Alternate Miss Universe
Thanks to Steve Harvey…
Somewhere in an alternate universe…
There is now an alternate MISS universe…
Current as of January, 2016
2016 is here – it seems like 2015 flew right by.
I’m going to start maintaining a list of technologies that I DO and DO NOT recommend for many technology categories, and update the list periodically.
For example, people regularly ask me what kind of phone or laptop they should buy – this list is for YOU!
New Cable Modem – Big Performance Boost
I’ve been “renting” an old Ambit cable modem from Time Warner for about 4 years now… so $8 per month, 4 years, 12 months per year, that’s $384 that I’ve “spent” on a router/modem that’s MAYBE worth $30 brand new (Ambit, now uBee, is a cheap piece of crap). These things have a life expectancy of maybe 2 years, so they definitely got their money out of that device (and me).
Loops of Zen is a completely addictive puzzle game, in which you must rotate a grid full of puzzle shapes in order to form complete loops, with no disconnected ends.
After a few weeks playing this game, I’ve developed a few strategies that are effective tools for finding a valid solution to every board.
Read on for more about Loops of Zen…
This one is fairly recent, but I thought it deserved its own post.
After working on my son’s car, I went off on a rant about how the American car industry seems to go out of its way to use a bunch of mix-matched fasteners — see my “rant on fasteners” here.
For example, removing ONE part on a 2001 Ford Explorer required an 8mm socket, a 1/2″ wrench, a 7/16″ wrench, and a screwdriver.
WHY??
After spewing a string of expletives about the lack of quality in Ford’s engineering staff, my final statement on the topic was this:
“When presented with two, similar fastener options, pick the larger of the two, and shut the f___ up!”
Meaning, don’t take it upon yourself to pick the “super-optimized” option — pick the MOST COMMON option instead. There is no reason why all of the fasteners in question could not have been 12mm, which is approximately 0.47″. This would have allowed the part in question to be removed using ONE TOOL.
Moral of the story: Standardization is more important than optimization.
Something super-optimized becomes inefficient. Stick to standards.
My son thought the thesis statement, “pick the larger of the two, and shut the f___ up” was hilarious, so this post is dedicated to him.
Lighting The Griswold House
In National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation”, Clark famously went way overboard decorating his house.
When the lights are turned on, we see the neighbors being blinded, and someone at the power company flips an “Auxiliary” switch as klaxons sound, indicating an emergency condition, necessitating the extra power.
Edit: Originally, I based the number of strands on the common number of C7 bulbs per strand that you can buy today, which is 25 bulbs per strand. In the movie, Clark mentions that he used 250 strands of lights, meaning that each strand has 100 lights, so I’ve edited my first bullet point, accordingly.
Further, I’ve seen some other websites that performed the calculation based on miniature lights – these are what we think of today as “normal” Christmas lights, that come in strands of 100, use a plug type connector, and consume about 1/2 watt per bulb.
In the movie, you can clearly see that the bulbs in question are the much larger C7 or C9 incandescent bulbs – C7 is about 5 watts per bulb, while C9 is about 7 watts per bulb. I saw one website that performed the calculation using C9, but I’m sticking to my original guess that these are C7 – a very popular option at the time the movie was made. The numbers for C7 and C9 are very similar.
Based on Ellen’s comment about there being 25,000 lights, Clark’s comment that he used 250 strands, and assuming they are C7 incandescent lights, we can extrapolate a few statistics about the Griswolds’ Christmas lights:
- Today, C7 lights are less common, and come in strands of 25. If he were decorating his house today, he might need 1,000 strands @ 25 lights each, rather than 250 strands @ 100 lights per strand.
- C7 lights each consume about 5 Watts of power, thus all of the bulbs, lit at once, would consume about 125,000 Watts, or 125 kiloWatts.
- At a nominal rate of 6 cents per kWh (killoWatt-hour), every 1000 Watts of power costs 6 cents to run for 1 hour. Clark’s lights would cost $7.50 per hour to run. Assuming he runs them for about 6 hours per night – from around dusk until around midnight – it would cost $45 per night to run them. If he leaves them up for two weeks, the total electrical cost would be around $630.
- At 110 volts and 125 kw, the current would be about 1,136 Amps. Most houses have a 200 Amp main, and most household circuits can handle only 15 Amps. Your clothes dryer and air conditioner might each require 30 Amps, running on a special circuit that can handle the extra power.
- Spaced 1 foot apart, the total length would be 25,000 feet, or 4.7 miles. That’s 4 miles, 3,880 feet of lights.
- Rolled in to a ball, it would be about 34 inches (just under 3 feet) in diameter, with an internal volume of about 12 cubic feet, and would weigh slightly less than 1,000 pounds.
Chicken vs. Egg
The eternal question: Which came first?
The answer is a semantic one: What is your definition of “egg”?
Egg: A gestation device laid by birds, fish, and reptiles.
The dinosaurs laid eggs, therefore, the egg pre-dates the chicken.
Egg: A gestation device laid by birds.
Other birds pre-dated the chicken, therefore, the egg came first.
What about a “Chicken Egg”?
What IS a chicken egg?
If you define a chicken egg as: An egg LAID BY a chicken, then:
The first “chicken egg” had to follow the first chicken in order to be laid by one, thus, the chicken came first. We assume the first CHICKEN came from the egg of some other slightly different bird variety that was NOT a chicken.
If you define a chicken egg as: An egg FROM WHICH a chicken is hatched, then:
Some other slightly different bird variety laid the first CHICKEN EGG, which subsequently produced the first CHICKEN. Thus, the chicken egg came first.
In the movie, Back to the Future II, Marty, Doc, and Jennifer travel to October 21, 2015 from the year 1985. Although the movie immediately follows events at the end of the original Back to the Future, the movie itself was actually released in 1989.
The future tech in BTTF II, therefore represents a 26 year guess in to the future.
As of this writing, we just passed BTTF Day, so the future is now. Let’s see how the writers did, predicting future tech.
The quote goes something like this:
Pi is an infinite, non-repeating decimal – meaning that every possible number combination exists somewhere in pi. Converted in to ASCII text, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is the name of every person you will ever love , the date, time, and manner of your death, and the answers to all the great questions of the universe.
Converted in to a bitmap, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is a pixel-perfect representation of the first thing you saw on this earth, the last thing you will see before your life leaves you, and all the moments, momentous and mundane, that will occur between these two points.
All information that has ever existed or will ever exist, the DNA of every being in the universe.
Everything: all contained in the ratio of a circumference and a diameter.
This is poetic, but false.
Read on, for my analysis…
In 2007, I bought a Nintendo Wii, that finally died earlier this year. When I attempted to replace it, what I found was a Wii bit surprising.