Stormy's Corner

Is your free time boring? Or spent watching TV?

It's probably because you think you need to relax during your free time.  Most people divide all time into either work or free time.  Scott Young, the author of Why Your Free Time is Boring says:

But the subtle message contained in this split is that work and leisure shouldn’t resemble each other. Your work needs to be productive, efficient and challenging. Therefore leisure should be relaxing, accomplish nothing and be free of pressures.

The problem?  We have the most fun when we are most engaged, challenged or using our skills.

It's harder to watch (than read) something you disagree with

That same New Yorker article, Twlight of the Books, says that it's harder to watch a program you disagree with than it is to read an article you disagree with.  I couldn't agree more.

The viewer feels at home with his show, or else he changes the channel. The closeness makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion. It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

So as I've written earlier, we are spending less time with people who aren't like us and now we are spending less time with opinions we don't agree with.  What does that mean for us as a society?  Will we become more isolated and more diversified?  Or more similar and less tolerant?  For sure, if we no longer mix diverse opinions, we'll have fewer new and creative ideas.

Literate vs illiterate thinking

Literate people actually think differently (not necessarily better or worse) than illiterate people.  All examples from the New Yorker.

They use different words:

In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.”

They see different types of association:

Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer:
Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them. 

The illiterates (peasants in this example) didn't like defining or describing things, even themselves.

Asked by Luria’s staff about polar bears, a peasant grew testy: “What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing beyond that!” The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions. “What can I say about my own heart?” one asked.

Quite interesting.  The whole article has a lot of interesting points about reading and society.

Sperm power for robots

Cornell University Researchers aim to harness sperm power for nano-robots.

Pioneer Woman featured on CNN

I really enjoy reading The Pioneer Woman's blog and I even bought her calendar because I like her pictures so much.  This is the woman who left Los Angeles, married a rancher and now home schools her four children.  And takes 75-150 pictures a day of life on the ranch.    I've wondered several times what she sounds like in person and what she looks like.  Well, she was featured on CNN so now I know!

Talk Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If you didn't read Good Calories, Bad Calories because you are not into reading nonfiction books or you didn't want to buy it, then I recommend you watch Gary Taubes talk The Quality of Calories: What Makes Us Fat and Why Nobody Seems to Care at University of California Berkeley.  It's a free webcast and he makes some really good points.

1. It's an undisputed fact that it takes insulin to store fat.  No insulin, no fat.  That's why undiagnosed diabetics lose weight.
2. Another undisputed fat: carbohydrates cause insulin, not fat or protein.
3. In many poor societies, the women are obese and the kids are undernourished.  (He gave almost 20 examples.)  Either the women are starving their kids (unlikely) or it doesn't take a lot of calories to be fat.  Those women are fat because they are eating the wrong foods not because they are eating too much.
4. Lack of will power, gluttony and sloth are not the causes of obesity.
5. Kids eat because they are growing.  They don't grow because they eat.  Vertical and horizontal growth are not so different.  People eat because something is telling them to grow horizontally.  They don't grow because they eat.

Gary Taubes' talk is well worth listening to.

Starbucks helps Mom and Pop coffee shops

There's an interesting article in Slate magazine that having a Starbucks nearby actually helps Mom and Pop coffee shops.  I recommend reading it but the basic argument seems to be that Starbucks does all the advertising, brings in new customers and unlike a Walmart, doesn't underprice the local competition.

Avoid the uh-oh mornings!

I really need to find a ritual to undo the "uh-oh morning."  This morning I was greeted with an uh-oh (again.)  It wasn't as bad as last time, but it wasn't good.

Caleb's uh-oh was that his pajama legs had come down so far, he was tripping on them.  (Easy for Mom to fix.)

My uh-oh was the entire coffee pot coming off its mountings and spilling 10 cups of water and coffee everywhere. 

