| 2008-06-06 10:23 |
| Opposite Day |
| Public |
I'm usually pretty careful (some might say anal) about the meanings of words. For instance, "uninterested" and "disinterested" mean very different things, and "peruse" means the opposite of what most people think it does.
So I was surprised recently to find that "ravel" can mean the same thing as "unravel". It is similar, in this way, to "bone"/"debone" ... but doesn't it seem like ravel should mean the opposite, to "untangle"? Turns out that that's right, as well. Ravel can assume either definition. It's an "autoantonym", a word that has two opposite meanings.
After some googling, I found this great list of autoantonyms. The best part is that you know many of these already; it's just that your brain is so good at inferring from context that it automatically decides on the contextually-correct meaning and the conflict is rarely apparent. My favorites:
- aught: anything / nothing
- custom: usual; normal / special; unique
- impregnable: impossible to enter / able to be impregnated
- resign: to quit; give up / to sign up again
- shank: latter part of a period of time / early part of a period of time
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| 2008-05-06 23:00 |
| Games |
| Public |
I think one of the most succinct and illuminating ways to understand how a person thinks is to ask him or her explain the rules of any reasonably complex game to you. If I get a chance later, I'll try to describe some of the things I've observed, but I suggest you just try it out and see for yourself.
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| 2008-03-30 18:14 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
So I'm doing this ESPN Tourney Challenge thing. Right now I'm in the 99.6th percentile, above all but 0.4% of entrants. And yet, due the the law of "the internet is frigging gigantic", I'm still ranked 12199th. How can I feel good about that?
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| 2008-03-28 20:44 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
For the first time ever (I think), I just completed the NYTimes Saturday puzzle in under 30 minutes, unassisted.
HOLLERATCHERBOY!
In other news, I might start posting again.
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| 2008-01-04 21:12 |
| Dish Network sucks/is incompetent |
| Public |
I subscribe to Dish Network for TV. My most recent statement, which arrived today, advertised a new plan called "DishDVR Advantage". The price is essentially the same as what I pay now (about $1/month cheaper), and you have to switch to paperless statements. Doesn't sound like a good deal to me. However, one benefit caught my eye when I went online to check it out.
This is a good deal: I already pay $20 just for DishHD, so based on this offer it looked like I could get both DishHD and HBO for the same price. So I signed up.
As soon as I finished signing up, it took me to the premium package signup page, where I saw
What gives? I called up Customer Service, and the guy "couldn't find" the initial page I was on which displayed the promo ad above. Luckily, I had kept a browser tab open to that first page. After 10 minutes of arguing on the phone, I reloaded that page, and it was the same ... except that the promo ad had changed! It now looked like this:
I have no idea how that happened, whether the CSR did something to change my plan behind the scenes, or whether there was a site-wide fix at that minute or what. With my evidence on the web gone, I didn't have a leg to stand on so I had to hang up. Luckily I was able to save all the images involved to my computer, just to show how crazy and sleazy the whole thing was. Even the names of the image files on the DISH servers were "AT100wDishHD.gif" and "AT100noDishHD.gif", respectively. I kid you not. Explain this to me.
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| 2007-09-26 10:57 |
| An Ode to the Minolta G400 |
| Public |
I never owned a digital camera until 2004, and since then I've only owned one. But I've owned it four times.
The first time, I did a massive amount of research online and came up with a relatively obscure camera, the Minolta G400, that seemed to have a holy grail of properties: excellent picture quality, fast startup time, relatively small size, superb battery life, a decent optical viewfinder. And it was dirt cheap: around $200 at the time. So I snatched it up. Here it is:
 Over the next couple of years, I carried it with me everywhere, and it was a champ. It performed as advertised and made me start looking at everything from the perspective of "What would be a good shot here?" Of course, this constant usage led to some troubles: Camera #1: Dropped it after taking a picture at the top of mountain while skiing in Tahoe. Hit my shoe, cracked the LCD. Had to send it in for repairs (or what seemed like replacement). Camera #2: Fell out of my bag while jumping a fence after playing some pickup ultimate. Came back 10 minutes later and it was gone. Submitted an insurance claim and used the money to buy the same camera again. Camera #3: After another year or so of constant usage and getting beat up in my backpack, the CCD finally gave up the ghost. Pictures were heavily banded. By this time, Minolta had stopped making digital cameras altogether. I suppose this was because they were too good. I searched around for a better camera (figuring that I might as well keep up with the times) but found nothing that had comparable features in the same price range, even 3 years later. Solution: I hit up eBay and got a used G400. Camera #4: Turns out the reason the guy was selling it was that it was busted and couldn't focus properly (though he failed to mention this during the auction!) I sent it back and gave up. That was over 6 months ago. In the meanwhile I've tried to use other people's cameras but I invariably give up halfway through with a bad taste in my mouth. Either the picture quality is terrible (so common in subcompacts these days) or the shutter lag is interminable, or something. So I've hardly taken any pictures since then. I've also debated buying a DSLR but ultimately decided against it because of the cost and the fact that I like having a camera that fits in my pocket and allows me to take some spontaneous pictures. Now my mourning period is finally over, though. I've stopped wearing black, and I've just ordered a new camera, the Canon SD850 IS, which I hope will be a worthy successor. In the meanwhile, here are some of my favorite pictures from the G400 days. (There are many portraits that I love as well, but I haven't selected them to protect the innocent.) Tell me your favorite!
