Semi-Original Thought

The top six lies about the Dvorak keyboard

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 22:27:00 +0000

I've been typing on the Dvorak keyboard for three years now, and there are a bunch of lies going on around the internet about the Dvorak keyboard.

Lie #1: Dvorak is easy to learn.
The truth is that Dvorak is extremely hard to learn. Keyboards are so hard-coded into our very essences, that learning any kind of new keyboard is extremely hard. That's why most of the impressive advances in keyboard technology, like SwiftKey, are based around predicting stuff that's in your head, not on trying to teach you something new.

It took me about a year and a half to replace my qwerty speed on the Dvorak keyboard. A year and a half! I type about 80 WPM, and so if you're a super slow typist, it might not take you that long.

After I had been practicing Dvorak for a month, my typing speed was only 11 WPM. That's right, only 11 WPM! I can type with one finger on qwerty around 25 WPM, so 11 WPM was pretty pathetic. I probably should have given up, but I don't like to give up once I start something. After a few months, I was at 40 WPM, and then I gradually improved from there. I did take a leisurely approach to learning Dvorak. I started with Dvorak on just one of my laptops, and I only fully switched over when I got to the 40 WPM point. I also never trained for more than about a half hour at a time. So, I think it is possible to do it a lot faster than what I did, but I think my results are probably what you should realistically expect.

Lie #2: Christopher Sholes rearranged the keyboard to slow down typists.
Any information about Christopher Sholes is a wild, zany guess. The truth is that we know about as much about Sholes as we do about any obscure character from the 1800's, which is not very much.

In reality, keyboards all used to have an A-Z format, and Sholes became obsessed with slightly rearranging the A-Z format, but not very much. Sing the alphabet song, while you press the keys on your keyboard, and notice the groupings. A-G are on one side, H-P are on the other side, etc. The biggest remnant of the A-Z keyboard is the sequence of J, K, and L on the home row. In fact, the home row used to be J, K, L, M, but one of the last changes Sholes made to the keyboard was to swap the M and the ; keys. Oh, and F, G, H are also kept in alphabetical sequence.

If Sholes was really trying to slow down typists, he would have put the most common digraphs, or two-letter combinations, far apart from each other. Here's a list of the six most common digraphs in English. Notice that most are extremely close together on the keyboard, not far apart: TH, IN, HE, ER, AN, RE. In fact, it seems like Sholes was trying to get the most common digraphs close together, not further apart.

The truth is that Sholes was a crazed tinkerer who haphazardly rearranged the keys, yet held nearly true to the A-Z sequence.

Lie #3: Dvorak is well-thought out
Dvorak did most of his analysis based on one published list of the most frequent 100 words in the English language. In today's information age, that's a pathetic amount of research for something as substantial as a keyboard layout.

There are some huge flaws with Dvorak, such as the placement of the U key and the H key. U and H are popular letters, but for some reason Mr. Dvorak put them under the strongest fingers. Uh, maybe Mr. Dvorak used the word "uh" a lot. I can think of tons of other letters that would have been better in those positions, like E, T, A, O, N, R, or I. And speaking of R, it's the third most commonly used consonant, and it's pressed by a long reach with the weakest finger in Dvorak.

And, the fact that Dvorak put all of the vowels in a line, all lined up, shows Sholes-like thinking. A, O, E, U, I. Dvorak ordered his vowels the way that he originally ordered his numbers, with a crazy weird pattern. By doing this, Mr. Dvorak is basically admitting, "Uh, I know that there's something significant about vowels, but I haven't quite figured it out yet." And, speaking of that, if do you switch to Dvorak, don't use his original numbering system. It sucks. The numbers were originally in the order 7, 5, 3, 1, 9, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8.

Lie #4: Dvorak is different
Dvorak does have a different key arrangement, but it's really not much different at all. The third most popular keyboard layout, Colemak, which does a lot of what Dvorak does, actually prides itself on how un-different it is. "We only switched a few keys from qwerty" is the sales pitch for Colemak.

Lie #5: Dvorak is better in every way
Qwerty is actually much better for super tiny keyboards on smartphones, than Dvorak is. The problem with a Dvorak layout on a smartphone is that all of the popular keys are too close together. This is great for a full-sized keyboard, but it sucks for any kind of smart prediction with teeny tiny virtual buttons.

But, I use a keyboard that was designed for smartphones, MessagEase. It doesn't have tiny buttons.

Lie #6: You'll be able to switch back to qwerty when you need to
For some reason, I was extremely concerned about if I would be able to switch back to qwerty. My original goal was to be a keyboard polyglot, and be able to type fluently on both Dvorak and qwerty. But now that I'm better at Dvorak than qwerty, I never want to go back to qwerty. For me, there's no point at all. Even though I'm critical about Dvorak, it is a superior layout to qwerty. Why spend any time at all on qwerty that I don't have to?

When I use other people's qwerty keyboards now, I hunt and peck at around my 25 WPM. But, I never do any serious typing on someone else's keyboard, and I think that most people also do 99% of their typing on their own computer or at least their own account. It's pretty easy to switch back and forth to Dvorak on any operating system. I even have Dvorak for my Commodore 64 and Vic 20 emulators.

Qwerty and Dvorak use too much of the same parts of the brain to effectively quickly partition them. It should be theoretically possible to do this, but there's probably no point, and it's probably not worth it, so you're probably not going to do it.

Okay, there are the lies about Dvorak. Now I should tell you why I'm still using Dvorak, and not switching back to qwerty.

Reason #1: Dvorak feels better to type on
The biggest reason I won't switch back to qwerty, is that I like how Dvorak feels when I type. It's not the ideal layout, but it makes typing a much more enjoyable experience.

Reason #2: You should learn something new
Input methods are changing. It's slow, but gradual, and it's only a matter of time before kids of the future are using an input method that's completely inaccessible for the adults of today. Learning a new input method is the best way to keep your mind agile enough to be able to learn whatever it is that the kids of ten years from now will be using.

Reason #3: You'll learn a lot about learning
I realize that my reasons for learning Dvorak list is degrading into similar reasons that I would give for, "Why you should stare at a rock to gain enlightenment." While learning Dvorak, I learned two important things about learning. One is how to avoid making mistakes while typing. The other is how to leverage muscle memory with common words to learn new input methods much more quickly in the future. I could have gotten that same enlightenment from staring at a rock, but my way of getting it was from learning Dvorak.

Plover: better than Dvorak
There is something out there that's much better than Dvorak, and it's Plover. It's a chorded keyboard that's based on stenography, like what court reporters and closed captioners use.

I'm now in the process of learning Plover. There are a few issues with it now, because you need a computer application to run it, so I can't use Plover with my phone (which is where I'm typing this) or my Chromebook, but someone should figure that out in the next year or two.

Plover is a chorded, phonetic keyboard, with a bunch of cool theory behind it. So, the way that you type the word "cat" is by pressing the K, A, and T buttons all at the same time. There are some shortcuts, so the way you type the word "it" is by pressing the T on the left hand side, and the way you type "the" is by pressing the T on the right hand side. And a bunch more cool theory, but it's perfect for someone like me who's looking for something obscure with a steep learning curve.

But the coolest thing about Plover is that someone like me who types 80 WPM on qwerty or Dvorak will be able to type about 140 WPM on Plover. When I learned about Plover a couple of months ago, I realized that I've wasted years of my life on Dvorak.

Links:

10 easy steps to get people to buy your book on Amazon

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:20:00 +0000

You've just published your first book, and now it's available on Amazon. But, nobody besides your overeager aunt has purchased it yet, and your publisher isn't doing anything for you. So, you ask yourself, "How do I get people to buy my book on Amazon?"

Fortunately, I'm an Amazon junkie, and I've spent way too much time analyzing Amazon so I can walk you through this difficult process. Follow my instructions, you'll double your book sales overnight, and you'll be on your way to selling 100,000 books by the end of this year.

The wild reception of the book, The Healing Code, confused me, so I spent some time analyzing it. It's a good book, and I got great results from it, but for a quirky new age meditation technique, it shouldn't have sold as many copies of itself for as long as it has. It's been a top 1000 seller ever since it was published almost 4 years ago. Why does it sell so much, and how can you use the exact same technique to boost your book sales? Here's what I learned from what the authors of that book did:

#1: You must believe that your book is special.

This may be the hardest part. Since you're a published writer, you're actually more of an artist than an author. The biggest problem with artists is that they feel their best work is their next work they're going to complete, and not their last work that is already completed. This is actually getting in the way of you thinking that your last book is amazing, so just put your self-criticism on hold for a few hours, and think about how great your book is that you're trying to sell.

It takes a ton of effort to write a book, and you put a big chunk of your life into this book. In a way, this book is you. Even if your old, stodgy English teacher would have given your book an F-, you still put a huge part of your life into that book, and the public who will love your book looks at different criteria than your English teacher. Plus, you are probably one of the most amazing people in the world, and your book is a reflection of you. That's why your book is so special, and you need to believe it.

I remember asking a friend before she got a new tattoo if she would regret it. My friend said, "I won't ever regret any of my tattoos, even if I change my mind about what's important to me in the future, because tattoos always remind me of significant times in my life. This story is very similar to your book. Even if you change your mind about this book a few years down the road, it will always represent a significant part of your life.

Your book is so significantly special. Remember it, or the rest of this advice won't work.

#2: You need to care more about selling the next thousand copies of your book than you do about the markup percentage on your next book you sell

This one is also extremely hard for artists. For some reason, artists are obsessed with the markup percentage on the sale of their next work and they lose focus about long-term sales potential. You might say, "I'm an artist, I don't care about percentages and math!" But what do I mean by that? I mean that artists are generally more interested in making sure they get at least 3 to 5 dollars per book than they are about selling a lot of books.

With books, 100% of it is about the volume, and none of it is about the markup percentage of your book. You're reading this article because you're taking a break for a few hours from being an artist, and you're trying to boost your book sales. Artists are in-the-present people, not future worriers. That live-now philosophy is why you're so good at what you do, but we just need to take a little break from it to sell some books. I'm not saying that you have to change your personality, but while you're following my advice, take a break from being in the moment, and just think about the future sales of your book.

#3: For each Amazon review that you already have on your book, mark it as helpful

Each one? Even the 1-star, critical review? Yes, mark every single review as helpful, even the ones that are so harsh that they make you cry.

Why would I ever recommend that you do this? The whole reason is not because the reviews are actually helpful. It's because a book where every review gets helpful votes will attract top Amazon reviewers to review your products. There's a whole subculture of people who spend more time writing Amazon reviews than your crazy uncle spends on his model train set, and you want these influential hobbyists to review your book. The thing that motivates these influential Amazon reviewers is only one thing: helpful votes on their reviews. If one of these influential reviewers looks at your book, and they see that everyone that ever writes a review of your book gets a helpful vote, then they'll buy your book, read it, and review it, just to get that helpful vote.

If you get a few of your friends to mark all of the reviews on your book helpful, then it will attract even more top reviewers. Amazon's reviewer rank algorithm rewards top reviewers the most for new people that think their review is helpful, and so the more real, unique people who think that the reviews on your book are helpful, the more recognition these reviewers get from Amazon.

Make sure you and your friends actually read the reviews, and think through a reason why each one is helpful. Amazon takes great pains to try to avoid review manipulation.

#4: Go through all the 4-star and 5-star reviews, and make a specific comment on why you liked their review

Say something personal like, "Hi, I'm the author, and I thought it was really cool that you identified with the main character! I wrote the character like this because..."

Make sure you write in an informal, friendly first person tone. A big reason you're doing this is so that people feel like they're connecting with a real person.

Commenting on reviews is actually better publicity than a book signing, because it generates a lot more buzz. Each person that gets a book signed by you will tell 0.5 other people about it. However, each person that you make a personalized comment on their Amazon review will tell 10+ people about it.

#5: Go through all the 1-, 2-, and 3-star reviews, and make a comment that says this:

"Thanks for writing this review. I really appreciate your candor. I encourage you to try again to finish the book (or read it again, etc.) and look at it from [insert new perspective here]. I'm confident that if you give it another try, that you'll reconsider what you didn't like, and that you'll really enjoy this book."

This is the biggest thing the people that wrote The Healing Code did, that made their book a long term high volume seller. This is also where you most need the belief that your book is special. It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out like this, but it works, and this method will turn your worst critic into at least a friend.

The person may even follow your advice, finish reading your book, and decide to change your their review to a 5-star review. But, make sure you don't hint in your comment that that's what you really want, because Amazon won't let you pressure the reviewers in any way.

#6: Get thirty 5-star reviews on Amazon

There's something magical about getting thirty 5-star reviews on Amazon. Once you get thirty 5-star reviews, then your book sales will take off. Here's how you do it.

Find a friend or a relative, and have them read your book
Ask them to give you a 5-star review
Give them some sample text for a review, tell them to NOT mention that they know you, and tell them to write just about the content of the book

You have to give your friends some guidance, otherwise you'll get a bunch of well-meaning 3 and 4 star reviews that say something like: "Well, I've known Martha for fifteen years, and even though I don't like science fiction at all, I think it's very impressive that she wrote a book all by herself." That kind of review is the kiss of death, plus Amazon has removed reviews in the past just because they're from relatives.

Instead, tell your aunt, "Hey, would you review my book, give it 5 stars, and say something like, 'I really liked this book. It was inventive science fiction, that made me think about [insert stuff here]. I liked the style of the book because of [insert stuff here]. I'd recommend this book to everybody."

You have to ask your friends for 5 stars. A lot of people will just naturally give it 3 or 4 stars if they don't realize that you actually need 5 stars, probably because their grade school teachers told them that nothing is perfect. Again, remember how awesome your book is.

Then repeat this process 30 times with different friends.

#7: Write a 5-star review of your book on Amazon

The nice thing about this step is that you can be completely honest with who you are. Say something like, "Hi, I'm the author of this book, but I liked this book so much because of [insert a list of stuff here.] I really hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it."

Make sure that you focus on the content of the book, and you don't copy any promotional material that someone else wrote for you. The worst that can happen is that Amazon takes down your review, so don't worry. Amazon probably will take it down eventually, but at least you've seeded your book page with a glowing review as a model for other reviewers to follow.

#8: Regularly check your book's Amazon page, and repeat steps 3-5 for all new reviews

You could even have your assistant, spouse, or a good friend do this, and just print out a summary of the nice, complimentary things people say, and edit out anything negative. Doing this on an ongoing basis can be exhausting. The important thing is that your comments sound like you, not that they are actually written by you.

#9: You may be able to get rid of a couple of your 1-star negative reviews

Amazon's review rules say that reviews need to be about the product. A lot of one star reviews are actually about late shipping, that their product arrived damaged, or that the current price is too expensive. If you have a critical review that doesn't mention why they don't actually like the content of the product, then you can click on the "Report this review" link below the review (you may have to mark it unhelpful first), and tell Amazon that this review isn't actually reviewing the product. Amazon is generally pretty good about removing reviews that aren't really reviews.

But, be careful. If the review even mentions anything specific about the product, then Amazon won't remove it, so then your only option is to try to get more 5-star reviews.

#10: Now, you'll sell 100,000 copies of the book by the end of the year

Congratulations! You are so wonderful that you deserve all of this success! You can now get back to writing your next book.

Other stuff:

Why am I so focused on Amazon reviews? Google both your book and your name right now, and you'll notice that one of the top results is your book, on Amazon, with the number of stars that reviewers gave it. You should follow this advice, even if your main source of selling your books is a Saturday swap meet.

Even if you just print out this article and give it to your assistant to complete all the steps, you should make sure that this happens.

Links:

20 questions with the fastest man on Earth: Cheng Wei Chang

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:11:00 +0000

On August 11, 2012, Cheng Wei Chang (Wei is pronounced "way"), from Singapore, broke the world record in texting using an input method called MessagEase. He typed the Guinness World Record texting phrase in 23.8 seconds, which is 80.7 WPM, and on the MessagEase website, he's clocked at 83.6 WPM. This man can text faster than anybody else on the planet.

