See this article: The real cause of the financial crisis, notable for the explanation of the Martingale system.
via Giles.
Apparently 1 out of 53K or so.
I’m not quite one of a kind, but getting there.
| I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I’m a
Lifelong Learning Self-Knowing Health Nut
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riRuby Documentation is terse and difficult to navigate. There are some web based solutions, but I am not always on the web, and there are some solutions for keeping your local documentation up to date, but I haven’t automated them.
Ri is the Ruby solution to this problem but the results are not always what you are expecting.
Words of wisdom from government employee Ronald Reagan:
The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.
Ronald Reagan
40th president of US (1911 – 2004)
The combination of “seems impossible” and “strong network effects” is about as close as you can get to the magic formula for incredible, sustainable success, as with eBay, Wikipedia, and Google.
Trenchant analysis from Joel Spolsky.
As someone who has definitely expended too much of my life on the watching of Gilligan’s Island, this is heartening news. Shirky argues that there has been a cognitive surplus in the developed world and for the past 50 years we have been soaking up that surplus with situation comedies and that now we are ready to divert that surplus to something, anything that is participatory.
Sample fact: The time American’s spend watching television commercials every weekend is approximately equal to the entire time spent in creating Wikipedia to date.
Rule of thumb: “Doing anything is better than doing nothing.” “It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”
Via Jason Sutter who lives in New Zealand but shows up in my feed of blogs local to my zip code.
Update – 28 April 2008 Here (via Gruber) is a link to the text of the talk. Also, the quoted rule of thumb is corrected.
A personal story in the Times talks about the impact of having a severely sick or injured child on parents. There isn’t any data, only personal stories, but startled me into recognition of my own condition. I still sit upright in bed in the middle of the night recalling the five seconds when I turned away from the wee one and she wandered into traffic. That nothing terrible happened in those five seconds has been the difference between a life that would have been very difficult to endure and a more or less constant source of joy in my life.
The days of waiting and worrying about the older girl as she lay ill in intensive care, twice, are also permanently engraved on my memory and stored in my body. I find and feel that concern every time that I get to see her and admire the young woman before me. That it all turned out well in the end was fortunately, but I still feel the toll.
How do you solve a problem?
I had two different concrete experiences of problem solving in the past couple of days. I think these examples are interesting because they are so contained, not because they are hard problems. They illustrate how I tackle a problem and provide some generalizable strategies for problem solving. I’ll cover the other problem in a future post and try to extract the strategies.
This post is about the little man’s homework this week. He’s still struggling with this:
Shelley wanted to buy some clothes that were on sale.
Blouses Pants Socks Shoes $10 $10 $5 $20 $15 $20 $10 $30 $25 $35 $15 $40 Her mother said she could spend $85. List all the different ways that Shelley can buy 1 blouse, 1 pair of pants, 1 pair of socks, and 1 pair of shoes that total exactly $85. One way has been done for you.
Blouses Pants Socks Shoes $10 $20 $15 $40 ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
So how do you solve this? Read the rest of this entry »
Wow! Prince’s solo in this performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is awesome.
Thanks Rodgers.
I rolled a stop sign last month and I received a well deserved ticket.
When it came time to pay the ticket, I elected to pay an additional $32 to the City and County of San Francisco and $20 to online provider of traffic school in this jurisdiction. This allows take a course and a test. Once I pass the test, I can have the infraction removed from my driving record, protecting my insurance rates, and presumably rendering me a better, safer driver.
I went through the course materials and took the chapter tests. The content was reasonably well presented, although the web site was annoyingly slow and there were a number of infelicitous UI decisions (arrows that seemed to imply links, but didn’t, no url or other identifying information in the e-mail that they sent me to confirm my registration, etc.)
Some of the material that was presented in the course and the chapter quizzes didn’t seem like it was particularly important to the goal of improving my driving skills and making me a safer, more responsible driver. Material on what constituted valid forms of identification at the DMV is useful, but it isn’t going to keep me from pulling out into traffic when I don’t have the right of way.
Little did I know. Read the rest of this entry »