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| 2007-08-16 19:48 |
| Harry Potter Question |
| Public |
So you've read the last Harry Potter book, and you think it makes sense? Then answer me this...
( Spoiler and plot hole follow... )
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| 2006-11-21 13:28 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
1. My little sister is a Rhodes Scholar! Woot!
2. Is Nancy Pelosi pissing you off, too? I thought we had moved beyond ignorant, crony-favoring politicians. Let's hope she doesn't screw things up for 2008.
3. And since I seem to like using my LJ to launch web sites, here's a new one:
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| 2006-09-26 15:15 |
| Sudoku Slam |
| Public |
 Bill and I have been slaving over this site for months, and we're finally (slowly) releasing it to the public. We think it's (by far) the best Sudoku web site out there... for once, it's more fun to solve Sudokus on the computer than it is with pencil and paper! We wrote everything from scratch (puzzle generator, hint machine, solver UI, etc.), in javascript, c, perl, and python. It was a lot of fun but also lots of work. So, if you (a) like Sudokus or (b) like any of my previous LJ posts, please link to this site yourself! Or send it to some friends. I mean, and send it to some friends. My plea is desperate and shameless: that much javascript should never go to waste. Of course, site feedback/comments are definitely welcome. Huzzah!
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| 2006-08-28 14:56 |
| Why do marriages fail? |
| Public |
Since I'm Indian, people occasionally ask me about arranged marriages (Indian-style) versus "love" marriages (western style). Invariably, and to my surprise, these people express their admiration at how well arranged marriages seem to work out.
Of course, no one really knows how well arranged marriages work. Sure, the divorce rate in India is much lower than it is here, but that's partially (and I'd say mostly) because social pressures there strongly disfavor divorce. To get a more accurate test of marriage strategy success, you'd have to poll the happiness of people who remained married as well.
There's still the question of why arranged marriage works as well as it does. (Especially since, despite the common misconception, families don't really seem select partners with any measure of personality compatibility in mind.) ... and also why love marriage doesn't do so hot, despite its seemingly perfect ideal.
Naturally, having experienced no form of marriage at all, I have some theories.
Arranged marriages, when they work, succeed because of well-placed expectations.
You're more comfortable with the fact that you're getting married than you are with the person to whom you're getting married. But maybe that understanding helps you survive the institution regardless of who that other person is.
Hrmm, I guess that's all I can figure out about arranged marriages. But what about marriages in the US? How does that famous 50% divorce rate come about? Of course, there are the common reasons (infidelity, etc.) but here are some less obvious ones that might still be significant.
There is a tendency to believe that being in love is the prerequisite for marriage.
You're in love. You get married. Makes sense... in the idealistic abstraction of American values that you absorb from TV and the movies during your formative years. Obviously a successful marriage requires some significant personality- and belief-based similarities as well. (And perhaps they're more important, in the long run?) But when you're love it's harder to see that, so out come the wedding bells -- and the subsequent disillusionment and failure.
Some people are not built for marriage.
Well, that sounds controversial. But consider the following points: (1) Humans evolved for polygyny, not monogamy. (As I've mentioned in an earlier post, monogamy puts most females at a disadvantage.) So it's not a given that the requirements for a successful marriage are inherent or expressible in all humans. (2) It seems (to me) that for a marriage to last half a century or longer, the couple involved needs to be under significant social pressure -- or share a large measure of patience, forgiveness, and who knows what other qualities. It seems conceivable that some people just do not possess these traits. (And it takes only one person to ruin a marriage.) And yet, as in the previous point, it's easy to overlook missing traits and get married. And then reality sets in.