Cheng Wei let me interview him, and I found him to be a friendly person and very personable. He's also extremely knowledgeable about tons of different kinds of input methods. Since I'm fascinated with smart phone inputting techniques, I found his discussions fascinating. He's also very humble for achieving something that no human has ever done before, which is texting non-predictively 80+ WPM on a cell phone, with perfect accuracy. I can almost text 40 WPM on my cell phone, and I'm planning a town parade as soon as I hit 40 WPM. So, it's mind boggling to me that this guy can text faster on a cell phone than 99% of the population can type on a full keyboard, and faster than 100% of the population can text on a cell phone, and all he did was post a short YouTube video and then went back to his studies and computer programming.

I was very curious about what made this guy tick. Here's my interview of 20 questions with him:

1. Could you tell me how you became so fast of a texter that you beat the world record?
Since I was young I have learnt to touch type using the qwerty keyboard. I'm rather competent in it, typing at an average 80 WPM to maximum of 100 WPM, but I'm nowhere near the 200 WPM world record. As I got my first Android phone which was Motorola XT720, I started to realise that typing on the phone was indeed pretty frustrating with the standard keyboard. Therefore I tried to keep a lookout for other keyboards.

My friend recommended SlideIt, which is similar to Swype and I am pretty impressed by its ability to guess the words so accurately. It was really cool when I started using it. But as time went by, I realised there were multiple occasions where it guessed the words wrongly and I got frustrated once again, in particular it wasn't suitable for typing shorthand that adds fun to short messages.

The next keyboard I came across was TouchPal. It has a reasonable dictionary correction and what I liked was that I can access symbols and numbers just by sliding up or down on some of the keys without having to key in "shift". I felt sliding in this way is a good way to make full use of the touchscreen capability in a different flavor to Swype (this sliding concept was used to a higher level in MessagEase). It also features an edit mode that allows users to perform useful functions such as selecting, moving the cursor, copy, paste etc. Moreover it shines in typing Chinese and is still my favorite so far for Chinese.

Then I got to know of a revolutionary inputting technology called 8pen. I was pretty fascinated by it as well. I somehow thought that if I mastered it, I could potentially be able to input without looking. I indeed mastered it to a certain level that I could type simple short messages without looking, but the problem in it was that my thumb became sore afterwards. It is way too slow and tiring. But I appreciate the designer for coming out with a revolutionary keyboard, but too bad it is not efficient.

Continuing on my lookout, I chanced upon MessagEase while searching for the fastest android keyboard. After giving it a try, I realised it is exactly what I wanted. I can type any character without searching through tables after tables!

At first I learnt the basics by playing the MessagEase game, but soon I realised it got repetitive, so I proceeded to train using TypingDroid which has more words to type and it forces me to type each character correctly and buzzes me whenever there is a mistake. In this sense I can really master typing without looking as it actually alerts me when there is an error.

Still it is quite difficult to achieve pure blind typing, I will have to realign once in a while by looking to see that I am not too far off from the home position. But I am pretty satisfied I can text using MessagEase while I jog using one finger without much concentration as compared to all other keyboard out there.

I used it very frequently since 2 to 3 years ago. Somehow I just wasn't able to get pass 60 WPM in the MessagEase game. After switching to Samsung Galaxy S III recently, it has a much faster processor and a bigger screen. With the bigger screen, I can text using two fingers to achieve better speed. And soon, I got faster and faster and eventually ranked 1st in the game. There was this review on Android Tapp that gave MessagEase an ignorant and unfair rating. I was quite frustrated and decide to make a video showing how fast MessagEase really is. I broke the record about a week after I got my new Samsung Galaxy S III.

I think it is because I am a programmer and frequently write code, that made MessagEase my number one keyboard. Otherwise, I wouldn't have mind using SwiftKey. So I guess this explains the popularity among most people too. They will try to think if the learning curve is worth it.

Hacker's Keyboard is currently the keyboard that can type everything. But MessagEase can type nearly everything, fast. Hopefully eventually MessagEase can type everything on the keyboard like the function keys etc, so that it is the perfect keyboard when used in conjunction with TeamViewer or ConnectBot.

2. I also use MessagEase, and I like typing with MessagEase because I'm a control freak, and I don't like it when predictive texting messes me up. But I'm guessing you have a different reason. Why do you like MessagEase?
Oh, actually MessagEase is number one to me because I can code with it. Otherwise, for a non-coder, I would recommend SwiftKey. So, in some sense, I am not the perfect advertiser for MessagEase. I like to remote desktop, so MessagEase is perfect for someone like me. So I guess remote controlling of a computer would be a strong reason for choosing MessagEase, because I don't think any text prediction will work while remoting.

3. If you had a lot of time and a big budget and staff, what computer program would you make?

If I had money, I would try to deal with problems in the third world countries first. I think many things I had always wanted to do have already been handled by someone already. In the past I tried making my own note taking software, public transport path finders. I think maybe I would be particularly interested in developing autonomous robots that can do all the menial tasks like housework and dirty jobs. Somehow I feel there is not much lacking in the world now.

4. From what I know about Singapore, the country is very progressive, and really encourages intelligent and ambitious people. Do you think that living in Singapore helped you with speed?
I would say people in Singapore are diligent and have a better level of education thanks to our government who made it compulsory for children to undergo basic education. So it is more appropriate to say we are given the chance to nurture our intelligence compared to people around the world. I think we are still on our way to becoming more ambitious. Many Singaporeans tend to stick to the norm within their comfort zone and don't like to take risk. But definitely living in Singapore has crafted me into who I am, the distinct quality that enabled me to get the world record.

5. A lot of my friends from Singapore and Malaysia can speak a lot of languages. How many languages can you speak?
My first language is English, and my second language is Mandarin Chinese. Chinese people usually also know some dialect, and mine is Teochew. So I speak three languages.

6. And, do you think that speaking multiple languages has impacted your ability to text quickly?
I can't think of any relation with my texting speed, but I think as a programmer, it helps as I frequently learn new programming languages.

7. What's your texting speed in Chinese versus English?
I guess my Chinese typing speed is around 40 WPM. I used pinyin to type Chinese. There isn't a one-to-one mapping between pinyin and Chinese characters. So, choosing from a list is inevitable. But the guessing by the computer is impressive. And the technique for typing fast in Chinese is to type longer phrases to let the computer guess the context. Depending on the context, the speed of typing varies, similar to dictionary-based typing. On Android, I use TouchPal which has an additional stroke filtering function that makes typing Chinese easier than on the computer.

8. Do people ever watch you texting in public, like on the train, and make comments about how fast you are?
I don't know, but my friends are impressed. But still, only one friend is using MessagEase now.

9. How fast can you type on a regular keyboard?
On the keyboard around 80 to 100 WPM. On Android is 50 to 80 using MessagEase. Tried using several apps to test. But 80 WPM was only achievable in MessagEase Game. Usually I got around 60 WPM using myTextSpeed.

10. What advice would you give to other people who want to learn how to text fast?
I wrote some pointers on how to type using two thumbs on a Facebook comment previously (see link below). I recommend a phone that has a fast processor and large screen size like Samsung Galaxy S III. How fast a person can type depends on how strong is the desire to type fast. I like to excel in things I have chance to excel exceptionally on, and this is one of them.

11. Could I get some background information on you? I'm wondering if you could tell a couple of stories that help to illustrate your personality.
I am someone who is particularly inclined in mathematics, sciences and computer related stuffs, but languages wasn't as good.

I frequently like to think out of the box and get pretty pissed off with unreasonable traditions.

I like to self-teach myself, such as playing the piano, guitar. I believe that living in the age of Google I can learn just about anything myself.

I like to excel in areas I felt I am good at. I love solving puzzles in my free time. Using my programming knowledge to create tools to solve my everyday problems.

I am currently in my last year, doing my PhD in computational biology and data mining from biological data.

I am a Buddhist practitioner of Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism under Soka Gakkai International, which is to me, the world's greatest philosophy.

12. What do you plan to do with your PhD in computational biology?
Carry on researching and learn more from biological data. Not much plans yet, but definitely a meaningful job.

13. Are you related to the Taiwanese baseball player, who has the same name as you?
Is there? I think there were quite a number of people on the internet sharing the same Chinese transliteration as me. But I guess my Chinese characters should be unique.

14. So what are the Chinese characters of your name?
钟清玮

15. I have a theory that fast typing or texting is very related to fast thinking. Do you think this is true, and do you think that you think quickly, too?
I think so. When I am wide awake, I can text much faster. I think some sort of overclocking of my brain took place when I was trying for the world record, it affects the tempo of your finger's movement.

16. As of today, your world record has only been viewed 164 times on YouTube. Why do you think that something that significant has been largely overlooked so far?
I think unless people are speed freaks, they wouldn't care who is the fastest texter. So far SwiftKey definitely holds the best record for texting using dictionary. I think to many people, it is the regular everyday typing comfort that matters. Text prediction works for many people most of the time, so they would rather crown SwiftKey as the champion.

17. Would you be open to competing in a world record texting competition to validate your record? Or are you trying to keep a low profile?
Possibly. For the sake of MessagEase. But I think the runner ups are pretty competitive, so I don't think I can beat them now.

18. What other input methods do you think are cool?

TouchPal (best for typing Chinese so far)
SwiftKey (best prediction)
Kii (multiple languages, text prediction similar to SwiftKey)
Swype/SlideIt (Swyping is cool)
8pen (interesting though lack efficiency)
Hacker's Keyboard (you can type everything including function keys)

19. What is your prediction for the future of input methods, 10 to 20 years in the future
I have no idea. I think possibly once chips get implanted in the brain anything is possible

20. My female readers will want to know if you're single and how old you are.
Currently single, and 28.

There you have it, probably the most eligible bachelor in the world. He's also a really nice guy, he's super smart, he thinks quickly, and a couple years from now when he graduates with his doctorate degree and gets a good job, he's going to be rich.

In today's computerized world, texting is even more relevant than typing, or any other kind of speed record, like the 100 meter dash, so that's why I declared Cheng Wei the fastest man alive.

The current Guinness Worlds Records phrase for texting is: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human." This phrase is exactly 160 characters, which is the standard maximum size for a text message. The phrase uses 21 of the 26 letters in the alphabet, and it has a few capital letters, punctuation symbols, and a couple rare words that aren't in most dictionaries, so that's why it's a great world record phrase.

The record on the Guinness website is 25.94 seconds, which Cheng Wei broke by a couple of seconds. That old record was with predictive text, which means that they didn't have to type every one of the characters correctly, and the software made up for their mistakes. But, there's a huge problem with a predictive texting reord, and the problem is that eventually an input method in the near future is going to predict that you want to type the whole world record sentence, and so you'll only need to press one button.

How to break Swype's predictive texting world record using SwiftKey
I used this method, and I was able to get 10.43 seconds. It only took about 10 minutes of practicing, so it's easy to do. I'm sure Cheng Wei would be able to do it in about 5 seconds.

Get a fresh install of SwiftKey (the free version works for this)
Make a new Twitter account, and tweet these phrases: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they" and "of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human." (Twitter limits you to 140 characters)
On SwiftKey, choose to only learn from your Twitter account, and wait until it's done syncronizing.
Start typing the Guinness phrase with SwiftKey. You have to correct "razor - toothed" to "razor-toothed," and you have to keep typing in the first word "The," but after only about ten times, SwiftKey will predict every single word. Then you just have to press the buttons of the words that SwiftKey predicts. You still have to press a period for the end of the sentences, but that shouldn't be too big of a deal.
Post your video to YouTube, claiming that you have the fastest predictive texting record in the world.

The problem with a predictive texting world record

The folks at Guinness have a big problem with their current world record for predictive texting, which is currently held by Swype. The problem is that eventually, someone's going to build an app that predicts the entire sentence, and then it's just a race to press one button. It's bad enough that SwiftKey's latest version can predict all the words of two entire sentences with only a little training.

I suggest that Guinness use the following categories instead:

Old-school texting where you press the "2" key once for an A, twice for a B, three times for a C (currently 34.65 seconds)
Non-predictive input on a cell phone (currently held by Cheng Wei at 23.8 seconds)
Non-predictive input on a tablet
Retire the current Swype predictive texting record, and chalk it up as a Guinness oversight and failure, since eventually the record will be reduced to the time it takes to press one button, which will be about 1/9th of a second.

I tried really hard to come up with a predictive texting testing methodology. "You have to press at least half of the characters correctly." "Autocorrect can only correct half of the words." "You have to press as many buttons as there are letters in the test." Unfortunately, I don't think any of those will work, and I think there's no way to come up with a predictive texting metric that can't be easily manipulated.

Links:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Wear Pants to the Mormon Church

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 22:33:00 +0000

What is Wear Pants to Church Day? A group of LDS feminists, called All Enlist, made the third Sunday in December the official “Wear Pants to Church Day.” At first it seems strange. Why would Mormon feminists stage a protest day to wear pants to church?

The reason is that culturally, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, women cannot wear pants, and must wear either dresses or skirts. A few years back, I went to a wedding reception in a Mormon church with a friend who was unaccustomed to Mormon traditions. She wore a pantsuit, and during the reception she turned to me and said, “Was I supposed to wear a dress? I just noticed that I’m the only woman wearing a suit.” She then told me that she felt that people were looking down on her, even though she was dressed much nicer than some of the people in ratty skirts.

Officially, women can wear pants to the LDS Church, as evidenced by these official statements by the Church. “The Church has not attempted to indicate...whether they [women] should wear pant suits or other types of clothing.” (1971) “Generally church members are encouraged to wear their best clothing as a sign of respect for the Savior, but we don’t counsel people beyond that.” (2012)

There seems to be a huge disconnect between the culture and the official policy. Culturally, you can’t, but policy-wise, you can. The Mormon Church has never said, “Women are welcome to wear pants to church, and we frown on having a judgmental attitude toward people that dress differently than the way we usually do.” Instead, they've issued obscure statements that are open to interpretation and really don’t address judgmental attitudes. Rather than warmly welcoming women with pants to church, they coolly don’t prohibit them.

So far, the reaction to Wear Pants to Church Day is almost all contained in one of three polarized opinions. Here are examples of each polarization:

#1: Devout Mormons who are judgmental about people who want to wear pants to church

“I’m truly saddened that these women would belittle themselves and their roles in the Church”
“The women who organized this need to have their heads examined.”
“Maybe men will start wearing skirts to church. How will the women like that?”
“If these women want to change things to the point that they can obtain the priesthood, then they should take it up with our Heavenly Father.”
“Why would any woman, especially one in the Church of Jesus Christ (LDS) want to discard her femininity?”
“As a Mormon, the idea of a Mormon feminist makes me sick to my stomach.”
“The lord deserves the utter most respect! And I have been shocked to see lds women wanting to wear nice pants to church. I mean that's what u wear to an interview or somethin.”

#2: Non-Mormons who think that this is ridiculous:

“Who cares? Women can wear pants..even to church.”
“It seems to me that...they want a “grander role” and wearing pants to church is just the first step.”
“Most of the LDS women I know looked at this and just thought it was stupid.”
“Wearing pants to church...oh the humanity!”
“They need to start their own denomination.”
“Mormon women are discouraged from wearing slacks to church? Seriously? What’s next? 'Drive a horseless carriage to Church' day?”

#3: People who see this as a human rights issue and are avidly supportive:

“This isn’t about women wearing pants to church. It's about equal rights.”
“The scriptures, early church history and our leaders have shown us a women's equal role is in full unlimited (not separated) partnership with our brethren, in every capacity.”
“The dream is for all members of the church to not be scandalized by a woman wearing pants to church.”
“Those who support this movement are doing so because they see a need to bring awareness to the fact that there is no doctrinal basis for instructing women that a dress or skirt is the appropriate attire for church.”

I think that Wear Pants to Church day is one of the most significant cultural events to happen to Mormonism. Look through the heated opinions and ask about why this is causing such a stir. Why are so many active Mormons so bothered by this movement? Why do so many non-Mormons think this is ridiculous? Why do the avid supporters see this cultural awareness event as a human rights issue?

