Ideas In Action: 60 Years of RAND
RAND has published a
60-minute documentary about itself, intended mainly for internal consumption. This documentary was apparently the idea of Amy Pascal, who is (a) on the RAND Board of Trustees; (b) the fiftieth most powerful woman in the world, according to
Forbes.
When you consider a self-celebratory documentary commissioned by an institution for purposes of internal propaganda, you'd probably expect it to be mediocre viewing. But actually I think it is pretty good. With maybe just a little cutting, it could be shown for a general audience as a documentary on public television.
The original screening, which I saw some months ago, had a very compelling opening scene. It opened with television footage of a news interview with a RAND researcher. I have to paraphrase the dialogue from memory:
ABC News Anchor: Citing recent terrorist activity in the Middle East, the White House declared a security alert for Washington, D.C., today, which included the placement of surface-to-air missiles on the White House lawn. Wouldn't you say this was a paranoid overreaction?RAND Expert: No, I would say that it is merely prudent... Thus far fortunately the U.S. has not experienced the kind of major terrorist violence that we've seen in some of the West European or Middle Eastern capitals. At the same time we haven't been immune to terrorist violence... Terrorists have not really attacked the United States from abroad, but it is conceivable. I think what we really see in terms of the protection at the White House is that the missiles are there because there have been cases in the past in which hijacked airliners have been threatened with crashing into major buildings.About this time the date of the television broadcast was discreetly displayed in the corner...
1983. A murmur ran through the audience.
RAND Expert: If there were any incident, those charged with security would be seen as derelict in their responsibilities if they hadn't taken precautions.It was a very effective scene.
Unfortunately the DVD version has been somewhat sabotaged because the filmmakers were not able to get permission to use the ABC footage on the DVD release! So the interview is not shown and instead the first scene consists of an apparent monologue by the RAND expert. I don't think it's as effective. It's a shame. But many other scenes in the documentary are still good.
In Memoriam: Ronald Scott
Professor Ronald Scott has died.I did not know him well. I believe I met him exactly twice. On both occasions he was on one of my oral examining committees, and on both occasions he was the examiner who gave me the most trouble.
The first time it was during my so-called mini-orals and he brought in two little rubber balls with very different coefficients of restitution. Unfortunately at that time I had never heard of Newton's Law of Restitution.
The second time was a year later, during the real orals. He asked some question about vibrations due to earthquakes. My answer must not have been very good since he offered the encouragement, "You don't really know this stuff at all, do you?"
Ah, good times.
He was from Scotland so we spoke a little bit about that. He seemed bitter about the economic malaise in Scotland that had caused him to leave in the 1950s. "Shortages of everything... Shortages of potatoes, in a country practically built of potatoes!" His mother tried to get him to come back from America and get a job as an engineer in Scotland, but when he quoted the interviewer his monthly American salary, they thought he was talking about an annual salary.
Games of Chance
It is a curious fact that very few people know the full rules of Monopoly. People don't know that if a player lands on an unowned property and doesn't buy it, then the property is auctioned off. They don't know about the requirement to pay 10% interest when you buy an already mortgaged property. Some people do funny things with Free Parking or have other misconceptions.
I would bet that 95% of all Monopoly games played fail to comply with the official rules in one way or another.
We played Monopoly at Thanksgiving and I won (YEE-HAW!). This Monopoly game might have been the most compliant with the rules that I have ever played. We still didn't get it 100% right because we forgot the surcharge on purchased mortgaged property at one point. But we were close.
I have had good results with luck-based party games recently. On Saturday I was introduced to
Fluxx, which is a fun low-effort card game, and I won twice.
Sadly this luck hasn't extended to poker, which cost me a little money this week. I guess poker must not be a game of chance.
Hybrid Super-SUVs
One thing about hybrid technology that you don't hear discussed too often: maybe in addition to improving the gas mileage of existing car models, it will enable consumers to further push the envelope of big SUVs, while keeping fuel costs somewhat affordable.
So instead of moms driving the kids to school in civilianized Hummers, they will drive the little tykes around in civilianized hybrid-drive Strykers instead.
Meanwhile, young men will drive around in Diet Pepsi trucks, like P. Diddy does.
House
They keep doing this thing on
House, M.D. where the dialogue calls for a two-thread conversation with the participants jumping back and forth from one subject to the other. I think it's too clever-clever. Yes, real people sometimes talk about more than one thing at once, but they don't zig-zag back and forth and back at one-sentence intervals. And if real people do, the actors/director on
House don't know how to do it. They get confused and don't say the lines right.
