All the Alex Bain you can handle!

What's in a Name?

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:30:29 -0700

As Alex and I struggle to come up with a name for our little guy, we’re hoping to draw on your wisdom for help. My aunt Alta suggested we solicit advice from friends and family for this issue. We’re hoping to pick a name that is common enough that everyone’s heard of it and knows how to spell it, but uncommon enough that there’s little chance of our guy having another kid with his name in any of his classes. Thoughts? Suggestions?

I promised Lisa I’d repost this request for name feedback. We’re brainstorming. There’s no wrong answers. You’re in the tree of trust.

I don’t screw around on panini night.

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:45:07 -0700

I don’t screw around on panini night.

MGH residents cut back hours, but with mixed feelings

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:22:20 -0700

MGH residents cut back hours, but with mixed feelings:

When Lisa was a resident at MGH, some of her rotations had a healthy respect for the 80-hour limit, and some led to “bad weeks.”

We did the Malcolm Gladwell math on how long it would take Lisa to get her 10K hours and be an expert. It was the exact length of her residency program, 3 years of 80 hours a week. I could never understand, then, why surgeons needed 96 hours a week for 7 years. That’s well over 30K hours. No matter how complicated surgery is, the system is broken if it takes 30K hours to learn. For example, the article mentions that one of the ways they trimmed back the hours was by hiring “dozens of nurse practitioners to take over some of their work.” Um, if that was possible all along it’s inexcusable that they’ve only now taken that action.

The next thing about medicine that needs to be fixed is the standardized testing. Lisa has to take 8-hour tests every few years that have nothing to do with her chosen profession. To pass them, she has to cram useless facts into her head by studying 5-6 hours a day for ~6 weeks. The equivalent here of the nurse practitioner solution would be to make the subject matter of the tests topical, and confirm that the doctors that score well are doing so based on knowledge gained from their work, not memorized trivia.

I got fired up when someone mentions inefficiency in healthcare :-)

I've worked my upcoming baby boy into conversations with the following people since Thursday

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:56:00 -0700

My barber who barely speaks English
Two waiters and one bartender
The maintenance people in my building at work
A group of engineers that I’d never met before in a business meeting
Anyone else that will listen…

Lisa & I caught up with my b-school buddy, BRad, last night...

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:46:57 -0700

Lisa & I caught up with my b-school buddy, BRad, last night at Hukilau, a fantastic Hawaiian restaurant in the city. It was great to see Brad, but that meal kicked my ass.

We saw some of his friends from college afterwards, and one had just returned from a yoga retreat, where she’d hiked 70 miles and eaten little more than sprouted plants for seven days. I laughed and told her, “I don’t recycle, and I just ate deep-fried spam sushi.”

Here’s a great Boston Phoenix article about Ken Miller, a...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:04:18 -0800

Here’s a great Boston Phoenix article about Ken Miller, a Brown University bio professor.

If you studied college biology, there’s an 80% chance your first textbook was written by him. He’s that widely respected.

I didn’t know this, but he’s also a devout Catholic, and the article describes his battles with both creationists and atheists.

Worth a quick read if you’ve interested in the intersection of science and religion.

littlebain: We got the news today: it’s a boy. Lisa and I...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:59:58 -0800

littlebain:

We got the news today: it’s a boy.

Lisa and I will spend the next couple months choosing a name we like. In the mean time, I’ll call him Blaine Bain (as a gag). We got the idea from The Barretts, who call their on-the-way boy Garrett Barrett.

If you guessed boy… YOU’RE RIGHT!

Interestingly, 7 of 9 guesses on Tumblr were for boy, so maybe this crowd-sourcing thing works.

We’ve set up a site for the baby at LittleBain.com. It’s pretty thin on content, and will probably remain thin until mid-August. This way, all the people that had come to depend on this site for pictures of Lisa across a restaurant table won’t have to have their web-surfing disturbed by baby pics :-)

We find out the gender tomorrow. I’d love to hear some...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:44:00 -0800

We find out the gender tomorrow. I’d love to hear some guesses.

If you’re wrong, no one will ever hold it against you. If you’re right, you get to pretend forever that you knew what would happen.

Boy or girl?

"Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:37:00 -0800

“

Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.

But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.