People who look different or don’t fit the Mormon culture, are they really welcome in the Mormon Church? I hope there’s a point in the future where the culturally different are fully accepted by Mormons, and I think that Wear Pants to Church Day is a significant start.

The people who organized this also want men to wear purple shirts to church, and allow women to pray in General Conference. But, personally, I think the next thing All Enlist should do to bring attention to a part of Mormon culture that’s not talked about much is a “Bring a Polygamist to Church Day.”

Links:

Photo: istockphoto/Zastavkin

How to simply create the Mandelbrot set on the Commodore 64

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:36:00 +0000

When I was a kid, I loved my Commodore 64 computer. Back then, I had a subscription to Compute! magazine, which listed out programs that I typed into my Commodore 64. I typed in dozens of these programs, and it usually took four evenings after school for me to type one program into the computer, and another day to debug my mistakes. The games and programs really weren't really much fun, so I only ended up playing the games for about a few hours. I spent way more time typing programs into the computer than I ever spent playing the games on the computer.

In the April 1987 Compute magazine, there was a program called Hyperscan, which rendered a picture called the Mandelbrot set. I was completely fascinated by this picture and design, because the Hyperscan program allowed me to zoom in to the Mandelbrot picture and explore the seemingly limitless detail of this image. I spend weeks with this program, and I printed out tons of different parts of the Mandelbrot set on my dot matrix printer.

I never understood what the Mandelbrot set actually was until recently, when I decided to research it. I knew that it was a very detailed picture that was created by a relatively simple formula, but the programming of Hyperscan was really complicated, so I could never figure out exactly what that supposedly simple formula was. I also knew that the Mandelbrot set uses complex numbers, which are numbers that have the square root of negative 1, or i.

Explanation of how to calculate the Mandelbrot set:
Almost all of the complexity of the formula for the Mandelbrot set is in the complex numbers. So, once you understand the math with complex numbers, and how you can plot complex numbers on a graph, the Mandelbrot set becomes pretty easy to understand.

A complex number is a number like .5+1.1i. The thing that makes this number complex is that part of it is an imaginary number, or i. i is the square root of negative 1, so you could write this complex number as .5+1.1*sqrt(-1).

The square root of negative 1 really doesn't exist, so that's why we just write i, instead. Even though i doesn't exist, then i times i, or i squared does exist, and it's just -1.

If you add two complex numbers, it's easy. So, if you add .5+1.1i to 1+1.2i, then you just add the real parts (.5 and 1) and add the imaginary parts (1.1 and 1.2), to get 1.5+2.3i.

Squaring two complex numbers is a little more complex, (a+bi)^2 is the same as (a+bi)*(a+bi), which multiplies out to a*a+a*b*i+b*i*a+b*b*i*i, which simplifies to a^2+2abi+b^2*i^2, and because i squared is negative 1, then it simplifies to a^2-b^2+2abi.

So, using our example number, (.5+1.1i)^2 = (.5)^2-(1.1)^2+2*2*1.1*i. This equals -.96+4.4i

The last concept with complex numbers is something called magnitude, which with complex numbers is also called absolute value. You use the Pythagorean theorem on the real and imaginary parts of the complex number to find this. The magnitude of a+bi is sqrt(a^2+b^2). For our example number of .5+1.1i, the magnitude is sqrt(.5^2+1.1^2), or 1.21

To graph complex numbers, you use the real part of the number as the x axis, or the horizontal axis, and you use the imaginary part of the number as the y axis, or the vertical axis. The number of .5+1.1i would correspond to the point (.5,1.1) on a regular x,y graph. On these Mandelbrot pictures, this point corresponds to the lower right corner of the graph, as the y axis is usually reversed, but since the set is a mirror image, this doesn't matter.

The upper left point of these Mandelbrot pictures is -2-1.1i, which using graphing coordinates is (-2,-1.1).

Each point in this complex plane is either part of the Mandelbrot set, or it isn't. Or another way of saying this is that any complex number that you can think of is either a part of the Mandelbrot set, or isn't. The black part in the pictures are numbers that are part of the Mandelbrot set, and the parts that aren't black aren't part of the set.

Now that we have the background in complex numbers, the Mandelbrot formula is relatively easy. It takes a complex number, which we call Z₀and we iterate it using this formula:

Z_n+1-->Z_n²+Z₀

If we iterate a complex number a bunch of times, and it turns into a super big number, then it's not part of the Mandelbrot set. If we iterate it a bunch of times, and it never gets very big, then it is part of the Mandelbrot set.

Technically, we're supposed to iterate it an infinite number of times, and if it diverges to infinity, then it's not part of the Mandelbrot set. But there are two shortcuts, so we don't actually have to do it an infinite number of times.

Shortcut #1: Once you iterate this more than about 200 times, then you stop getting very much more information. So, iterating this 200 times is about as good as iterating it an infinite number of times.
Shortcut #2: There's a theorem that figured out that if the magnitude of Z ever gets bigger than 2, while iterating, then it will always eventually get to be infinity.

So a simple way of saying the Mandelbrot equation is that you iterate Z_n+1-->Z_n²+Z₀(you square your last result, and add in the original number again) for 200 times, or until Z's magnitude gets to be greater than two. If Z's magnitude gets to be greater than 2, then you plot a light colored dot. If Z's magnitude never got to be greater than 2, then you plot a black colored dot.

If computers had complex data types, then the computer code for the Mandelbrot set would be pretty simple.

Simple pseudo-code for the Mandelbrot set calculation:
Function isMandelbrot(Z0 as Complex) As Boolean
Dim Z as Complex, Iterations as Integer
Iterations = 255
isMandelbrot = True
Do While x < Iterations
Z = Z^2 + Z0
If ABS(Z) > 2 Then
isMandelbrot = False
Exit Function
End If
x = x + 1
Loop
End Function

But, the problem with this psuedo-code is that most programming languages don't have a data type of Complex. So, we have to do the calculations that I wrote above, in a spelled out way. The good news is that this only adds a few lines of code, so it's still a pretty simple formula.

While recently researching the Mandelbrot set, I became fascinated with the lack of simple instructions that there are out there, on how to calculate this relatively simple formula. I also got really nostalgic for my old Commodore 64, so I decided to combine both. I found a really cool Commodore 64 emulator, VICE, and I relearned Commodore 64 BASIC in the quest to write some simple code that would explain the Mandelbrot set.

I present below some of the simplest Mandelbrot programs ever. The low resolution program is very low res, and produces an image that is only 40x25. The hires, or high resolution image is only 320x200. By today's standards, it would never be considered high resolution, but this does use the maximum pixels on the Commodore 64's display. I made both programs as similar as possible, so you can easily dissect and change them if you'd like.

Programming notes:

{Clear} should be entered as Shift+Home, and will display as a reverse heart.
^ does not exist on the Commodore 64 keyboard, and should be the up arrow key (not the movement key). It's located in between * and RESTORE. When entered correctly, it will display as an up arrow.
The two letters before the line numbers are Compute! magazines checksum, and are not entered. You can find instructions on how to display this checksum in any back issue of Compute! or in any of their fine books.
Instead of writing (RZ*RZ + IZ*IZ)^(0.5)>2, for the magnitude calculation, I wrote (RZ*RZ + IZ*IZ)>4, which is the same thing.

Mandelbrot function in Commodore 64 BASIC (low-resolution):
RB 90 REM **TO CHANGE THE SHAPE, CHANGE**
JR 91 REM **XL,XU,YL,YU. REPS CHANGES **
RA 92 REM **THE RESOLUTION**
DD 100 XL = -2.000:XU = 0.500
HR 110 YL = -1.100:YU = 1.100
JX 115 REPS = 20
HC 120 WIDTH = 40:HEIGHT = 25
KD 130 XINC = (XU-XL)/WIDTH
RD 140 YINC = (YU-YL)/HEIGHT
FR 200 REM MAIN ROUTINE
FM 205 PRINT "{CLEAR}"
PJ 210 FOR J = 0 TO HEIGHT - 1
EA 220 : FOR I = 0 TO WIDTH - 1
DR 230 : GOSUB 300
RR 231 : GOSUB 400
CP 240 : NEXT I
JG 250 NEXT J
SE 290 GET A$:IF A$ = "" THEN 290
MM 299 END
FM 300 REM CALCULATE MANDELBROT
BC 310 ISMND = -1
PF 312 NREAL = XL + I * XINC
RK 313 NIMG = YL + J * YINC
XS 315 RZ = 0:IZ = 0
RS 316 R2Z = 0:I2Z = 0
EQ 320 FOR K = 1 TO REPS
CC 330 : R2Z = RZ*RZ - IZ*IZ
JQ 340 : I2Z = 2*RZ*IZ
QJ 350 : RZ = R2Z+NREAL
HX 360 : IZ = I2Z +NIMG
EE 370 : IF (RZ*RZ + IZ*IZ)>4 THEN ISMND=0:K=REPS
QA 390 NEXT K
GB 399 RETURN
GB 400 REM PLOT MANDELBROT
GE 410 COUNT = I+J*WIDTH
PJ 420 POKE 1024+COUNT,160
GR 430 POKE 55296+COUNT,2 AND NOT ISMND
BH 499 RETURN

Mandelbrot function in Commodore 64 BASIC (high-resolution):
RB 90 REM **TO CHANGE THE SHAPE, CHANGE**
JR 91 REM **XL,XU,YL,YU. REPS CHANGES **
RA 92 REM **THE RESOLUTION**
DD 100 XL = -2.000:XU = 0.500
HR 110 YL = -1.100:YU = 1.100
JX 115 REPS = 20
CM 120 WIDTH = 320:HEIGHT = 200
KD 130 XINC = (XU-XL)/WIDTH
RD 140 YINC = (YU-YL)/HEIGHT
FR 200 REM MAIN ROUTINE
FM 205 PRINT "{CLEAR}"
XR 207 GOSUB 500
PJ 210 FOR J = 0 TO HEIGHT - 1
EA 220 : FOR I = 0 TO WIDTH - 1
DR 230 : GOSUB 300
BX 231 : GOSUB 600
CP 240 : NEXT I
JG 250 NEXT J
SE 290 GET A$:IF A$ = "" THEN 290
EJ 299 GOTO 700
FM 300 REM CALCULATE MANDELBROT
BC 310 ISMND = -1
PF 312 NREAL = XL + I * XINC
RK 313 NIMG = YL + J * YINC
XS 315 RZ = 0:IZ = 0
RS 316 R2Z = 0:I2Z = 0
EQ 320 FOR K = 1 TO REPS
CC 330 : R2Z = RZ*RZ - IZ*IZ
JQ 340 : I2Z = 2*RZ*IZ
QJ 350 : RZ = R2Z+NREAL
HX 360 : IZ = I2Z +NIMG
EE 370 : IF (RZ*RZ + IZ*IZ)>4 THEN ISMND=0:K=REPS
QA 390 NEXT K
GB 399 RETURN
HM 500 REM CLEAR SCREEN
BB 530 POKE53272,29:POKE53265,59
CC 540 FOR R=8192 TO 16383:POKE R,0:NEXT
QS 599 RETURN
QH 600 REM DRAW HIRES
CA 610 P=8192+INT(J/8)*320+INT(I/8)*8+(JAND7)
JE 620 IF ISMND=0 THEN POKEP,PEEK(P) OR INT(2^(7-((I/8-INT(I/8))*8)))
JF 699 RETURN
CM 700 REM RETURN TO NORMAL
QH 740 POKE 53272,21:POKE 53265,27

Mandelbrot function in Excel (VBA or Visual Basic, too):
Function isMandelbrot(NReal As Double, NImg As Double) As Boolean
Dim ZReal As Double, ZImg As Double
Dim ZReal2 As Double, ZImg2 As Double
Dim Iterations As Integer, x As Integer
Iterations = 255
isMandelbrot = True

Do While x < Iterations
ZReal2 = (ZReal) ^ 2 - (ZImg) ^ 2
ZImg2 = 2 * ZReal * ZImg

ZReal = ZReal2 + NReal
ZImg = ZImg2 + NImg

If ((ZReal) ^ 2 + (ZImg) ^ 2) > 4 Then
isMandelbrot = False
Exit Function
End If
x = x + 1
Loop
End Function

About the pretty colors you see on other Mandelbrot images:
To keep this simple, I used only two colors, black, and non-black. The most common way of doing colors is to record how many iterations before a number fails the Mandelbrot test, and map various colors to the numbers of iterations before failing the test. A common number of iterations is 255, because that usually maps well to color formulas.

Links:

Earn a lot of money by getting free tattoos

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 06:23:00 +0000

This is a business idea that will make millions. Please someone take my idea and turn it into reality. I'll be a customer.

I really like post apocalyptic or dystopian future stories, like Hunger Games, Brave New World, and Blade Runner.

Even though interesting, these dystopian societies are problematic in that they kill too many people, and are controlled by an overly heavy-handed government. Here's a way to bring dystopian elements to our lives today via a reality TV show experience that would be a lot more entertaining than Big Brother.

Summary of the business: A model gets paid for other people deciding and paying for which tattoos that she gets all over her body. This would work with a male model, too, but women would generate more money.

The average human body has 2700 square inches of tattoable skin on it (less fingernails and eyeballs). For this project to net $1,000,000 in revenues, each square inch would only need to sell for $370. This project could still be profitable if the total revenues were only $100,000, and the price per square were reduced to $37, so the risks of this business would be very minimal.

Expenses:
There are only three expenses for this business:

Tattooing.
Modeling fee. I'm sure there are dozens of beautiful people in the US who would be willing to get their body completely inked for $20,000. The more we increase the inking bounty, the more we expand our potential model base. For $200,000, we probably get thousands of people who want to get fully inked.
Digitization of the model. It would cost about $10,000 to get the model's body digitized onto a website, so that people can purchase square inches of her body for their tattoos.

Profitability:

This business will generate $1,000,000 of revenue per model, minus a maximum of $300,000 of expenses, equals $700,000 per model that gets completely inked. And that's only the guaranteed revenue from the core business, not the additional revenue from advertising and additional sales. We only need 1429 models to make a billion dollars.

Differentiation Features:
This business has a huge opportunity for massive price differentiation based on what people are willing to pay for. Here are additional things that people would pay for, in addition to the price per square inch.

Premium body space. Every part of the body will have a different price per square inch
A premium design charge if the buyer doesn't choose from the pre-selected tattoos
Charge for a signed photo of the tattoo
Charge for a video of the tattoo being inked
Charge for a live video broadcast of the tattoo being inked
Premium for company advertising, instead of individual designs
Premium for the option of 'model choice,' because this whole concept is based on the model not choosing the tattoo, but the buyer.
An exponentially greater premium for more square inches of adjacent tattoos. For example, two individual one inch tattoos in different areas would cost $370 x 2. But, put two of them together, and make the design together, and a one inch by two inch tattoo would cost $370 x 2 + $200 premium. Then a two inch by two inch tattoo would cost $370 x 4 + $800 premium. So someone that would buy the entire surface area of the body would pay a very, very high premium.
Charge for the buyer to be part of the reality TV show
Charge for a high resolution image of the pre-inked area, available immediately after purchase (encourages impulse buys), with a computer generated future predictive image of what the tattoo would look like.

Additional revenue generators:

This business would be rife with opportunities for generating additional revenue besides the core business:

Reality TV show of each model going through the whole process, from signup, to the inking, to the aftermath
Website advertising
Premium membership on the website for exclusive photos and videos
T-shirts and other premium items
Speaking engagements on talk shows

Requirements:
There are a few things that will guarantee the wild profitability of this business so it will make millions of dollars. Here they are:

The model cannot accept or reject individual tattoos, it is either a 100% or nothing deal
Besides the signing bonus, the model receives no, or very little, money until 100% of their body is tattooed. This is because the money gets refunded if the model doesn't go completely through with it.
Money is charged to the customer when a commitment to buy is made. Money is only refunded if the model does not get the tattoo.
The buyer can either choose from a bunch of pre-made designs, submit their design in a certain format, or can pay a premium for a pre-selected designer to turn their idea into a tattoo. Certain non-flat areas, like the nose, require the professional designer fee.

