New new phone, old old problem

My new RAZR is having the same trouble holding a charge that the old one had. I can't possibly have gotten three bad batteries in a row! Or two bad phones in a row. But what else could it be?

• My settings are fundamentally the same as Siobhan's identical phone, which is a year and a half old and still holds a charge at least a day, usually more.
  
• I've tried several chargers. (Next experiment though is to use her charger.)
  
• I barely use the phone. I haven't had a call or even a text message in days. Siobhan uses hers a few times a day on average.
  
• Could it matter where I am, which cell towers I'm communicating with? Could my office somehow drain it more?
  
• I have more pictures on mine than she has on hers, but we both have an MP3 ringtone.
  
• Hers connects by Bluetooth to something for an hour and a half every day, but mine rarely connects to anything by Bluetooth, even though it's been bonded to more things in the past. But the extra things it's been bonded to don't even have Bluetooth turned on.
  
• If all else fails maybe I'll try swapping batteries with her phone and see if the problem stays with the battery. I can't imagine it will since this is the third battery I've had.
  

Thank you, Irving!

For many years we've been customers of Gillespie Fuels for our propane. This year, however, their pre-buy price was higher than many competitors, and more importantly, our credit union set up a special deal with Irving Oil to get propane at a more reasonable price for members only. They kept the price low through a close partnership with the credit union, so they could draw directly from an account set up for this purpose there, keeping their costs down. It was a great price, so we decided to switch.

Propane dealers aren't allowed to fill each other's tanks, so Irving needed to make arrangements to switch our tanks. We asked Gillespie to stop filling our tank so we could run down the propane that was still in it, and when they finally picked up the tank, they could reimburse us for what was in it at that time, along with the credit we still have with them from last year's pre-buy. Irving said they'd put in a new tank on August 24th.

On July 24th, an Irving truck came and filled up our Gillespie tank and left us a bill, which would be automatically debited from our account. Whoops. Seems someone in customer service hadn't told someone who actually does the filling about the status of our account (not yet active for another month), and that person also didn't notice the big Gillespie logo on the tank. Big problem, because now there was no way to tell how much propane in that tank was Gillespie's.

We called. They were stumped for a bit but came up with a solution. When the guy came out to set up the new tank on August 24th, he'd transfer all the propane in it to the new tank. We'd already paid for it all, after all. Then Gillespie could pick up an empty tank and reimburse us for only the amount we'd overpaid last year. Okay, a bit of a hassle, but no problem.

I was home on August 24th so I could make sure this all got done right. The guy who put the tank in had never heard anything about this situation. He radioed back to base and then told me, sorry, they didn't tell me about this and I'm not scheduled for it, someone will have to come back next week to do the transfer. So we're delayed another week or so before we can get the money Gillespie owes us from last year, but we can live with that.

He suggested that this transfer would be scheduled for me, but we didn't trust it. Today, Siobhan called to try to get a firm idea of when it would happen. No one at Irving could answer, but they said they'd know by tomorrow.

Tonight we got home to find a $575 bill from Irving. Apparently, someone came out and filled the new tank. Now they're going to debit our account again. And we have one full and one almost-full tank in our backyard, with no way for them to transfer the propane because there's no room to transfer it into. Naturally, there's no one at Irving who can even speculate about what will happen next. We can call first thing in the morning and try to beat them to processing the bill.

They really need to figure out how to talk to one another.

Next step to the MGB

Cigna's response to the letter our doctor's office sent them was more positive than we expected, suggesting maybe there'll be fewer rounds in the fight than we thought. I've no doubt they're going to be more difficult than this eventually, but so far, we're off to a good start.

However, they will only approve this as an out-of-plan surgery, which means we're going to have to fork over $2500 per surgery out of pocket (on top of travel costs). That's not going to be easy, but the far bigger question is how we're going to float the total cost of the surgery, $17,000 each, while we wait to be reimbursed. High Point won't bill insurance; they require payment on the day of the surgery. Assuming we have written commitment to reimburse us from Cigna, we still have to cover the $34,000 plus travel costs ourselves for the weeks or months it takes to get reimbursement. I'm not yet sure how we're going to do that, but I know I'll find a way. It's just a question of how good or bad a way I end up with.

This also means I have to dig into doing their Getting Started packet, which includes, amongst other things, a ten-page essay on what the MGB is. Being on the MGB YahooGroup I can certainly see why they require this. It's mind-boggling how many people don't know anything about the surgery or its impacts on patients, even as they're nearing getting it. Even some people who've had it! And these are the best-informed group, too. It's even worse for other surgeons and groups. But for me it's a bit perfunctory. I could spill out ten pages worth of information about MGB with my eyes closed. I know more about it than my doctor. But I don't relish the time I'll have to spend writing a book report to prove it.

