Con Art - Solution

This is the solution to the question I posed in this post, so if you haven't read it you can safely skip this one too.

Hussein got it pretty much right on in the comments.

What the company could have done is the following.
Identify 32000 recepients, that's a very easy feat and most mailing lists for sale contain way more than that.
First week, divide them in halves. Send to half of them (16000) saying that X stock will go up, and the other half saying that X stock is going down.
Wait for 1 week, see the results. You must have sent the correct prediction to 8000 people, no matter how the stock actually did. Identify those 16000, divide them in halves, repeat the exact same process saying to half of them that the stock is going up and to the other half that it's going down.

At the end of 6 weeks you would've sent 6 correct prediction in a row to 500 people. Collect your money and profit :)
This con game is illegal when/if played on purpose. Do not attempt :)

Adaptation

You know you've spent too much time in Seattle when:

1. You start to panic when you're driving in a small suburban street and the lane markers disappear.
2. You wonder how you ever got anywhere before the invent of live/google maps.
3. On a strange road the first thing you do is start looking for the speed limit signs.
4. You have trouble parallel parking in a spot that is twice the length of your car.
5. You regard a Jeep Grand Cherokee or a mini van as a small car.
6. You walk around with zero cash in your pocket.
7. You wonder how you ever lived without online shopping.
8. You think that a 10 mile drive is a really short one.
9. You're very surprised to find a place that's open past midnight on weekdays.
10. You start using 5+ word phrases to describe how you want your coffee, e.g. Tall Non-Fat Eggnog Vanilla Latte.

Popular and Right

Apparently we tend to confuse these two separate things, or assume some sort of correlation.

This might seem all a bit random but bear with me.

What do you think is the percentage of smart people in a given population?

Trying to come up with a definition for smartness or intelligence is not as easy of a task as it sounds. There are thousands of totally different I.Q. tests which are assumed to measure ability at a skillset and call it IQ.
Being well informed about a specific topic, however, is much easier to define and measure.

So what do you think is the percentage of people who are well versed in medical sciences or philosophy in a given population? The US's or Egypt's for example?

My conjecture says that it's not a majority.

This, in itself, is not so bad. But substitute economics or politics for medicine or philosophy and it becomes kind of dangerous.

Smart or not, you have to be well informed about a subject to be able to take sound decisions regarding matters of said subject. It took countless smart people thousands of years to build a foundation of science that got us to where we are today. You simply can not, no matter how smart you (think you) are, rebuild it all from scratch in one lifetime.

I said earlier that one can get away with little knowledge of medicine because one doesn't get to vote if one wants his son's tonsils removed or not. The decision is made in a dictatorial fashion by someone who is (hopefully) an expert on the subject.

But this very same person gets to vote for what his country's policies should be, at least in a true democracy he does.

To make matters worse, individuals rarely get to pick from individual policies on a decision by decision basis (or else nobody will do anything but attend political meetings and vote for whatever today's decision is). Instead, you and I get to pick a "package deal", be it a political party or a presidential candidate. For example American voters can (and recently actually did) pick candidates from the Democratic Party for the senate or the house. The Democratic party generally stands for a higher minimum wage and legalization of abortion.
If you happen to agree on the latter but disagree with the former, tough luck. It's our package of the day.
Or of course start your own party, good luck with that.

Combine all of the above and you might arrive at the same conclusion I did.
1. The majority of people are not well informed (sometimes ill-informed?) about economics and politics.
2. If you're ill/dis/mis-informed about a specific matter, you shouldn't be expected to take a sound a decision regarding said matter.
2. Voters get to pick one out of several candidates, each is a bag of specific stands on a multitude of subjects.
3. A democracy guarantees that the candidate with the most votes win.

Do you see it yet?
Democracy guarantees the domination of what's popular. It even actually creates an incentive system for politicians to stay "in fashion" with what's popular and form their strategies or advertised agendas accordingly.

The result?
What's popular is what will get done. And what's popular shouldn't be expected to magically intersect with what's right. Not until the majority is knowledgeable about economics and politics (in the very least).

We might as well be flipping coins.

P.S.
I'm not anti-democracy. Nor do I have an alternative worthwhile system that I can suggest. I'm just debating the merits and flaws of what is currently, widely accepted as the best system to run a country.

Con Art

Or How to Make Money using Mathematics.

So here is the question, and I'll answer this one after I get a few responses. Just think about it and don't cheat.