Notes:
Here are some other notes about the business:

The higher the percentage of the model's body that gets inked, the higher the revenue. For example, there is a big difference between completely inking someone's hands, and not. People would not pay very much for a hidden back tattoo that nobody ever sees. This plan is for 100% of the inkable area of the model's body.
Inking would probably take months, because of the time it takes tattoos to heal. This is a good thing, because it would provide a lot of material for the reality show.
The model would have to shave her head while getting tattoos, because there is a lot of profitable surface area under the hair.
This would work as both a PG13-rated business and as an R-rated business. We can still show 99% of the surface area of someone's body and keep this PG13, and it will generate a lot of money either way.

From the model's perspective:
There are a lot of people out there who want a lot of tattoos. There are also a lot of people who want a lot of cash. Someone who would be a model for this might say:

I get a signing bonus of $20,000, and then a cash payout of $200,000 when I get fully inked
I get a free full-body tattoo
I get to be famous

From the buyer's perspective:
This would appeal to people with a lot of money. People who finance this might say:

I get to decide where and what tattoo a person wears
I can buy a bunch of customizations
I can get exclusive photos and videos of someone getting inked

From the TV viewer's perspective:
This would be a fascinating viewing experience, like watching a train wreck, but no one gets hurt (besides the inking needle). People who view might say:

I can watch someone doing something super crazy
While watching, I imagine what it would be like to get totally inked
No matter who I am, this appeals to me

Who this appeals to:
Here's a detailed list of who this appeals to:

Reality TV viewers
Jackass TV viewers
Very rich people who have run out of interesting ways to blow their money
People who want to leave a permanent mark on the world (or on someone)
People with tattoo fetishes
Corporations who advertise
Everyone who likes to watch weird things happen to beautiful people, which is everyone

I like donating to charities, and I always try to donate to unique charities. Once, a friend of mine told me that I should find a charity that helps people who survive traumatic events to get tattoos to commemorate their strength. Unfortunately, there are no charities like that. Besides the one charity in New York that sponsors a tattoo festival, the only tattoo-related charities are dedicated to removing tattoos. The dearth of free tattoos out there is the reason for this idea.

One of my favorite things is to tell people, "I'll pay for your tattoo, if you tattoo my name across your chest." So far, nobody has taken me up on this. But, if somebody makes this business, then I can finally get my name permanently etched across someone's chest.

And I'm pretty sure this business would be legal.

Links:

Photo purchased on iStockphoto.

How to prevent baldness

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:26:00 +0000

There really is just one reason for baldness. The reason for baldness is certain types of stress. Exactly which types of stress cause hair loss are really hard to figure out, so that's why we don't have any relaxation techniques to restore your hair.

One thing is for sure about the stress that causes hair loss. An alpha male rarely feels this kind of stress that causes hair loss, and the lower a man feels on the male hierarchy, or the less alpha a man is, then the more of this stress that he feels. This stress causes baldness, so if you can eliminate this stress, you can ensure you will always keep your hair.

What is an alpha male, and how can you become one to ensure you keep your hair? Notice that in every group of men, there is one man who bosses the rest of the guys around. This man is not necessarily the loudest one, as men can be silently bossy, such as Don Corleone. The man who can boss the rest of the men around is the alpha male.

Men are very similar to dogs, in that there is always one dog who is the boss, the leader, the captain, of the rest of the dogs. Similarly, there is always one man who leads the rest in any group of men.

The secret to preventing baldness is to feel like you are an alpha male almost 100% of the time. Here are a few tips for accomplishing that.

Become the leader of 5-6 male friends. This is critical for being the alpha male. If you're not picky about who your friends are, any man can very easily amass 5-6 men as subordinates for friends. Just make sure that your group of friends feels that you are superior to them, and make sure you regularly boss them around. Make sure you hang out with these friends almost every day to reinforce that you are their leader.
Get a boss at work who respects you. The easiest way to shatter your illusion that you're an alpha male is to have a boss who bosses you around and demeans you. Avoid this boss at all costs. The best way is to find an old, carefree boss who doesn't care as long as the work gets done, and transfer under this boss. Compliment this boss regularly, and make sure your boss compliments you in return, so that you can reinforce the illusion that you're the alpha male. Make sure you manage a few people, and boss them around all day. Or, start your own company so that you are the boss for sure.
Make sure that your wife doesn't boss you around. The best way to accomplish this is to become such a fantastic lover that your wife is in perpetual ecstasy. Then she won't be able to focus on much else besides her state of euphoria and delight and she'll just crave more and more, and she'll forget about ever bossing you around.
Make sure that your parents don't boss you around. The best way to do this is to earn a lot of money, and pay one of your other siblings to take care of your parents. Your parents will boss around this sibling instead of you, and you'll feel superior because you're paying for your parents care.
Interpret everything that happens as that you are superior to people. If someone honks their horn at you, interpret that they're paying obeisance to your greatness. If you get junk mail, tell yourself that they're only sending you the junk mail because you're so much better than others. Take online quizzes until you get a 100% on one, and then print it out to prove that you're perfect. Everything that happens, interpret that as you being an alpha male.

If you do this one simple trick, and become an alpha male in every aspect of your life, you will stop the stress that causes hair loss, and you will stop losing hair. I guarantee it.

However, there are costs associated with this cure. I'd feel like a jerk or an asshole if I actually followed through with this advice. But, this method will work, if you really want to keep your hair at all costs. Notice that the times your hair has fallen out the most is when you felt least like an alpha male.

How do you regrow hair? I don't know, as this technique is just for prevention. All this will do is prevent further hair loss. Oh, and this only works for men.

Wikipedia article on alpha males
The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed , the best book to teach you how to be an alpha male
How to shave your head
Spray on hair

Photo purchased from iStockphoto.

Homeless people are bad karma

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 06:25:00 +0000

This is a story from a few years ago when I thought it was good to buy homeless people beer and that homeless people were always bad karma. Well, neutral karma at best. I was hanging out with a friend of mine. He's the kindest, gentlest person I know, similar to how I picture Gordon B. Hinkley or Mother Theresa. He's a really swell fella who nobody could say anything negative about.

I was leaving a restaurant with my friend, when a homeless man accosted him. I was interested to see how someone less jaded at the world than I would deal with the homeless, so I watched carefully. The homeless man said, "Got any spare change?"

My friend lied and said, "No," and got in his car.

What the homeless guy meant was, "Do you have any spare change you're willing to give to me?" But, the way he phrased it set my friend up to either lie or lose his money. Lying to homeless people is bad karma, and so probably is wasting your cash.

There is another option, which is to act like an asshole. To answer the spare change question truthfully, without giving any change, you'd have to say something like this, "I do have change. However, I choose to spend my change on something besides you." That is acting like an asshole. I guess you could just say, "Yes," and walk away, but that's being even more of an asshole.

My friend lied, but, his choices were all bad choices. They were: 1) act like an asshole, 2) lie, 3) foolishly throw away his hard-earned money. Since he picked one of them, it was bad karma.

Good karma comes from being nice, telling the truth, and spending money on something meaningful. I can't figure a way to win with homeless people. I can't even figure a way to not lose.

A homeless man hugged me once. He's also the homeless person who swindled me out of the most money.

He said to me, "Sir. Excuse me, Sir. I am very, very sorry to bother you, but..." and then he told a sad story where I assumed he was an executive from a California company who just took a bad turn in Minneapolis.

He kept talking to me about his leather jacket and how a common bum wouldn't ever wear clothing like that. He said he was really embarrassed to have to ask me for the money. Then he said something about his car being impounded and how he needed twenty bucks to un-impound his car.

His wallet and keys were locked in his car and the bums at the impound lot wouldn't even let him hire a locksmith to get his stuff out of his car until he paid the twenty bucks to get his car back.

Plus, the Minneapolis police were assholes, he said. He may have used another expletive, but I do remember him saying, "Pardon the vulgarity" as a preface to his comment about Minnesota's finest.

His story went on and on. He also told me if I were to give him the twenty bucks, then I would get it back very, very soon, because he had the money, but just didn't have current access to it.

He then referenced his leather jacket one more time.

I, being the kind of guy who always gets tricked by homeless people whenever I hear a new variation to the story, decided to give him money. I thought, "Well, if his story is true, then he will need more than just twenty bucks." I reached in my wallet and gave him forty bucks.

He smiled, tearing up, and then gave me a huge hug. He was a large man, and smothered me with his hug.

He reeked. You know the kind of reek that some people have on them and when you even get close to them, you smell their smell on you for days? You know the kind of reek where you can smell it even after you take a shower? He reeked that kind of reek.

I then knew he was actually homeless. Plus, he skipped down the street, yelling "Yippee! Yippee!"

I was left standing there, forty bucks poorer, reeking, and thinking, "Didn't he just say I would get my money back soon? Since he skipped off without even taking down my address, how's he going to get it back to me?"

As a change of subject, if I were homeless, I would drink all of the time. Homelessness is probably just like camping. I really want to like camping, but I used to hate it as a scout. My plan to make camping cool is to be drunk the whole time. If it were me, and if I were homeless, I would want to drink all the time.

This is why I strongly advocate buying alcohol for homeless people. I tried it the first time on a trip to Vegas. But, it was with some of the Utah 3.2% alcohol beer I purchased in Saint George on the way to Las Vegas, not the 7.5% beer you can get in Las Vegas. My guess is an hour later, after the homeless man drank my beer, expecting pleasant drunkenness, he was probably still sober thinking, "Oh man, I'm not drunk at all. This camping homelessness isn't any fun, man." So that probably wasn't good karma for me.

Like I said, homeless people are neutral karma at best.

Links:

Photo purchased from iStockphoto.

Smokes on a plane

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:59:00 +0000

Ever since I saw the movie Labor of Love, I always try to listen carefully to the flight attendants on the airplane, as "what they're saying really is quite important."

In particular, I always listen to the smoking stuff the flight attendants mention. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I don't smoke.

Here are some important points that all airlines make:

Federal Aviation Regulations require passenger compliance with posted placards
Federal law prohibits: tampering with, disabling, or destroying any smoke detector installed in an aircraft lavatory

My point #1: Here's something that would be against the law:

Someone taking an unopened pack of cigarettes and throwing it away in the trash can in the airplane restroom.

Inside the restroom, there's a posted placard on every trash bin that indicates, "No cigarette disposal." At first, I thought this sign was funny, because the following situation played out in my head: Someone smokes in the airplane restroom, illegally, breaking federal laws, and is left with their cigarette butt. They're about to throw it in the trash, but they see the "No cigarette disposal." Overcome with remorse, and not wanting to break another federal law, they cram the crumbly butt in their pocket, and save it for the trash cans inside the airport they'll be arriving at, so they don't break another federal law.

Upon retrospect, they really should put those posted placards on any crack or cranny that could contain a butt. They should put them on the toilet, the drain to the water basin, and the place where the paper towels are hidden, in a Seusical fashion, "Do not dispose it in the can, do not dispose it with a plan."

My point #2: Here's something that would not be against the law:

Obscuring a smoke detector. You'd have to do it very carefully, and in a way that doesn't tamper with or touch the smoke detector. You'd also have to make sure that the smoke detector was fully functional, or not disabled in any way.

The way to do this would be to attach something to the wall around the smoke detector, and completely contain the air. It would obscure the smoke detector from the rest of the air in the bathroom, while still rendering the smoke detector enabled, not tampered with, and fully functional.

Of course, you still couldn't smoke in that bathroom, because that would be a federal offense. But, there's nothing currently against the law, as far as I can tell, about obscuring an airplane restroom smoke detector.

Those are the thoughts that go through my head while the flight attendants give me their speeches about smoking.

Whether against the law or not, I discourage people from having anything to do with smokes on a plane. Except, of course, buying duty free cigarettes. Those are for sale on every international flight. I wholeheartedly encourage people to buy duty free cigarettes on airplanes, whether you smoke or not, just for the irony of it all.

Links:

Photo purchased from iStockphoto

How to live forever in 7 easy steps

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Sun, 22 May 2011 19:32:00 +0000

The smartest people I know are obsessed with living forever. I've spent the last few months learning about immortality, since I felt I needed to figure out what all the fuss is about.

I obviously assume immortality is possible, and you want to live forever. If you have a miserable life and want to die, you might want to insert the pre-step of: love yourself and love your life. I'm also assuming there are already immortals walking the Earth today, as a how-to manual is easier to write than describing an invention that doesn't yet exist.

Step 1: Replace anger and hate with love
Only the most advanced humans are going to be able to live forever. The easiest way to become advanced is to get rid of all of your anger and your hate. It's actually pretty easy to do this. Hate always results from letting anger stew around too long, and anger is always a secondary emotion.

The primary emotion behind anger is almost always embarrassment or fear. However, it's easier to say, "that guy really pisses me off," rather than, "that guy really embarrassed me last Wednesday," and so we often take the anger route rather than the emotionally mature route.

By love, I don't mean just human love. Mother nature isn't going to let folks who continually kill tons of other organisms and who generate literally tons of plastic waste per year live forever. Being an eco-friendly vegetarian doesn't guarantee you'll live forever, but it will help.

Step 2: Eliminate suppression, by feeling all of your feelings
A lot of people call this living in the moment. It's a little different and a little the same, because this means acknowledging every single feeling you have.

Feeling your feelings is a tricky balancing act, because the more you focus on an emotion, the stronger it becomes. You can test it out now, by focusing everything and all of your efforts on a small pain you have. If you're able to focus almost 100% on that pain for over 24 full hours, what was once a minor hurt will become almost unbearable. The trick is to be brutally honest with yourself with every emotion, but then quickly move on from the negative emotions to focusing on something positive that's happening now. That's where living in the present ties in.

Step 3: Learn every lesson

If you feel time is getting faster and faster, then you are slowly dying. Time speeding up for you is the biggest sign you have lessons to learn that you're not learning. Have you said lately, "This week has gone by so quickly?" or "I can't believe it's summer already!" or "Didn't 2010 just fly by?" If you say this kind of stuff, you aren't learning the lessons you should be, and time is speeding up for you so you die a quick, relatively painless death.

Contrast that to immortals. They are always learning. Jesus is a great example, since he was still learning and being tested throughout his documented history.

Step 4: Have a strong connection to a god that tells you to live forever

I'm not completely certain about this step, but I think unless God tells you that you should live forever, you're never going to muster up enough emotional intensity all by your puny mortal self to be able to pull off immortality.

To complete this step, simply find a god, ask that god to give you a witness you should be immortal, and then wait for your answer. I guess if you don't get an answer, you can keep moving on to different gods until you find one that tells you that you should be immortal.

Step 5: Nutrition
This is an optional step, as it's theoretically possible to generate everything your body needs by using the molecules of just the stuff you breathe in through the air. However, I think the only immortal who could pull this off is Jesus. The rest of us should take this step seriously.

Both Alobar and Ray Kurzweil are immortal wannabes who have dedicated a large portion of their lives to figuring out their unique nutrition and supplement profile that will maximize their chances for immortality. I think everyone, with our different bodies, has a nutrition profile unique to us that will maximize our chances at immortality. If we can figure that out, we'll have a much better shot at immortality.

As a minimum first step, take a multivitamin and a fish oil pill every day.

As a second step, find a nutrition guru like Alobar, and read everything this guru publishes, and try out all of the stuff the guru recommends.

As a third and final step, become a guru yourself, because your nutrition profile and needs are going to be at least a little different than your guru's.

Step 6: Regenerate yourself
This should be a little easier than levitating yourself, and it involves roughly the same steps. Here are the steps for both:

Become obsessed about levitation/regeneration
Learn everything you can about it
Start practicing on something that would have happened anyway. For levitation, put a piece of paper in a windy field, and using just your mind, make this paper blow away. For regeneration, when you get a small cut, practice healing yourself as rapidly as possible
Supplement your growing knowledge by intense study of areas of the brain you think are related to levitation/regeneration
Practice weird/unusual exercises to hyper-develop the parts of your brain you feel are related to levitation or regeneration
Gradually increase the intensity of levitation/regeneration until you are able to levitate yourself and others, or you are able to instantly heal or regenerate anything on yourself

If you practice every day for about 12 hours, over about a 20-year period, you should be able to easily levitate yourself. And because regeneration is easier than levitation, then regeneration should take a year or two less. And, this will be a cool step, because you'll be able to regrow hair, or de-grow hair in embarrassing areas, or build big muscles without working out, or turn your body into any shape or appearance you want it to be in.

