A few months ago, for some reason, I googled World’s best taco. I guess I was thinking I’d find a restaurant review, or maybe raves about a taco stand somewhere in L.A. But instead the top results were all recipes. The number one result back then has now settled to number two. A recipe would be even better than a restaurant, because I was pretty sure the world’s best taco stand wasn’t going to be within driving distance of Davidson, N.C.

What the heck, I thought, why don’t I try this recipe? It seemed easy enough. Here’s the link to the recipe, which was apparently the debut post on a short-lived blog called “God Damn Yank.” Even better, the recipe calls for “a really cheap cut of beef,” which meant I had very little to lose.

I made the recipe with just a single modification. Instead of using store-bought taco shells, I pan-fried my own in a little vegetable oil. MUCH better than store-bought — just cook them flat until they get slightly crispy, but not so crispy that they break when you fold them in half. For toppings, I used cilantro, guacamole, sour cream, and chopped tomatoes.

These tacos came very close to their billing, and we’ve had them several times since then. So, last week, we decided to try again on another food — macaroni and cheese. We came up with this. This blog is actually still being updated, so maybe the recipe would be even better!

Unfortunately, the recipe wasn’t nearly as good as the tacos. We’ve made better mac and cheese on our own, using a lot less heavy cream. Not that Mac and Cheese is supposed to be a healthy recipe or anything, but if you actually prefer a slightly healthier version, I don’t think “world’s best” applies.

So currently the Google “world’s best” rating system is batting about .500. I wonder if the first recipe was just an anomaly, or if there’s a chance of finding other great recipes in the same way. Or maybe I should create my own “world’s best recipe” — I can cook a mean Fettucine Alfredo!

In 1977, at age 10 (!) my stepbrother and I waited for hours in line at the one theater in Seattle that was showing Star Wars. I’m still a little shocked to realize my mom let me go downtown by myself on the bus to hang out in a marginal neighborhood and watch a silly space opera. But she did, and we did. I came home and told her all about it. “It sounds kind of violent,” she said to me. “Besides, who would want to wait in line to watch a movie? In a few weeks, the lines will die down and you’ll be able to walk right in!”

Right, I thought. The lines will die down, there will be no one there, no one will cheer when the Death Star blows up, and the experience will be ruined. Old people just don’t understand.

Fast-forward 31 years. People are standing in line as I write this, hoping against hope that the iPhone of their choice will still be around. Already, hundreds, perhaps thousands of hopeful iFans have been sent home disappointed, the store in their area sold out of the most popular models, or even sold out of every model.

My reaction: It’s the same as my mom’s, 31 years ago. I simply can’t understand why there’s all this excitement over a phone. What’s more, most of these die-hard fans already have an iPhone, which is capable of an upgrade and nearly all of the same features as the new phone. Just like my mom, I wonder why these people can’t wait a few days, or a week or two at most, for Apple to get the kinks out of the distribution system and get iPhones to everyone who wants one.

You’ll have your phone for at least a year or two. What’s a few days, more or less?

I must be old.

After reading Declan Butler’s shocking report about the impending doom of PLoS, I became very concerned about the future of non-profit organizations in America. As Butler rightly points out:

Since its launch in 2002, PLoS has been kept afloat financially by some US$17.3 million in philanthropic grants. An analysis by Nature of the company’s accounts shows that PLoS still relies heavily on charity funding, and falls far short of its stated goal of quickly breaking even through its business model of charging authors a fee to publish in its journals. In the past financial year, ending 30 September 2007, its $6.68-million spending outstripped its revenue of $2.86 million, according to the publicly available accounts.

My goodness! PLoS has received $17 million in grants! This is obviously a signal that things are going badly for the revolutionary open-access publisher. They’re resorting to handouts! When a charitable organization continues to earn the respect of more and more foundations, increasing its bottom line year after year, it’s clearly a sign of impending doom!

