I have so many ideas for improving baseball, but nobody listens.

For example, I'd let runners catch the ball for an automatic home run. I'd give the runner the option to visit 3rd before 2nd. I'd allow tackling.

Maybe I should patent these ideas :-)

Airports are so inefficient. Here we have the fastest form of travel the common person can take, but you have to park far away, and walk a mile inside the airport. It all evolved from a smaller system, obviously, but if we took some time to redesign it, it could be so much more efficient.

We waste about half an hour just for boarding. This could be almost completely eliminated with some good engineering. For example: You find your seat in the terminal. When it's time to board, the airplane rolls under the terminal, in wheel ruts for accuracy, and the seats are lowered into the plane. The plane seals up, and heads for a runway. Simple, and quick, but requires a significant redesign of airplanes and terminals. On the other hand, I would love that airline.

Wii Bowling ... 10 consecutive strikes ... starting to sweat ... need 2 more for a perfect game ... and then I rolled an 8. Final score: 288. Oh, so close.

My previous hi score was 279, which I did twice. In a sense, that was a better performance: 11 strikes with a 9/ spare somewhere in the middle. Funny how putting the frames in a different order changes the final score.

I don't like the final score being a surprise, but I don't really want to do arithmetic during the game. So I've developed a way to estimate the final score in my head easily:

* Start with 190.
* If it's a spare, keep the same number (this is the typical case for me).
* If it's a strike and the previous roll was a strike, add 10.
* If it isn't even a spare, subtract 10.

This works best if most of your first rolls of each frame are 9s and 10s. Given that, this method is strikingly accurate. It almost always seems to be within ±7, and usually ±4. If you start rolling 8s and 7s, the accuracy starts to deteriorate, but it's still pretty good. Anything less, and it will overestimate. The lowest score this method will ever estimate is a 90 (meaning no spares or strikes), and that's an overestimate for every no-spare, no-strike game, except ten nines. A 300, on the other hand, works out to 190 + 11 x 10 = 300. My 288 game estimates as a 280, same as my 279s.

I should add that these hi scores are way above my average. My Wii tells me I've played Bowling 483 times. Hmm, I think that must be an overestimate ;-) ... though it is, after all, my primary form of exercise ... anyway, the other thing I know is that my average score these days is somewhere around 190. My standard deviation is probably above average, too... sometimes I have a good day, and sometimes I don't.

And one final disclaimer: I've read on various forums, and I have no reason to doubt it, that Wii Bowling scores have very little correlation with real bowling scores. I'm not actually going pro in bowling! My hi score in real life is 140.

"The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer."

This line (and its variants) is usually delivered as bad news/bad news. But isn't it actually good news/bad news? There is never any stated reason for the rich getting richer, so if your assumption is that they didn't earn it, then okay, maybe it is bad news. But is that really the right default assumption?

Generally speaking, conservatives tend to assume that if you're rich, you probably earned it, and if you're poor, you're probably lazy. Therefore, anyone getting richer is good news. And liberals tend to assume the opposite: that if you're rich, you probably didn't earn it, or if you did, you've become a lazy bastard in the meantime and aren't earning it now, and now you're just exploiting your poor workers. And if you're one of those poor workers, you're working your hands to the bone and never getting ahead. There is some truth to both sides, of course. But, generally speaking, if working hard made you poor, you wouldn't. On the whole, wealth is earned, simply because of the loose causality: working harder causes earning more money.

So I have to conclude "the rich are getting richer" is good news, unless there's more to the story. My default assumption is that the rich get richer because they generate good business ideas, and capitalize on them. And I'd like to think that the poor get poorer because they decide to spend more time enjoying life, not working so hard.

A closely related perspective is that it's about behavior. Rich people get richer because they continue to do the things that make them rich. Poor people get poorer because they continue to do the things that make them poor.

Another unfortunate aspect of the statement is the implied zero-sum game: that poor people got poorer because rich took it from them. Of course this is just silly... or maybe not so silly, if it is preying on economic ignorance.

From another angle, there are statistical problems in the statement. It's often pointed out that poor people are much better off than they used to be, especially in the US, where today it is more an issue of material goods than starvation. It's still not pleasant to be poor, but it's hard to compare apples to apples when poor people can afford technologies that didn't even exist a few years ago.

