lavatory. If you're in there with your book, inevitably other passengers will converge outside, and bustle and bump and get in our way. And by the looks of you sir, there's at least a 50-50 chance that we will end up downwind of whatever might waft out when you finally fold the door open again. Please sir, don't poop. For us.

So anyway, FYI, if a stewardess jokes, "No books in the bathroom," it's a safe bet, I think, that she's really not joking at all. It's serious. And it's a plea for help.

Mmm... Pie!