But what of the other esteemed organizations in America? If doomsday is nearing for PLoS, then perhaps other non-profits may soon suffer the same fate. I took a look at Harvard University’s most recent annual report, and just like PLoS, I saw the same worrisome signs: Of Harvard’s $3.1 billion in expenditures, a mere $657 million came from student revenue such as tuition, room and board. Just like PLoS, Harvard is looking for handouts. For example, a whopping $641 million came from government and institutional grants.

Even more troubling, this represents an increase over the $634 million in grants Harvard received the year before. Just like PLoS, they’re getting more and more handouts each year.

But even that doesn’t cover Harvard’s expenses — Harvard has had to dip into investment income and even its endowment assets for another $1.4 billion, and it’s needed to resort to charging rents, student fees, and charging for access to its intellectual property to cover the rest.

Clearly this demonstrates that Harvard is in dire circumstances, just like PLoS. Don’t let Harvard and PLoS’s impeccable reputations fool you. When granting institutions and other donors want to give non-profits large sums of money, it’s a sign of their inevitable decline. Fortunately we have private institutions like Nature, the University of Phoenix, and DeVry University to take their place.

Day 3 of our hike began much as Day 2 had ended — a misty, buggy walk along a creek, and yet another ford — the longest, deepest ford of our entire hike. We were pros at this by now, so we handled it with no problems:

Almost immediately after this ford, we started heading uphill:

Yes, Nora is on the trail. If it looks like she’s walking straight up a small creek, it’s because she is. For the next four miles, we hiked straight up a very rocky, very steep creekbed — about 3,000 vertical feet. Sometimes we could see that the trail makers had made an attempt to keep the creek separate from the trail, but it was no use. We had to hop over large rocks with water trickling between them for the entire ascent. When we finally arrived at the top of our climb, we had only about a half-liter of water. We had been so close to water for three hours of hiking, that we forgot to refill our bottles. Now, at the top of a ridge, there was no water to be found.

No matter, I thought, the trail took us down another creek on the other side. I thought wrong. Actually it was another three miles before we finally reached Bear Creek — thankfully all downhill. I vowed never to let that happen again.

It was at this point that Nora and I realized that we hadn’t seen another person for nearly two full days. And we were in the nation’s most “crowded” national park. Would we see anyone when we arrived at our campground, near the lake at the bottom of the mountain range? We still had several miles to go before we found out, but thankfully the trail followed an old road. It even looked like the road was still passable for motor vehicles. A mile or two down the road, Nora spotted the most curious site we’d seen yet on this hike:

What intelligent beings had traveled this route before us, creating this magnificent structure, the likes of which we’d never seen on this hike? It was constructed entirely of wood, and was sturdy enough to walk across! Why, it appeared that some advanced civilization had engineered a structure capable of conveying a human across a creek without getting her feet wet! Brilliant! We called this miraculous construction a “bridge.”

Other wonders were in store for us: Soon we arrived at the campsite, where we saw other humans, sitting on a device made of wood and metal, with a flat surface suitable for supporting dishes or even cooking implements, oriented at just the right level for optimal usage. We called this contraption a “picnic table.”

We speculated that a civilization advanced enough to create a bridge and a picnic table might also have invented a small private room with a storage chamber for depositing human waste, but alas, this was beyond this civilization’s technological capabilities. We had to get rid of our waste the old fashioned way (by the way, that post is the first result on a Google search for dump woods).

At this point, at the bottom of the Smoky Mountains, we were 4,400 feet below where we started. We were within a half mile of the lake you could see in the photo we took on Day 1, but we were too exhausted to go check it out. We slept well that night.

The next morning we awoke before dark, anxious to get started on our last, most difficult day of hiking. It would 11 miles of straight uphill. Actually, it was first about 3 flat miles, then 8 miles of straight uphill. But it was hard.

About 9 a.m., well into our climb, we started to pass through some sunny patches and decided to stop to put on sunscreen. The trail angled across a steep hillside, so that when we looked straight to the side at the trees downslope from us, we were seeing branches 30 feet above the ground. I took off my glasses to put sunscreen on my face.