You open your mailbox and you find that a "stock prediction" company sent you this letter saying that it's their business to predict the stock market and they want you as a customer. They provide you with a free prediction that the stock price of company xxxx will go up in the next week. xxxx is a large company like MSFT or something of the sort.
You toss the mail out, but come next week you note that the xxxx stock price did go up. Next week, surely enough, you get another mail from the same company extending one more free prediction that the xxxx stock price will go up (or down for that matter). A week passes by and they were right again.
You get that for 6 weeks in a row, and every time they are spot on right about the stock price prediction.
For the 7th week you get a mail that they had sent you enough free predictions and you should pay for the next one if you want it.

Would you pay? Obviously they're good at predicting stock prices aren't they?
If not then why?
Just think about if for a few minutes and leave me a comment with your answer.
Please don't cheat by looking it up (or otherwise), or at least if you do, don't paste it here in the comments :)

Hofstadter's Law

Have you ever read about Hofstadter's Law?
If not, it's about time you do. It's true.

Probability and Coincidence

A man who travels a lot was concerned with the possibility of a bomb on his plane. He determined the probability of this, found it to be low but not low enough for him, so now he always travels with a bomb in his suitcase. He reasons that the probability of two bombs being on board is infinitesimal.
-John Allen Paulos in Innumeracy

Sacrifice

I just finished watching the movie "The Weather Man". I started watching it at 11:20pm and finished it at 1:02 am.
This line, in my opinion, is one of the truest statements you'll ever find in a movie.

Robert Spritzel, played by Sir Michael Caine, said to his son David:
Sacrifice is... To get anything of value, you have to sacrifice. Do you know that the hardest thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy. Easy doesn't enter into grown-up life.

This post is for you, you know who you are.

Home

If somebody relocates when he's 25 years old to a different part of the world.
If this somebody lives there till he's 50.
Which part of the world is home to somebody? One..., both..., or neither...?

Halloween 2006 aka Borat in Seattle

Time for a less serious, less important, and a more personal post after the couple past ones.

So last year I took a back seat and watched Halloween in the US for the first time. This year I jumped right in.

First of all, if you don't know who Borat is, you need a primer. You will also probably love the trailer.

So, for this Halloween I was Borat! And even though the movie hasn't come out yet, the character is insanely popular. Going out on Friday in the costume was pretty amazing, people are really nice on Halloween. Everybody dressed up in the most creative customes, complementing you on yours. In Borat's case people were taking pictures, yelling lines from the movie. It was truly a weekend of living like a movie star :)

Such a post would, of course, not be complete without photos, so I present you with a few.

Huh?

I don't think I'll ever understand how a person, any person, think like this, assuming there was thinking involved.
I will never understand what can make a person become like that either.

Sex maniacs, are these real?

If you live in Egypt please help me out here, is this real?
http://malek-x.net/node/268

If you're a girl who lives in Egypt, please be careful. Try to avoid the busy spots and downtown at night. Better safe than sorry.

I don't know what to say, it's a new low.

The Smiling Cucumber

You probably thought the title was some kind of metaphor or hoped the post would have some deep insightful meaning to it.

If you did, then I am actually not terribly sorry to disappoint. This post is exactly and literally about what's in the title.

After 25 years of eating cucumber, I can announce that I have a photo of what up to my knowledge is the first smiley embedded in a cucumber. There is no manipulation of the cucumber or image processing of any sort. This is what I saw looking back at me when I looked at a piece of cucumber I was biting.

Flying Spaghetti Music

I'll keep it sweet simple, I'm sure the less I talk the better a post it is :)

-Pastafarianism
Nothing for me to say, the wikipedia page says it all. Awesome stuff.

-Pandora Box
The only such website that I see actually works. It's realy cool, just tell it what you already like and it'll guide you through discovering music that you most probably never heard before but will like. And it works!

Bloggerhea

Recently I've been blogging more than I used to so that's the term I came up with to describe the phenomenon. I have a feeling it'll become popular one day, maybe just with the guys. I know all the girls are saying "ewwww" together right now, no big deal.

The newly coined term swiftly takes me to the topic, which is probably going to provoke more ewwws. It's just I noticed what looked to me like an interesting phenomenon. The naming for bathrooms.

Every few years English speaking people seem to get fed up or disgusted by one name and decide to switch to another. So far we have bathroom, water closet, washroom (mostly Canadian), men's/women's room, loo, toilet, can, and lavatory as words that are pretty much referring to the same thing. I conjecture that this is the one physical object with the largest number of words associated with it in the English language.

It seems to me that the new word gets associated with the concept and disgust ensues, and then people think they can solve that by using a a new word and designating the old one as non-PC (politically correct). Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Seriously, what difference does a word make if we understand we're referring to the same concept?