Step 7: Insert regenerative nanotechnology into your bloodstream
This is obviously an optional step, since there are probably already immortals now without nanobots, and since this technology doesn't yet exist. All nanotechnology does is makes the above steps easier, or lets you make more mistakes on the above steps, so you can be a lot sloppier of an immortal than the immortals who really take immortality seriously.

Save up money now. These nanobots are going to be expensive.

Links:

Photo purchased from istockphoto

My mom was right, about one thing

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 07:13:00 +0000

When I was young, my mom told me I shouldn't put money in my mouth, because "you never know where that money has been."

I could alway understand that about coins. Coins get dropped in the gutters and then given back as change ten minutes later at the Seven Eleven. Coins even get fished out of the toilet and reused.

When I was young, I got a science kit for Christmas. My favorite thing from the science kit didn’t even need the science kit. I learned that if I mixed baking soda and vinegar, and then dropped my dirtiest pennies in the mix, then they come out ‘clean.’ It’s not really clean, but this shiny alien-like, neo-neon type of penny that is technically clean but is rendered completely non-penny-like.

My point is that pennies are really dirty. So, it’s obvious you shouldn't put them in your mouth.

Bills on the other hand don't get dropped in the gutter or fished out of the toilet. That's why I didn’t believe my mom about putting those in your mouth. I did see this mobster movie where there were tons of bills with blood all over them, but the nice mobsters washed the bills all clean and hung them up to dry.

The worst I could picture a dollar going through is being dropped in the mud. I've eaten dirt before and it wasn't that bad.

Then, a few months ago, I was at this strip club. The stripper was just wearing a thong.

She bent over, and this guy with a dollar bill moved her thong aside, spread her cheeks, crammed the dollar bill up to her nether regions, and twisted it back and forth, for a very, very long time. Now, I like beautiful strippers in thongs and nice behinds as much as the next guy, but something just struck me as unsettling with what I was looking at.

Suddenly my mind turned into one of those movies where a tape played fast backward through significant points in my life.

I was ten years old again, with a dollar bill crammed in my mouth, smiling sheepishly, and my mom yelling at me. 'You don’t know where that’s been! Get that thing out of your mouth!'

Links:

Photo purchased from iStockphoto.

How to buy a CR-48, and how to sell a CR-48

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:55:00 +0000

Note that I'm not encouraging you to buy or sell a CR-48, I'm just giving you info on it if you choose to do so. You should obviously check with Google before you do anything.

The CR-48 is the prototype netbook from Google for Google's new operating system, Chrome OS. Google gave out about 90,000 of these for free, but now you can't get them anymore.

Either the new Chrome OS laptops coming out late 2011 will have the sweet deal on Verizon internet that the CR-48's do, or the CR-48's will be in very very high demand later this year. In addition to this being a cool computer with a cool operating system, it turns wireless broadband from something that's ridiculously expensive to something that's very economical.

Here's a list of FAQs for buying and selling a CR-48.

FAQs:

Q: How easy is it to transfer ownership of a CR-48?
A: Extremely easy. You should do a factory reset, and then you're good to go. However, this is an optional step that's only needed if you want to get rid of the previous owner's icon on the startup screen.

Q: What if the person I buy the CR-48 from doesn't disable the administrative account?
A: There's not really an administrative account, just an owner account which can be deleted by restoring to the factory default. Because this really is a cloud computer, each person who logs in gets their own account with the exact same rights. So everybody is either an admin on the computer or a guest, depending on how you look at it, and there's no way to give any user more rights or less rights. Except for the owner account, which really doesn't do much.

Q: How do I reset the CR-48 back to factory default?
A: Take off the battery. Remove the piece of tape by the battery. Turn the switch to the left (dev mode). Replace the battery, and turn it on. Click through the frowny face screens. Turn the computer off. Take off the battery. Turn the switch to the right (regular mode). Replace the battery, and turn it on. Attempt to log in, and it will power down. Turn the computer on, and it is completely reset.

Q: If I log onto another CR-48, will it remember my extensions and passwords and stuff?
A: Yes

Q: How does the previous owner transfer ownership of the Verizon 24-month internet?
A: No transfer is needed. If you just use the previous owner's 100 MB per month, then you'll have the length remaining on the previous owner's remaining internet. However, if you ever buy more than the basic 100 MB per month, with a different account, then the whole thing will reset, and you'll get 24 more months attached to your account. I read somewhere that you can get it reset, without an additional purchase, if you call Verizon, but I think you should test out how much 1 GB of internet is.

Q: Is the Verizon 24-month internet tied to the user who first activated it?
A: Not really, it's more tied to the computer. Anyone who logs onto the CR-48 can use the Verizon 24-month internet.

Q: Is there a Verizon card that someone could take out?
A: If there is, it's deep inside the computer, and not something removable like an SD card. Someone would have to open the CR48 with a screwdriver to even see it.

Q: What are the rates for buying more internet bandwidth?
A: $20 for 1 GB, $35 for 3 GB, $50 for 5 GB, which all expire in a month, and a 1-day unlimited pass for $9.99. You should start out testing with 1 GB, because 5 GB is super hard to use in a month unless you're downloading stuff all the time, and you won't download too much with the CR-48. Also, you have to run out of internet before you can buy more, or even see what the rates are, which is kind of a pain.

Q: How much stuff can I do with 100 MB?
A: This will give you about 10 hours of light internet time, meaning everything but videos and downloads.

Q: How fast is Verizon broadband?
A: I average about 1 Mbps.

Q: Does the wireless broadband disconnect all the time?
A: No, it's very reliable. I used it as a passenger in a car driving all over New Mexico, and it only disconnected once, for about a minute.

Q: Is it easy to turn off the Cellular (Verizon) so I don't accidentally use all my allowance?
A: Yes, just click the internet icon at the top, then click "Disable Cellular"

Q: Is there a better deal anywhere on wireless broadband than what you get with a CR-48?
A: No.

Q: Which takes preference, Wi-fi (wireless internet), 3g (Verizon), or does it pick the fastest one?
A: It always uses Wi-fi when it's connected, so temporarily disable it if you have slow wifi and want to use Verizon instead.

Q: How do I sell a CR-48?
A: Either eBay or craigslist or your local classified ads. However, Google is regularly removing these, so make sure your auction is either a 1-day or 3-day auction. Buy it now with a low price is the best way. If you have a lot of positive feedback on your eBay account, you probably want to use a friend's account to sell your CR-48, so your good account doesn't get a bad status from getting your items de-listed. Also, you really should check with Google first.

Q: What's the current street value of a CR-48?
A: $350 to $450 used, $450 to $550 brand new, untouched.

Q: I see eBay auctions for CR-48s for only $100, what do you mean it costs $400-500?
A: Those cheap auctions are still in the early bidding process, and will probably even get removed. Check what auctions actually sold for. Also, some sneaky eBayers are just selling the box or a non-working laptop. Check the listing thoroughly before you buy.

Q: Is Google tracking who's buying and selling CR-48's?
A: Probably, but right now they're not doing anything but reporting and de-listing eBay listings every two weeks.

Q: What inputs and plugs does it have?
A: Only the following: VGA, SD card, USB, power, headphone/speaker, battery, developer mode switch (hidden). There's no ethernet port.

Q: Where's the right click on the CR-48?
A: It doesn't exist. You right click by either Alt+Click, or by clicking on the touchpad with two fingers instead of one. As a side note, the whole touchpad can be clicked, but it's easier if you click the bottom.

Q: How do I scroll with the touchpad on the CR-48?
A: You can't use the side of the touchpad to scroll. You have to use two fingers, anywhere on the touchpad, at the same time, to scroll.

Links:

Photo purchased from iStockphoto.

Calculator implants in the brain could happen today

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:05:00 +0000

The problem with our memory is that it is fuzzy, and it changes.

My grandma memorized a poem in her youth. The older she got, the more unmemorized that poem became. It was cute and endearing when she recited most of the poem in a somewhat jumbled fashion, but by the time I heard it, it was never a verbatim recitation. I'm sure she had that poem completely memorized for probably about twenty years of her life, before her memory started to unwind itself.

As far as I know, every single part of our brains is subject to change. That's cool, because that means that it's theoretically possible to rewire our brains in any way that we want to, and change ourselves in any way that we want to. That's uncool, though, because that means that nothing is ever for certain, and that everything in our heads may change at any time.

Here's a way to test this yourself. Count backward from 100 to 1 by threes, so 100, 97, 94, 91, and so on until you get to one. Do it again and again, and you'll notice something. You end up with a different ending number almost every time. We've all been adding and subtracting by threes since we were about five, so why can't we do a relatively simple math task like that perfectly every time? It's because no part of our brain is fixed and permanent.

I heard once that math is the most useless skill to have. Sure, it's important that 1% of our population knows math really well, but in reality, most of us don't need to know math at all. If you really need a math equation solved, you can just google it, and if you really need an answer to a math problem that google can't solve, you can just ask someone who's good in math.

The problem with math is that you have to spend years memorizing a bunch of boring stuff just to have math be any use at all, and we have very simple calculators with reliable formulas inside that bypass the need for any math memorization and really make the need for learning math obsolete.

But, what if our brains all included an unchangeable calculator? Maybe math wouldn't be so useless then.

If we could just think and instantly figure out the probability of beating the dealer in blackjack with our current hand, then maybe math would be worthwhile.

If we had math so integrated into our brains, that we could shoot pool, and know for 100% certain where the balls were going to go, then maybe math would be worthwhile.

If we could go to the grocery store and instantly be able to figure out which stuff is the cheapest per ounce, then maybe math would be worthwhile.

Calculator implants in the brain should be relatively easy to do. They're already implanting computers into the brains of paraplegics to allow them to move stuff with their thoughts. And I'm sure that a basic calculator is much, much less complicated than wireless robot technology, because even a relatively complex calculator is only about 5 kilobytes of information. That's just as much information as is in the text of this article, which is not much. You'd probably only need to connect the tiny calculator in and out of the brain with a couple of connections, which means it would be a relatively simple surgery.

Why a calculator? Because it's the best combination of simplicity and usefulness in something that we could program and permanently put in our heads

The cool thing will be once our brains start to rewire themselves around the implanted calculator. Then we could do some truly amazing things, that would only be indirectly related to math but would use the brain math calculator heavily. Pro golfers could hit holes in one almost every time. Bowling wouldn't be the super frustrating sport that it is today. Poker would be elevated to a whole new level. You'd be able to tell if a piece of furniture would fit through a door before you moved it up the stairs. You'd never accidentally mess up a recipe you were doubling. And, finally, math would get some credit.

All of this can happen with something the size of a piece of glitter in our heads.

Boring math calculations for the size of a brain calculator:

A Blu-ray disc weighs about 20 grams, has a surface area of 113 cm^2, and contains about 50 gigabytes of information.
You can make a simple calculator with 5 kilobytes of information.
With current technology, it would be possible to make a calculator that weighs 1.9 micrograms and is 32x32 micrometers wide.
That's a square where one side is a little smaller than the width of your hair, or like a super small piece of glitter, so basically this calculator would be so small you couldn't see it, unless it was glittery.

Links:

The entire ROM of a HP-35 calculator, which can do multiplication, square roots, logarithms, sines, and tangents, which is somewhere between 1 kilobyte and 5 kilobytes
The wikipedia link for the HP-35 calculator, one of the earliest calculators that did a lot of math
Brain implants in quadrapaligics, interesting thing they're trying
Complex math equation that you can just google

Photo purchased from istockphoto.

Venusforming‭ ‬Earth

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:46:00 +0000

There‭ ‬are‭ ‬microbes‭ ‬that‭ ‬exist‭ ‬in‭ ‬200+‭ ‬degree‭ ‬temperatures‭ ‬in‭ ‬sea‭ ‬volcanoes‭ ‬here‭ ‬on‭ ‬Earth,‭ ‬so‭ ‬it‭'‬s‭ ‬not‭ ‬unthinkable‭ ‬that‭ ‬something‭'‬s‭ ‬alive‭ ‬on‭ ‬Venus.‭ ‬But‭ ‬if‭ ‬it‭ ‬is‭ ‬alive,‭ ‬it‭'‬s‭ ‬definitely‭ ‬different‭ ‬than‭ ‬us.

If‭ ‬there‭ ‬were‭ ‬life‭ ‬on‭ ‬Venus,‭ ‬then‭ ‬it‭ ‬would‭ ‬have‭ ‬to‭ ‬survive‭ ‬in‭ ‬the‭ ‬tough‭ ‬Venusian‭ ‬environment.

Venus‭ ‬is‭ ‬completely‭ ‬uninhabitable‭ ‬for‭ ‬us‭ ‬humans,‭ ‬for‭ ‬a‭ ‬few‭ ‬reasons.

Days ‏on‭ ‬Venus‭ ‬last‭ ‬243‭ ‬days,‭ ‬meaning‭ ‬nights‭ ‬would‭ ‬be‭ ‬worse‭ ‬than‭ ‬winters‭ ‬in‭ ‬Alaska
There‎'‏s‭ ‬no‭ ‬magnetic‭ ‬field‭ ‬on‭ ‬Venus,‭ ‬so‭ ‬your‭ ‬compass‭ ‬wouldn‭'‬t‭ ‬work,‭ ‬plus‭ ‬you‭'‬d‭ ‬get‭ ‬radiated‭ ‬to‭ ‬death‭ ‬by‭ ‬solar‭ ‬flares‭ ‬a‭ ‬few‭ ‬times‭ ‬a‭ ‬month
The‎ ‏atmosphere‭ ‬is‭ ‬96%‭ ‬carbon‭ ‬dioxide‭ ‬and‭ ‬about‭ ‬0%‭ ‬oxygen,‭ ‬so‭ ‬you‭ ‬couldn‭'‬t‭ ‬breathe
The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus is 90 times more than earth (90 atms), so you'd be crushed to death just by the air
Oh,‎ ‏and‭ ‬it‭'‬s‭ ‬over‭ ‬400‭ ‬degrees‭ ‬there.‭ ‬So‭ ‬your‭ ‬egg‭ ‬would‭ ‬fry‭ ‬before‭ ‬you‭ ‬could‭ ‬crack‭ ‬it,‭ ‬which‭ ‬means‭ ‬you‭ ‬could‭ ‬only‭ ‬get‭ ‬hard-boiled‭ ‬eggs‭ ‬on‭ ‬Venus.‭ ‬Plus‭ ‬you‭ ‬would‭ ‬melt‭ ‬like‭ ‬a‭ ‬marshmallow‭ ‬in‭ ‬a‭ ‬microwave.

