Make Friends With Your Fast
The latest
Volkswagen GTI commercials feature a demonic totem called "the Fast" that exerts an unhealthy influence over Volkswagen GTI owners.
I wondered if I could get one to put in Maribeth's Volkswagen GTI.
It turns out that, although the Volkswagen website offers
an impressive variety of that kind of crap, they don't show any Fasts for sale at this time.
However, a limited number of Fasts are
selling on Ebay for ridiculous prices.
Idol Thought
I wonder if one could do some statistical analysis of the American Idol judges' comments on contestants and determine the relative frequency and importance of 1) the X factor; 2) the it factor; 3) the wow factor; and 4) the likability factor.
Update 2/28/06: Tonight Ryan added "the irresistibility factor." That sounds like the most powerful of all!
I really empathize with Taylor Hicks, a.k.a. Mr. Grey, because he is so uncoordinated. They tell him to clap along to the other kids' music and he can't do it right. They tell him to rotate his arm in a "woof woof" gesture and he can't do that either.
Big Picture
We made a small donation to
CALPIRG last year, and yesterday they sent me a survey listing items on their agenda and asking me to rank them in terms of priority.
I filled out the survey, then they showed me the results from 254 respondents.
Unfortunately my suggested ranking of priorities was pretty much 180-degrees away from the majority of respondents.
I thought that CALPIRG should agitate for small, specific things, like greater transparency in cell phone bills.
Most people thought that was least important, and CALPIRG's top priority should be broad-stroke stuff, like "ensure that our tax dollars are spent wisely."
You Forgot Poland
I think
The O.C. character of "Chili" Childress has been
misidentified as Canada.
Instead, I think Chili symbolizes Poland. Poland was formerly a satellite of Russia, but he actually played a role in bringing Iraq into the arms of America.
Location, Location, Location
This morning NPR talked to figure skating journalist Christine Brennan about Russian skater Evgeni Plushenko, and asked, "What makes him so good?"
I would not know how to answer this question, but Christine Brennan offered an apparently serious answer. She says that he is "lucky in where he lives," since he trains in St. Petersburg, just a few miles from the Hermitage, and she thinks that through "osmosis" the "passion" of the artwork of the Hermitage makes him a better skater.
Footnotes v. Endnotes
You should only use endnotes if all the notes are really boring. If even some of the notes are sufficiently interesting that the reader will want to see them
en passant, they should be footnotes.
Bart Ehrman is the offender of the moment, but I think Jared Diamond also screwed this up.
I guess you could also have (unnumbered, interesting) footnotes and (numbered, boring) endnotes.
Patently Ridiculous
What better way to while away a Saturday afternoon than to read some random patents?
"It is appreciated that gravity will operate on a mass to pull it down to the surface of the earth. As the area of a mass increases, the gravitational pull of the earth on that mass also increases. Thus, when one leans his head down, he effectively increases the mass area upon which the earth's gravitational pull can act upon. From this it can be reasoned that a person that keeps his head down may have a greater chance of falling to the ground after a stumble than a person that keeps his head up."
-- U.S. Patent No. 6,886,186.
I wonder if patent examiners actually read these things.
Galois Humor
Forced to read an old
Newsweek while having therapeutic electrical currents sent through my foot, I came across a review of
The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved, a book about Abel and Galois.
The review explained that the equation which couldn't be solved was the quintic equation, which is "one step up from the dreaded quadratic equation," which students have to struggle to solve in school.
WSJ Factoid Debunked
The "trend" that
whichever team scores first wins the Superbowl is
no longer statistically significant.
You Only Live Twice
heizei sunawachi jisei nari
nanigoto zo kono setsu ni ara n ya?
every day's poem is a death verse
what else could there be at this time?
--Basho (October 10, 1694; two days prior to his death)
I had often heard that the title of
You Only Live Twice was taken from a verse by Basho: "You only live twice/ Once when you are born/ And once when you stare death in the face."
It turns out this is totally wrong. This is supposedly a "haiku" made up by James Bond himself.
However, Fleming confuses the inattentive reader, first by putting the verse at the beginning of the book and labeling it as, "After
Bassho, Japanese poet, 1643-94." Later on Bond seems to attribute his own haiku to Basho: "As Bassho said, or almost said, 'You only live twice.'"
There are a lot of trivia questions out there with the wrong answer.