Superlatives

Sleep has a funny habbit of evading me for a few days every now and then. Tonight, reading the last 100 pages of the book I was going through hasn't helped. Turning in bed for a few hundred times didn't help either, and I found thoughts racing through my head. They're doing so even faster than what I'm used to in the shower which by now everybody knows is my inspirational place. If we can be so misled as to call these things in my head inspirations, that is.
So I thought blogging as a means of documenting my brain's electrical activity was in order.

Of course, the net had to be down at my place. For only the 3rd time since I got it here a year ago probably. But, like sleep, it seems to go away when I want it the most. Or maybe we've grown too attached to our online "presence" that all the time is when we want it the most, but I digress.

So anyway, I'm writing in notepad and will post it later, I think.

My amusing thought of the day is about human nature and competition. If there is anything that human beings are best at, it's getting better at something. Every day people in all walks of life outdo other people as well as previous versions of themselves in a relentless quest for something that I can't figure out yet.
Sometimes it's about wealth, and sometimes it's about fame, but most of the time you can't really tell what it's about. People are breaking records and outdoing everyone else noisily and quietly every day and at things ranging from the grand medical or technological breakthroughs to the absurd eating records.

We're all proud of ourselves and how well we do a specific thing or two, be it our jobs or playing a sport, musical instrument, or a particular video game. I know I am. But a little exposure to the best in the world usually changes your perception of just how good you actually are.
Look closer and there is someone who's stronger than you are, another one who's taller or shorter or fatter or thinner, someone who's better at doing what you do for a living, and someone who's better at playing your favorite sport or video game. There's someone who's more social, someone who can speak more languages than you do more fluently, and someone who can drive faster.
You can only attach superlatives to yourself in a (very) limited context, and it's a scary thought, even a depressing one if you let it get to your self confidence and sense of self worthiness.
After all, if that's the case then you're pretty much disposable from a world point of view.

I thought this would be the end of this post when I started it, but as I type the thoughts came flowing and I think I found a way out.
I guess this is why I keep on blogging.

Most of us can't be the best at everything or even one thing almost by definition. As long as there are more people than things to gauge skill at this has to be the case. There just can't be 10 best people at doing 5 things. There can only be 5, and this doesn't bode very well with 3 billion people in the world.

But each one of us is the (relatively) unique combination of how well he/she is at those things combined. I am the mix of an 8/10 driver, an 8/10 gamer, a 7/10 programmer, a 2/10 ping pong player, an 0.1/10 squash player and a 0/10 singer. As well as a bunch of other stuff, but you get the idea.
It's not only the things we're good (or best) at that makes us who we are, but also what we're fairly good at, not so good at, and absolutely bad at.

Maybe now I can sleep.....

Stack overflow

Lately it's been feeling like very little bit of new information that makes its way through to my head displaces an older one. I feel like I've hit the (admittedly low) limits on my memory and now I'm starting to merely replace old information with new one.

Maybe I have to stop acquiring information...

UnNews

I woke up today to a text message from Nagaiaia asking me to remind her of the wikipedia parody website. Took me a bit to remember she was talking about Uncyclopedia

Having been reminded of it I took a glance and the UnNews section actually contained a couple of hilarious posts.

This one should be enjoyable by the geekier population. If you'd caught on the computer thing long enough to remember Duke Nukem 3D (circa 1997) you should be good to go.

I also came across a more general audience "article" and it's just as hilarious. The news? A man had bad picture taken of him.

Geek, Geekier, Geekiest

Let me state the obvious first, I (surprise!) have changed the template. This one looks better imho and it isn't messed up on some computers like the other one was after I'd tried to make the post pages wider and messed it all up. Ironically this one is just as narrow as the old one was before I messed it up, so I'm back to square one. Anyway, just let me know if something is (not?) broken with the change.

I've always been a supporter of the cool geek concept. I believe that being a geek doesn't have to carry the negative connotations it does, it makes me sleep better at night you could say. In that vein I have some of the geekiest confessions to make.

One day this week it just hit me that I dreamt of Windows Vista the previous night. I had dreamt that Microsoft "called it off" and the whole company was in jeopardy because of the announcement. This has got to be one of the geekiest things that happened to me, or maybe even to anybody. Don't ask.

I happen to have another confession in the same vein that I've kept a secret for a long time.
Sometimes, in real life, when someone says something really funny, instead of laughing I find myself "LOLing". That is actually saying the word 'LOL' instead of actually doing the act and laughing out loud. Weirdly enough people didn't seem to notice the 3 or 4 times I've done that. Apparently few people actually listen to me, not that it's a bad thing.

There, I said it all. Got Geekier?