Another statistical problem is that it is over some unstated unit of time. Surely, at most times, you can find a previous time when the rich were poorer, and the poor were richer. A year ago? Two? Maybe. Or it may be a new record gap - and I'm sure it often is - but that is usually only vaguely implied.

And then there's the question of who belongs in the categories of "rich" and "poor". There is still considerable mobility between these groups, so if you track the same group of people, you'll find that some rich people were on the verge of losing it all, and some poor people were on their way up. You can define cutoffs for these groups, but then the choice of cutoffs affects the statistics. Also, you can (and should) adjust for inflation, but then there are problems with calculating inflation, comparing apples to oranges again.

I'm not trying to muddy things up. I'm just making some tasty sacred cow hamburgers. Mmmm. I realize none of this is PC to say, and I also realize that the ever-growing wealth gap is the most embarrassing features of capitalism. It doesn't seem fair. But fairness is just not a big part of my world view. Maybe it will be, when the government starts taking hair from guys that have more and planting it on the heads of guys like me... because the bald are getting balder, you know!

I have to ask, because I haven't heard anyone else ask. And it's the obvious question to ask.

CEO pay has grown outrageously since the 1980's. Why? (Not the fake answer: greed. I don't buy into the idea that greed finally slithered out of Pandora's box in the 1980's. It's not credible.)

Something must have happened... possibly a law was passed, which had unintended consequences.

Here's my theory: A law was passed that created the famous "golden parachutes". When you go into salary negotiations, you are naturally balancing your greed against your fear of losing your job. If losing your job means lying in the gutter, you're not going to be very aggressive. However, if it means laughing all the way to the bank, you go for it. At first, you may be overpaid compared to other CEOs, but if other CEOs are thinking the same way, pretty soon you won't be. Next year it goes up again.

The solution, logically, if you want to reverse the trend, is to repeal the law that caused it.

(Also continuing logically, I also have to point out that nobody has proven what executive pay should be, so "overpaid" is being used as a probabilistic term. As in: they were probably overpaid before, but even if they weren't, surely they are now?)

The solution, politically, is not that at all!

If you're Republican, you'd be hurting your rich constituents, so you pretend it's all fair.

If you're Democrat, you have some rich constituents too, but more importantly than that, attacking the root cause would mean losing a golden opportunity to promote the liberal Robin Hood fantasy, so you wait for the right time to sock it to the rich, while benefitting the poor as little as you can get away with, since you wouldn't want to shrink a core constituency (by having fewer poor people).

And if you're Libertarian, you think it's none of anyone's business but the payer's and the payee's, although it could be a sign of economic inefficiency.

So, if you're serious about the issue, ignore the politics. Logically, why is executive pay rising? Is it because of a law, like I theorize? Shouldn't we figure the root cause, before we go hacking at the leaves?

Defenders of Big Government like to bring up the fact that it was Big Government that built the Interstate Highway System. But that was half a century ago. Government is much bigger now, and it builds bridges to nowhere. Big Government put a man on the moon; Really Big Government can't keep us in low earth orbit. Big Government built the Hoover Dam; Really Big Government lets the levees break in New Orleans. Big Government defeated major powers on both sides of the ocean, and built the first atomic bomb; Really Big Government gets us into quagmires in small countries.

So, what's the optimal size for government? Shouldn't there be a general shift in public belief in Big Government to Limited Government, as the government grows, passes its optimal size, and starts achieving lackluster results? Instead, both of our major parties seem to be solidly in the Make Government Even Bigger camp now.

I see it as a 3-step process:

1. Government is asked to do some smart, benevolent things. ("Hey look, this road is paved with good intentions!")
2. In order to extend the benevolence to maximum effect, government needs to become bigger and more powerful. It's an obvious conclusion, and the government sure doesn't mind.
3. Bigger means more bureaucracy, which leads to stupidity. And more power means less motivation to be benevolent. You might stave it off for a while, but eventually entropy always prevails and Big Government gets stupid and evil.

And that's how a small, limited, and mostly harmless government becomes big, powerful, stupid, and evil.