Benazir Bhutto assasinated

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today and the world is a poorer place for it.  I had the opportunity to see her speak at a Simmons Leadership Conference a few years ago.  I wish I had my notes to share with you (but they were in my company notebook which I had to leave with the company.)  She was inspiring though.  She was doing what she thought was right for her country at great personal expense. 

I wish the best to her family and her country.

More megapixels is not better

It turns out that more megapixels are not always better in a digital camera.  If you are looking for a compact camera, six megapixels is ideal.  More than that and you get more "noise" since the sensor isn't really capable of collecting that much more info.

Read all about it: Best picture quality with 6 megapixels!

It's an uh-oh morning

I should have known I was in for it when the baby greeted me this morning with "uh-oh." 

"What's uh-oh?"

"Uh-oh."

When your diaper comes off under your pajamas, that's uh-oh.  So I put him in the tub.  Turns out there was more uh-oh coming.  I know there was a Dirty Job show about how to clean baby and poop out of the bathtub but I must not have paid enough attention.  Next time.  Next time they can feature us.

On to the dishes.  It turns out that shrimp ceviche and cheese sauce do not wash well in the dish washer.  In the process of unloading the dishes to manually wash them, the dishwasher rack fell off and a margarita glass fell and ... uh-oh.

It's an uh-oh morning but since it's not even eight o'clock, I figure we can just start over!

Have a good uh-oh morning!

Save more gas switching from 15 to 18mpg than from 50 to 100mpg

I saw this on Eric de Place's blog and although not immediately intuitive, he's right:

You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car.

Driving 20,000 miles

15 mpg	18 mpg	50 mpg	100 mpg
1333 gallons	1111 gallons	400 gallons	200 gallons

So going from 15mpg to 18mpg, you'd save 220 gallons, but doubling your mileage from 50mpg to 100mpg would only save you 200 gallons a year, assuming you drove 20,000/year. So it really is important to pay attention to the car you pick's gas mileage, even if it's only a few miles more per gallon than another one.

Flickr's new uploader rocks!

If you follow my pictures on Flickr, you know that I'm a bit sporadic about uploading them.  I just uploaded a bunch today with Flickr's new Uploadr 3.0 and it worked great!  Much, much better than the old one. 

• Faster.  Faster.
• You can edit titles before you upload.
• You can edit the tags and privacy settings for pictures individually.
• Once you hit upload, you can immediately start working on another set of photos.
• It didn't drop me once!
• You can work offline.
• It's open source.  (This doesn't immediately buy me anything but it's cool and it means if anything really bugs me, I could fix it.)

The one thing that bugged me is that when I selected pictures to upload, it never remembered what directory I got them from.  Every time I selected pictures I had to navigate to my pictures' directory again.

A quick tip to speed up your computer

A tech support guy gave me a quick and easy tip to make your computer faster:

Remove all the icons on your desktop.

Each time you start your computer - or any application - Windows reads all the icons on your desktop.  If you have a lot of icons, that takes a long time.  All of those icons are probably shortcuts to applications you can also find on your Start menu.

Merry Christmas!

How much allowance did you get?

There's an interesting blog post over on freemoneyfinance that is asking two serious financial questions:

• How much did you get for an allowance as a kid?
• How much did the tooth fairy leave you?

I answered:

I got $1/week allowance starting around first grade and $1/tooth from the tooth fairy. 

My seven year old stepson gets $1/week at both houses and $1/tooth from the tooth fairy. I think the tooth fairy is being a bit cheap since she gave me a $1/tooth over 25 years ago!

What about you?

The book that changed our lives

For all of you that tried to click through on the book link to see what it was all about, I fixed the link.  Here it is: Good Calories, Bad Calories.

(For those of you that didn't read the previous post and have no idea what I'm talking about:  Frank and I are eating less carbs for health reasons thanks to this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.)

Gasp! A salad for lunch!

