Posts from ‘July, 2009’

Some games are better than others; here are some criteria for evaluating a game’s strength. How easy would it be for computers to beat humans? I would rank basketball as the toughest game for a team of robots to win, followed by soccer. Baseball would be fairly easy for a team of robots to win. [...]

I’d like to learn more about writing/telling/speaking excellent stories. Besides holding readings at my local library, any suggestions about where to start? On a related note why aren’t there more classes for this at school? Perhaps the Bible counts.

As a kid, I loved building sets. I loved pouring out all the pieces, following the instructions and watching a giant machine evolve out of small parts. I still have a giant Rube Goldberg ball machine in the attic, with three different towers involved. I used to dream about making a pinball machine out of [...]

Today at basketball camp the head coach at camp told a story to the campers about an extremely bright, talented kid from New Jersey. The kid was the valedictorian of his high school class, extremely bright, athletic, tall, good-looking etc. He had his pick of the Ivies, he’s going to Yale to study Arabic. But [...]

Many forms of self-control involve tying the hands of our future selves; putting the alarm clock across the room so our 7 AM self will have to wake up and retrieve it; resolving to make expensive payments or donations unless behavior changes; disabling our Internet for eight hours at a time. I read recently that [...]

This practice should not really surprise anyone, but should be stopped: “Congress frequently votes on huge and complex bills that few if any members of the House or Senate has read through. They couldn’t read them even if they wanted to, since it is not unusual for legislation to be put to a vote just [...]

My favorite post from today comes from Ezra Klein, a blogger for the Washington Post, speaking about healthcare (“It’s Not the Money, It’s the Relationships”). The healthcare industry snaps up Senate Finance committee aides as soon as they retire, so that they can lobby for the industry. Because we are social creatures this makes for [...]

The Giants upgraded to a full-color, huge scoreboard two years ago. It’s the best scoreboard I’ve ever seen, in terms of size, clarity, and content. This was the best photo that I could find (by the way, Flickr is much better than Google for finding photos). For the team that’s up (the Dodgers) they also [...]

Why can I get internet anywhere on my phone but not my laptop? As in, why do phones have Internet built in before laptops do? Laptops are a more expensive, sophisticated product and if they can stick a mobile Internet thingy inside a laptop. Internet dongles for a laptop cost about $60 per month, much [...]

I am not sure why but if you try to go to gethuman.com, it no longer displays useful information about company customer service numbers but instead the homepage for Paul English, who founded the site. Google’s cache of the page still works.