Many people think it's just Bush, but the problem is systemic.

Still, it would help to have a president that believes in limited government. One that might find his veto pen more often.

That, in a nutshell, is why I support Ron Paul for president in 2008. I don't agree with everything he says, but he sure stands apart from the crowd where it counts.

Addendum. This is also, in a nutshell, why I'm wary of National Health Care plans. Repeat after me: Iraq, Katrina, Health Care... Yes, other nations have it, but with all due respect, other nations' governments are way smarter than ours. And smaller. With fewer special interest groups tugging every which way. They can be trusted, to a much greater extent, to get it right, and even then, there's no slam dunk.

Two weeks ago I started a new job. This one's contract-to-perm. I was getting tired of the short-term contracts. 3 months, 4 months, 11 days... but what finally got to me was the period of unemployment. The company I was doing contracts for had a major reorg back around September, and everyone's playing it safe until the political fallout is over, and that meant no new contracts until around the April time frame, but no guarantees.

While I wasn't making money, I was trying not to spend it. My wife and I are both naturally frugal, so this wasn't very hard. But now that I'm employed again, I had a little spending spree!

We just got a Wii! One of 13 that Circuit City in West Durham had in stock from 10:00 - 10:01 am this morning. (They're a little hard to get these days.) We got an extra controller and nunchuck, too.

Also, I got a MacBook Pro. It's the notebook of choice among programmers ('cuz it's a Unix machine that just works, smarmy commercials notwithstanding). Of course I also installed Parallels with Windows XP, just in case, though it doesn't really come in handy much.

On Friday, I got a DGT easy game timer (a chess clock). LuAnn and I played Scrabble with it, 25 minutes each. She won, 342-299... mainly because of "EQUATED", 7 letters, Q on a triple letter score, word on a double word score, for a total of 122 points in a single turn. Wow... The box for the timer lists games you can use it for, and the list includes Twixt! Best chess clock ever!

Also, I got a new watch. I liked my old one, but my wrist was turning red, in a sunburn sort of way, under the plastic wristband. I think I must be allergic to it. The new one has a metal wristband. I would have gotten a metal wristband before, but it's nearly impossible to find a nice, good-looking, water-resistant, digital watch with a metal wristband. Previously I compromised on looks and metal; this time I compromised on digital. I don't think I should have to compromise, but it seems as if the watch market is sharply divided between stylish analog watches designed by expert craftsmen, and digital watches designed by engineers. Apple needs to make an iWatch. Seriously.

Definition: Refrigerator Limbo:

The period of time during which food goes bad, because it has not obviously gone bad yet; you can't eat it because it might be bad, but you can't throw it away because it might still be good.

Since I'm one of those people who eats to live (as opposed to people who live to eat), the foods that I keep often stand a high risk of going into refrigerator limbo.

Sometimes a google search is required to bring something out of limbo. Well, this time I'm stumped. Vegetable oil: has this gone bad, or is it merely separated?

Most Americans will get a chance at an extra hour of sleep this weekend, as the clocks fall back to standard time.

Why is it commonly presumed that we'll use the extra hour to sleep? Is that the one day that Americans are not sleep-deprived? If so, then why don't we do the switch on a Tuesday, so that we can follow it with Super-Productive Wednesday? (Uh, aside from the fact that the coffee companies would lobby against it....)

Personally, I won't use the extra hour to sleep, because I get dopey if I sleep too much. I always try to get enough sleep at night, because I have to. I'm oversensitive to caffeine. If I have one coke at lunchtime, my eyeballs become ice balls within hours, and then I have trouble sleeping at night, and the next day I'm tired and I have a terrible headache. And so, since I can't prop myself up on caffeine, I have taken the drastic step of trying to get enough sleep every night.

It's not easy. I'm a natural night owl. What that really means is that I have a long circadian rhythm. I've read that sensory deprivation chamber studies show that everyone has a natural sleep cycle, usually in the 23-27 hour range, averaging around 25 hours. It's not that simple, of course, because the rhythm is affected by exposure to sunlight, and probably other things, such as your diet and your age.