I've been so busy with so many projects lately, but at work and at home, that I've been for a few weeks in a "no new things" mode: no new projects, no new items on my to-do list if I can help it, just try to winnow things down. Hahahahahah. Now I have a whole new set of things to do! Time to take some more time off from work -- making my work to-do list get more cramped.

In other related news, my weight dropped below 450 for the first time. I've lost 37.4 pounds since this program started in May.

Testing the math solution

I couldn't post this as a comment in response to the comment posted on my previous post because of the very limited formatting allowed in comments. Frank posted in response that the expected value should be (1-X)/X, which provides some results we both agreed seemed counter-intuitive -- though in the way that these kinds of probability things often are. (In fact, this problem is kind of related to the birthday paradox, now that I think about it.) So I whipped up a little C program to test it by brute force.

Here's the program:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#include <conio.h>
#include <time.h>

/* Macro to get a random integer within a specified range */
#define getrandom( min, max ) ((rand() % (int)(((max)+1) - (min))) + (min))

int main() {
  int probability, count, result;
  long total;

  /* Seed the random number generator with current time. */
  srand( (unsigned)time( NULL ) );

  for (probability = 50; probability >= 1; probability--) {
    total = 0L;
    for (count = 1; count < 1000; count++) {
      result = 0;
      while (getrandom(1,100) > probability) result++;
      total += result;
      }
    printf("%2d%%  calculated=%6.2f  simulated=%6.2f\n", probability, (100 - (float) probability) / (float) probability, (float) total / (float) count);
    }
}

And here are the results:

50%  calculated=  1.00  simulated=  0.97
49%  calculated=  1.04  simulated=  1.07
48%  calculated=  1.08  simulated=  1.09
47%  calculated=  1.13  simulated=  1.09
46%  calculated=  1.17  simulated=  1.19
45%  calculated=  1.22  simulated=  1.22
44%  calculated=  1.27  simulated=  1.22
43%  calculated=  1.33  simulated=  1.37
42%  calculated=  1.38  simulated=  1.41
41%  calculated=  1.44  simulated=  1.54
40%  calculated=  1.50  simulated=  1.52
39%  calculated=  1.56  simulated=  1.67
38%  calculated=  1.63  simulated=  1.64
37%  calculated=  1.70  simulated=  1.66
36%  calculated=  1.78  simulated=  1.71
35%  calculated=  1.86  simulated=  1.97
34%  calculated=  1.94  simulated=  1.89
33%  calculated=  2.03  simulated=  1.95
32%  calculated=  2.13  simulated=  2.20
31%  calculated=  2.23  simulated=  2.30
30%  calculated=  2.33  simulated=  2.33
29%  calculated=  2.45  simulated=  2.41
28%  calculated=  2.57  simulated=  2.55
27%  calculated=  2.70  simulated=  2.78
26%  calculated=  2.85  simulated=  2.81
25%  calculated=  3.00  simulated=  2.91
24%  calculated=  3.17  simulated=  3.17
23%  calculated=  3.35  simulated=  3.38
22%  calculated=  3.55  simulated=  3.73
21%  calculated=  3.76  simulated=  3.77
20%  calculated=  4.00  simulated=  4.07
19%  calculated=  4.26  simulated=  4.19
18%  calculated=  4.56  simulated=  4.70
17%  calculated=  4.88  simulated=  4.93
16%  calculated=  5.25  simulated=  5.38
15%  calculated=  5.67  simulated=  5.52
14%  calculated=  6.14  simulated=  6.11
13%  calculated=  6.69  simulated=  6.66
12%  calculated=  7.33  simulated=  7.29
11%  calculated=  8.09  simulated=  8.41
10%  calculated=  9.00  simulated=  9.20
 9%  calculated= 10.11  simulated=  9.97
 8%  calculated= 11.50  simulated= 11.09
 7%  calculated= 13.29  simulated= 12.98
 6%  calculated= 15.67  simulated= 15.47
 5%  calculated= 19.00  simulated= 18.58
 4%  calculated= 24.00  simulated= 24.61
 3%  calculated= 32.33  simulated= 33.43
 2%  calculated= 49.00  simulated= 47.77
 1%  calculated= 99.00  simulated=101.59

Close enough that I'd say the difference is likely due to not doing enough trials (I did 1000 for each probability) and inaccuracies in the floating point math and random number generation I used.

