Regruntled.com

I thought this was a spoof at first, but apparently not.  This is wrong on several levels.  From the New Age, pop psych point of view, affirmations are supposed to be  first-person.  This is second-person.  From the behaviorist point of view, the reward is not connected to behavior, so it has no effect on behavior.  It’s just a reward.  And from the marketing point of view, what did you think about the actors?  I wasn’t thinking “Yes!  I want to be that person!”  I was thinking “Jeez, what a loser.”

Hana (Japanese for “flower”) is a Mac OSX screensaver.  From Andreas Muller’s blog:

Hana is a dream about flowers for computers.

The idea is that no aspect of creating the flowers is hidden from the computers, everything is created in code and no bitmaps are used that the computer has not seen to the creation of itself, letting the computer “think” through every step.

This is an interesting constraint.  I tend to do the opposite, substituting data for code whenever possible.  I can give all the standard arguments as to why my style of programming is better, but none so eloquent as this.  Something to think about.

Legoland in California has a Lego inauguration for Obama, complete with little Lego porta-potties for the attendees. 

Reader Herman Turnip sends a link to a story about psychiatrist Karen Norberg knitting an anatomically correct human brain.  You know who else likes knitted brains?  Knitted zombies, that’s who!  The internet is amazing!  I can actually type “knitted zombie” into Google, and somebody has already been there and done that.

I was watching the coverage of the rescue on the news.  It was all there, right in front of me, the flotation devices, the life rafts, the rescue boats, the people throwing life preservers, the ambulances, the paramedics, the stretchers… I didn’t see a single thing that required a supernatural explanation.

Some reports focus on the landing rather than the rescue, and dispense the factoid that “no one ever successfully ditched a plane before.”  Well, not exactly.  Wikipedia lists some emergency water landings with 100% survival rates.  Let’s give credit where credit is due.  God was not Sullenberger’s copilot.  The copilot was a man named Skiles.  Invoking supernatural assistance denies Sullenberger and Skiles full credit for their outstanding achievement.

On the other hand, for geese to knock out both engines at exactly the same time… that sounds pretty unlikely.  Too unlikely to be the result of blind chance.  I think it’s evidence of Design.  Yeah, sure, blame it on the geese.  But Who created geese?  And why did He have to make them such big honking birds?  I’m not about to second-guess Infinite Wisdom. I can only trust that if a miracle knocked that plane out of the sky, there was a good reason for it.

Intrade has contracts for the Academy Award for Best Picture.  I’ve been watching the situation for a while, waiting for a potential arbitrage opportunity.  The opportunity appeared, and I sold short 11 different contracts.  I will lose on one of these, and win on the other 10, for a mathematically guaranteed net win.  What  a country!

The Oscar contracts have some interesting characteristics.  The Academy will announce 5 nominees on January 22nd, and the winner on February 22nd.  This means that there are really two expiration dates.  6 of my contracts will expire on January 22nd.  They will all be winners, and maybe I can even roll them over into the other 5 contracts.

Intrade also had contracts for the Golden Globes, but they had multiple categories (Best Picture Drama, Best Picture Comedy, etc.) with only a few contracts in each category.  For the Oscars, there is only one category, Best Picture, with lots of contracts.  Lots of long shots, that seems to be the key.  People will overpay for long shots, which creates the arbitrage opportunity.  It reminds me of the Vice Presidential contracts leading up to the conventions.

Meanwhile, Intrade gives Wall-E a 3.5% chance at Best Picture.  This sounds like a slam-dunk short.  The last time an animated film got Best Picture was Wizard of Oz in 1939.  Oh, wait!  1939 was Gone with the Wind.  Best Picture has never gone to an animated film, not even Wizard of Oz.

According to the NY Times, Disney is pushing Wall-E for Best Picture.  If successful, it would be a historic first, and bad news for the shorts.

Wall-E is tempting, but so far I prefer mathematical certainty to a slam dunk.

Craig Kaplan has an online interactive Penrose tiling generator.  It is easy enough to tile the plane with identical tiles of one shape.  The tilings tend to be periodic.  If you use hexagonal tiles, for example, the tiling looks the same no matter which hexagon you start from.  A Penrose tiling uses two different shapes, and is not periodic.  The pattern repeats more or less, but never exactly.

Well.  Either you find this totally fascinating, or you’re bored silly.  If you find it fascinating, try out the online generator.  You can tweak one tile and see how the other tile has to change in order to maintain the tiling.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

“A non-periodic tiling of the plane?

Damn! I’d like to see that!”

Artist Sarah Illenberger of Berlin knits human organs. 

See also: Dead cat knitting.

Buttons for mouse made a fractal teddy bear and named it Mandelbrot.  The blog also has a Dewey Decimal Clock that converts the current time to a Dewey Decimal and displays the corresponding subject heading.