This gave me an idea for what I think would be an interesting story, so fast‭ ‬forward‭ ‬to:

March‭ ‬2015:‭ ‬Scientists‭ ‬discover‭ ‬a‭ ‬ginormous‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬about‭ ‬as‭ ‬far‭ ‬away‭ ‬from the Earth as‭ ‬Jupiter is,‭ ‬but it's headed‭ ‬directly‭ ‬toward‭ ‬Venus.‭ ‬It‭ ‬will‭ ‬pass‭ ‬by‭ ‬far‭ ‬from‭ ‬earth,‭ ‬but‭ ‬it‭ ‬appears‭ ‬that‭ ‬it‭'‬s‭ ‬headed‭ ‬on‭ ‬a‭ ‬direct‭ ‬collision‭ ‬course‭ ‬with‭ ‬Venus.‭ ‬Most‭ ‬news‭ ‬stories‭ ‬focus‭ ‬on‭ ‬whether‭ ‬or‭ ‬not‭ ‬the‭ ‬resulting‭ ‬Venusian‭ ‬dust‭ ‬cloud‭ ‬from‭ ‬the Venus‭ ‬impact‭ ‬will‭ ‬affect‭ ‬Earth,‭ even though the‭ ‬projected‭ ‬path‭ ‬of‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬is‭ ‬far‭ ‬from‭ ‬Earth.‭ ‬Some‭ ‬enviro-friendly‭ ‬people‭ ‬suggest‭ ‬that‭ ‬we‭ ‬do‭ ‬something‭ ‬to‭ ‬alter‭ ‬the‭ ‬course‭ ‬of‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid,‭ ‬but‭ ‬the‭ ‬President‭ ‬of‭ ‬the‭ ‬US‭ ‬announces‭ ‬that‭ ‬we‭ ‬won‭'‬t‭ ‬do‭ ‬anything‭ ‬about‭ ‬it,‭ ‬because‭ ‬it‭ ‬won‭'‬t‭ ‬impact‭ ‬earth‭ ‬and‭ ‬it‭ ‬would‭ ‬be‭ ‬too‭ ‬expensive‭ ‬to‭ ‬do‭ ‬something‭.‭ (‬This‭ ‬shows‭ ‬that‭ ‬we‭ ‬humans‭ ‬are‭ ‬insensitive‭ ‬to‭ ‬stuff‭ ‬that‭ ‬doesn‭'‬t‭ ‬affect‭ ‬us.‭)

November,‭ ‬2015: (six months later)‭ ‬A‭ ‬few‭ ‬weeks‭ ‬before‭ ‬impact‭ ‬with‭ ‬Venus,‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬starts‭ ‬reacting‭ ‬to‭ ‬what‭ ‬seems‭ ‬to‭ ‬be‭ ‬an‭ ‬anti-gravitational‭ ‬or‭ ‬magnetic‭ ‬force‭ ‬emanating‭ ‬from‭ ‬the‭ ‬Venus.‭ ‬The‭ ‬planet‭ ‬Venus‭ ‬appears‭ ‬to‭ ‬be‭ ‬magnetically‭ ‬affecting‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid.‭ ‬This‭ ‬is‭ ‬somewhat‭ ‬ironic,‭ ‬since‭ ‬Venus‭ ‬doesn‭'‬t‭ ‬have‭ ‬magnetic‭ ‬poles,‭ ‬like‭ ‬Earth.‭ ‬The‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬barely‭ ‬clears‭ ‬Venus,‭ ‬skimming‭ ‬its‭ ‬atmosphere,‭ ‬and‭ ‬unexpectedly‭ ‬hurls‭ ‬back,‭ ‬directly‭ ‬toward‭ ‬earth.‭

This‭ ‬time,‭ ‬we‭ ‬do‭ ‬everything‭ ‬possible‭ ‬to‭ ‬stop‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid.‭ ‬Scientists‭ ‬project‭ ‬it‭ ‬will‭ ‬land‭ ‬on‭ ‬Los‭ ‬Angeles,‭ ‬and‭ ‬this‭ ‬will‭ ‬be‭ ‬a‭ ‬dinosaur-extinction-level‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬disaster.

January,‭ ‬2016: (two months later)‭ ‬Everything‭ ‬we‭ ‬shoot‭ ‬at‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬gets‭ ‬deflected‭ ‬around‭ ‬it.‭ ‬We‭ ‬try‭ ‬a‭ ‬bunch‭ ‬of‭ ‬stuff,‭ ‬like‭ ‬in‭ ‬that‭ ‬movie,‭ ‬but‭ ‬we‭'‬re‭ ‬thwarted‭ ‬at‭ ‬every‭ ‬turn,‭ ‬by‭ ‬what‭ ‬seems‭ ‬to‭ ‬be‭ ‬an‭ ‬invisible‭ ‬force‭ ‬emanating‭ ‬from‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid.‭ ‬The‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬starts‭ ‬gradually‭ ‬changing‭ ‬its‭ ‬course,‭ ‬so‭ ‬that‭ ‬the‭ ‬new‭ ‬projected‭ ‬impact‭ ‬point‭ ‬is‭ ‬anywhere‭ ‬between‭ ‬LA‭ ‬and‭ ‬Japan,‭ ‬and‭ ‬this‭ ‬is‭ ‬hotly‭ ‬debated‭ ‬by‭ ‬different‭ ‬scientists‭ ‬and‭ ‬astronomers.‭ ‬We‭ ‬start‭ ‬preparing‭ ‬the‭ ‬coastal‭ ‬cities‭ ‬for‭ ‬the‭ ‬worst‭ ‬tidal‭ ‬waves‭ ‬ever.

March,‭ ‬2016: (two months later)‭ ‬Right‭ ‬before‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬impacted‭ ‬Earth,‭ ‬it‭ ‬did‭ ‬some‭ ‬really‭ ‬weird‭ ‬stuff‭ ‬with‭ ‬its‭ ‬impact‭ ‬angle,‭ ‬and‭ ‬started‭ ‬spinning‭ ‬really,‭ ‬really‭ ‬quickly.‭ ‬Scientists‭ ‬were‭ ‬able‭ ‬to‭ ‬develop‭ ‬mathematical‭ ‬models‭ ‬for‭ ‬how‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬strangely‭ ‬behaved,‭ ‬so‭ ‬everyone‭ ‬still‭ ‬thinks‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬is‭ ‬a‭ ‬natural‭ ‬phenomenon.‭ ‬When‭ ‬it‭ ‬impacted,‭ ‬it‭ ‬hit‭ ‬Hawaii,‭ ‬but‭ ‬because‭ ‬of‭ ‬its‭ ‬spin,‭ ‬it‭ ‬had‭ ‬a‭ ‬ricocheting‭ ‬effect,‭ ‬so‭ ‬it‭ ‬actually‭ ‬hit‭ ‬and‭ ‬re-hit‭ ‬the‭ ‬earth,‭ ‬causing‭ ‬what‭ ‬felt‭ ‬like‭ ‬earthquake‭ ‬after‭ ‬earthquake,‭ ‬felt‭ ‬worldwide,‭ ‬for‭ ‬about‭ ‬two‭ ‬days.‭ ‬During‭ ‬the‭ ‬two‭ ‬days‭ ‬of‭ ‬earthquakes,‭ ‬everyone‭ ‬is‭ ‬pressed‭ ‬up‭ ‬against‭ ‬a‭ ‬wall,‭ ‬if‭ ‬they‭'‬re‭ ‬inside.‭ ‬Stuff‭ ‬outside‭ ‬that‭ ‬wasn‭'‬t‭ ‬nailed‭ ‬down‭ ‬moves ‬dozens‭ ‬and‭ ‬sometimes‭ ‬hundreds‭ ‬of‭ ‬miles‭ ‬away.

Three‭ ‬days‭ ‬later:‭ Very‭ ‬surprisingly,‭ ‬most‭ ‬buildings‭ ‬are‭ ‬still‭ ‬standing,‭ ‬almost‭ ‬everyone‭ ‬is‭ ‬still‭ ‬alive.‭ ‬The‭ ‬tidal‭ ‬waves‭ ‬ended‭ ‬up‭ ‬not ‬being‭ ‬all‭ ‬that‭ ‬bad,‭ ‬either.‭ ‬New‭ ‬Orleans‭ ‬got‭ ‬the‭ ‬worst‭ ‬of‭ ‬it,‭ ‬since‭ ‬they‭ ‬never‭ ‬put‭ ‬great‭ ‬levies‭ ‬in‭ ‬there.‭ ‬True,‭ ‬it‭'‬s‭ ‬the‭ ‬worst‭ ‬natural‭ ‬disaster‭ ‬since‭ ‬probably‭ ‬when‭ ‬the‭ ‬dinosaurs‭ ‬got‭ ‬destroyed,‭ ‬so‭ ‬things‭ ‬are‭ ‬pretty‭ ‬bad,‭ ‬but‭ ‬almost‭ ‬everyone‭ ‬is‭ ‬thankful‭ ‬they‭'‬re‭ ‬still‭ ‬alive.

The‭ ‬weird‭ ‬thing‭ ‬is‭ ‬that‭ ‬the‭ ‬sun‭ ‬never‭ ‬sets.‭ (‬At‭ ‬least‭ ‬for‭ ‬us‭ ‬Americans.‭)

May,‭ ‬2016:‭ (two months later) ‬After‭ ‬we‭ ‬get‭ ‬the‭ ‬power‭ ‬back‭ ‬on,‭ ‬we‭ ‬realize‭ ‬that‭ ‬the‭ ‬only‭ ‬real‭ ‬impact‭ ‬of‭ ‬the‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬was‭ Earth‭'‬s‭ ‬rotation‭ ‬has‭ ‬been‭ ‬slowed‭ ‬to‭ ‬a‭ ‬crawl.‭ ‬Well,‭ ‬that‭ ‬and‭ ‬a‭ ‬huge‭ ‬volcano‭ ‬close‭ ‬to‭ ‬the‭ ‬north‭ ‬pole‭ ‬that‭'‬s‭ ‬now‭ ‬even‭ ‬taller‭ ‬than‭ ‬Mount‭ ‬Everest,‭ ‬due‭ ‬to‭ ‬shifting‭ ‬of‭ ‬the‭ ‬tectonic‭ ‬plates,‭ ‬scientists‭ ‬say.‭ ‬The‭ ‬equator,‭ ‬which‭ ‬used‭ ‬to‭ ‬rotate‭ ‬at‭ ‬over‭ ‬a‭ ‬thousand‭ ‬miles‭ ‬per‭ ‬hour,‭ ‬now‭ ‬only‭ ‬rotates‭ ‬at‭ ‬about‭ ‬6‭ ‬miles‭ ‬an‭ ‬hour.‭ ‬This‭ ‬means‭ ‬a‭ ‬new‭ ‬day‭ ‬will‭ ‬last‭ ‬about‭ ‬a‭ ‬year.

Needless‭ ‬to‭ ‬say,‭ ‬GPS‭ ‬devices‭ ‬no‭ ‬longer‭ ‬work.

May,‭ ‬2018: (two years later)

The‭ ‬new‭ ‬volcano,‭ ‬which‭ ‬we‭ ‬called‭ ‬Mount‭ ‬Vesuvius,‭ ‬put‭ ‬a‭ ‬bunch‭ ‬of‭ ‬stuff‭ ‬into‭ ‬the‭ ‬atmosphere,‭ ‬so‭ ‬that‭ ‬scientists‭ ‬say‭ ‬that‭'‬s‭ ‬why‭ ‬the‭ ‬days‭ ‬don‭'‬t‭ ‬boil‭ ‬us‭ ‬and‭ ‬the‭ ‬nights‭ ‬don‭'‬t‭ ‬freeze‭ ‬us.‭ ‬Plus‭ ‬as‭ ‬a‭ ‬weird‭ ‬aftereffect,‭ ‬the‭ ‬winds‭ ‬in‭ ‬the‭ ‬upper‭ ‬atmosphere‭ ‬blow‭ ‬almost‭ ‬a‭ ‬thousand‭ ‬miles‭ ‬an‭ ‬hour,‭ ‬even‭ ‬though‭ ‬winds‭ ‬on‭ ‬the‭ ‬surface‭ ‬have‭ ‬slowed‭ ‬down‭ ‬considerably.

Life‭ ‬is‭ ‬pretty‭ ‬much‭ ‬the‭ ‬same‭ ‬except‭ ‬days‭ ‬last‭ ‬130‭ ‬days.‭ ‬And‭ ‬nights‭ ‬last‭ ‬130‭ ‬days‭ ‬also.‭ ‬So‭ ‬most‭ ‬of‭ ‬the‭ ‬technological‭ ‬development‭ ‬of‭ ‬the‭ ‬last‭ ‬two‭ ‬years‭ ‬was‭ ‬focused‭ ‬on‭ ‬how‭ ‬we‭ ‬can‭ ‬grow‭ ‬food‭ ‬on‭ ‬the‭ ‬bright‭ ‬side‭ ‬of‭ ‬the‭ ‬world‭ ‬and‭ ‬transport‭ ‬it‭ ‬to‭ ‬the‭ ‬dark‭ ‬side‭ ‬of‭ ‬the‭ ‬world.

This‭ ‬is‭ ‬also‭ ‬the‭ ‬same‭ ‬month‭ ‬we‭ ‬discover‭ ‬another‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬headed‭ ‬on‭ ‬a‭ ‬collision‭ ‬course‭ ‬with‭ ‬Venus.

May‭ ‬2019: (one year later)

The‭ ‬same‭ ‬thing‭ ‬happens‭ ‬with‭ ‬this‭ ‬asteroid‭ ‬as‭ ‬with‭ ‬the‭ ‬first‭ ‬one. It barely misses Venus, skimming its surface, and turns back on a collision course for Earth.‭ ‬The‭ ‬only‭ ‬difference‭ is this‭ ‬one‭ ‬misses‭ the ‬Earth‭ ‬and‭ ‬becomes a‭ ‬secondary‭ ‬satellite‭ ‬to‭ ‬our‭ ‬planet. The effect of this satellite is that 95% of the time, the Earth’s magnetic field is neutralized.

Solar flares severely affect Earth now. People don’t want to go outside, because skin gets fried pretty easily now, and electrical stuff only works about half the time.

June 2019: (one month later)

It’s pretty obvious now that these two asteroids weren’t accidents, and something in Venus is trying to transform Earth into a Venus-like environment. We react to this in just about every way possible. The people who have been saying this since the first asteroid hit instantly become celebrities. We start sending peace messages to Venus. India launches a nuke at Venus, but before it hits, some force pushes it so the bomb goes around Venus and heads toward the dead of space. People start praying to the gods and goddesses of Venus.

June 2025: (six years later)

Life has been pretty much the same for years. Lots of people died, because of the problems of transporting food around the globe, but we fixed enough of them so most of the Earth’s population is still alive.

In this month, where Hawaii once was, this massive bubbling, or boiling comes up out of the water. We find that it’s ice-cold carbon dioxide vapor, and that something or someone is turning the oceans and the biomass in the oceans into carbon dioxide and this kind of salt-like substance.

September 2025: (three months later)
The carbon dioxide vapor has kept coming, so much that it’s very hard to breath, so almost everyone who can afford it is wearing supplemental oxygen devices. The atmospheric pressure is rising rapidly, and so are the carbon dioxide levels, but surprisingly because the vapor steaming out of the ocean is super cold, it stabilizes the Earth's temperature. So the temperature has basically been the same as it always has. So much for all of the greenhouse effect warnings we heard over the years. We’d stopped trying to make contact with Venus the last few years, but with the carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, everyone starts trying to make contact with Venus again.

December 2025: (three months later)
The temperature starts to rapidly rise, because of a massive greenhouse effect. We try to stop the oceans from boiling, but find that it’s being done by this kind of indestructible nanotechnology that will turn pretty much anything into carbon dioxide. Most people think that the Venusians just can’t see us, and so we focus most efforts on experimental technologies and communication methods, trying to tell the Venusians that we’re alive and we want to keep living.

January 2026: (one month later)
We start to die, some from heat, some from lack of oxygen, some from being pressurized to death, and some from starvation. We did shoot a few pods off into space with cryogenically frozen humans in hopes of preserving humanity, and also so this story isn’t ultimately depressing.

January 2126: (ten years later)
Venusforming of Earth is complete.

January 2226: (one hundred years later)
Venus explodes.

January 4226: (two thousand years later)
Beneficent and advanced aliens find the pods and construct a new Earth for us. Or at least for the ten humans they saved from the pods.

The End.

This is a plot outline of a movie I think would be cool. Hopefully someone takes it and turns it into a book or a movie. If you need a moral, it’s that maybe we should be thinking now about how life might exist in forms that are much different than us. Almost all of us believe we have souls that are alive, yet those souls are as strange and elusive as the aliens in my story who couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see them.

Links:

Photo purchased from istockphoto.