I had a salad for lunch.  I would dare to bet that none of you have ever seen me eat a salad at a restaurant ... because this is the first time I think I've ever ordered a salad at a restaurant.  It wasn't too bad ... especially with the Red Ale to go with it!

This is a direct result of Frank and I deciding to eat less carbs ... all because of Good Calories, Bad Calories. (And the best things I could find on the menu were steak, fajitas and salads.  I got the cajun salmon salad because we've had lots of steak recently and we're having Mexican for dinner.)

Writers don't have to be politically correct

John Scalzi, the author of Old Man's War, pointed me at Nick Mamata's story of talking about his book Under My Roof to a bunch of freshman.  It's quite funny.  The listeners seemed to think that his book would corrupt people:

Explicitly, I was asked several times if I didn't think that a kid might read the book and build a bomb or become a racist or anti-American.

By people that seemed to be having some politically correct issues of their own:

Indeed, one woman went off on a long tangent about making English the official language of the United States — this was of course prefaced with "I'm totally not racist, but" (you know, racist throat-clearing) and then her friend said that yeah, she'd read a study that predicted that in a few years New York would be 75% Spanish and that "we'll be the minority." And I said "We who?" and she said "We, you know, us, normal people." (I shared an eye-roll with the Nigerian and Pakistani students in front of me at that point.)

I recommend reading his whole story - it was funny.  And thought provoking.  Hopefully authors can continue to write the stories they do without having to be politically correct.  The day they have to change their words to be politically correct will be a sad day indeed.

What to do when your shirt doesn't meet your pants ...

Have you noticed lately, that shirts don't often meet pants?  So there's a gap in between?  Well, now there's a solution, hip-T.  It's a really short tube top that you wear under your shirt, over your jeans.

I guess the hip-t might be a handy thing to have (I switched the shirt I was going to wear today because the shirt didn't meet the pants) - but I'd rather they just went back to making shirts longer or pants higher ...

To my regular readers ...

About the ads and anything else you might find annoying on this website ... As you've probably noticed, I use this website to play around with things.   If you love or hate anything in particular, let me know!  If anything interferes in your reading, definitely let me know!

If I won the lottery, my Christmas list would be

In no particular order:

1. A couple of weeks on a catamaran in the British Virgin Islands
2. A week on a catamaran in the Seychelles
3. Hmm.  Maybe my own catamaran with crew that I could just send around the world.
4. A  little robot that would sit on our seven year old's ear and remind him to put on his shoes, zip up his bookbag, write his letters, say please, ...
5. A robot vacuum cleaner that would follow the kids around and put all their toys away
6. A really large, open, warm kitchen with a big island in the middle
7. New floors (maybe if we won the lottery Frank would be up for all wood floors :)
8. Some electronic toys to play with: a Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device, a GPS unit for my car, an iTouch, an iPhone, ...
9. A personal chef to deliver tasty foods that meets my diet plan
10. New bedroom furniture for us all
11. A shunt that I can use to designate what food I eat should go to never-never land instead of my stomach
12. A really cool restaurant with good food, good music, great atmosphere and a safe and fun place for the kids to play
13. My own personal jet so I didn't have to deal with commercial airports any more (although I kind of like them for some reason)
14. Better yet, an instant personal transport machine that would just whisk us wherever we wanted to go in no time flat
15. Fun and satisfying jobs for all my working friends

I've left off a few things but that's a good start.

Right brained or left brain or both?

Remember the spinning girl?  If she spun one way, you were left-brained, if she spun the other way, she was right-brained.  I thought it was a trick because she kept changing directions.  A friend came over and actually watched it with me and he swore it kept going the same way all the time even when I called out the "switches."

Today yet another test shows that I'm right brained and left brained.  This test said that I'm a:

• 49% left brain thinker
• 51% right brain thinker

They even broke it down further:

• 38% logical / 39% intuitive
• 34% symbolic / 37% concrete
• etc

So I guess I'm a bit of everything - but not random!  (I'm only 17% random.)  And what is fantasy-oriented? 