Shar el baleya ma yod7ek

Apologies if you can't speak Arabic. I can't think of an equivalent saying in English but roughly translated the title is an Arabic saying that means "The worst type of tragedy is one that makes you laugh".

I couldn't really think of a more suitable quote when I came across 2 news articles today.
I had been looking for news about people who were killed in an accident when their bus rolled over while driving them to Saudi Arabia to do omra because one of the victims is a friend's aunt. I'm not one to read websites written in Arabic in general but when my attempts to locate the news on the bbc website failed I thought I'd give masrawy a try.

I eventually found what I think is the news item I wanted here where it says in one and a half lines that 36 people died.
But I also found this article which describes in great detail and 6 paragraphs how the American embassador in Egypt spent his night at a cafe in Egypt smoking shisha/hookah. Including, but not limited to, the exact cafe he was at, other ones he considered, and the all important facts that he ordered apple shisha, a cup of tea, and rice pudding for dessert while watching a football game.

As one of my friends put it, they forgot to tell us if he wiped his ass afterwards.

We 3agaby

Anniversary we ramadan kareem

A couple days ago (Saturday the 23rd to be exact) marked 1 year since I set foot on US soil. I had thought about synchronizing the post with the day and time but couldn't really be bothered.

Ironically (or maybe just weirdly) enough, I had to go to the airport on the exact same day, only a couple hours later than I'd landed, to pick up a friend who's starting with Microsoft this October. The traffic was nothing like I've seen before that it took me around an hour to get there. The upside was lots of time for reflecting on a very different and maybe significant year of my life.

-Ramadan Kareem
Once again it's upon us. To all my friends I haven't called, Ramadan Kareem! Kol sana wento tayebeen. To some of my friends I haven't called, Khefo 3al la7ma, you know who you are :)

-Useless tip of the day:
I'm pretty sure most people know this already, but to my surprise I recently found out that some don't so here goes.
If a given calendar day falls on day x of the week, the same day falls on the next day of the week the year after, except when it's a leap year. For example, September 23rd was a Friday in 2005. In 2006 it's a Saturday and it's going to be a Sunday in 2007.

-Uplifter of the day:
It happened to everybody, you remember something that happened in the past and think 'God I was stupid/foolish/naive/an idiot'. If you're in the habit of writing some of your thoughts anything written a year or 2 ago will sound to you like it was written by someone else. A slight hint of remorse would usually follow when this happened to me, if only I was smarter/more knowledgable/more eloquent back then.
Think like me no more, all thanks to a quote I stumbled across
'We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish' F. A. Hayek
There! It's the sign you're growing wiser everytime this happens to you.

Tidbits

It's been long since I posted something, and I'm having second thoughts about keeping the blog altogether. But for now I'll try to push through.

So here are a few news items and thoughts that were of note to me:


-California Sues Automakers
It says here that California is suing the 6 largest car makers in the US (including japanese ones with operations in the US) over global warming seeking millions of dollars.
Now regardless of how green I try to be, I just can't see the logic in this (other than it being an election year).
Even if you disregard the ongoing debate about global warming, whether it is actually happening, or what its causes are. Even disregarding all that and looking at the distribution of sources that contribute to producing greenhouse gases, fuel for transportation comes 3rd after industrial processes and power stations. Agricultural processes come a close 4th. Why doesn't California sue all factories and power stations, and after those maybe farmers as well?

-Crime and Punishment
The topic seems to pop in my head quite often for reasons beyond me.
The more I think about it, the more prison seems like a really bad idea. If someone who knows how to pickpocket goes to prison he'll graduate with a doctorate in serial killing. If there is such a thing as bad influence then it really doesn't get any worse than prison.
Only "solution" I could think of is solitary imprisonment and apart from the increased costs I think over any significant period of time it'll turn the prisoners all crazy. So we might as well just kill all criminals while we're at it.
Expulsion sounded like a good idea while it lasted, society gets rid of a bad seed and the bad seed is deprived of something that should be of value, but I can't think of somewhere you could expel criminals to nowadays.
Any ideas?

Memories

They're weird. You'd think it's a good thing to have so many good memories with people you've known. But you look at the photos and remember the silly stuff. They might make you giggle for a bit but it feels bitter sweet and before you know it you're all nostalgic. They really don't make you feel any better. If anything they make you feel worse.

Would we be better off with a selective memory where we would just keep the stuff we need for things like 'burning stuff hurt don't touch it again'.

Economics a.k.a El Banzeen Ghaly!

Almost all Egyptians know that gas prices are subsidized, people outside Egypt might not but if they're reading now they do.