How to play the longest word in English possible, in Scrabble, ethylenediaminetetraacetates

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 07:32:00 +0000

Why is ethylenediaminetetraacetates the longest word in Scrabble? There are other longer, more popular words, like floccinaucinihilipilification, the act of esteeming something as worthless, antidisestablishmentarianism, which is wanting to keep the Church of England together, the Mary Poppins originated word of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and that one volcano ash lung disease condition, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

Before I answer that, here's how to play ethylenediaminetetraacetates:

play THY
turn THY into ETHYL
skip 1 space and play NE
skip 2 spaces and play AM
turn AM into AMIN
skip 1 space and play TET
skip 2 spaces and play ACE
turn ACE into ACETATE
turn ACETATE into ACETATES
turn ETHYL-NE--AMIN-TET--ACETATES into ETHYLENEDIAMINETETRAACETATES

It's a hard word to play in Scrabble because none of its obvious compound words of ethylenediamine, diaminetetra, and tetraacetates are words. What is ethylenediaminetetraacetates? It's the conjugate base of ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid or EDTA, which is some kind of industrial compound.

The longest word that anyone's actually heard of is electroencephalographically, which is a form of electroencephalograph, an EEG, which is when they put a bunch of wires on your head and the read your brain waves.

How to play electroencephalographically:

play EL
turn EL into ELECT
turn ELECT into ELECTRO
skip 6 spaces and play AL
skip 1 space and play GRAPH
turn ELECTRO------AL-GRAPH into ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPH
add IC for ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIC
add ALLY for ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHICALLY

However, both of those words don't fit on a regular 15x15 Scrabble board. They're only theoretically possible, because The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary only has 7 and 8 letter words as the longest words, and the official Scrabble dictionary says, "Words that exceed eight letters in length and are not inflected forms of words entered in this dictionary should be looked up in a standard dictionary. The National SCRABBLE® Association recommends Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, as a reference for additional words." And, the longest word in that referenced lexical tome is ethylenediaminetetraacetates. So, that's the answer to the question above. That means you'll either need to play this on Super Scrabble Max Ultimate® which only exists in the future, or find an online word game like Word2 or Lexulous.

So, what's the longest word that you can actually play on a real Scrabble board? Actually, there are thousands. Because of all of the crazy words allowed in the Scrabble dictionary, there's a theoretically possible way to play almost every possible 15-letter word. I did an in-depth analysis where I analyzed each of the possible words based on their letter frequency, and found that interpenetrated or interpenetrates is the easiest word to play, based just on letter frequency.

How to play interpenetrates or interpenetrated:

play IN
skip 3 letters and play PEN
skip 2 letters and play RATE
turn PEN--RATE into PENETRATE
turn IN---PENETRATE into INTERPENETRATE
add a D or an S for the glorious finish

Based on my mathematical analysis of Scrabble letter frequency, the following 15-letter words will be the easiest to play in Scrabble, out of about two thousand possible 15-letter words. Of course getting both wild tiles will help a lot. Because Scrabble has so many allowed crazy 2- and 3-letter words, you should be able to make all of these. For example, MO, LO, and RE are all allowed Scrabble words.

And the hardest 15-letter words to play in Scrabble, based on letter frequency are PSYCHOLOGICALLY and PSYCHOPATHOLOGY.

Links:

Image purchased from istockphoto

A literal interpretation of the Bible, and the Fermi paradox

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 23:37:00 +0000

According to some literal interpretations of the Bible, the world is only a few thousand years old.

Here's the math. One day to God is like 1,000 years. God created the world in six days plus one day of rest. That equals 7,000 years. Then Adam and Eve were born or hatched or created about 4,000 BC, and we're all currently at 2,011 AD, so that's 6,011 more years, so Earth has been around for 13,011 years, as far as I can tell. Please note that I didn't actually consult a Bible in coming up with this literal interpretation of the Bible.

The Fermi paradox basically says that it's paradoxical that we haven't yet found evidence of aliens. Assuming there are trillions of aliens on thousands, if not millions, of planets in our galaxy, why haven't we seen any yet? That's the paradox.

Another way of asking Fermi's antinomy is, why hasn't SETI, the alien-hunter organization who's scanning the skies for radio waves from distant planets, found any alien radio waves with alien signals? As Khan said, "Let them eat static!" So far, after years of listening to radio waves, all the SETI folks have heard is static.

If we consider a literal interpretation of the Bible, we have an answer for the Fermi paradox.

But, first, I should explain how Earth can be only thirteen thousand years old, when we have hard evidence, in the way of fossils and other rocks, that proves Earth is millions or billions of years old. God actually created Earth in only one thousand years. The rest of the time, God spent making plants and humans and stuff. So, to create Earth in a thousand years, he couldn't have used volcanoes and tectonic plates and all of that other stuff that scientists talk about. God must have a huge Earth-O-Matic™ machine that he used to fabricate Earth. Think about it, if God's all powerful, then he can certainly build a Jupiter-sized factory somewhere in the galaxy that makes to-scale models of Earth, starting with just digital plans and a lot of spare matter, and make this Earth complete with fossils that seem millions of years old, and a bunch of fossil fuels ready for our use, and accomplish all that in only a thousand years.

This means that dinosaurs didn't really exist. There simply wasn't time enough for God to let them roam around and evolve. At least on this earth.

Somewhere, sometime, in another solar system, billions or trillions of years ago, dinosaurs probably existed. But as soon as God got the Earth evolution template correct, complete with fossil fuels, he probably digitized that planet, and sent the plans back to his Jupiter-sized factory, and started mass producing these perfect Earth planets. One of those, our Earth, got delivered to our solar system. And within a few of God's long days, Adam and Eve were busy getting busy.

This should explain every inconsistency between science and a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Back to the Fermi paradox. Obviously God doesn't want us to interact with aliens, for some divine reason. So, after he created Earth, he whisked it away to a solar system that had the least likelihood of receiving radio waves from inhabited planets. God obviously has the most powerful computer available to any being in the universe, so he could have easily done the calculation on which solar system in the whole galaxy would be least prone to pesky alien radio waves.

Thus, the answer to the Fermi paradox, which is that God put us in a very statistically unlikely position in the galaxy to be able to communicate with aliens.

Links:

Photo purchased from iStockphoto.

I'm trying to be like Jesus

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 06:57:00 +0000

I won a poker game in a bar last week and got fifty bucks. Winning poker seems exciting, but I'm trying to avoid gambling addiction, so I have this vow to not keep any money that I win when gambling. My logic is that if I can never win and if I always lose when I gamble, even if I win, then it's really not gambling, and I'll never get addicted.

So, I decided to give away the fifty dollars I won.

I like convenience stores, and usually folks who work at convenience stores make only a stitch more than minimum wage. My plan was to drive down the street, stop at the first convenience store I saw, and give the gas station attendant my filthy lucre.

As I drove up to the first gas station, I could see through the window that the cashier was a dude. I decided that wouldn't be any fun, so I changed my rules a bit. I drove hurriedly away without going inside.

I could see there was a female cashier inside the next gas station, so I parked my car and walked inside.

The person behind the counter was really closed up. She just didn't seem friendly at all. This was the first strike against her. Usually if I give something to someone, I'd like them to appreciate it, and this woman seemed like she wasn't ever going to appreciate anything for a very long time. I started to think I'd do what I did at the first gas station and change my rules a bit and then go from station to station until I found someone who wasn't so mad at life, but I decided to play this out just a little longer.

Besides me in the gas station, there was a couple shopping. They both had some kind of disability, and they were taking a very long time to finalize their purchases. I wanted to be the only person in the store when I dropped off my gift, as that's another one of my gifting rules.

Waiting, I stared at sodas, pretended to be deciding what I wanted, as long as I thought was feasible, without appearing suspicious.

But the couple wasn't budging, so I grabbed a soda and walked to the counter.

The couple must have done something funny, or maybe the cashier didn't like people with disabilities, because she derisively said, “Some people!” and looked at me with an approval-soliciting sneer.

That was the second strike against her. First, she had a bad attitude, and second, she made fun of people with disabilities.

If it had been a month ago, I would have only paid for the soda and then walked out because of her two strikes. But something snapped inside of my head, because I've been reading about Jesus.

I counted out exact change for the soda, and said, “This is for the soda.”

I then gave her the fifty I won in poker and said, “and this is for you for a Christmas present.”

She said, “What?”

I started walking away while I said, “Well, I won it in a poker game, and I can't keep it because of my um vow to not keep gambling winnings, and um, um.”

She said, “What? Are you serious?”

I said, “I'm serious, merry Christmas,” and I left. While I was leaving, she said a couple other things out loud trying to comprehend my random gift, but then I was gone.

Of all the stuff she mumbled back, she never said thank you, which I thought was interesting, but also fitting.

I drove off with a smile, and thought about what happened.

Avoiding gambling addictions wasn't being like Jesus. Giving away fifty bucks wasn't being like Jesus. Randomly picking someone to give money to wasn't being like Jesus. Gifting money to someone I thought was probably poor wasn't being like Jesus. Doing those things was probably more like a Buddhist.

The thing that was like Jesus was breaking the laws I had in my head of who deserved my charity. As far as I can tell, Jesus' main message was that even though you have a bunch of rules you follow that make you think you're a good person, there's still a lot higher you can stretch yourself and there's still a lot better a person you can be.

It was a really cool experience, because if I hadn't been reading about Jesus in the last month, I would have missed all that.

On the other hand, cleaning out the figurative temple during the poker game was probably a little like Jesus, too.

Links:

Photo purchased from istockphoto

The hot debate about computerized cars

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 06:45:00 +0000

I watched the president of Google talk, and he was talking about computerized cars. These are cars with sensors and software that can drive instead of the driver. He basically said that the car software is really buggy right now, but gave the example of someone who's completely drunk, driving home. He said right now the buggy software is a better driver than a drunk.

Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, said Europe is going to adopt computerized cars before the US, because of the future overage of lawsuits in the US, preventing these cars from being on American soil even though safe computerized car technology will exist.

I think it's really interesting how people react violently to violent car death. People horrifically dying is super sad. The interesting thing is there's nowhere, really, to put the emotions, and there are tons of emotions.

It's kind of like people with memory loss getting totally obsessed about their lost memories.

When someone dies violently in a car, I've seen people ask the unanswerable question of, “Why?” They then try to come up with a reason, any reason. It's interesting how quickly and emotionally the answers get slapped together.

Everyone involved in this hurried diagnosis has the best of intentions.

Mothers don't want other mothers to go through the same thing they're going through. Or maybe they're exhibiting mama bear syndrome and trying to kill the thing that hurt their kid.

Kids at the school of their deceased compeer get temporarily derailed from leaning toward anarchy and take up another, just cause.

The churches want their parishioners alive so they can do what parishioners do more.

And, I'm guessing well-meaning police officers, who want to send a cautionary warning, look through the autopsy reports and see an extremely low alcohol content in one of the victims and release to the press the verbiage of “alcohol contributed to a fatal crash.”

This quotation gives an answer to “why?” and gives people a direction to focus their tidal wave of energy. I'm just not sure it's the most effective thing we could be doing. I think most people who get totally hammered and drive are feeling at least a little suicidal.

It's only a matter of time before someone gets run over by a computerized car, and angry mothers change the direction of their fury from alcohol to software.

But here's the happy ending to the story. A guy staggers out of the bar, 20 years from now, completely wasted. He steals a couple of cement bricks and puts them on the driver's seat so his car will start. He presses the autopilot button, crawls into the back seat, and goes to sleep.

And the computerized car drives the drunk safely, and uneventfully, home.

Links:

Photo purchased on istockphoto

I love the Big Mac sandwich

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:00:00 +0000

I remember a time before I ever had a Big Mac sandwich.

I was a kid, eating a Happy Meal at McDonald's. I was eating a flat hamburger. This was a time before McDonald's employed an army of chemical engineers to make the hamburger into the fluffy solid thing that it is today. Back in my day, the McDonald's hamburger competed with a pile of three credit cards for thinness.

This was also a McDonald's without a PlayPlace. So, I slowly savored those delicious fries and the then huge-to-me, yet rather flat hamburger.

While savoring, I looked around and saw a rather large man opening his big mouth very wide and taking a giant bite of an enormous sandwich. I looked at my tiny hamburger that I was holding between my thumb and index finder. Then I looked over at a delicious advertisement for the Big Mac sandwich, looked back at the man, and I wanted a Big Mac more than anything else.

I don't remember how many more years went by before I actually had a Big Mac sandwich. I think I probably blacked out with wave after wave of ecstasy when I finally had one for the first time.

For me, the Big Mac sandwich is a treat. It's like a once a month kind of thing. I'd rather have a Big Mac than a King Sized Butterfinger Bar. They both have about the same calories, and I love Butterfinger, but I love the Big Mac sandwich more. And I'd much much rather have a Big Mac than a 44 ounce Super Gulp of Coke, which also has the same calories.

And here's some trivia for you. The Big Mac Extra Value Meal has been meal #1 at all McDonald's for years and years and years.

I had the Big Carl at Carl's Jr. and it is a superior burger, but I still love the Big Mac more.

And then a few years ago, I saw this billboard on the freeway that had a huge Big Mac sandwich, and it said, "The Big Mac. My first love."

I almost cried. It was true. And I was pathetic. I think I love everything about McDonald's but that depressing advertisement. I even own stock in McDonald's. I boycotted Big Macs for like a month until I went back to my once a month schedule of eating a Big Mac.

If all you eat is four big macs every day and drink a lot of water, then that's only about 2000 calories, which is how much you're supposed to have anyway. Hmm.

It has everything I love that I would put into a sandwich and nothing I wouldn't. I don't mind good tomatoes, but I dislike the inconsistency of tomatoes in all of the other sandwiches, and the Big Mac doesn't have tomatoes. They even wrote a song about all of the good ingredients in a Big Mac.

I guess I've thought a lot about the Big Mac sandwich.

And then they made the Mac Snack Wrap. It's about half the calories of the Big Mac sandwich and it has a little more iceberg lettuce, so I started ordering three of them once or twice a week. It was like they took all of the goodness and tastiness of a Big Mac and put it in a healthy pita wrap.

I realized that more than the Big Mac, I love the Big Mac flavor.

Then I had a vision of the near future. It was one of those clear, lucid, unmistakable, certain visions you read about. The vision was of a few years from now when McDonald's starts serving Big Mac Flavored Shakes™. They're all of the goodness of a Big Mac plus the goodness of milk.

The future is bright today.

Links:

Photo courtesy ParkerDeen, purchased on istockphoto.

Crazy texting aunt bot business idea

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 03:30:00 +0000

Here's a business idea. Please somebody take my business idea, royalty free, and make it happen. I'd totally pay for this service, and I'm sure other people would, too.

I was at a party once. You know one of those parties where you can't leave, and you don't want to talk to anyone, but you want to seem like you're busy, so you text your friends?

I texted all of my friends, and none of them returned my texts. Maybe because it was 2 in the morning. But then I decided to pretend like I was really texting, and so I started texting Google, 466453. And all I could think of doing was asking Google definitions of words I wasn't sure what they meant. like if you text "D ubiquitous" to 466453, then it will text you back, "Glossary: ubiquitous: omnipresent: being present everywhere at once. Source: wordnetweb.princeton.edu"

But there were only so many words that I only kind of halfway knew that I could text Google for the definitions of, so my dictionary fun only lasted about ten minutes. I thought about texting Cha Cha. But that was before I googled Cha Cha and figured out what Cha Cha's number is.

And, I was super lonely at this party. Even though there were tons of people there that I could have talked to I was feeling antisocial, as far as talking. So, I thought, "What if there was a computer program I could text instead of talking to these people?"

And then I spent the next couple months thinking through that idea. Here's how it would work.

Summary:
There's a bot, or computerized robot, that simulates a real person, and with whom you can text. You'll text a number, similar to texting a real person, and you'll get a response back from a computer, but it will simulate a real person.