A new new phone

After replacing the battery, and sending it in for five weeks of repair, failed to make my old Motorola RAZR able to hold a charge through the day, I finally got them to simply replace it. As an extra bonus, this time, they had the black RAZRs in stock, which not only looks slick and matches my clip, it's visually distinct from Siobhan's silver one.

I had the foresight this time to go through the menus and take notes on all my settings, so the new one is now loaded up with the same address book pictures, the same ringtones, the same wallpaper, the same configuration. Let's hope this one holds a charge!

Doing more reading

Life is full because there are so many enjoyable things to do, that every minute I can spare has a list of things I'd like to be doing during it. One of the things that tends to fall by the wayside when I'm really busy is reading. But one good thing about my current exercise program is that it lets me do more reading. Audiobooks, mostly, which I get from Audible and play on my Palm while I ride the recumbent stationary bike.

I recently finished reading Entanglement by Amir Aczel, a very thorough tour of quantum mechanics focusing on entanglement and its role in the history of quantum theory. I've read a lot of books about quantum mechanics and sometimes feel like I almost, but don't quite, understand it as I'm in the thick of one of these books, though by the end I feel it's slipped away again.

This book was perhaps the first time I understood, at least a little, Bell's theorem, or at least the alternative three-particle-entanglement version. Specifically, how it's possible to prove mathematically that there can't be a hidden-variables theory, something which had always puzzled me before. Of course, it's already feeling like it's melting away. But at least I can recall that I have known it, and been convinced, and could review it at any time, so I no longer just have to take it on faith that the proof is real.

As with most books about quantum mechanics, the author plays up how the book will talk about the fantastic possibilities for technological advances made possible by our advancing understanding of quantum mechanics, but in the end, he really doesn't talk about them. I want to know what quantum computing is, how it works, and what advantages it has, but all I get are news article blurbs that just say that there's a huge advance, but not what or why, let alone how it works. I want to know how "spooky action at a distance" could be used for superluminal communications, or more to the point, why it can't! I want to know why we couldn't have lasers and microwave ovens without quantum mechanics, and what else we can expect to get in the years to come.

Currently I'm reading Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke, read by the author. He does an amusing, and surprisingly good, impression of the voices and accents of the presidents and other public figures he's served under and with. His from-the-inside view of the history of modern terrorism has been shockingly enlightening, particular as I see the roots of our current situation with Al Qaeda in the events of the Cold War's end.

I always had a vague sense that there was the Cold War, then a decade or so of relative peace and safety, during which terrorism gradually became an issue, and eventually came to replace the Cold War in the role of making us all feel terrified and powerless, and giving Hollywood a source for villains. And I knew that some elements of terrorism had roots in the Middle East conflicts revolving around Israel, as well as the global oil trade. What I really never understood before this book was how the rise of terrorism, and particularly Al Qaeda and the Taliban, are not merely something that came after the Cold War, but were birthed in the same events that brought the Cold War to an end. Now I see that the events at the end of the Cold War are at least as responsible for the advent of modern terrorism as anything about Israel or oil, if not more so.

Probably the next book will be some bit of science fiction, maybe a collection of short stories. Then back to science.

Mr. Mojo Risin'

Listening to some songs by The Doors this morning, it occurred to me that while their songs are firmly rooted in classic rock, there's some of the same quality of "texture", an ethereal, atmospheric effect, in their songs as in some trip-hop stuff, like Portishead. If Jim Morrison were alive today, I wonder if he'd be into trip-hop.

Memetics versus memecrobial infection

You can't understand what a meme is without understanding the principle of the selfish gene. We usually think of genetics as a function of organisms; that a species survives because its genetics work to make it able to survive. Dawkins turned this on its head. The genes are what are trying to survive and procreate, and the organisms are just complex, effective tools that the genes use for this purpose. Genes are what really matter, though. That's why, the minute your body can no longer procreate -- can no longer pass on genes -- it tends to fall apart. There's no longer an advantage to keeping it working after that point, because the survival of the organism is irrelevant, only the survival of the gene.

The idea of a meme was an outgrowth of this idea. Memes, as they were originally defined, were ideas that did the same thing that genes do. The canonical example of a meme is a religion, or an ideology. A meme is a long-lasting thing which struggles for survival against other memes, and the minds it will inhabit along the way are important only as a means to continue and spread the meme. That's why martyrdom works: the meme doesn't mind losing a host, as long as the process gets it into other hosts.