“Isn’t that a bear?” Nora asked.

I looked at a tree not more than 30 feet away and saw a brown furry lump clutching to its trunk, even with my eye level. “Yes! That’s a bear.” Even though I can barely see 5 feet in front of me without my glasses, I could clearly recognize what I was looking at.

“It’s a baby!” Nora said.

“Where’s its mother?” we both thought, but didn’t say.

“We better get out of here,” I said. You don’t want to get between a baby bear and its mother. We hastily threw our packs on, without even putting the sunscreen away. I slipped my glasses on in time to see the bear finish its equally hasty climb to the base of the tree, looking back at us as fearfully as we were looking at him. He was a baby–or an adolescent–but he was still bigger than most dogs. He moved quickly away from us, down the hill. We moved just as quickly in the opposite direction. It was an astonishing, beautiful sight, but it was closer than I’d ever wanted to get to a baby bear in the wild.

We trudged on up the hill, and this time I would make sure we got plenty of water before we reached the end of the creek we were following. The afternoon portion of the hike would have no water — we’d be hiking along the top of Forney Ridge. The trail veered off from the creek and I wondered for a while if I’d again waited to long before replenishing our water supply. A quarter mile later, we reached water! But this was the “stream”:

Notwithstanding Nora’s goofy expression, this was really where we were going to have to get the water supply for the rest of our day. By trudging 20 yards or so downstream, we were able to find a place where the water trickled over a large stick. I could just squeeze our frying pan underneath it, and the pan filled with clear water. We pumped 5 liters through our filtration system and hiked on.

By lunchtime, we arrived at the final junction, where the Forney Ridge Trail branched off from the Springhouse Branch trail. We had hiked 6.6 miles, and our maps told us there were just 4.5 miles left. The sign said something different: “Clingman’s Dome, 5.9 miles.” “FIVE POINT NINE?!?” we both shouted in disgust. Why did both of our maps say 4.5? Which figure was correct? At this point, it was academic. We’d have to hike whatever trail there was between here and our car. 11.1 miles, 12.5 miles, what’s the difference? The Forney Ridge Trail, whatever its length, stood between us and modern plumbing, air conditioning, and ice cream.

On this trail, we expected to see day-hikers who walked down from Clingman’s Dome, but we saw no one. We arrived at Andrews Bald around 4 p.m., just a mile and a half from the parking lot, with a spectacular view of the mountains. No one. We were getting just a little tired at this point:

View? What view? I want ice cream.

An hour and a half later, we arrived at the parking lot. We hadn’t seen a soul since we’d started uphill. Now we were treated to a guided tour of obese america, as unfit families waddled up the quarter-mile paved path to the top of Clingman’s Dome, stopping at the conveniently placed park benches every 200 feet. We had carefully left a gallon jug of clean water in the car, to wash our feet with before heading to the restroom to change into clean clothes. It was a hot day, but we hadn’t realized how hot. The water was so hot that it was painful to use even for foot-washing. Fortunately there was a cool water-fountain at the edge of the parking lot, a welcome relief since we’d actually drank all 5 liters of water on our hike.

We changed, then got a tourist to snap our photo. We don’t look half bad, given what we’d just been through:

I believe that’s Forney Ridge to the left in the photo, and if you look carefully, you can see the lake where we’d started our hike in the distance.

All that was left now was to hop into the car, drive down to Cherokee for ice cream, then on to the Fuddrucker’s in Asheville for hamburgers, and finally home.

I just got back from an intense hike in the Smoky Mountains. Without further ado, here’s the report.

Here’s me and Nora at the start of the trip, in the Clingman’s Dome parking lot, where probably a hundred tourists have parked to make the half-mile ascent up the paved path to the highest point in the park:

But there’s a bit of a story for how we got there, which I recorded in my journal later that day:

Not a bad day of hiking — went about 5 mi. without any incidents other than a couple bone-headed wrong turns.