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| 2006-08-24 17:50 |
| Do some good |
| Public |
A family friend of ours, Steve Bethune (roughly my age, incredibly nice guy), is running across the country. 30 miles a day, every day, until he gets to California from New York.
It's pretty amazing, especially since he's 6'5". Check out the website, his blog, and pictures.
He's doing it all for charity, the American Heart Association. It's a truly remarkable feat. If you've been thinking about making a charitable donation but need some impetus, here's one. He's a long way from his modest goal, and it's too bad. Help out if it moves you.
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| 2006-07-27 09:57 |
| One of my favorites, re-interpreted |
| Public |
It's Friday afternoon and fourth period is almost over.
"Okay, just a reminder -- there will be a surprise quiz sometime next week on the last three chapters!" the teacher brays as the bell rings and the students begin to shuffle out.
In the hallway, Alice looks to Bob and says, "Dude, what a crock. Mrs. Trunchbull sucks. I hate surprise quizzes!"
"Me too! You can waste the whole week studying. I'd rather just cram, take the text, and expunge."
But then a thought occurs to Alice. "Wait a minute -- she said there's going to be a surprise quiz sometime next week, right?"
"Right..." Bob slams his locker shut, and they walk down the hall towards their fifth period class.
"But we know the test can't be next Friday, or else there won't be a surprise!" Alice exclaims.
"What do you mean?" Bob asks.
"Well, say she's secretly planning on giving the test on Friday. But we know that the test is sometime next week only. So by Thursday afternoon, when she hasn't given the test yet, we'll know that the test has to be on Friday -- no surprise!"
"Dang, I see." Bob's eyes open wider. "Hold on -- it's crazier than that. It can't be Friday, right? But then it also can't be Thursday either! Since when Wednesday afternoon rolls around, and she hasn't given the test yet, we'll know it can't be Friday -- as you just explained -- so it must be Thursday. But if we know it has to be Thursday, that would eliminate the surprise too!"
"Wow, this is awesome. And by the same logic, it can't be Wednesday either..."
"... or Tuesday ..."
"... or Monday!"
"Holy smokes... it seems like she can't possibly surprise us," Bob says with a grin.
Alice frowns. "And yet I still have no idea when the quiz actually will be." The bell rings for the start of fifth period, and the pair make their way into the classroom. "We'll have to figure out what this means after class."
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| 2006-07-23 22:13 |
| Failed Fetish Theory |
| Public |
Among ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) f18225's recent string of excellent entries was one about fetishes. As in: "Bob totally has yellow fever. He's got a huge asian fetish."
It seems like the popular take on fetishes is that they, and the people who have them, are weird in a negative kind of way. It's a bit of a stigma. I was going to write a post with a mathematical evaluation of fetish "strategy", but I had to make too many assumptions, the post got too long, and I got confused.
Instead, we only make the simple statement: for most fetishes, under reasonable assumptions, more than half of the population benefits.
First, let's define a fetish as "a heightened attraction to a (smallish) subset of the population". We limit these subsets to ones based on characteristics orthogonal to attractiveness. (e.g. there is no fetish "for hot girls".) In this scenario, for simplicity, we assume a heterosexual fetish. We partition the population into four groups: F = fetishists; (1-F) = all other people of that gender; OF = fetishized group; (1-OF) = all other people of that (opposite) gender. Here's how each group fares.
F: By definition, since this group has a heightened attraction to members of OF, people in (1-F) don't find OF quite as attractive. Thus members of F have less competition in succeeding with their most desired partners, members of OF.
(1-F): Members of F are more concerned with OF, leaving less competition for (1-OF), which is good for (1-F).
OF: Members are subject to heightened attention, and thus have a larger swath of partners to choose from.
(1-OF): Members are less desirable on average, so they lose out.
But (F + (1-F)) = all people of one gender, so (F + (1-F) + OF) > 50% of the population. So fetishes aren't so bad.
(* This evaluation isn't strictly true; you can come up with degenerate cases using bizarre values of F and OF. Have at it...)