But these days if you say "meme" on the Internet odds are what people will think of is not a meme at all, but just a momentary fad. Nothing about the genetic model of the meme really applies to how these fads propogate or survive, nor is there really anything fundamentally different about how they spread today than how they used to spread 30 years ago -- it's mostly just faster, and can happen with less investment, but these are differences of quantity, not of kind.

What is mistakenly called a meme on the Internet today is more aptly compared to a microbial infection. It passes from person to person by contact, a person suffers it for a short while and then gets over it, and that's it. It survives by finding more hosts, but that's where the comparison to genetics ends, because it doesn't have any long-term survival. It doesn't have a consistent identity over time. It survives not through tenacity or ability but through sheer numbers.

It's always a pity when a really powerful, really meaningful word, which is the only way to express a unique, insightful concept, is devoured by the grinding engine of word-trivialization. Especially when it's co-opted to mean something we already had perfectly good words for. The language is lessened, and so is the scope of human thought. Having thought this through, I now regret my own contribution to the misuse and erosion of this sublime word.

A math problem

Consider this game. I've got a die with sides marked "win" and "lose", such that the probability of rolling "lose" is X. You roll the die; if you roll "lose", the game ends. If you roll "win", I give you a dollar and you roll again.

For example, if X is 0.15 (a 15% chance of rolling "lose"), the odds of you getting nothing is 15%. The odds of getting $1 is 85% * 15%. The odds of getting $2 is 85% * 85% * 15%.

Put generally, the probability of any result n is:

P(n) = x (1-x)^n

The question: How can I calculate the average expected payout for a given value of X? All I can figure out is it would be the sum of this infinite series:



Once upon a time I might have been able to figure out whether that converges on something I can express as a simpler formula, or at least calculate for a few selected values of X. But I don't even know where to start now.

Arguing on the Internet

The problem with arguing on the Internet is somewhat analogous to if a skilled swordsman wandered the streets offering a foil to random strangers to fence with them. The average person on the Internet is about as skilled at logical argumentation and rhetoric as he is at swordplay, having never touched a sword, but having watched a few Hollywood pirate movies.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Imagine instead if the master swordsman handed a foil to a random stranger on the street and started fencing, but every time he got a hit, his foe said "no you didn't, that's not how the game works!" and insisted he was actually winning. Every time he did some kind of ridiculous Hollywood cinematic thing, he'd consider that he scored a point, but since the master swordsman wasn't doing those things, neither his foe nor the bystanders would accord him any points.

In the end, of course, the master swordsman would have had dozens of chances to maim, kill, or subdue his foe, and blocked every blow that came anywhere near being able to injure him. But no one else would realize that he won. They just thought he was dry, and kind of boring.

You can only win so many arguments against people who don't even realize what an argument is before it's not even amusing for its own sake.

(Months after I made this post, the following strip showed up on Cectic:)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Remember a few years ago when it was all the rage to type in "leet"? I mean stuff like this:

lolz 1 4/\/\ §0 \/\/1++¥

That used to be so cool, so amusing. How antiquated that seems now! Today everyone realizes that was just dull, unfunny, affected, contrived, and worthy of ridicule.

We've come so far. Today, if you want to be funny, you should talk like this:

im in ur shed hasing ur buckitz, lol wut

That's endlessly amusing, and eternally cool. Surely, there's no need for any further progress in the evolution of culture. I think we've finally nailed it this time.

Getting better

My hemoglobin A1c is down 0.5 to a new level of 7.7, a distinct improvement. And the trends in my blood glucose continue to drop. My cholesterol levels are also back into the fantastic range (except my HDL (good cholesterol) which stubbornly refuses to budge, or even obey the laws of physics).

Of course it's hard to tell how much of that is because of the extensive changes in diet, and my steadily more consistent and complete levels of exercise, and how much because of the simvastatin and increased dosage of metformin.

The doctor's office is working on the letter to Cigna to get that process started. Probably we'll see that within a few weeks.

I'm eating an apple a day, and boy is it not working. I am seeing some doctor or other like every week!

I don't know about you but I'm getting bored reading about health stuff on this blog all the time. Why doesn't the dumb blogger write about something else already?

A glimmer of hope

A Cigna representative raised the heretofore unconsidered possibility that our 3½ years in control of diabetes using only diet and exercise might, combined with a letter from our doctor, count as proof that we can make the changes necessary, thus obviating the need for the six month wait while we prove it again.

Of course, we're already two months into that, and doing very well. I've 24 pounds, well ahead of the goal timeline Cigna required (in fact, I've already lost as much in two months as they want in six) and even still ahead of my own personal (and more ambitious) goal. And we're not about to stop on it. But we are going to talk to the doctor about getting that letter. If so, maybe we'll be able to get going sooner than we'd thought.