The first one happened at 6:30 this morning. We had gotten off to a smooth start, and pulled into the IHOP for our traditional pre-hike breakfast, when I realized I didn’t have my wallet!

U-turn, drive 15 mins back home, get wallet, change mind about IHOP and head to Denny’s.

We also took a wrong turn getting into the Smokies. The town of Cherokee, NC, gateway to the Smokies, didn’t see fit to place a sign on the turnoff into the park. A confusing map compounded the problem.

There was one more wrong turn in the parking lot since the trail we wanted to take wasn’t marked.

This cost us a half-mile, straight up the concrete path to Clingman’s Dome, the prime tourist attraction in GSMNP.

Once we were on the trail, things went swimmingly — it just took a while to get there.

Here’s a picture of Nora once we finally made it onto the right trail:

And here’s the two of us. It was a beautiful, sunny day:

… and here are the Smokies, all by themselves:

You see that lake, way off in the distance. That’s where we would be in two days. But first we needed to spend the night in the Siler’s Bald Shelter. A pleasant evening, and a decent night’s sleep, thanks to a new 2-inch thick pad that was my one luxury on the trip. Here’s a photo of the two of us getting ready to hit the trail the next morning, snapped by one of our shelter-mates:

Here’s what I said about Day 2 in my journal:

So today wasn’t all miserable, contrary to Nora’s proclamation. I mean, sure, the bugs were swarming in vast quantities, seemingly undeterred by the fact that we’d practically bathed in DEET.

There really were some charming and inspirational moments today.

Okay, so we had to ford something like six creeks in less than a mile, carefully removing our boots and donning Crocs for the crossing, then repeating in reverse.

So we finally got so frustrated by this that we resorted to hiking in our wet Crocs, squishing our way down the trail between ford after ford, in a ridiculous promenade that Nora took to calling the “Croc walk.”

And here’s some documentation of the Croc walk:

Don’t let this seemingly lovely creek fool you. It was a bear.

(click on the picture for a bigger version). Honest, this creek was incredibly annoying.

Here’s Nora on a crossing:

And here’s a movie of a crossing. Honest, it really was annoying:

Ford

Here we are after a crossing:

Yech. And my journal entry goes on:

So we were so harrassed by the devilish, nameless insects that hovered three inches from our faces. So it was like we were trapped in the back seat of a station wagon with half a million older siblings.

Despite all this, we still got to see and do some things that many people in this country never get to do. We walked over eight miles without seeing another living human.

We saw flowers so perfectly formed that we first thought someone had spilled a box of plastic cake decorations.

We saw a millipede four inches long and half an inch thick, and several other gorgeous, almost primeval centipedes and millipedes.

And we arrived at 3:30 p.m. to a beautiful (if still somewhat buggy) campsite, next to a roaring creek, and it looks like tonight, we’re going to have this whole place to ourselves.

More about the hike soon…

Last time I checked, the phrase “courtesy of” indicated that an item had been provided by its owner.

For example, unless I was being ironic, if I stole a candy bar from the grocery store, I wouldn’t say “this Snickers Bar courtesy of Food Lion.”

So it amuses me when people borrow images and / or text from Cognitive Daily without our permission and then “credit” us with “courtesy of Cognitive Daily.”

This means you, ArsTechnica!

Here’s a neat idea that is obviously fake:

With the help of a GPS device and DHL, I have drawn a self-portrait on our planet. My pen was a briefcase containing the GPS device, being sent around the world. The paths the briefcase took around the world became the strokes of the drawing.

Update: Heh. I was right. Now he’s got a disclaimer up on the site. But I don’t have the venom that some commenters on the Wired article about the project do:

This guy is no “artist”, he’s a graduate from the Beckman school of advertising in Stockholm. He did it as his final-year project, together with DHL.

Lighten up, dude. It’s a neat idea. You’re just jealous that you didn’t think of it first.