As a consequence, Egypt "enjoyed" one of the lowest prices for gas (petrol if you're a brit) anywhere in the world. Up until a few weeks ago 1 liter of 90 octane gas was being sold to the public for 1 EGP (around 18 US cents), that is less than 70 US cents per US gallon. For a quick comparison gas in the US is cheap because it goes for around $3 US a gallon, and is expensive in the UK where people pay around 1 sterling pound for a liter. That's more than 10 times as much.

A few weeks ago, the price at which gas is controlled rose 30% to 1.3 egyptian pounds, and while I was not there when it did, I can definitely imagine the major uproar on the streets following that. If conversations with friends and family are anything to go by, I actually bet thousands, if not millions, of people are still uttering swear words in disapproval of the government's action.

I, too, think this was a wrong step to take, gas prices should not have slidden up 30%. The subsidies should have been lifted and prices should have been let to shoot up to the 5 or 7 times the current price that it's estimated to be worth. I am not being sarcastic either, hold on to your guns a little bit before you declare me crazy and hear me out.


Subsidies mean that the government is paying the price difference between what you're paying at the pump and what it actually cost to get the gas to the pump. It does *not* mean that the cost of gas is less, it was just transferred and is being paid by someone else.

Now, a basic economic fact is that demand increases with lower prices and decreases at higher prices. That is why not everybody is driving around in cars costing millions of pounds, and why on the other hand almost everybody can eat bread.
In fact it is so basic that it's almost considered common sense, and is ultimately portrayed by the common saying "Abo balash kattar meno" or translated "Get more of that which is free".

Combine both facts and you get a better picture, taxpayers' money is used to buy gas and people are using more of it because of exactly that.
If subsidies were removed, and gas prices are allowed to fluctuate according to free market conditions, prices will shoot up to maybe 6 or 7 times their current values. This will naturally cause people to use less and prices will go back down a bit. Not back to the point they're at with subsidies but to the point where equilibrium is reached between supply and demand.

And before thinking that this would be a life threatening situation for low income people let me explain what I think.
What would people do if they found out their dinner is free? I say they will probably eat more than what they usually do, much more actually.
This is no different than the gas situation. I know that I drove around for much more than 500 Kms on the first day I got my first car in Egypt. I also know that it would have been prohibitively expensive for me to do that if gas prices were 5 times their values back then.

Nobody likes high prices, specially those who can't afford it themselves. And even though it might be nice to imagine a world where everyone affords everything, the underlying scarcity of resources makes that practically impossible.

What subsidizing gas is doing is taking from tax payers, many(most?) of which are low to middle income, and paying it for gas much of which is consumed by the higher income classes who own the bigger and more gas guzzling cars.

Still not convinced? I'll leave you with a few statistics I just looked up.

-The FY 2006-07 budget earmarks EGP 40 billion for fuel subsidies, up from EGP 22 billion in 2005, and more than is allocated to health and education combined.

-According to Boutros-Ghali, the rich benefit by EGP 1,700 per capita from fuel subsidies, while the poor benefit by only EGP 300 per capita.


Economics* is interesting isn't it?

*Most of my recently acquired and embarassingly little knowledge of economics has been through this book, Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. A highly recommended read.

Layout

I know it's long overdue but somehow whenever I decide to blog I end up doing something else... I assume this is a good thing (that I'm busy with other stuff) but I also promise I'll keep on blogging (even if just photos :P).

Anyway, I just have a quick question, does the blog layout show correctly on your computer? Ever since I modified it to be wider so that I can post bigger photos inline it's been showing up great on my laptop but kinda funny on my desktop. Is it just my desktop?

Appreciate the feedback!

Rebel!

Been a while since I last posted and I don't feel like typing a lot. And while most people use lyrics to fill in the gaps, I feel photos are more my style.

Of course the fact that I just got the Canon Digital Rebel XT that I've always wanted comes to play very conveniently. I'm extremely happy with it even though I only have one low end lens for it thus far (50mm/f1.8, yes fixed focal length and no zoom)

Instead of boring you with a review which you can find better done somewhere else I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

Enjoy, but be forewarned, lots of sexy cars in the photos amongst other things. :)

Not all that looks like politics is

The subject is an early disclaimer that I'm not politically inclined. I'm not a lawyer, all characters and events -- even those based on real persons -- are entirely fictional, of course your mileage may vary, and you should eat your greens.

Anyway, so a good discussion today was brought up at lunch out of the blue. Usually we'd discuss... errr pretty much nothing, but somehow today we ended up debating whether punishment should be applied to "insane criminals" just as well as their sane counterparts, specially in a murder case where a sane person would've been sentenced to death.