Because of the affect of sunlight on the circadian rhythm, I chose a house where the master bedroom faces south, and I have no drapes on the bedroom windows. For many years I did not wake up to an alarm clock at all. This produces inconsistent results, and makes you a latecomer to work in the wintertime, so last winter I woke up to my watch alarm. Why a teeny watch alarm instead of the powerful alarm clock? Because it is hard to hit snooze, and I get only one second chance. Then I know that if I don't get up now, then I will oversleep. So far, that's always been enough incentive.

The other half of the problem is getting to bed at a reasonable hour. I haven't quite mastered that yet. There are many distractions. Steve Pavlina has articles about getting enough sleep. His advice is to get up at the same time every day, and go to bed whenever you feel tired, and it will all balance out. It sounds to me like part of his personal success is his ability to bore himself to sleep in the evening. (I have Twixt games to play, man! And so many other interesting things on the internet...) I also suspect he must have a circadian rhythm near 24 hours. Not that it's bad advice; it's just easier for some people than others.

He also comments about how amazed he is at the number of hits that article gets. Why should he be amazed? Just look at the number of Starbucks. People are chronically sleep-deprived, because they have long circadian rhythms. They'll try almost anything. They'll get addicted to caffeine; they'll try random suggestions from blogs.

Steve Pavlina also has interesting ideas about training yourself to get up to your alarm clock. Basically, you just train yourself to hop out of bed when the alarm goes off. You don't do the training in the morning, because it won't work when you're waking up! You're too groggy then. You train yourself when you're wide awake. Once you've developed your knee-jerk reaction to hop out of bed when you hear the alarm, you'll hardly be able to do anything else. I have yet to try this. But there's an extra hour this weekend... Maybe I'll use it for some personal training!

Recently, I got an e-mail from the SETI@home team, saying "need help setting up SETI@home?"

Heh, no, that's not the problem. You see, I ran SETI@home for years, from 1999 until sometime around 2003. I was in the top 95% of their users. Then I upgraded to a faster computer. Over 4x faster. It processed SETI@home packets amazingly fast. However, a faster computer means a hotter cpu, which means cooling fans running during peak cpu loads, which means noise. Now SETI@home became an annoying source of white noise in my computer room. That's the main reason I stopped running it.

There's a second reason. I've decided we're unlikely to find ET's radio signals, even if they're out there, and even if they're broadcasting nearby. Why? The old thinking was that we're sending out analog signals that could easily be picked up, and since we imagine ET is like us, they'd be doing the same.

But now our own radio signals are going digital. Do you know what a digital signal sounds like? Ever hear your 56K modem? Especially if the signal is compressed, it sounds like static. How are we gonna pick up static out of the static? The more they fill their spectrum and compress their signals, the more it will sound like white noise to us. That's what I'd expect an advanced civilization to do.

If an average civilization has about 100 years of analog signals before they go digital, we have pretty much have to catch them in that window. If not, we have a complex alien digital protocol to crack, if we can recognize it as a signal at all. Our best hope is that they beam a message directly meant for us.

So the irony is that I'd be generating my own white noise, with no signal, trying to separate ET's signal from their nearly-white noise from the white noise of the universe. Before I go back to donating my cpu cycles, I need a quieter computer. And probably a more meaningful project. There are a bunch to choose from now.

Are video phones still the next big thing?

Recently at work, a few of us had Mac notebooks on the network, and we decided to try an iChat videoconference. You don't hear about the downsides very often, so here are the main ones, that were obvious at the time:

1) Eye contact! The camera would have to be behind the image of a person's eyes. Typically, the camera is on top of the monitor. The resulting impression will only be familiar to large-breasted women.

2) You have to stay in your picture frame. On an audio line, you can stand up, pace, sit down, and nobody complains.

3) Some time will be lost to vanity: fixing your hair, your collar, commenting on visual things irrelevant to the conversation, etc. Which leads to 3a: Video phones are always going to be more popular among the good-looking.

And not really a con, but how do you reconcile it with the trend toward cell phones? A video cell phone would have to be held away from your head. Not like a walkie-talkie -- that would be looking up your nose! You'd have to hold it up high and proud, at eye level. And not too close -- again, camera angles. You could fix the fish-eye view, but the camera may still be too close: if the camera can't see both of your ears, it can't fix that, and you'll seem uncomfortably close. Arms-length, eye-level. Is that gonna fly?

