willclarke.net

Destruction:

Killing is better than cleaning. An analysis of an oil spill in 2002 off the coast of Spain found that, “of the thousands [of birds] that were cleaned, most died within a few days, and only 600 lived and were able to be released into the wild. According to a British study of the spill, the median lifespan of a bird that was cleaned and released was only seven days.”

BP is using the disaster to distract from another ecological disaster. A 2005 refinery explosion in Texas City, TX released 36,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides and 17,000 pounds of benzene as they tried to replace a faulty doohickey. The details aren’t important, the point is they knew they could avoid public scrutiny by acknowledging the spill while the Deepwater Horizon was still bleeding oil.

Incompetence:

Exxon, Chevron, and BP CEOs all admit their local disaster plans for the Gulf region include provisions for saving walruses. Walruses, of course, do not live anywhere near the Gulf, unless you count…

Rush Limbaugh, who brushes off the oil spill since more oil is spilled every year in Nigeria than in the Gulf. He’s, of course, right. 1.5 tons have been spilled there in the past 50 years, and unlike in America, there are no laws on civil liability, and no accounts set up to compensate victims whose livelihoods have been destroyed. I’m waiting for his explanation on why this makes it okay. On his fourth wife, I suppose he’s an expert on failed drilling attempts.

In the starkest example of Congressional curmudgeonry since Ted Stevens told us about the series of tubes, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Flyover state) announced this week that, although he has never used an ATM, he does buy his own groceries and therefore knows about the holograms.

The holograms, you know, those things on the products that the colored fella at the grocery store scans with the red laser. He’s not out of touch!

According to the New York Times, in a recent briefing on the BP oil spill, BP senior vice president Kent Wells said, “there’s just no way to measure it.”

No way, Kent? Let’s see, in order to make an accurate estimation of the spill, you’d need to know exactly how big the hole is, and how quickly the oil is coming out of it. If only we could get that information.

Oh, turns out we can. From this video, recorded by BP earlier this week. They’ve had access to video like this for weeks but have been refusing requests to share it. And for good reason - independent analysts say that, based on the video, oil is spilling at anywhere from four to twenty times faster than the official estimate of 5000 barrels (210000 gallons) a day.

Of course there are all kind of complicating factors - some of the spill is methane, it assumes a constant spill rate, and the fact that there is currently a second leak in addition to this one. So in a way, BP is right, there is no way to measure it exactly. But we can make some pretty accurate guesses, and their conservative one ain’t it.

One of the (many) nagging doubts in my head as 2010 starts is the ability of Apple to deliver on the hype of their mythical tablet computer. iSlate, iTablet, Magic Slate, iGuide, whatever you want to call it - I just can’t see it being that useful.

From the rumors, it seems like Apple is prepping an iPod Touch on steroids, complete with ten-inch touchscreen and an always-on data connection. It will probably have an App Store, maybe even the same one as the iPhone. And it will be used to read books.

I don’t mean to insult it on that ground alone, but I have to question a device whose main feature is to do something that, statistically speaking, most people hate. Don’t get me wrong - I love reading - but I am also painfully aware that most people don’t. And I can’t imagine the masses paying $1000 (the rumored price, according to the Wall Street Journal) so they can read. Even Twilight.

Of course, it will do other things as well. It will do everything the iPhone does, including playback of video, web browsing, and game playing. It’s gonna look cool, and it’s interface is going to be bad ass. It’s going to be able to do a lot - but what do we want to do with it?

It’s going to be a “Kindle killer” I’ve heard, in what I consider a disturbing trend to label all new electronics devices murderous villains. How come every new product has to violently assault an existing product in order to be considered successful? Can’t it just be a new, better thing? But I digress.

Holding a ten inch device is going to be weird. Either you will hold it with one hand behind the screen, which will mean you have to only control it with one hand, or you will hold it with both hands and use your thumbs, which won’t reach everywhere on the screen. You could place it on a table, but the viewing angle will be bizarre and you’ll have to hunch over it like a Mongoloid*.

I feel like whenever you’re using the device, you will be thinking one of two things:

1. This would be just as easy on my iPhone, without the need for this expensive second device, or
2. this would be a lot easier on my computer.

Apple has killed tablet projects exactly for reasons like this before, so I have to hope that this time they’ve figured out how to get it right. Allegedly Steve Jobs has been working almost exclusively on this project since he returned to Apple, and he is very happy with the product. But Steve was also very excited about the Apple Cube and both revisions of the AppleTV, which ultimately failed in the market.

Microsoft’s Steve Balmer showed off a tablet PC on Wednesday at the CES trade show. Didn’t hear about it? Yeah that’s because it was boring as hell. Microsoft has been flogging the tablet concept for what’s going on ten years now, failing spectacularly at generating significant consumer interest.

I want to be wrong here, after all, I love Apple and I have a job now so I could probably afford it. So, Apple, impress me.