The discussion evolved to include ethics, right and wrong, free will, what it means to be human, the philosophy of imprisonment and the death penalty amongst other things. And the answer is not 42 (a joke if you're a galaxy hitchhiker). Actually we never came up with any answers, as is often with such highly enjoyable and rare debates. I was playing devil's advocate most of the time just to fuel the debate more and it worked. Good mental exercise.

- Waking life
An excellent movie (beware the spoilers on that link), one that can actually be watched many times over always finding new hidden ideas to think about. Warning: it's not for the faint of mind and will make you ponder themes you might have never thought of before.

- Women vote in Kuwait
While this should be good news. I can't help but think of how sad it is that the date this news item is published is in the year 2006.

- Bogs
By complete accident I learned this is not just a typo people make when trying to type blogs. It actually is something.

- Typos
Open notepad (or kpad if you're on linux or something) and type the word ratio. Seriously, try to do it. I can safely bet that at least 90% of the people will type it 'ration' first before correcting it (or not). It is one of the most popular typos out there. It's probably because we're used to typing 'ion' as in "relation", or "nation", come to think of it. 'io' is an uncommon ending for an English word. I find the typo that usually results amusing.

Congratulations, you just lost 5 minutes of non refundable time.

We eih kaman

Life can get boring sometimes, living seems to be the one action you can't just stop doing when you're bored with it to take a break and do something else, dying for example.
At a very high level, there's really nothing much to do out here but living. And living takes its toll on you eventually, they say smoking is dangerous because it might kill you at the age of 50 or something, but living is about as dangerous as smoking. In Egypt, for example, it kills people at an average age between 68 and 73.

Anyway, I'm done with the nonsense, here is a few things that might make slightly more sense:

- Drama
For some reason we all use the word Drama when we actually mean tragedy. Drama turns out to be a greek word that means "Action", kinda ironic, and something to think about the next time you watch a Jackie Chan movie.

- Ratatouille (rat.a.too.ee)
The funniest trailer I have ever seen, a definite must see. It played while I was waiting for Cars (an excellent movie too) to start and I was still laughing 10 minutes into the movie. Even though it's still a year away I can't wait.

It's getting late so I'll just wrap it up here.
Over and out.

Mom, what is a planet?

You thought you'd learnt it in school. Everybody knows what a planet is. And if you didn't you can always pick up a dictionary and look it up, right?.

Well I thought so too, but then I saw this on the news and I kid you not.

"After over seven years of debating, the International Astronomical Union announced that it expects to announce the official definition of a planet in September. After many-a-deadlock, they handed the task of deciding exactly what a planet is to a new committee, which includes historians and educators. 'They wanted a different perspective from that of planetary scientists,' said Edward Bowell, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory who is also vice president of the IAU's Division III-Planetary Systems Sciences group. If all goes according to plan, the wording will be proposed in their 12-day General Assembly meeting in Prague." (Courtesy of /.)

Unfortunately, they're serious.
Some people have too much time on their hands obviously.

Tourism And Marketing

Continuing with the multi-point posts I had these 2 separate subjects in mind. Only when I put them together in the title did I notice they are actually related. My post however is agnostic of that and you'll hardly notice any relation, it's more of something for you to think about.

-Tourism
At the start of the last century (the 1900s) Leavenworth, WA was a city that depended on commerce for its economy. The railroad tracks used to go through it and a railroad track going through a city back then meant a healthy commercial economy. But then the railroads were rerouted, the city's economy fell apart gradually and for some 30 years the city was on the brink of extinction.
In the late 1960s they decided to try and do something about it.
Ideas were thrown around and an idea to turn the city into a mock bavarian (Bavaria is a state in Germany) village was chosen to turn the city into a touristic destination and help revitalize economy.
And it worked. Even though the city had nothing particularly Bavarian about it, they started remodelling their hamlet to look Bavarian. People started festivals, signs in German were erected, and with all the remodelling work the city looks very refreshing.
Today the city whose area is 3.2 Km² and population around 2000 people gets more than a million tourists annually.
It would be a healthy exercise to think about the story of this city and compare it to how we're "investing" our priceless monuments and potentially touristic areas.

Actually, I take that back, this is not a healthy exercise at all.

-Marketing
I've noticed a few things about ads and marketing that I find oxymoronic. Let me illustrate.
Quite a few ads or statements on product packaging proudly boast "Better taste or less fat or more cleaning power than the leading (beverage, or chocolate, or detergent) brand(s)"
Well, if I, the advertiser, willingly admit that some other brand is the leading brand what am I basically declaring my brand to be... the following brand perhaps?