Not to be too negative, there is probably still a killer app in telepresence, if we can think past this video phone notion (which is an example of analogous thinking gone wrong - TV followed radio, so therefore video phones must follow phones - wrong). At some point we'll come up with something viable thru the combination of virtual reality and robotics. I think there are a lot of unexplored combinations.

One combo I think might work: you know those remote-control helium balloons? You could add two small cameras (the kind they put on cell phones) and two little microphones, and a small speaker, and it becomes a floating head. On the other end of the line, you put on a helmet and take the flight controls, and voila! Cheap telepresence. And you get to float up to the ceiling.

That solution, though it may be cheap and fun, lacks neutrality. One person is clearly visiting the other, and facial expressions and body language are only communicated one way.

Okay. A year since my last post. Why so long? Well, ever since my mom died on Nov 26, I didn't want to blog about it, and I couldn't blog without mentioning it. So...

So now that I've blogged about it, tangentially, a quick update on the rest of my life over the past year:

February: I won Twixt Championship #11 on Little Golem! That was really hard. (Championship #12 didn't go so well. #13 is coming up.)

March: I quit my permanent job of six and a half years and started contracting. I was simply no longer a fit for my position, and hadn't been for quite a while; at least, not as much of a fit as I could be in other companies. Also, the money's much better, when I have a contract, though right now I'm between contracts.

May: My wife and I vacationed in Japan. That was a trip of a lifetime.

August: My wife and I competed in the World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, PA. In Twixt, I lost to David Bush in the final four.

In the past few weeks, I created a Twixt puzzle page ( http://www.ibiblio.org/twixtpuzzles/ )... It has 17 puzzles of my own design, added to the 40 that Alex Randolph made. I like the interactive nature of it. On the original non-interactive site, you had to look at the answer to check if you were right. This is more fun.

A friend at work just got a Toyota Prius gas-electric hybrid. The cool thing about it is how much of a gadget this car is! Built-in GPS maps, voice recognition... I had my doubts about voice recognition in a car at first, but a quick test erased all doubts:

Driver: "Set temperature to 68 degrees."
Computer: "Zooming in." (GPS map zooms in)

I am coveting the GPS computer and the great gas mileage. And it wasn't that long ago I was excited to get remote keyless entry. I never really wanted to talk to my car, though. Unless it was a car that drives itself - then, I might have more to say. But I'm hoping for vast improvements by then. I can imagine asking it to go to Wal*Mart, doze off, and wake up in Atlanta.

I think a lot about self-driving cars while driving. Doesn't everybody? Isn't that a natural thing to think about while driving? Of course, I might be having more design and engineering thoughts about it than most people. For one thing, I'm sure they won't put just put a camera on the driver's side. But then you have to wonder, where's the best place for the cameras? Beneath the headlights and taillights? On top of the car, for a panoramic view?

I think you'd want the cameras to see in red, green, and infrared, because I haven't observed much need for blue while driving, and infrared is my favorite color. :-)

I think the next step after deciding the hardware requirements is to put the hardware aside, and develop a driver's virtual reality simulation. No cheating: inputs are gas, brakes, steering; outputs are simulated video camera output, and other sensor readings. It should start out easy: bright, hazy day, clear flat road ahead. Then add the glare of sunshine, along with shadows, and then the cover of darkness, along with street lamps; combine with rain or snow, or splashed-up mud; add hills, speed bumps, pot-holes, traffic lights, other cars, bicyclists and pedestrians, including suicidal ones; pylons, construction workers, detour signs, and emergency vehicles; add a bunny hopping across the road, and a soccer ball followed by a child, and if there does happen to be a simulated accident, take major points off, especially for hit-and-run. And do this for all expected variations on the hardware - for different kinds of cars, and different hardware failures. It also has to be able to handle off-road situations, such as parking in the grass at the county fair.

Make the simulation harder and harder until the software is so good that it becomes qualified for stunt driving, and I can feel safe playing Scrabble while the car does twisting leaps over other cars. "It's okay officer, nobody was driving." I hope I'm not being too optimistic. In my lifetime, I hope it will be made illegal for humans to drive.