Is it just me, or are airline seats not quite what they used to be? Here I am, on board a flight to Chicago, and like a good citizen, I make sure my seat back is in its full, upright position when the plane is taking off and landing.

What’s more, as a relatively big guy, I know that reclining at any time can be quite uncomfortable for the person sitting behind you. Not only does it often make the tray table completely useless, it reduces knee-room to near-zero. It can make a tolerable trip into a three-hour exercise in mental discipline. Depending on the flight, sitting behind a reclined seat can be as uncomfortable as a Guantanamo-style stress position.

And maybe I’m the only one who feels this way, but reclining in a coach airline seat isn’t actually any more comfortable than sitting upright. The chair only leans back a couple inches — just enough that it’s a strain on your abdomen to read a book or work on a laptop, but not enough for a real rest. Given the tremendous discomfort reclining inflicts on fellow passengers, it just doesn’t seem worth it. So I make every effort not to recline.

But that’s becoming more and more difficult, because the “recline” mechanism in nearly every airline seat I’ve occupied in the last few years has been broken. Sure, you can bring the seat upright, but any time you try to sit back in your seat, the chair begins a slow, inexorable crawl to the reclined position, much to the discomfort and annoyance of the person sitting behind you. My seat’s doing it right now. On previous flights, I’ve even had flight attendants chew me out for not putting the seat in the proper position for take-off and landing.

No, I want to say, I’m not one of those passive-aggressive nimrods who doesn’t think the directions apply to me. I’m not a clueless first-time flier who can’t figure out how the seat works. It’s your damned plane that’s borked, not me!

But of course I say none of that, because I don’t want to sound like a holier-than-thou “road warrior” either. I also don’t ask for the whole can of soda when you’re handing out drinks, and I don’t wheel and deal with other passengers to get an aisle seat closer to the front of the plane.

So what is it about plane seats? Can’t the airlines afford to keep the ordinary, everyday “recline” mechanism functional? Apparently not. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I heard an “airline expert” interviewed on Terry Gross, and he said that airlines were cutting pretty much every nonessential out of their flight service these days. Heck, American says it’s about to start charging $15 apiece for checked luggage. Maybe I should just be excited that United hasn’t yet stooped to that level.

In some ways, the old-fashioned “perks” of air travel like bringing along your things and sitting in functioning seats are beside the point. I say that in all seriousness — really it’s all about the destination. When I was planning this trip, I didn’t say to myself, “I’m looking forward to my flight to Chicago.” I was looking forward to being in Chicago, not getting there. That hasn’t changed much from even the “golden age” of government-regulated air travel.

The New York Times has an article about how the Internet advertising industry is looking to place fewer fancy interactive ads. Hmmm… I wonder why that is. The article has a lot of theories:

“The new advertisers are more cautious about requiring some sort of proof or evidence that something is working,” said Paul Iaffaldano, executive vice president and general manager of the Weather Channel Media Solutions. Existing clients, he said, are continuing to spend, just not at the same pace.

So advertisers want to be convinced these ads are actually working before they spend money on them. Makes some sense. If I was an advertiser, I’d be going even further. Maybe advertisers ought to consider trying to read a web page that’s been crippled by an advertisement. Maybe they should try to read a 12-page article that takes 30 minutes to load because of those fancy interactive ads. And maybe they should consider how easy it is for readers to install software that blocks those annoying ads.

You know, I never minded discreet advertisements peppered even fairly liberally around the web pages I read. I figured if I was getting the web page for free, the least I could do was to peruse the ads. But when the latest crop of ads started making web pages load slower, I installed adblock and never looked back.

I’d be interested to see statistics on how many people use ad blocking software. I wouldn’t be surprised if the upturn in adblocking software mirrored advertisers increasing disinterest in fancy ads that disrupt readers’ browsing experience.

I’ve been tagged by Scott Spiegelberg to do the following:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Making up the Mind by Chris Frith

Group D: 8,950 women without breast cancer, and with negative mammography.