* I’m not sure if the term Mongoloid is offensive. If it is, I’m sorry. I’m sure Mongols are good people, with exceptional posture.

What I did:

• Visited Seattle for the New Year.
• Traveled to Vancouver in the snow.
• Fell in love with a girl.
• Hiked Blood Mountain alone in the frost.
• Celebrated Mardi Gras in New Orleans for the fourth year in a row.
• Hiked in the F.D. Roosevelt Park with my dad.
• UrbanHiked all over Atlanta.
• Quit my job after 3 years.
• Learned Objective-C.
• Bought a ton of bike gear.
• Biked the Shenandoah National Park.
• Biked the C&O Towpath to DC.
• Visited the Smithsonian Museums of American History, Natural History, the National Art Gallery, and the National Zoo.
• Helped Mary study chemistry in Baltimore.
• Biked to New York.
• Met author TJ Jackson Lears; slept in his yard.
• Watched a live taping of the Daily Show.
• Had a mind-blowing experience in Central Park.
• Performed stand-up at an NYC comedy club.
• Took a bus back to Atlanta.
• Crashed on friends’ couches.
• Sold almost all my possessions.
• Found a new job in DC.
• Moved into a row house in Columbia Heights.

What I learned:

• Nice people are everywhere. “Southern hospitality” is a myth - “Universal hospitality” is the reality. Life is hard and if we’re not nice to each other, nothing works.
• The human body is at it’s best when pushed to the brink. If you’re not regularly breathing heavy, you’re not living enough.
• You’re capable of more than you think, if you can put yourself in the situation where failure isn’t the easy way out. Force yourself out of your comfort zone, so you have to fight your way back in.
• The mind loves confirmation - be skeptical, and seek opposing viewpoints.
• Cold weather isn’t so bad. Just wear more clothes.
• The body of human knowledge is like a beach, and in our brain we have, at best, a handful of sand from which we construct our worldview. Don’t be surprised we all disagree from time to time. We’ve got different sand.

I learned a lot, but not enough. Here’s to a happy and fulfilling 2010!

For weeks I sent emails to companies advertising job openings on craigslist, with dismal results. I sent dozens of well-written, thoughtful emails hyping the skills and qualifications that would make me an ideal candidate for the specific job for which I was applying. And I didn’t hear word one back.

I’ll be honest - it was depressing. Applying for jobs can be very stressful because you’re making your first, and possibly only, impression in what can be a perilous medium. How formal should you be? Should you use a salutation? (I say no - you’ve already named the recipient in the To: field, leave it at that.) Does the email body act as a cover letter, or should you attach a cover letter separately? The process is not incredibly well defined, and on top of that, there are all kinds of easy mistakes you can make - forgetting to attach a file, copy and pasting some text from another application without changing some important text, and of course the everyday grammar and spelling mistakes.

I finally heard back from what I thought was the most unlikely job - one I had applied for not more than twenty minutes prior. More than that, the job hadn’t been posted for more than a couple hours.

After thinking about it, and reading that the ratio of job applicants to job openings is at an all-time high, I realized how important timing is. As someone who has posted jobs on craigslist before, I know how overwhelming the response can sometimes be. So the lesson I learned is, don’t even bother with jobs that have been posted for more than a couple days. This is especially true with unskilled or semiskilled labor jobs - their inbox is full, and they’re just going find a qualified candidate in the first ten or so applications and ignore the rest.

From then on, my goal was to jump on all jobs as soon as they were posted. Craigslist can make this really easy if you have an RSS reader that updates frequently - just go to the “Jobs” section in your city, search for some keyword (mine was “PHP”) and then at the bottom of the page, there is a little RSS link. Click it for an RSS feed for just that search. Then, whenever a new job gets posted with that keyword, your reader will let you know and you can respond quickly.

(part 2 in a series)

A few days ago I was eating at Waffle House when I discovered an interesting claim. According to my receipt, there are over 3.5 million ways to enjoy Waffle House Hash Browns.

That seemed high. According to menu, there are only nine options for hash browns - scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, diced, topped, capped, peppered, and country - and three sizes, regular, double, and triple. I did my best to recall Probability and Statistics, the last college math course I took at Georgia Tech, and came to the conclusion that there should be 9! * 3. I entered that into Google on my iPhone, and got my result: 1,088,640.

I want to make a quick side note here: Google is a great calculator. I use it all the time, yet I’ve found that almost nobody knows this amazing feature. You can enter any mathematical statement into Google and it will evaluate it. It’s also great for all types of unit conversion, from “12 miles per hour in meters per second” to “1337 megabytes in bits” and even currency conversion based on current exchange rates.

But I digress. Based on my calculations, which I later discovered to be wrong (damn you Tech!), Waffle House was 2,411,360 hash brown possibilities shy of their claim. After consulting with my waitress, who claimed she didn’t know about any other off-menu options, I resolved to call Waffle House customer service the next day.

What follows is a video playlist of my interaction with Waffle House. Be prepared for nerdiness.

