Last night around 3:30, Parker whined at me and nosed me. Given the hour, this meant something important. I found pants, shoes, a sweatshirt, a coat, then got my keys from their usual spot.
Parker took about 5 minutes to sniff out the best patch of mud on which to make his after-hours deposit. After cleaning it up, I took him back to my building, reached into my jacket, and pulled out the keys to my other apartment.
At this point I said a bad word. Then I calmly told Parker this was his fault. He licked my nose.
Maybe a New Yorker would have handled this differently, but I figured, there are a few early risers in the building, how long could I have to wait?
Two hours. I must have nodded off because it seemed like only 90 minutes. In the cold. On the floor.
At least I was inside.
Quick update: A Kindle can disappear from just centimeters from your left elbow, and hotel security didn't see nothin'. And whoever took it now has a nonfunctional brick, albeit one with several decent books on it including the complete works of Shakespeare. Maybe he'll read?
More later.
A micromort is the amount of risk that equals a one-in-one million probability of death. Drinking two beers, smoking 1.4 cigarettes, traveling 6 minutes by canoe, and living for two days in New York are all 1-millimort activities. (Intentionally jumping out of a perfectly-flyable airplane, which some people call "skydiving," is a 17-millimort activity.)
This unit does not pip my favorite unit of measure, the millihelen, which is the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. (Negative helen values indicate the number of ships that can be launched away from the object being measured.)
Every year, I surprise myself by the amount of money I loan the United States, interest-free. Today I found out it's about double what I estimated earlier. This isn't a good thing: while I have no objection to paying taxes, I object strongly to over-paying during the tax year, even if they do refund it a week after I ask for it.
</ rant>
Scott Adams thinks kids should learn how to compare, and I agree:
In our current system, the skills you need to compare alternatives are broken into little pieces and spread across several disciplines. A business student might learn about the time value of money while the psychology student is learning about confirmation bias. The math major is studying statistics while the religion student is learning that people will believe just about anything if the context is right.
Lacking the basic skills needed to compare alternatives, two people with different information and a couple of drinks can argue all night long and produce nothing but bad feelings. The same goes for people with different selfish interests and different ethical/moral standards. But people with good comparison skills can quickly find common ground. In our increasingly complex world, where different cultures are colliding, we'll all need a lot more talent for making the right comparisons.
Consider the budget debate in the United States. Every knowledgeable observer recognizes that the solution involves both deep cuts in expenses and higher taxes on those who can afford it. And yet our elected officials have framed the issue as one of higher taxes or not, and budget cuts or not. Politicians get away with false comparisons because the majority of voters are not trained in the skill of comparing. Borrowing a strategy from Gandhi, we need to become the change we seek in the government. Leaders will only make rational comparisons, and therefore rational decisions, when they know that the voters can tell the difference.
This is a great idea. It's important to keep in mind, however, that generally children have difficulty with abstract reasoning until they're 14-16 years old. Back in a previous life, in the 1990s, I tried teaching high school kids the basic fallacies of relevance. I had a small sample size, so I can't say my experience was statistically significant, but all the kids under 15 had trouble and all the kids over 16 mastered them with only a little effort.
Still, in a democracy, we need people who can reason; Adams's approach makes a lot of sense.
Monday I cabbed out to the Gorilla Tango Theater near Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood for Chris Conley's and Kevin Sheehan's one-act play The Last Word. I loved it. I won't give anything away—at 30 minutes, any useful summary would spoil it—except to say that Sheehan and Conley have created an intriguing capsule of a world on GTT's tiny stage.
Becky Blomgren (Grace) brought her character to life with the right blend of vulnerability and integrity it required. The character has an odd trait that her mentor/antagonist Mandy (Whitney LaMora) takes for granted but should surprise her Zenish-hippie friend Trish (Amber Olivier) and the earnest but touchingly clueless Libby (Rosa SanMarch). The play remains faithful to the reality it creates, so that Grace's talent not only makes sense, but drives the story to its satisfying conclusion.
Conley (who also directed) confessed to me she'd like to tighten up a couple of bits in the script, and I think I know what she means. I hope she and Sheehan get the chance; I'd love to see a longer version that, for example, shows more of the relationship between Grace and Mandy before the argument that opens the play. But maybe not; it's a gem as it is, and I'd like to see more of Conley's work in the future.
The Last Word has one remaining performance on January 31st at 8pm. Tickets are $12.
My reading stack has now passed my own height (175 cm):
This happened because:
- I spent 18 months reading a lot of stuff for school;
- Friends kept recommending books to me;
- There have always been books I really should read (like the three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson my mom left me); and
- Amazon is just so convenient.
(Some of those are gifts, too.)
I have therefore declared a moratorium on buying books from Amazon until I get through at least one of those shelves.
Then there's the problem of the 12 movies stacked up on my DVD player I have yet to watch...
I meant to post this yesterday. Sullivan rounds up an entertaining collection of posts about post-punctuation spacing in the era of computerized typesetting:
Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period.
The Daily Parker has adhered to the one-space rule since the beginning of time. In fact, even when I used a mechanical typewriter as a kid, I never got into the habit of adding supernumerary spaces after punctuation. I feel for those poor lost souls who do.
My year in numbers:
Air miles flown: 66,674
Flight segments: 50 (Of those, arriving or departing O'Hare: 43)
Countries visited: 7 (UK, India, Japan, China, Finland, Russia, Estonia)
Hours working for pay: 1,488
Hours working for free: 128
Hours working for school: 848
Hours walking Parker: 146[1]
Blog postings: 398
Photos taken: 4,633
CDs purchased: 12
Books read: 51
Movies watched: 61 (In theaters: only 8, sadly)
But really, the only statistic that matters is:
Duke MBAs earned: 1
[1] He got much more walking than just this. He and I were separated on and off for about four months total while I traveled last year.
Via Bruce Schneier, a retired CIA codebreaker recently decoded a message sent to Confederate Lt. Gen. John Pemberton in July 1863:
The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton's surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.
The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.
"He's saying, 'I can't help you. I have no troops, I have no supplies, I have no way to get over there,'" Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message. "It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was."
That day, 4 July 1863, the Union not only captured Vicksburg but also prevailed at Gettysburg. Historians generally agree the two victories effectively ended any possibility of the Confederacy winning the war, though they would continue to fight for another 20 months.
The full text of the message to Pemberton reads:
"Gen'l Pemberton:
You can expect no help from this side of the river. Let Gen'l Johnston know, if possible, when you can attack the same point on the enemy's lines. Inform me also and I will endeavor to make a diversion. I have sent some caps (explosive devices). I subjoin a despatch from General Johnston."
The last line, Wright said, seems to suggest a separate delivery to Pemberton would be the code to break the message.
The news story has more details about how they found the message, and how they broke the code.