The other thing is just as popular, I would be watching TV or listening to the radio when the announcer declares '60 minutes of music brought to you "commercial free" by Mercedes Benz' or 'The Closer, series premiere brought to you "commercial free" by Audi'
What exactly is this statement if not a commercial?

Anyway, I'm done talking. I'll leave you with a few photos of my visit to Leavenworth that triggered parts of this post.

Game Theory and the Luring Lottery

I've been fascinated with Game Theory ever since I was introduced to the concept by the movie "A Beautiful Mind"(see, watching movies can be useful). To be honest the movie didn't say much about game theory itself and whatever little was used in the story line was mostly wrong. (the solution given by the movie to the bar pick up problem is not a true Nash equilibrium for this type of game, see here[pdf] for the true equilibrium point for this game)

Still it made me look up John Nash and his work and I was hooked.

The nice thing about game theory is that the problems it tries to solve will sound very familiar to you and hence it is more likely to have a readily applicable value to you. To illustrate here's an example of a problem.

Now one of the first games you'll read about if you poke around looking for stuff about game theory is prisoner's dilemma, and I'm sure many of you will have heard of it. And that's exactly why it will *not* be my example.

Instead, why don't you think of the following:

In the June 1983 issue of Scientific American, Douglas Hofstadter announced a largest-number game open to anyone who sent in postcards before midnight, June 30, 1983. The prize was $1 million divided by the total number of entries. To enter the contest the rules say that all you have to do is send in a single 3 by 5-inch card with your name and address and a number indicating how many entries you wish to submit. Everyone is allowed unlimited entries, or rather limited only by one's ability to write a number on the 3x5 card.

Now think about how would you play this game... or rather how it should be played...


Don't look here, you should still be thinking :P

When you're done thinking, you can check for solution, rationale, and what actually happened in this contest here[wikipedia], and here[heretical.com].

Fun ha?

Of the thin and thick

A previous attempt at multi point blog posts failed miserably. I just babbled on for a few paragraphs and when I'd realized I intended on talking about more stuff it was just too late. So maybe this one will succeed where the other has failed.

-Fear of Death
Why? It's understandable to me that we can be afraid of pain, or living a worse life than we'd anticipated. But why are we afraid of death? It's not like when you're dead you're going to be regretting the fact. Some (religious) people would say it's fear of eternal punishment if they think they might be deemed not good enough for heaven but atheists, too, fear death. So either atheists believe in eternal punishment and reward at some subconscious level or there is something else in play here. Go figure.

-Baseball
I went to my first live baseball game yesterday. In the spirit of doing new stuff (we keda). And now that I narrowly escaped death by boredom I can safely say it's my last.
Well that might not be entirely true, the game is boring to death to watch, and I suspect to play too although I've never tried. But you see, you might still want to go to a baseball game. The logic might not be readily obvious but it's pretty straight forward. Baseball games would be a great idea for dates, or so I am theorizing. The game is ridiculously long (150+ minutes), and it's even more ridiculously boring. That means you get time to talk about stuff with your date and generally fool around. Who wants to go see a good movie when you're both pinned to your seats with your eyes fixed on the screen for 2 hours. Go to a baseball game and it'll bore her as close to death as possible that she would just have to listen to you, and better yet, you'll sound interesting!
However, if you think you're more boring than a baseball game then obviously you shouldn't take my advice. But then again if you are, you really have bigger problems to worry about than a failed date.

-Karaoke
Been meaning to go for a long time, and a friend of mine is now determined on making it happen. Weirdly enough I jumped off a 53 meter high bridge and a 5 Km high plane but I'm still afraid of singing in public (my bathroom is not public even though it might share a thin wall with the public). We'll see how this one goes.

-Free Audio Books
Courtesy of BMW, go to BMW audiobooks and you can download 4 audio books for your listening pleasure. Nothing about cars there don't let the name fool you. They're in mp3 format and free as in beer, no strings attached. They might add some more in the future but these should keep you busy for some time.


So there, I did it! A quad point post! (counting the bullet points not the actual literary point)

Speechless

Project Melokheya

First off, a note to international readers. Melokheya/Molokheya is an Egyptian national dish, translated it's Jute Mallow. Now that we got this out of the way....

Finally I did it!
Been meaning to cook a nice meal since I came to Uncle Sam's land. I know how to cook but it takes so much effort and time that I kept delaying it, till today.

So I woke up late and was looking for a mood lifter. Now, If you think melokheya is just a good tasting meal you're sadly mistaken. It can also be an excellent mood lifter and cooking a good one will give you a feeling of self accomplishment very few other things can. And just imagine how much Karma you gain when you cook a hearty meal for 4 single guys who are 7000 miles away from home and all they'd eaten in months is frozen meals reheated in the microwave.