Also, as promised on the video, here’s the spreadsheet they sent me:

How Many Ways

During this contentious health care debate, we should keep in mind what’s really important: grammar.

Generally:
Preventive is an adjective, as in “We need to spend more money on preventive care.” Preventative is a noun, as in “This vaccination is a preventative for the flu.”

Of course, “preventative” has an extra syllable and people like to use it to sound smart. So it has been overused a lot, to the point where it is generally accepted as an adjective. But technically, when you refer to care that prevents later disease, you should say “preventive care.”

Sometimes when people misuse this word, I like to later refer to “preventitative” care, which of course is not a word but is even longer and makes me feel superior because I am both playing their more-syllables-is-better game and subtly making fun of them.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, maybe the reason people overuse “preventative” isn’t because they want to use more syllables; rather, it is because the letter T is elitist. Take the word “often” for example: the T is silent. But people pronounce it when the are being snobby.

Bill Clinton was both at his best and his most cynical last Thursday on his seemingly seven thousandth appearance on The Daily Show. Let’s start with the worst, his (likely accidental) observation about the sham that is our political system:

Of course he’s not upset about Obama’s flip flop on the health care mandate! Because in American politics, liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats, Republicans, they’re basically all the same. Don’t forget, McCain’s healthcare proposal was basically identical to Obama’s with the exception of the public option which probably won’t even happen anyway. But you have to PRETEND like you’re different… “otherwise how will people make a choice??”

Kind of reminds me of an episode of Futurama… (then again everything reminds me of an episode of Futurama)

In other words, we don’t have a choice. We just have candidates pretending like they’re different… except in Clinton’s words, he’s not pretending. “What you have to do, so you feel good about yourself, is to at least believe in the differences that you highlight.” Candidates’ deception must go so deep that they actually convince themselves of their own bullshit! Whatever makes you sleep at night, I suppose.

However, towards the end of the video he reminds us of why he was, and to a certain extent still is, one of the greatest American policy analysts in our history:

I like that analogy: America the functional drunk, stumbling in the right direction, albeit behind the rest of the world; full of doubt and self loathing, raising hell and shouting obscenities along the way. But we’ll get there eventually and we’ll be all right. Maybe the public option isn’t essential, but getting the government involved in healthcare is an important first step. If we can keep Olympia Snowe on board, of course.

I got in a discussion the other day with my friend Eli, who is a frequent T9 texter, about words that have the same T9 codes. He was wondering what the longest two words are that have the same T9 code.

For those that don’t know, T9 is a text input method for phones that just have a 9 digit keypad. You can read more about it here on wikipedia. But in our discussion, I realized I could easily use the word database I use for my Scrabble iPhone web app to answer this question. I told him I’d do this; I don’t think he believed me. He was wrong.

First, I added a new integer field to the database table of words. This would hold the T9 value for each word. Then I wrote a script to convert all the words in the DB to their T9 counterparts, e.g. IRREFLEXIVE to 47733539483. Then I searched for words that have the same T9 codes.

Unfortunately a lot of words in the dictionary are very similar - for example “photosensitizer” and “photosensitizes.” Those are both 15 letter words, but they are basically the same word. So I realized what I wanted is long words that are significantly different from each other. I wrote a script that found all of the longest duplicates, and then compared them character by character for similarities. I then eliminated all the words that only have one character that’s different. Here’s what I found.

There are only two 15 character pairs of words with the same T9 code and more than one letter different. They are Repeatabilities / Resectabilities (in T9, 737328224548437) and Defectivenesses / Effectivenesses (333328483637737). There is a 14 character pair that have three characters different, Gamesomenesses and Handsomenesses (in T9, 42637663637737). It starts to get more satisfying at 13 characters, where you have the T9 code 2667874284667 spelling either Compurgations or Constrictions (five letters different). Most diverse is the ten character pair Housemaids / Intrenches, with a whopping eight letters different.

Of course that is just T9 pairs. If you go back and search based on number of matches, you can also find some interesting stuff. For example, it you type 22737 into your phone, it might explode. There are 13 different five letter words for that code: Acres, Bards, Barer, Bares, Barfs, Baser, Bases, Caper, Capes, Cards, Carer, Cares, and Cases. Also, there are 11 words for the six letter T9 code 727437: Parges, Paries, Pashes, Raphes, Rapids, Rapier, Rasher, Rashes, Sarges, Sashes, and Scries.

In T9-speak these are all called “textonyms” - words with the same T9 code. T9 sorts the textonyms by frequency of use in order to give you the best word, but as many frequent T9ers know, it gets things wrong a lot. If I could get a database of word frequency, I could find the longest textonyms with high frequency, and that might be fun.

Or everyone could just get an iPhone.

If you’re interested in the data, here are a couple links to the scripts I used:
Textonym Pairs (only 2 matching words)
Most Textonyms (most numbers of matches for a single T9 code)