There's an obvious, easy answer to rising gas prices: Lottery! (Hey, if it works for education...)

NC finally passes the lottery bill.

No civilized society would actually do this to itself. It's illogical.

It pains me that most of the people who are against the lottery are against it on moral grounds. The other side of the argument is worse, of course; they make fine examples of the human capacity for rationalization. For example, from the WRAL forum:

Having a lotter can only be plus - money for education.

Right. And this will not reduce the amount of tax money that goes to education, by an amount pretty comparable to the amount that it raises, within a few short years. Anyway, our governor has already fully demonstrated his lack of commitment to education, so this obviously isn't about education. That's a red herring to confuse the issue. But hey, the same red herring worked in other states, and people fall for it here, too.

If you do not like the lottery I have a sure plan for you, DON'T PLAY!!

Oh, right, we don't live in an interdependent reality. Oh, wait, we do.

No wealth is created in a lottery. Some wealth is destroyed, because there is some overhead cost in running it, and one by one we make people rich enough to quit their jobs, which they're likely to do. Also, even those who do not win will waste time nursing false hopes, instead of working to improve things. None of this is good for the economy.

Also, crime is encouraged by the combination of poverty, materialism, and cheapened morals, all of which the lottery promotes. Your seedy neighborhoods will get seedier. Your poor will get poorer. But that's OK! Because you won't be able to trace your burglarized house directly back to this.

(No, your poor don't have to get poorer. But they will.)

Next.

I'm a Christian conservative, I play the lottery, and am glad we're finally getting one so I can stop driving to Virginia to play theirs.

Unfortunately, it's true: we're being sucked down to their level.

Also, it's easier to get North Carolina to adopt a lottery than it is to get Virginia to give theirs up. Once the special interest is entrenched, it's hard to dislodge it. This is a permanent decision. It will last at least until the next major revolution, but probably longer.

So, the lottery is as inevitable as death -- eventually, the bill comes up again and gets passed. And there is no undoing it. And that doesn't mean we should welcome it. It's an entropic part of societal decay.

ALL IT IS IS A BUNCH OF OLD FOGIES STILL TRYING TO DICTATE HOW PEOPLE LIVE THEIR LIVES AND WHAT THEY CAN AND CANT DO.

Wow, thank you for imposing your morality on me that one shouldn't impose one's morality on others.

We can have strip clubs, dial up a prostitute but we caanot have a lottery.. The people making these decisions are a bunch of idiots who make more money then the average citizen, why should they care???? WE need to start a protest!!!

That gives me an idea... The state could make a lot of money running a prostitution ring!

Anyway, I could go on debunking pro-lottery rationalizations forever. The bottom line is that it does not create wealth, but to some extent destroys wealth. Wow, all this excitement about swindling people. Woohoo! Swindling people! Gotta love it!

I must clarify yesterday's post, based on comments by my wife. I'm not saying I don't like sci-fi/fantasy, or that I didn't like the movies I mentioned. In fact, I gave many of them 5 stars on Netflix. I didn't even imply anything of the sort, if you read my lines carefully. I'm just pointing out a plot defect.

Stories are ultimately about ourselves. Ever notice that the majority of our stories feature humans? But if a story violates the laws of physics, then it is not really from this universe, and it is therefore not as much of a reflection of ourselves, and is therefore less interesting. It is also more impressive to create a story while sticking to the actual laws of physics. Anything else is cheating!

Still, a minor defect, usually. And a slight criticism is not a total rejection.

I <3 my wife (squirrellady), but sometimes she expects me to be psychic. Or she hopes it, at least. She and I are on the same wavelength much more often than anyone else I've ever met. But you can't turn the communication dial down all the way to zero, and expect continued results. Well, sometimes I can make an educated guess. That just makes it worse.

There must be something deeply embedded in the human psyche that hopes for psychic powers. Since the beginning of recorded history (such as the Oracle at Delphi), to the most forward-looking science fiction (such as Deanna Troi on Star Trek), there are tales of psychic power. Not a whiff of scientific evidence has shown up in these 5000 years or so. But people want to believe.