So in order to commit to my ambitious project, I called up a few friends and invited them to dinner. We were to be 5 guys. Next was getting the raw materials, not an easy task in Redmond, but I learned of a mediterranean deli and supermarket close by so I made the trip, got myself 2 bags of frozen Melokheya (Montana, made in Egypt no less!) and some Cardamom pod (habahan). I already had rice, garlic and oil and I got 2 young chickens on the way back.

With the raw material ready it was time to start cooking, 4 young men collaborated in the kitchen orchestrated by your truly. We boiled the chicken, Helal single handedly cooked the rice (very well too!), and an hour or so later mission melokheya was accomplished!

It all turned out well and everybody actually liked the food. I felt so proud of it that I came to blog it out :) I even have a few photos to commemorate the day when Redmond got a taste of my melokheya


Probably the first time I hold a raw chicken.


We had to boil 2 chickens to feed the crowds :)


Making "El Ta2leya", didn't forget the "shah2a" shortly afterwards.


And the final product, yes I know our kitchen could use some tidying up.










Apologies for the blurry photos, it wasn't me taking them :P
Happy melokheya day!

The speed records part II

So I didn't get to post it the next day like I'd planned but better late than never I guess.

The thing is that I've always wanted to try skydiving. Thought it should be cool, new perspective on old things maybe, and hearing that the speeds involved during free fall go up to 120mph I really couldn't pass.

We made a group, and we went together to a local airbase where they do skydiving lessons and tandem jumps. Tandem jumps is a cool concept, it's highly recommended that you start out skydiving with a tandem jump. It's kind of feeling the waters and seeing if you like this type of thing. You jump strapped to a professional called the tandem master. Your tandem master has the parachute, takes care of everything. You more or less jump and tag along during the trip back to the ground. You don't have to worry about checking your altitude, opening a parachute, landing in the right spot. And that's the way I went.

The experience was incredible.... Actually when I did the bungee jump I had predicted that the skydive might be less scary. And I was right!
For some (weird and unknown) reason, standing at the door of a plane and then jumping off is not scary. While standing on the edge of a bridge looking down on a river _is_ scary. My theory is that it's the conditioning throughout our evolution. Man has been over mountains and heights that "look like" what it what you see when you're about to bungee jump, and somehow this fear was encoded in our DNA. Planes have been around for far less time and the conditioning just doesn't seem to be there yet. Looking down from the plane with the door open looks more like what you see on google maps or virtual earth than anything else. And somehow we're not pre-conditioned to get scared from maps and satellite photos.

Anyway, enough with psychology for the insane. The long story short is that I jumped from 13500 feet (around 5Kms) high, went down at a speed of 120mph for less than a minute, and then back on the ground a few minutes later. It was amazing, a lot less scary than most people think and a lot more fun.

A few photos will probably relieve me from writing any more (Can you tell already I'm not in the mood for writing?)


^ That's me thinking I'm a pilot


^The plane that carried us up



Mid air


And landing

Cheers!

140mph on the ground, 120mph in the air

The speed gods seemed to be ever so present last weekend for I broke a couple of my personal records.

I had organized another drive for Saturday, although on a smaller scaler. I wanted to go out to enjoy the weather, get a healthy dose of spirited driving, and pay more attention to shooting some photos. a bit more than the usual on such group drives that is, therefore a smaller number of people/cars was preferable. Specifically, we were 5 people in 3 cars. An 2001 Lemans blue M5, a Toledo blue z4 3.0, and a black E90 325i.

Being that small (and that crazy) of a group we decided on a 350 mile (around 560Kms) route that would take us to and fro the beautiful city of Yakima down south. That's record number one, the longest distance I have ever driven in a day.

We met at 8 am and little had I known that I'm gonna be in for such a weird adventure. 10 hours, 18 gallons of fuel, 350 miles, 50 degrees fahrenheit temperature change, and 250 photos later I was back in Redmond. With a new speed record of a little over 140mph (~230 Km/hr) under my belt for the fastest I have ever driven*. On the trip I saw waterfalls, snow, mountains, rivers, endless greenery, and got sunburnt in 90 degrees fahrenheit (~32c)
It is beautiful down here in the summer. I'm sure a few photos will say it better than I can do:







Hope you liked the photos, would have loved to ramble on some more and tell you about the other speed record. But blogiquette tells me this is long enough, so I promise this will be the next story. A demain :)

*Performed by a professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt. (:P)