Group C is the 9.6 percent false positive: P(X|~A).

So the screening gives a positive result in 950 women who don’t have cancer and only 100 women who do have cancer.

I actually haven’t even read this book — Greta read it. It looks like a neat one though. I’m going to break rule number five, though. If you read this post, consider yourself tagged.

Here.

I scored 25 out of 34. If you know your fonts (which I don’t), it’s not that difficult. Usually two of the answer choices can be eliminated right away (hint: It’s not Comic Sans).

I like PZ Myers, and I enjoy reading his blog Pharyngula. I think the whole Expelled fiasco was hilarious, and, like Jake Young, I think PZ is basically right to object to Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney’s characterization of the episode as a win for the creationists.

But this is just stupid. Only a tiny portion of religious folk actually believe anything resembling it, so why alienate them with crap like this?

Evolutionists argue all the time that creationists don’t understand the science. When evolutionists do the same thing, shouldn’t creationists rightly get upset about it?

Of course, PZ can put whatever he wants on his blog, but I don’t think posting cartoons like this is going to do anything for the cause of science — or atheism, for that matter.

Wow. I’ve kept this blog up for four years now. Who’d a thunk it?

It’s been quite a stretch, and some would say the peak years of this blog are behind it. I certainly don’t get the kind of traffic I got a couple years back, but of course, I’m a little sidetracked these days, what with CogDaily and now ResearchBlogging.org.

All this has gotten me thinking. Am I really blogging any less than I did four years ago? This stacked line graph gives you a pretty good idea of my productivity over the past four years:

As you can see, things haven’t actually changed that much. Other than my warm-up year in 2005, year to year, I’m good for right around 500 posts. It’s just that now those posts happen to be distributed over three different blogs.

What will the future hold? For now, I’d say Word Munger will probably continue at about its current rate of roughly 100 posts per year. I’ll probably ramp up the blogging here during the summer vacation season, with ups and downs as I get more or less busy in the other parts of my writing life.

I’d venture a guess that Word Munger is probably in the top 1 percent of blogs in terms of longevity and number of posts. Higher if you count the number of posts written in complete sentences (excepting this one, of course).

But maybe next year I’ll look back at this post and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

For the record, here are links to past Blogiversary posts (there wasn’t one last year):

2005
2006

With all the trouble public figures have gotten into lately getting caught with escort services, it’s occurred to me that someone with the right qualifications has a unique opportunity to make a lot of money.

All the navel-gazing about why anyone would pay up to $7000 for a service that typically maxes out at around $500 has pointed to one thing: Rich and powerful people need companionship and privacy, something that’s not typically offered by your run-of-the-mill $500 prostitute. Since politicians and other public figures may be starting to realize that paying for sex isn’t a very good career move, they’ve got a lot of extra spending money lying around, and they still need companionship.

That’s where my business idea comes in. What’s needed is some way to match up affluent people with overeducated, underemployed people with a lot of time on their hands. After all, a rich person isn’t going to spend quality time with just anyone. But fortunately, the internet has a solution:

Bloggers.

That’s right, bloggers are the perfect people to fulfill every desire of rich and powerful people, with the exception of one relatively cheap, commodity service. And since that one missing service could also destroy these folks’ careers, it’s the one service they’re probably most willing to do without.

The business would work like this: There’s a central clearinghouse that would allow rich people to hire bloggers by the hour to be their platonic friends. Since most bloggers have at least one liberal arts degree, they can chat about any subject the rich and powerful would like to discuss. Since they’re already being handsomely paid for their services, they wouldn’t ever be in the awkward position of asking their patrons for favors. The rich and famous person need never feel guilty about not calling if, say, their rent-a-friend’s dog died. Money erases all embarrassing social gaffes. It’s a no-commitment platonic relationship!