Stop it,
House writers!
Recent Reading Material
You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner. Funny. But it does kind of go on and on endlessly.
The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles. Interesting article about an inventor.
Oracle by Greg Egan and
The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald by Peter Watts. Two science fiction short stories with certain significant similarities.
Watch the Road
The local buses have a lot of posters inside with traffic safety admonishments. "Drive Safely," "Watch for Pedestrians," "Stop on Red or End Up Dead."
I would like to meet the advertising genius who thought these messages should go on the inside of a bus to be read by bus riders.
The posters, in larger form, are also pasted on the outside of the buses. I guess that makes more sense. Although it still comes off as a little preachy considering that bus drivers are among the most aggressive drivers around.
The Passing of Scrappy the Jeep
The clutch froze up on the Jeep again so I had to drive around stuck in second gear. That was more or less the last straw. An auto wrecker gave me $400 for the Jeep. So long, Scrappy.
I wish this had happened about six days ago, it would have saved me about $150 in liability insurance. I got (most of?) the insurance premium back.
I found a lot of good junk cleaning out the back seat though.
Bullets
I was watching a
show about bullets on the National Geographic Channel.
The tag line was, "You can run, but you can't hide, from these bullets of the future."
From what I know of ballistics, I believe this is pretty much backward. Hiding from bullets generally works much better than running away from them.
More Volkswagen: Thank You Very Much
I was curious about the Volkswagen Passat commercial where they sing, "Thank you very very very much." It sounded like a tune from
Oliver!Well, it turns out it is not from
Oliver! It is from
Scrooge: The Musical. So, you know, I was close.
Ampersands
Language Log cites articles claiming that an ampersand conveys "hipness and modernity." To me at least, an ampersand conveys just the opposite of modernity, a retro air (although I suppose it could be both hip and retro).
Contrast the old-timey flavor of Smith & Company with the more modern Smith, Inc., Smith LLC, and smith.com.
And as for computer technology spreading ampersand usage among the young, poor old Barnes & Noble couldn't even use an ampersand in their URL, but had to be barnesandnoble.com. In many computer contexts (for example, HTML), adding an ampersand to text is no easier than adding a letter from the Greek alphabet.
Spreading the Gospel of the Pilot G2 Pen
Possibly my favorite consumer product is the Pilot G2 Retractable Gel Ink Roller Ball pen. I actually regret that I never tried to get Pilot Pens to sponsor the robot truck. If we were going to plaster corporate logos all over the truck, I would rather have the Pilot Pen logo than a soft drink or something. Because the G2 pen is just that good. Apple Computer would be another good choice. But I digress.
One good thing about working on the polls on Tuesday is that I got about a thousand people to sign their names using my G2 pen. And the stealth marketing worked, too! I saw at least one person stop and check the brand name on the pen, and one other person said, "Good pen."
Dear Pilot Pen, if you would like to reward me for my efforts on your behalf, I wouldn't say no to a few boxes of pens.
We Are Such Suckers
Our Netflix DVDs have been sitting unwatched on the shelf for four months.
Four months.[When I first attempted to post this, the body of the text didn't appear for some reason. But the title really says it all.]
We should either get rid of Netflix or adopt a more aggressive watch-it-or-return-it policy. We finally watched
Y tu mamá también on Sunday, so we can send it back now.
The Robot Gig
I gave the Robot Talk at RAND yesterday. It went pretty well, I filled the room, but I felt disappointed because when I gave the Previous Robot Talk at RAND eighteen months ago, I filled a significantly bigger room.
I think I had better attendance for the Railgun Talk than I did for this edition of the Robot Talk.
It's my own fault. I should have marketed the talk better. I should have printed up some flyers and posted them. Then I think there would have been too many people to fit in the room. That's the effect we're looking for!
Celebrity Sighting: Steven Wright
Yesterday I went to Philly Steak, one of my usual lunch hangouts-- I like it because they have free copies of the Wall Street Journal to read-- and Steven Wright was there having a sandwich.
I sat down at the table, diagonally across from him, and we ate our sandwiches without comment. I read the Wall Street Journal. We were sitting there together for quite a long time. Eventually he left. He left his trash behind on the table, which was a trifle thoughtless.
I told Maribeth about my celebrity encounter. She did not know who Steven Wright was.
I guess maybe his career peaked in 1991-1992.