In sci-fi/fantasy, it's excusable, because it makes a story more interesting if one person is differentiated from another by special knowledge or powers - and you can skip the explanation. Besides, it's the future - wave hands vigorously - and in the future, psychic powers turn out to be real (yay! my wife would say) but are limited, of course, in ways that make the rest of the story line maximally interesting. I still consider it a defect in the story. I appreciate a story more if it doesn't rely on crutches like that. Do you realize how many stories that dings? Star Wars, E.T., Minority Report, X-Men, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense... The worst psychic movie moment had to be from The Black Hole: "Kate, use your E.S.P. to communicate with the robot!"

Frist, R-Tenn., spoke to a Rotary Club meeting Friday and told reporters afterward that students need to be exposed to different ideas, including intelligent design.

I'm reminded of a joke:

Four engineering students go into a bar. After a few drinks, the subject turns to religion.
  "I think God is a Mechanical Engineer," said the Mechanical Engineering student. "Just look at the bones in the hand, and -"
  "No way," said the Chemical Engineering student. "The chemistry of the human body is way more complex than any bone structure. God is obviously a Chemical Engineer!"
  "That's nothing!" said the Electrical Engineer. "Look at the human brain. That's the ultimate achievement. God may have dabbled in Chemical Engineering for a few million years, but he eventually saw the light and became an Electrical Engineer."
  "I think God is a Civil Engineer," blurted the Biomedical Engineering student.
  "Why???" asked the other students.
  "Well," he said, "who else would put a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?"

Okay, let's start with the bone structure. Let's start with our spine, so perfectly designed ... for a quadruped. Any mechanical engineer worth his salt, when designing a vertical structure, if restricted to a single load-bearing support, will try to put that support close to the center - not way in back. That just causes structural problems later. Why do people have so many back problems? Unintelligent design.

Connected with the back, our vestigial tail bones. Elsewhere, we find wisdom teeth - connecting intelligence again with dumb design. Let's hope genetic engineering can at least rid us of wisdom teeth. And have you ever taken a good look at those three little bones in the middle ear? Rube Goldberg would be proud.

Okay, so God is not a Mechanical Engineer. What about our eyes? We see colors in the "visible" spectrum, but I can't imagine an engineer not wanting to give us infrared vision. What's wrong with seeing infrared light? Well, only that infrared light is not transmitted by water. In fact, water is an extremely opaque liquid across most of the spectrum, which is a big problem for submarines. We think of water as clear, because we only see light in the frequencies that water transmits.

But what do I know? I was born yesterday. That's my theory: God created the world yesterday, on August 19, 2005, and made it look 13.7 billion years old. He was so thorough in his deception that he gave us all these woeful disadvantages, just to fake out the smartypants among us. They should teach that in school. Just to be balanced and fair.

A friend of mine is leaving our software development department (in our pharmaceutical-related company) and going back to work for a game company. This got me thinking today... These industries have something in common: they flourish best in a capitalist system, but in an obviously sub-optimal way.

In the games industry, one might naïvely assume that the optimal strategy is to make the funnest game possible. Not so! If it's too much fun, people will get addicted, and then the best you can do is sell expansions. You have to make games good enough to sell, but not so good that they're still playing it next Christmas.

In the pharmaceutical industry, the same "keep the cash coming" principle applies. There's not much incentive to develop drugs that cure diseases; the highest incentive is to develop drugs that treat diseases. (In this case, though, it's a more accidental discovery process, so every so often you may get a drug that the drug company wishes weren't so effective. C'est la vie, by accident the drug companies are less evil than the game companies.)

I wonder if there's a way to correct these flaws. Certainly not socialized medicine. If we can develop AI that we can trust, then there might be a solution -- but I think that trust in AI will be elusive, because sci-fi will continue planting doubts in peoples' minds, because, you know, it just wouldn't make an interesting story unless the robots ran amok.

I used to think Hershey's Special Dark was good dark chocolate... until I discovered the Wall of Chocolate at A Southern Season. Now my favorites are:

• Nirvana - São Thome
• Venchi - 75%
• Korkunov

The store is a bit out of the way now, so I'll be ordering these online when the weather cools off. (I don't want chocolate melting on my doorstep.)