I envision the service priced in tiers, something like this:

The Divine Proportion
$6,500/hour
All bloggers in this group have at least one Ph.D. from an Ivy-League university. Their Technorati rankings are above 1,000, and they have at least two completed manuscripts that are making the rounds with agents. They have Wikipedia pages that they didn’t create themselves. All have been trained to mix the perfect Martini, and for an extra $500, they promise not to talk about themselves or their blogs.

The Salon
$5,500/hour
All bloggers in this group have a Ph.D. from a top-tier state school or an M.A. from an Ivy. Their Technorati rankings are above 5,000, and they’re well over 50,000 words into their first novel. They have made fewer than five edits on their personal Wikipedia pages. They don’t usually get embarrassingly drunk in public. An extra $500 will ensure they don’t talk about themselves, but there’s no guarantee about their blogs.

The Saloon
$4,500/hour
All bloggers in this group have or are currently in process of completing a liberal-arts B.A. Their Technorati rankings are above 20,000, and they’re thinking about writing a novel. They personally know more than 5 of their Facebook friends.

The Mosh Pit
$3,500/hour
All bloggers in this group can read at an eighth-grade level. They have posted more than ten YouTube videos. They have gone sub-one-minute on Mario-Kart: Double-Dash, Rainbow Road.

All Rent-A-Platonic-Friend bloggers would sign non-disclosure agreements, so patrons need never worry about disclosing embarrassing stories or trade secrets to their paid companions. The service would be 100 percent discreet.

Since this is MY idea, I expect anyone who actually executes this plan to offer me a royalty. I’ll be reasonable — just five percent of net income would work fine for me. And if you need someone to write copy for your web site, you know who to call!

Given the latest barrage of spam, I’m going to upgrade WordPress. Hopefully everything will work out all right, but if it doesn’t, that’s why.

Update: Upgrade complete! Everything seems to be okay, but let me know if something’s awry.

Google allows you to do single-letter searches. What’s the first result for each search? You can do it yourself or consult this handy guide!

a: Links in html documents

b: Physical Review B

c: the speed of light = 299 792 458 m / s

d: Dominion resources, Inc (stock symbol D)

e: e = 2.71828183.

f: Ford Motors (stock symbol F)

g: Gmail from google (who can fault them for a little self-promotion?)

h: Planck’s constant = 6.626068 × 10-34 m2 kg / s (However I had to do a second Google search to find out wtf it is)

i: Wikipedia entry for the letter “i”

j: Wikipedia entry for the letter “j”

k: Boltzmann constant = 1.3806503 × 10-23 m2 kg s-2 K-1 (what’s that?)

l: Wikipedia entry for the letter “l”

m: 1931 film by Fritz Lang

n: A horrifyingly addictive flash game. Jim and Nora played this game for endless hours in our Tuscan Villa this summer.

o: Realty Income Corp (stock symbol O). How’d they swing that?

p: html p tag — create a new paragraph, stat!

q: Qwest Communications (stock symbol Q). The James Bond character rated a lowly third place.

r: Open-source stats program

s: Craigslist. Huh.

t: AT&T (stock symbol T).

u: Wikipedia entry for the letter “u”

v: Visa, Inc. (stock symbol V).

w: W hotels. Whatever.

x: United States Steel (stock symbol X).

y: Yahoo! Mail

z: Wikipedia entry for letter “z”.

I’ve spent a whole lot of time in various medical professionals’ waiting rooms over the past couple of days. Yesterday I went to the dentist and eye doctor, and today I’m here at the allergist waiting for Jim to get his bee-venom shots. When it comes to waiting rooms, it turns out, eye doctors wipe the floor with everyone else’s ass. Not only does the eye doctor have the least shabby interior decor, it also arguably offers the best selection of reading material and visual entertainment (in the form of an infomercial for Lasik surgery on a 40-inch plasma TV mounted on the wall).