Atheism, Catholism and numbers

Reading America's Atheists, Believe it or not, the fact that surprised me wasn't that 30 million Americans claimed "no religion," but rather that Catholicism is America's largest Christian denomination.  Growing up Catholic, I never felt like I was in the majority (except when we lived in Spain,) and I'm still surprised to find out that friends are Catholic.  I wonder why that is?

The same article also said the United States' problem with religion is:

• over-aggressive proselytising in the armed forces,
• undermining science or AIDS programmes,
• alienating minorities at home and Muslims abroad

and suggested that if America's atheists were more politically active they could help fix those problems.

Selfish baby boomers?

This article slams baby boomers for being selfish because they are (supposedly) rich and not planning on leaving it to their kids.  They are planning on spending their money in retirement.

I don't understand why people are expected to leave things to their kids.  I understand that once upon a time you left your farm, trade or store to the kids and it became their livelihood but in today's world, that's the same as giving them a good education.  Why are parents expected to also fund their kids' retirements?

Mom, Dad, thanks for the great education.  Please spend all your money as you wish and enjoy your retirement!  (But anytime you want to babysit ... ;)

A truly disposable society: disposable underwear

I knew we lived a disposable society the time Jacob and I broke a wine glass and he said, "it's ok, we can buy another one."  That's his answer to most problems: we can always buy a solution.  Makes you wonder what our society will be like when all our kids are adults.  They have grown up with cheap, replaceable things.  Things are not treasured and saved.  You use them, break them, lose them, buy new ones.  No big deal.

This had to top them all though: disposable underwear:

"Nundies are a one-time use, pantyless panty that adheres to the inside inseam of a woman's pants. Nundies are a great fashion solution product for women who want to go bare-down-there without the discomfort of itchy clothing. Nundies also save women from the embarrassment of tacky panty lines and from having to wear uncomfortable thongs."

The really bad thing is that I immediately thought, "cool, I should check into those!"  (My suitcase would be lighter coming home ...) 

How long until all our clothing is disposable like hospital gowns?

What's your credit card number mean?

I have two credit cards from the same bank and I noticed that they were almost all the same number.  That seemed strange to me since I got them at very different times. 

Turns out that you can tell a lot just from your credit card number.  For example, the first number tells you what type of company issued it: a bank, an airline or an oil company.  The first six numbers will tell you exactly which company issued it (if you had the master sheet of companies.)  You can read all about your credit card number in Anatomy of Credit Card Numbers. 

Have fun!

Save your time, skip this movie

If you like stupid comedies and bad horror movies, Planet Terror might be the movie for you.  I don't like stupid comedies nor any kind of horror movie, so I agreed to watch it for Bruce Willis.  If, like me, you watch it for Bruce Willis, here's a tip: watch the movie until you see Bruce's first 60 second scene ... then fast forward to the end and watch his second, and last, 60 second scene.  You won't miss anything in middle.  Trust me.

A much better movie (if you are trying to satisfy a bad horror need when you hate the genre) is From Dusk Till Dawn.  George Clooney and Juliette Lewis are actually in the movie.  It's not bad ... if you're into that kind of dark horror movie.  It might even be watchable if you hate horror movies.

They are both directed by Robert Rodriguez - I really liked the book about his story about how he became a director.  I just realized I never blogged about it!  In Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player, Robert Rodriguez writes about how he becomes a movie director by just doing it.  He makes home movies with his brothers and sisters and no budgets.  It's a good story even if you have no desire to ever become a movie director.

Who would you meet during a week in the mall?

This guy spent a week in the Mall of Americas in Minneapolis - all open hours and one night.  It's an interesting read just for the people he met and the things he tried.  He met one woman who claimed to be a stay-at-home mom who shopped at the mall six days a week and spent over $100,000 a year!

