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The Devils Trampingground is a fun little bit of creepiness. Or at least, it’s as creepy as you can get with cartoony looking flash movies.

I might need to get a subscription to The New Yorker. I’ve never read it before, but they publish some great stories. I only recently discovered the writings of Malcolm Gladwell who is a regular contributor. Those are amazingly good.

And now, I’ve just read with fascination
Annals of Medicine — The Bell Curve, which is a story about different quality of care for different hospitals. It’s more varried than I ever would have imagined.

The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average? If we took all the surgeons at my level of experience, compared our results, and found that I am one of the worst, the answer would be easy: I’d turn in my scalpel. But what if I were a C? Working as I do in a city that’s mobbed with surgeons, how could I justify putting patients under the knife? I could tell myself, Someone’s got to be average. If the bell curve is a fact, then so is the reality that most doctors are going to be average. There is no shame in being one of them, right?

Link grabbed from here.

Boy, would I love to believe that We will be able to live to 1,000.

I’m generally very optimistic about the potential of science to make the future better. So, I would naturally love to believe that the first person to live to be 1,000 years old is already in their 60s. I just can’t quite get there though. That seems a little too optimistic even for me. At 35, I half think that I might be able to make it, but even there, I feel like I’m in a race against decay. I hope that Aubrey de Grey is right though. Come on SENS project. Bring me my immortality. I want my Science Fiction future, and I want it now.

Arghhhhh!!! Aghhhhhhhh! Arghhhhhhh!!!

Cheats for PuzzleDonkey4 Available here

The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act requires the big 3 credit reporting bureaus to provide consumers with 1 free copy of their credit report each year. The idea is to give people a chance to correct mistaken information and protect against identity theft.

It’s a phased roll-out with the Western region of the US coming on-line first in December, 2004. That region includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

Why, I’m in California, and it’s pretty much December now. And look, their site is up and working. I ordered my free report from AnnualCreditReport.com. Have you?

After a gray and rainy day yesterday, today turned out to be absolutely beautiful. I wanted to take advantage of that, so I grabbed my camera and headed down to El Dorado Nature Center in Southern Long Beach.

When I was about a block away (or so I thought), I noticed a park with people feeding birds by a lake and plenty of free street parking. I figured I’d stop there, take a few photos, then just walk over to the nature center. One and a half miles later, I was still walking. Yeah, I misjudged it pretty bad.

Still, when I finally got to the nature center it was great. There were plenty of shaded trails next to lakes and streams. It felt a lot like walking through a forest. I took the one mile path, and was feeling pretty good until I remembered I still needed to walk all the way back to my car. I’ve never been so happy to see a car in all my life. I do want to go back and take the 2 mile trail sometime soon. I think I’ll park closer next time.

You can see some of the photos of El Dorado Nature Center here.

There is a ton of really interesting information in Malcolm Gladwell’s article, The New-Boy Network - What do job interviews really tell us?. It starts a bit slow, but keep reading as it quickly gets to some great stuff.

Choice bit:

The observers, presented with a ten-second silent video clip, had no difficulty rating the teachers on a fifteen- item checklist of personality traits. In fact, when Ambady cut the clips back to five seconds, the ratings were the same. They were even the same when she showed her raters just two seconds of videotape. That sounds unbelievable unless you actually watch Ambady’s teacher clips, as I did, and realize that the eight seconds that distinguish the longest clips from the shortest are superfluous: anything beyond the first flash of insight is unnecessary. When we make a snap judgment, it is made in a snap. It’s also, very clearly, a judgment: we get a feeling that we have no difficulty articulating.

Ambady’s next step led to an even more remarkable conclusion. She compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations made, after a full semester of classes, by students of the same teachers. The correlation between the two, she found, was astoundingly high. A person watching a two-second silent video clip of a teacher he has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who sits in the teacher’s class for an entire semester.

We’ve all heard the old chestnut about never getting a second chance to make a first impression, but that seems remarkable to me. I’m assuming that 2 seconds of silent video isn’t enough to form a valid impression of competency, but then I’m left with a deeper question. Do we ever really know anybody? How much time do you have to spend with somebody before the weight of evidence overrides that initial impression?

Flying Sharks, Flaming Swords, Pirates, Robots, Time Travel — I don’t remember any of that stuff being in To Kill a Mockingbird. Then again, it has been a really long time since I read it. In fact, to tell you the truth, I don’t remember anything at all about the book. Based on this most awesome book report ever, I definitely HAVE to read it again. Hardcore!

Neuro is a funny little web animation about noisy neighbors and the things you do to get just a little peace and quiet. I think I used to live in that building. via

I’ve decided that I want to learn how to sail. Actually, I decided that almost exactly 2 years ago, but now I’ve decided to do something about it. I had my first lesson today. It was kind of chilly out there on the water, but there was a nice sunset as we were heading back in, and it was fun and interesting.

I got to Long Beach a bit early, so I killed a bit of time taking Pictures around Shoreline Village.

So, now I know the difference between the main sail and the jib, and I can tell a halyard from a sheet, and any day now I’ll be able to say with great conviction that “The albatross and the whales they are my brothers”.