Anyway, a couple of years ago, I did a little fetish-testing experiment. I sent out pictures of 10 (fully-clothed) women to a large number of my guy friends. These 10 women had a variety of hair colors, body types, ethnicities, and so on. I had the friends rank the women from 1 (best) to 10 (worst), and aggregated all of their votes to create an overall top 10 list. Then I compared each person's top 10 list with the aggregate, and computed the deviation. The larger the deviation, the greater that person's "fetish index" -- and the better off he was. For instance, if a guy had a high deviation, that meant that a woman he thought was hot wasn't generally recognized as hot (what you might call a fetish). So, he was in a great position: that woman wouldn't receive much attention (since most other guys didn't think she was hot), so he's got a better shot of getting her. Good for him!
My results? Improbably, my top 10 (which was the first I inputted into the system) was exactly the same as the aggregate top 10... which meant that every girl I thought was hot, every other guy did too. Great, say, if I wanted to become a model talent scout, but bad for real life.
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| 2006-07-17 19:24 |
| Hawaii, Take Two |
| Public |
Here are some pictures of Hawaii; click to go to the slideshow. (Some pictures were taken by Grant, Matt, and Siobhan.) Pristine beaches, beautiful sunsets, a great wedding, and best friends. Totally awesome. 
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| 2006-07-12 10:40 |
| Some suggestions for improving the game of soccer |
| Public |
Culled from my own thoughts and discussions with various others over the years. - Add more refs. There should be a minimum of two on-field refs, and ideally three.
- Put a fourth ref in the booth to decide via video replay. Purists complain that replay slows down the game. But how many times have you seen a game decided by a bogus PK, because the refs just didn't have the right angle? I'd rather have a slightly slower game than an illegit one.
- Retroactively punish diving. The number of dives per game can be drastically reduced by drastically increasing the cost of diving. A committee should evaluate game footage afterwards and issue cards for obvious dives that the refs have missed.
- Have an intermediate penalty between yellow and red cards. Make teams play a man down for a specific amount of time, as in hockey. It sucks when the balance of a game is horribly skewed after a marginal foul because the ref had no option but to issue a red.
- Modify overtime to avoid penalty kicks. PKs are incredibly exciting, no doubt, but if you're an actual fan of one of the teams playing, they're a horrible way to decide the game. (Imagine if tied NBA games were decided by free throws instead of overtimes.) Instead, when overtime starts, and every five minutes thereafter, each team should remove a player. The fewer players there are on the pitch, the more open the game will be, and the more likely someone is to score. At least this way, the outcome is decided by a soccer-like mechanism.
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| 2006-07-02 12:52 |
| England are out |
| Public |
My emotional investment in the World Cup ended when England bowed out yesterday. Perenially content to meet expectations, they did so once again, cementing their horrible record in penalty-kick shootouts. Some English players will no doubt claim that penalties are a crapshoot, etc. Of course, they are wrong. Penalties are unfair, for sure, as they don't accurately determine which is the better side at playing soccer, but they are not a crapshoot -- some teams (that practice penalties, and study the penalty habits of opponents) consistently win, while others (that offer up excuses) consistently lose.
It's sad that England's in this latter category. I am somewhat fanatical about English football. I'd rather have them win the World Cup than the U.S.A. Their premier players now -- Beckham, Gerrard, Owen, the Coles, etc., are, on a good day, a joy to watch. They're honest on the pitch and earnest off of it. How can you not like them? They are the Red Sox of the World Cup -- enormously talented, with great potential and a fanatical fan base, but (nearly) always insufficient in the final tally.
After tough losses you sometimes find yourself reeling for days afterwards, your daydreams (or conversations) randomly interrupted by brutal memories of the losing game that you quickly try to quell. Luckily, this loss wasn't tough: it was well-earned (Rooney's total idiocy) and quite expected (England's miserable penalty performance, Eriksson's passionless and ill-conceived managing, Rooney's total idiocy). It's like everyone knew the Sox had a terrible closer. How bad can you feel when he blows the final game for you?
So instead, there's just the feeling of pointlessness. This didn't have to happen. Well, there's 2010 to look forward to.
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| 2006-06-21 14:44 |
| Stochastic processes |
| Public |
The snacks I consumed at work yesterday:
* 4 Nutter Butter Cookies ^
* 6 Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers ^
* 4 Nature Valley Peanut Granola Bars +
That's over 1000 calories of peanut-based food. Now, granted, I like peanuts, but this is just too much. Sadly, it's simply another result of my deterministic tendencies.