You'll live longer if you retire early

This study shows an amazing correlation between the age you retire and how long you live.  Retire by 50 and live to be 86.  Retire at 65 and you'll only live another year.  The study was based on data from Boeing so we should probably do a few more studies before we advise everyone to retire at 50 but it sure can't hurt!

I'm working on a Nobel Prize

According to Optimum Strategies for Creativity and Longevity, Nobel prize winners made their discoveries and innovations at an average age of 32.  So I figure I better hurry up and get with it, if it's not too late already!

Sharing books & Amazon's Kindle

Dale Dougherty argues that Amazon needs to allow Kindle users to share their books with friends and family.  I disagree.  I think the model of sharing a physical book is changing to a model of recommending books and rating them. 

• Amazon's rating model has drastically changed the way users buy books.  I won't buy a book without first checking the Amazon rating!
• We are already familiar with the idea of sharing recommendations instead of the object itself.  Most of us recommend movies to our friends but don't actually have the DVD to pass out.
• Most of the friends and family I would share books with are not local.  I'd rather buy a cheaper book, not pay shipping and then buy them an Amazon gift certificate.  They can then either buy the books I recommend or another book that they'd rather read.
• Most of us want instantaneous access to the book or movie we want to see.  If I could download it immediately from Amazon's library and read it this weekend (if the price was right) or wait a week for my friend to mail it to me, more often than not I would just buy it.  This is why I end up buying new books from Amazon instead of used ones.  I subscribe to Prime shipping and I know I'll get the book in two days instead of a week or two!

So while it would be nice to be able to share or resell Kindle books, I think as long as the price is right (to reflect the fact that you can't resell or share them), I think the model will work.

Amazon Kindle is a success!

People predicted that the Amazon Kindle, their electronic book reader, was too expensive to be successful.  Turns out they were wrong.  Amazon is sold out until after Christmas so new Kindles are going for $1000/each on eBay!!  (The Kindle retails for about $400.)

I really wanted to play with one.  I should have bought one, played with it and then sold it on eBay.  I'd then have $600 to buy Christmas presents with!  Or more electronic toys.

Sleeping with a softball

Caleb, our 15 month old, likes to sleep with a ball.  Softball, football, whatever.  He curls up hugging it.  He must have gotten that from Frank.  I mean - I don't even like to play catch!

Corporate personhood

I've often said "companies aren't people!" when trying to explain to people why companies make some of their decisions.  Companies are made up of people, run by people and for people (or at least for people's profit) but a company is not a person.

Well, in the eyes of the law, thanks to a lot of lobbying, companies are often treated like people.  That's a mistake because a company is not a person and a company doesn't behave like a human individual - so we need to treat a company differently than a person.  Here's a good article by Thom Hartmann that explains how that happened and what it means.

More Americans Believe in the Devil than in Darwin!

More Americans believe in the devil than in Darwin!  As someone who definitely believes in Darwin and evolution and thinks the devil doesn't exist, at least as depicted by most religions, that fact is outstanding!  Here's the survey data:

• 82% believe in God
• 62% believe in hell and the devil (It wasn't clear if this was an "and" or an "or" question.)
• 42% believe in Darwin's theory

I find that last fact amazing.  Should I blame it on society, our schools, churches, the way the poll was done ... what?

Digital pens

Frank bought me an io2 digital pen a while back and I love it.  I take notes at home and at work and then I upload them all to my computer - you can search them then.  So I have:

• a backup of my notes (I was always really afraid I'd lose my notebook) and
• I have copies of old notebooks without carrying them around and
• I can search them!

My one complaint would be that you have to use their notebooks and they don't have any graph paper - it's all line ruled.  On the other hand, the memory and battery life have been outstanding.  I really miss my Miquelrius leather like journals but not enough to give up the benefits of an io2!

Leapfrog - the company that makes the computer like books - also makes a digital pen for kids.  It works like the io2 but does more - it actually reads back what you write and has programs to help you with writing, foreign languages and math!