”

- Cool article about Google’s Translation Tool. The list of projects that might be easier to takle with billions of data points instead of rules is endless, & probably includes fields like healthcare, meteorology, calling football plays, etc.

via Andy McAfee

This site creates a cool heat map of one’s foursquare...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:26:59 -0800

This site creates a cool heat map of one’s foursquare check-ins. As I’m big on walking, it’s no surprise that most of mine are near my apartment. I was surprised to see so much “heat” on Fillmore Street, though.

OK Go is so good at this stuff. It’s funny that you...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:33:00 -0800

OK Go is so good at this stuff. It’s funny that you don’t see more up and coming bands try to do this. I guess the video and music both have to be good, or it wouldn’t “go viral”, and most bands have a hard enough time getting the music part right.

How to Become an Insta-Expert

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:04:36 -0800

How to Become an Insta-Expert:

The author nailed every Oscar pick just by watching prediction markets.

I’ve been doing this with American Idol so far this year. I’ve watched ~30 total minutes of the season, but because I’ve been watching the futures market for the contestants, I actually have opinions about how things will turn out.

My friends, the Barneses (sp?), put together this fantastic 20...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:06:00 -0800

My friends, the Barneses (sp?), put together this fantastic 20 second video of their son Jack’s first experience with crawling.

Time to update my 3 year-old tradition of documenting how...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:06:00 -0800

Time to update my 3 year-old tradition of documenting how I’m wished happy birthday by medium.

Here’s 2009 & 2008.

Some thoughts:

Some friends sent along well-wishes via more than one medium. I double-counted them. I thought about only counting the first, or counting each one as a half, but figured that this exercise isn’t intended to gauge my own popularity so much as the popularity of each medium.
Similarly, I thought about plotting it on a 100% axis, but liked that the absolute axis made two points:
1. Facebook appears to be stealing “share” from email, but not other mediums.
2. There seems to be a static amount of kindness generated by the combination of email, Facebook, and in-person greetings, and the other platforms are additive.
This year was the first year that IM and Tumblr appeared on the list. IM may have been bigger in the past, but I was never signed on. Now I’m attached to IM almost all day long. Tumblr just recently turned on a “replies” feature sort of like comments, and my cousin-in-law, Sarah, took quick advantage.
I wish there were an easy way to control for things like day-of-the-week and social media connections. I’ve got way more Facebook and Twitter friends now than in 2008, but I don’t have a great record of the historical counts. Oh well.

The whole thing is also a fun reminder of how lucky I am to have such great friends/family.

Got a mysterious phone call this AM: “Brunch....

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:30:00 -0800

Got a mysterious phone call this AM:

“Brunch. Ella’s. 20 minutes.”

We took a risk, & showed up.

We were relieved to discover it was the Easons :-)

Looks like the matched the wall paint to a mango lassi.

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:14:09 -0800

Looks like the matched the wall paint to a mango lassi.

Indian b-day buffet. I’m in curry-flavored heaven.

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:10:08 -0800

Indian b-day buffet. I’m in curry-flavored heaven.

The birthday plan

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:19:32 -0800

I don’t usually make a big deal of my birthday (especially a funny number like 31), but Lisa very kindly does. She suggested an itinerary for the day, that we tweaked a bit together. Here it is:

Jog along the water (while she catches some extra Z’s)
Chai lattés from Coffee Bean
Hitting the neighborhood indian buffet for lunch
Practicing the piano together (she’s normally resistant, because she doesn’t like playing on my unnaturally weighted keyboard)
Reading together at a nearby café
A nice walk along the water
Head out to the East Bay for dinner with Lisa’s fam, where there’s a rumor that her mother’s famous applesauce cake may make an appearance.

This is a great way to usher in my 32nd year.

"The “Notes” app on the iPhone will forever be a simulation of a legal pad; the similar app on the..."

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:35:00 -0800

“The “Notes” app on the iPhone will forever be a simulation of a legal pad; the similar app on the iPad is a legal pad.”

- This quote from an article on
iPad Application Design stuck out. I hope a lot of the best apps we’ll see for the iPad will have real life metaphors that will feel natural. Reading this made me wish I knew how to write software.

Via Gruber

We hit 5A5 in SF for some pre-b-day steak. That’s GOOD...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:08:33 -0800

We hit 5A5 in SF for some pre-b-day steak. That’s GOOD meat.