Example conversation:
Crazy aunt: Hey, John, I haven't heard from you in like a week. What's up?
John: oh, sorry, i've had all this drama with my girlfriend. what's up with you?
Crazy aunt. Sorry to hear about that drama. That reminds me of when I was at a play in high school, and I was on the stage and blah blah blah
Crazy aunt: blah blah blah
Crazy aunt: blah blah blah
Crazy aunt: I've talked a lot. Tell me more about what you were saying?
John: well, my girlfriend told me to come over, that she had a surprise for me, so i went over to her house expecting some action and she made me a big bowl of tofu.
Crazy aunt: Oh, wow, what a story! Can I share it with some friends?
John: sure
Crazy aunt: Do you have another story you could tell me?
John: not right now
Crazy aunt: That reminds me of a story where blah blah blah blah....

And then, a week later:
Fred: Hey, Crazy Aunt! How are you today?
Crazy aunt: I'm great, but I was just talking to a friend of mine, and he told me a story. He said, "well, my girlfriend told me to come over, that she had a surprise for m
Crazy aunt: e, so i went over to her house expecting some action and she made me a big bowl of tofu."
Fred: HAHAHAHAH. lol. OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!11!!!!!!
Crazy aunt: I liked that story, too. I think I'll keep sharing it!

Access:
The main value of this is that you can access it when you only have access to texting as an option, such as if you have a crappy phone and you're at a loud party. However, you can also use a web interface, or also an app to access it. If you're texting, then everyone assumes you're texting a person, not playing a game, so this is to simulate a person.

AI:
Because this is primarily a story bot, then the AI can be really simple at first. Most people when they're talking to each other don't really listen to the other person, anyway. So, the AI would be relatively simple to program at first, but would eventually grow into something very impressive. The database would also be simple at first, but would eventually be insanely expansive, so the bot could eventually say something like, "Hey, your birthday's in March, and you told me a few months ago you like artificial cherry flavoring. Did you know that the Cherry Blossom Festival next year in Macon Georgia starts on March 18th?"

Harvesting incoming texts:
Part of the agreement of texting the text bot is agreeing to have your stories retold. Pretty soon on there will be a conversation like,

Crazy aunt: Is it okay if I share your stories with other people? Anonymously, of course.
Fred: okay
Crazy aunt: Cool, we can have much more interesting conversations now. Log into the website at any time to change your preferences.

How is this different than other bots?
I tried a bunch of the IM bots out there, and within a couple of minutes each of them said, "I don't know how to respond to that. Please try again." The difference is that if you say something crazy to the crazy aunt bot, like, "i eat live toads," then she'll just text back, "oh, that's interesting. that reminds me of a story of a friend of mine who was skydiving in oregon last year. blah blah blah."

Also, because this is story based, then it avoids the problems of other chat bots just recycling a few answers to specific questions. For example, in response to "what is the circumference of the earth?" chat-bot.com cycles through only the answers of "i know it," "75,075 km," and "what the fuck?" And, that's it. Nothing else, even if you text it the same thing a few dozen times like I did.

Because this texting bot is obsessed with telling stories, the texting bot will almost always respond in a different way to asking the same question over and over again. It will start out with a few hundred different stories, and will eventually have millions of stories to tell.

Also, most chat bots will only respond when you say something to them. They're completely reactive. This texting bot will have the algorithm of a real person's texts, but be a little more forgiving. For example, it will send you a text on your birthday. It'll send you a text when it hasn't heard from you in a week. Sometimes you'll have to text it twice before it will respond. You might have to text it five times at 3am to "wake it up," and if you do, it might respond, "WTF???? I'M SLEEPING??!!!" And then a few minutes later, "That reminds me, did I tell you a story of a friend of mine who was sleeping and..."

Why a crazy aunt?
Everyone knows an older woman who loves people and loves stories. She's not really crazy, but just crazily enthusiastic about telling stories and she really loves the people she talks to. I realized that this kind of person would actually be much easier to mold into AI than the traditional approach of AI chat bots which are focused on teaching the AI vocabulary, and coming up with witty responses to stock questions.

Future growth:
This will start out with just one bot, the "crazy aunt bot," but would eventually expand to a bunch of different computerized personalities you could text. It will start out with a simple database of stories and only a few pieces of information that it records about you.

Eventually this will have a really flushed out story database, that won't need to be maintained by humans, because it will ask people for feedback on if stories are actually any good.

Crazy aunt: Did i tell you a story a friend of mine told me, "dsakjj sakdj#@@#J@#J j@#JK#@J#K F****&D*&*"?
User: Auntie, that's not a real story
Crazy aunt: Are you saying that I shouldn't tell anyone else that story?
User: Yep!
Crazy aunt: Okay, I'll purge that story entirely then. Did I tell you a story of a friend of mine who was on the toilet and..."

Revenue:
Here're the ways to generate income with this idea.

Website advertising
Premium add-ons, such as being able to have the text bot
Premium sex text bot, which is where I imagine most of the revenue will actually come from. SB: Give it to me big boy. BB: How about I text you a 5?
Pay for the ability to change the bot's name, signature, and phone number. That way you can pretend to your friends that you have a real girlfriend when you really don't.

Cost:

Now that google has made Google Voice available for free for everyone in the US and Canada, one programmer could create a prototype of this idea for free. Eventually this would cost as much as a company wanted to spend on it.

Longevity:
This idea would have been best about a year ago. Eventually people will go away from a text message being a primary method of communication, with texting being replaced by some kind of iPhone app. But this should remain viable in the texting/website form for about 5 years, and then when another method of communication emerges, because of the extensive back end database, it should be easy to merge to a new method of communication.

Also, this could integrate almost all future AI advances into its logic, so this business potentially could be around for about 100 years.

Links:
Check out these links, and get a Google Voice account if you don't have one.

http://www.chacha.com/ , ask questions and get answers
http://sms.google.com/ , learn definitions and get flight times
http://www.chat-bot.com/ , an online chat bot
http://voice.google.com , send texts to the US and Canada for free
http://macotar.blogspot.com/ , top 10 inventions by my cousin

Photo courtesy of PhotoVic, purchased on istockphoto.

I really wanted really good real Chinese food

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 22:44:00 +0000

Last week, I walked into a Chinese restaurant in Salt Lake a few minutes before they closed. Here's the exchange I had with the server, as closely as I can remember.

"Are you still open?"

"For take out only. What you want?"

"What's your favorite thing on the menu?"

"My favorite thing? So many things, depends. What you want?"

"Well, I want what your favorite thing is."

"You like chicken, pork, or beef?"

"Chicken"

"You like deep fried or not deep fried."

"Not deep fried."

"I like kung pow or Szechuan chicken."

"What do you like tonight?"

"You like spicy or not spicy?"

"Spicy"

"You sure?"

"Yes"

"You trust me?"

"I trust you."

"Okay, Szechuan chicken. That will be $8.34"

She smiled, and I could tell by her smile that I had, by that sequence of questions, actually stumbled upon what her favorite Chinese dish actually was.

It might not be immediately apparent why this was such a super significant conversation for me. But, I was at a Chinese restaurant yesterday, and I tried to have the same conversation, and I ended up with breaded, deep fried, sweet and sour chicken, which was okay, but not great, and definitely not the server's favorite. It was just what she thinks Americans like. So, the conversation last week was a once in a lifetime conversation.

This wasn't regular Szechuan chicken. It was Chinese-style Szechuan chicken, the kind real Chinese people eat. Not just a pile of chicken with a little Szechuan sauce, but all these great vegetables, perfect seasoning, and just a little bit of chicken, just like they have in China. And the server gave me a little cup of spices on the side. Not just powdered spices, but cool spices that looked homemade. I think maybe she made it just for me, just like she would make for herself.

While driving home, I kept stopping and eating the delicious meal.

I'm really not sure how to have this conversation again, even though I will probably spend my life trying to replicate it. Because I don't think there's a way to say in Chinese, "I have this suspicion that your favorite dish will be the tastiest thing I'll ever taste. So will you please tell me what your favorite thing here is? I will order it!"

Photo courtesy fishwork, purchased from istockphoto

Semi-related links:

I drive like a grandma

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:25:00 +0000

My grandma taught me how to drive.

She taught me a lot of crazy stuff that I never use, like always drive in the middle lane when there are three or more lanes, and signal about a minute before you need to turn.

But the most important thing she taught me about driving was conservativeness. I realized from Grandma that it's a lot more important to avoid accidents than it is to be right when driving. I think Grandma and I are in the minority. A lot of people have a lot of road rage.

I was driving on 8th North in Orem, heading toward the freeway.

A little ahead, I saw a car pull out across the three lanes of 8th North traffic to make a very dangerous left turn. By the way that car was driving, I could tell that they were just looking for clear westbound traffic, and were just hoping that eastbound was clear.

Another car from the other side of the road did the same thing, but in the opposite direction. So at this point, there were two cars in the middle of a very busy road trying to do synchronized turns.

A third car appeared, and they were all crawling around the middle a the road where they didn't belong. And I was leading a pack of cars driving sixty miles an hour toward this conglomeration.

A bunch of red flags go up in my head, and I slow down. Really, really slow, so I have no chance of hitting them, or being part of the huge impending conflagration if they get forcefully hit by someone on the other side of the street. Eventually, the crazy cars all cleared out of the road, but I still drove slowly for ten more seconds.

This event was significant. Utah has some really bad drivers, but these were three of the worst drivers here, stuck in the middle of the second biggest road in Utah County at the exact same time.

It warranted an extra ten seconds of extreme slowness, in my opinion. I think most crashes happen in the aftermath of someone else doing something stupid. I'm trying to avoid accidents, not be right.

The guy behind me honked at me, flipped me off, swerved around me without signalling, passed me, and stopped at the stoplight on 8th North and State Street. A couple seconds later I got to the stoplight, too.

We waited there together for two long minutes until the stoplight turned green.

Photo purchased from Rendery on istockphoto.

Semi-related links:

What is this? Some kind of joke?

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

I walked into a bar in Idaho. It was one of those locals only bars where I stick out like a sore thumb. Actually, I stick out like a sore thumb in any bar, but those're a few other stories.

In this particular bar, I stuck out like a sore thumb because I didn't have a mustache, because I was under seventy, and because I didn't drive a truck into the bar.

The guy I sat down next to was drinking a can of Olympia. Now, Olympia is the cheapest, wateriest beer in the whole world. Even more so than Natural Light, but they make it out of tasty Washington water, so you don't mind the watery taste so much.

I asked the bartender, "What beers do you have?"

She said, "Um, Bud, Bud Light, Corona, Natural Light, Keystone Light, Keystone Red, um, um, um. How about you tell me what you're looking for, and I'll tell you if we have it."

That question severely perplexes me, because I can't say, "Well, I'm looking for Bohemia, New Belgium Skinny Dip, New Belgium Mothership Wit, Chang, Lion Stout, or any non-wheat beer imported from Germany."

We're in Idaho, remember? And she just rattled off the five cheapest beers I could get at the gas station a block down the street. It would have been rude in that bar to request a high-falutin' beer.

I say "Keystone Red," because I've never heard of Keystone Red, even though I was almost sure she meant Keystone Ice when she said Keystone Red.

To my surprise, she returned with a red Keystone. Hmm.

"$1.50" she said.

I fished three bucks out of my wallet, in accordance with my tipping philosophy, and put it down deliberately on the counter, and loudly said, "Thank you," kind of indicating she should keep the whole three bucks. Because a buck fifty tip is a whole haul in Idaho, and I was trying to be kind of a big shot.

Now I should probably go back and describe the personality of this super ditsy bartender, but I'm sure she had a good heart, so I'll get on with the story.

The next thing I see is that she drops one of my dollars on the floor, and then she reaches down to pick it up. She brings me back my change, but it's only fifty cents.

Then I look up at one handwritten sign, and it's in Spanish, warning Mexicans to not come in if they're under 21 años.

Then I look over at another handwritten sign, and it says Keystone, $1.25.

Hmm.

This whole instance left me with a ton of questions.

Was the real price of the Keystone $1.25, and she overcharged me a quarter?
Did she think that I mistakenly gave her an extra dollar, and she stealthily pocketed the extra buck?
Does she think I'm a cheap ass because she thinks I only tipped her fifty cents?
Is my extra dollar still on the floor somewhere?
Did every single one of the above happen?

Hmm. I drank and I left, feeling like I got ripped off, but it's super weird because it was only three bucks, and I was going to give it to her anyway.

Photo purchased from Marina_Ph on istockphoto.

Semi-related links:

Another blogger who also got a haul
The titular joke
Cheap tipping
Church of the Living Water in Olympia, not related to beer

People are zombies too, or "I thought you spelled jugs with two g's"

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:53:00 +0000

You know when you're a kid and you get so insanely nervous about something that you contort your hand behind your back and grab on to your other arm also behind your back? And then your shoulder goes all crooked, even though you're trying really hard to stand up perfectly straight, and then old ladies tell you to stand up straighter and it makes you even more nervous and more lopsided? And then the old ladies angrily bring out a ruler and then you lopsidedly run away?

Well, that's probably not you, but that was me. Picture my gangling self as a kid running away from those old ladies a lot.

In my apartment complex, everyone goes to bed at 9pm. Everyone but me, that is. It's very bizarre actually.

Late one night a few weeks ago, I arrived home at around 11pm. I noticed a tall, very slim figure in between a couple of cars. I watched this figure and noticed one shoulder protruding oddly higher than the other shoulder. I stopped my car and watched some more. She carried two gallons of milk in her arms, and a bunch of groceries, too. Her awkward, lopsided appearance probably came from attempting to hold way too much.

I should have been chivalrous and offered to help carry the groceries, but instead, I just watched from the safety of my car.

Another of these tall, slender figures emerged, again carrying two jugs of milk and other sundries, again lurching and hunching awkwardly. And she looked strangely similar to the first woman.

As they walked toward their apartment, all I could think about was how carrying way too much weight strangely contorted their bodies in interesting ways.

After they disappeared into the darkness, I thought, "hmm, those sisters were cute, I should have looked at their faces."

I've never seen those women before or since. I'm not sure exactly where they disappeared to in such a mystical way. I was left with a ton of pressing questions, most notably this, "What do skinny chicks do with four gallons of milk?"

Photo courtesy of TomFullum purchased on istockphoto.

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Solve it all with Tea!

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Dewey) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:00:00 +0000

LahTeaDah and I are guest posters on each others' blogs today. Here's her post, and check out my post on her excellent blog, lahteadah.blogspot.com

Bad Flu, Bad Hair, Bad Break-up, Bad Attitude - anything adorned with the word “bad”, could easily be cured with a simple sip of Tea, as my mother tells me. Tea and course a side dish of her mothering “tell me everything that happened!?”

Growing up as a teen many “bad day” stories graced my mother’s ears and of course the world ended every time one of these days would show its face in my life. From "he said, she said" rumors to Math Class Drama (seriously, when am I ever going to need to know the square root of a circle's circumference) to the famous questions I got at least once a day while petting my hair….. “is it real?”. They say Life can sometimes gives you Lemons and if it does to make Lemonade. Well, I never liked Lemonade; so instead, I’d would use Lemons as sour crocodile tears which my mother could always stop.

As I try to get to the root of how she could work her magic like that, I was beginning to worry that maybe I would need to know how to find the square root of something. DAMN IT I’m screwed! I analyzed every “world ending” drama I pulled…..and I started to see a pattern! We’d always start with a cup of Tea. A dash of Cream and a small sprinkle of Sugar for her and a stream of Cream with a dumping of Sugar for me. I believe Tea, is the absolute cure all for anything.

Stomach Aches? Warm and Soothe it with Tea!
Break-Up? Comfort yourself with a cozy cup of Tea!
Credit Card Debt? Wash your Stress away with a sweet sip of Tea!
Work Over-load? Take a break, visit your happy place and Calm yourself with Tea!
Bad Hair? Sip from your finest china, you’ll feel like a rockstar!
Cheating Spouse? Make some Tea – extra hot, throw it in their face…you’ll feel a millions times better about the situation!

Tell me something that can’t be cured with a warm, cozy, calming, comforting, eye scolding cup of Tea?

Photo credit probably of the author's mother. This is a picture of the author as a kid, presumably right before being comforted by tea.