Sitting around, waiting for an event to start, two new units of measurement occurred to me.
Name50 - Size of the group required for the given Name to have a 50% chance of being first on an alphabetical listing.
Late50 - Size of the group required for an event having an equal chance of being postponed because of the absence of a single individual.
My name, Baxter, seems to have a surprisingly small Name50 in the typical mostly American circles that I have moved in through my life. Throughout grade school, high school and college, whenever there were more than about 13 or 14 people in the class, I was second alphabetically. The Adamses, Bakers and Ballarons came first.
In the San Francisco white pages my name would appear on page 24 of 456. That means that my name alphabetically proceeds that of 432/456ths or about 95% of the admittedly atypical population of San Francisco.
By calculation, Baxter50 is 1 + ln(0.5) / ln(432/456) or 13.82, a remarkable confirmation of my impressions above so take it with a grain of salt.
Late50 obviously depends on the composition of the group, who it is that is late and what the event is, but it sure does seem like it is often a surprisingly large number. I’ve seen 50 people sitting or standing around waiting for one person who is only peripherally involved in the proceedings. Talk about the difference that one person can make.
I have no idea what either of these metrics could be used for.
“Your Call Is Important to Us”
Why is it that whenever I hear those words on an automated voicemail system, I react viscerally?
If my call were important to the recipient, there would be a live person saying, “Hello,” and asking me how they could help me. That’s what you do when a call is important. You answer the phone.
Instead the business is saying, “Our money is important to us,” “Your time is not important to us,” or worst, “Our money is more important to us than your time.”
After the long weekend and being away for a while before that, I had a few calls that that I needed to make yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »
The little man had taken his blanket into the living room and I brought it back to him at bed time. As I was leaving he said, “Love you, Dad.”
Without betraying his confidence, I’d just like to thank everyone who made this moment, and all of the similar moments of the past months that have lead to it, possible.
Heve, via Monoscope is a long-for-the-web documentary about the work of artist Ron Mueck.
This is the look of an expert in action. Read the rest of this entry »
How does one become an expert and once you are an expert, what does that mean?
These to be important questions. For reasons I’ll go into below, I think that achieving expert knowledge in at least one field is critical for every thinking person.
As the final paragraph of this Scientific American article has it,
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert–in chess, music and a host of other subjects–sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills?
Read the rest of this entry »
As part of a larger project to clarify all my various work and personal projects, I have redesigned this site. The redesign is not 100% complete but it is well over 90% so I’m turning it wild to see if anyone else turns up any problems.
What I did
I had been using standard Wordpress themes, most recently Bosco 2.0 + Widgets. This was a fine theme, clearly organized and readable, but it was a black box that I never looked into. I needed to get a better understanding of my tools to handle some future projects that I am considering.
One of the tools that I was looking into was Instiki. While reading up on Instiki, I came across this post from Kevin Lawver on how he was using S5 with Instiki.
I loved the look of Kevin’s site (I also enjoyed reading some of his presentations on CSS) so I am giving him the sincerest form of flattery by imitating the general look of his site a Wordpress theme.
I pulled my Wordpress install over to my home machine and went to work. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a keyboard shortcut that I don’t think I ever learned.
From the TextMate documentation:
4.5.2 Find Clipboard
Two useful key equivalents are ⌘E and ⌘G. The first copies the selection to the shared find clipboard. This works in the majority of applications and allows you to find the next occurrence of that string by then pressing ⌘G.
The find clipboard works across applications so whether in Safari, TextEdit, Mail, TextMate, Terminal, Console, or similar, one can copy the selected text to the find clipboard, switch application and use ⌘G to find that string.
Reasoning, when we do it, is mostly to find justification for what we already believe.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, in here.
The search for life in the universe is expanding. A National Academy of Sciences panel is recommending that NASA and the National Science Foundation support searching for forms of life that are different than those which we have experienced. So called weird life would be based on a fundamentally different chemistry than known life forms, silica instead of carbon, arsenic instead of phosphorous or RNA instead of DNA.
Most interesting to me, this weird life could exist on Earth and have been overlooked because it is so unusual.
My pockets and back felt a sigh of relief last year when I started carrying a jimi wallet. Much less than a half inch thick and I can carry 5 bills and 5 cards in my front pocket.
I may be replacing the jimi with this paper wallet. I made one in about five minutes and a second one in two minutes. Lighter and thinner than the jimi, plus it carries the same contents.
The bonus is that it is made out of a single 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper. I’m fantasizing about all the things that I could print on that paper and what else I could stop carrying. Notebook - check, important phone numbers - check, emergency contact info - check, family photos - check.
Update - April 27 - After carrying one for a few days, I’m still happy with it, but I did make one mistake. I thought that since it was wallet-like, I could revert to my old pre-jimi days of carrying all my cash inside the wallet. It doesn’t really work. The wallet isn’t big enough to attempt to sort through the bills inside. It doesn’t open wide enough to discriminate between bills. Just carry large bills in the wallet and everything else loose in the pocket. When you need a large bill, slip it out.