Here at the allergist nearly all the magazines are of the complimentary local shoppers’ guide variety. We’ve got Charlotte Woman, the area Seniors guide, and a holistic medicine brochure. The other magazines aren’t much better: Better Homes and Gardens, and a copy of Medizine’s Healthy Living featuring Christina Applegate.

No matter where you go, however, the Muzak is pretty much always running Classic Hits of the ’70s. It seems to me that Classic Hits of the ’70s have been on Muzak since about 1986. Will we ever move on to the Classic Hits of the ’80s or ’90s? Or will doctors’ offices in 2048 still be playing the Classic Hits of the ’70s?

Not that I have anything against the ’70s, but it would be kinda cool to stroll into the doctor’s office one day and hear the pulsating rhythm of Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” or maybe Soft Cell’s “Sex Dwarf,” or Janet Jackson’s “Nasty.” I’m just sayin’.

When you get your allergy shots, you’re supposed to sit and wait thirty minutes to make sure you don’t have an adverse reaction to the medication, but practically no one actually waits around. Am I just being a wuss for making Jim sit around? It’s not actually that big a deal since you can work on blog posts or text your friends or whatever, but there’s this sinking feeling that you’re not one of the cool kids when you sit down and wait instead of heading straight for the exit after your shot.

Maybe if they were playing better music I’d be more inclined to hang around. At least they could have a decent plasma screen.

Fortunately, our 30 minutes are up. ‘Til next time…

Yesterday was one of our most popular days ever at CogDaily — two posts were on the front page of Reddit and one was on the front page of Digg.com. Most of the visits went to this post, which explains an amazing illusion by Arthur Shapiro. Greta actually went to grad school with Artie, and he was a good friend of mine back in the day, so it’s great to see that he’s getting noticed.

Artie sent me another illusion that I couldn’t squeeze into the CogDaily page, so I thought I’d post it here (I also want to know whether this works on WordPress):

The illusion is in the pattern created. The central disks are oscillating in rows from light to dark. But it appears that only half of each row is alternating together. Neat stuff. There’s much more at Artie’s Lab web page.

This guy seems to think the reason Linux isn’t popular is because it is free. Since people can get Linux for free, they don’t value it as much as Windows (or Mac OS X).

I have a different reason.

Linux doesn’t work.

Yes, I’ve heard some geeks have been able to install it on their home machines, and they claim it works fine. I think even the very web site you’re reading now (installed by geeks) runs on Linux.

I had a Linux geek tell me about this wonderful, easy to use version of Linux called Ubuntu. You can go to their site, download it and burn it onto a CD, and it will run on your computer. You don’t even have to install anything, he assured me, it just works.

Easy to use? I figured I’d give it a shot. I went to the web site, followed the instructions as best I could (they were a little confusing — I wasn’t quite sure which type of computer to say I have; there’s no choice for “iMac Core Duo”). I downloaded the file and burned a CD. There were no instructions on what type of CD to burn. I picked the default option, figuring if there were no instructions, I should stick with the default. I put the CD in the computer. I rebooted. Was I transported to Linux bliss? No. I got the normal Mac bootup screen.

I searched their forums. It was still unclear, but best I could tell, it sounded like I might need to install an additional bit of software to get Ubuntu to work. This was no longer seeming so easy, but I downloaded the software and installed it. I put my CD in the computer and rebooted. Still nothing.

I consulted with my geek friend. He suggested that I download the software that I had just downloaded.

I gave up. Linux was not easy to use, and it was taking my whole day just to get the thing running. There was very little indication it was EVER going to get running. I’ve had problems with my Macs before, but there was always SOME hope, and the instructions on the forums were much clearer.

Maybe some geek could get Ubuntu to work on my computer, but I couldn’t — not without spending untold hours searching forums for an answer. These untold hours are not free, they’re EXPENSIVE. That’s why I gave up on installing Linux on my computer.

Until normal people can easily install and use Linux, normal people will not use Linux. Not for free, not for money, not for any price.

Per The World’s fair, here’s my six-word memoir (make sure you count!):

Still writing my life story.