Not sure if I've described this phenomenon before, but it turns out that I have too many green shirts. It so happens that I like the color green slightly more than I like other colors. So you might expect that I have slightly more green shirts than shirts of other colors. But noooo. Instead, when I'm thinking of buying a shirt, the green one always looks slightly better and so I often (but not always) end up buying it. That is, my slight green preference manifests itself every time I buy a shirt, rather than just in aggregate. The result: I have more than twice as many green shirts as shirts of any other specific color, even though I only like green a little bit more.
Similarly, with snacks. The peanut butter snack always looks just a bit better (especially when I'm at the grocery store, where I got these snacks on subsequent trips, and I haven't been gorging myself on peanut stuff recently). Oof. Now I'm paying the price. Next time, I'm going to make decisions probabilistically.
^ ("Made with real peanut butter!")
+ ("Dipped in peanut butter coating. Bursting with peanuts!")
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| 2006-06-05 19:26 |
| Competition |
| Public |
This past Thursday I found myself watching the National Spelling Bee with my mom. I'll admit I have a pretty low opinion of the Spelling Bee -- rote memorization seems be a strange thing to glorify to such a degree. It's like having a competition reeling off prime numbers.
But at the same time, it was great television (especially watching with my mom, who's one of the all-time great rooters). There's a lot of personality-reading to be done, as the kids aren't trying to be composed, as in other competition shows (e.g. American Idol); they're just trying to spell the words correctly. So you pick your favorites quickly, and root for them the whole time. Mine was the girl from Canada, who seemed genuinely nice.
And, of course, there is the satisfaction you get in observing anything, no matter how mundane, done well. And these kids are champs.
The one surprise this year was that the best Indian kid only finished fourth. Fourth may sound like an impressive feat, since Indians make up less than 1% of the US population. However, they have nevertheless exhibited an ethnic dominance of the Spelling Bee unrivaled in magnitude by any ethnicity in any other "intellectual" pursuit I know of. Recent results: | Year | First | Second | Third |
| 1997 | | Indian | Indian |
| 1998 | | Indian | Indian |
| 1999 | Indian | | Indian |
| 2000 | Indian | | |
| 2001 | | | |
| 2002 | Indian | | |
| 2003 | Indian | | Indian |
| 2004 | | Indian | |
| 2005 | Indian | Indian | Indian |
Perhaps the Spelling Bee's lesser known cousin, the National Geographic Bee, is next in the sights of the great memorization armies streaming forth from the motherland. Things are picking up. | Year | First | Second | Third |
| 2003 | | | Indian |
| 2004 | | | |
| 2005 | | Indian | |
| 2006 | Indian | Indian | Indian |
Unfortunately, these results are at best a source of amusement (especially when translated into articles like this one), furthering the conception that Indians excel at tedious, time-intensive, soul-crushing tasks; doing as well in, say, winning Nobel Prizes would be a little cooler. --- Speaking of competition, I watched some track and field on TV this weekend. Of course, I have some appreciation as a former track runner myself (good enough, interestingly, to have been national champion in my event if I were a girl, but unfortunately not good enough to be the best guy runner at my school), and just observing their times and speed -- and imagining how far back I'd be if I were in the race (either men's or women's) -- makes me feel the jaw-dropping "holy-crap" kind of awe that I imagine pickup basketball players must get when they watch an NBA star. But the really fascinating thing about track is that it is, unequivocally (to me), the single most competitive endeavor in the world. I can't think of any other competition that's as hotly contested. Soccer is the only other truly world-wide sport, but I'm not convinced that even when I'm watching the World Cup, I'm watching the best game of soccer I could be, given the talent existing today. It likely suffers from some anti-Moneyball selection bias, since it's so hard to evaluate how good players are and how well they'll interact with each other. So it's an inefficient market, and scouts and managers no doubt are making suboptimal decisions when selecting players. Similarly, intellectual competitions just have too many external variables to control for. But track is based purely on an objective measure, time, so the best people have a great shot of making it through. Sure, not every fast runner in the world is identified, and not every runner who competes gets the best training, but on the whole I'm betting that of all competitions it has the highest percentage of the best people in the world operating at the highest levels. (Or maybe I'm forgetting something?) And that's pretty cool. By watching track, you're able to really see the true current limits of human achievement, in this respect at least. What else can you say that for?
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