One caveat on that is the fact that I myself might still have to lose a bunch more before I fit into the requirements for the laparoscopic surgery. However, at my current rate, that shouldn't be a problem. Even if we get to skip three of the six months, I should still be at that goal quicker than all this could be arranged.

Besides, it's unlikely we'd get ours at the same time, in spite of how much more convenient that'd be for travel costs and the like, just because someone has to take care of us. And I don't mean stopping by to ask how we're doing every few days. It's more like what you can only ask of family, and for a week or two at that. We'll really have to do it for one another, which means we take turns. And that means I go second since my stomach size is an issue.

So for now, status quo. I continue the tedious and annoying process of recording everything I eat in my Palm (ten times as tedious and annoying for Siobhan since she has to calculate all the things she cooks too). I continue to do my exercises, using Kinesio knee tape, icing, and soon a cane for long walks, to avoid the pain that so far isn't stopping me this time. And I continue to lose weight, aiming for that compatability-with-surgery size.

The good kind of busy

Been feeling kind of harried lately with so many things I want to be doing and not enough time to do them all, but they're not bad things, they're just too many good things. There's some programming I want to be working on, game prep for GMing I need to be doing, a story I have in mind to write, and an assortment of around-the-house work to do: replace a bent lawnmower blade, take a load of trash to the dump, fix the tires on my lawn trailer, clean the utility room and garage, and unpack books onto the bookshelves I set up a few months back. Plus if there's ever nice weather on a not-too-busy weekend day, I'd like to go fly the RC plane I got for Christmas, finally!

Since some of these are more "creative" endeavors, it's hard not to get swept up by whichever one happens to have inspired me at the moment. Some of those other things might never get done, or at least not when they need to be done, if I allow the inspiration to lead me. But it's always hard to let it go. Feeling inspired and full of creative ideas always feels like an opportunity I shouldn't let slip by because it might not come again.

Health update

The good news: in the first month of my "new start", I lost 19 pounds. Of those, 12 were in the three weeks after my first doctor's appointment, and thus, count against Cigna's 5% requirement. Since that only comes to 25 pounds or so, I'm clearly going to have no trouble getting there in six months. It seems I might even be able to get to the target weight that the MGB surgeons would prefer for doing my surgery laparoscopically (the only way MGBs are done).

The bad news: my HbA1c (a measure of long-term blood glucose levels) went up from 8.0 to 8.2. Now, that's not much; it's actually within the plus-or-minus of the test. But it's an increase when it should be a decrease. I'm not too worried, though. My tests have shown a slow but steady decrease, about what I expected. After all, I'm not aiming primarily for fast BG reduction this time around. My exercise regimen is limited by my pain, and my reluctance to push myself too hard and make myself stop. And my diet regimen is limited by the dietitian's insistence on adding fruits and vegetables despite the fact that their carbs will bring up my BG. I expect slow progress, but progress, and that's what I've been seeing. I suspect the HbA1c just isn't showing it yet, but will by my next test.

It's kind of hard to really feel invested in it now. I have a dose of short-timer's syndrome. After the surgery, odds are good my blood sugars will be a simple non-issue. It's easy to get thinking of this process as not being about my blood sugar, but simply about checking boxes on Cigna's checklist. The doctors would be horrified at that attitude; they want all my efforts to be based on the idea that the surgery will never happen. I'm trying to strike a balance. I care about my blood glucose, but if the long-term goal of eliminating diabetes and achieving significant weight loss requires me to have slower improvement in my BG and HbA1c right now, that's fine, too.

Anyway, the exercise part, which I've always said is the linchpin of everything else, is still in a preliminary state. Still not seen the physical therapist, and still using the same equipment, so the fact that I'm keeping it up at all, even at this reduced level, is an impressive achievement. (Not that the doctors even realize that, let alone give me credit. All they see is that it's not as much as they'd like. But I'd much rather be able to sustain doing some-but-not-enough than to push too hard and end up stopping.)

Next week's physical therapist appointment is a hopeful step. The arrival of the recumbent stationary bike I ordered, expected in the next two days, is an even more hopeful one. The hope they point to is being able to keep my exercise regimen more thorough and complete without a lot of pain. That'll lead to better improvement in blood glucose, and sustaining the weight loss.

---

On the other side is the process of arranging the surgery itself and its insurance coverage. The doctors keep talking about this like it's routine, and asking us when our surgery date is, but it's likely to be quite a struggle. We're not sure if it's better to start working with Cigna now, in hopes of getting the lengthy process of them losing our paperwork and issuing spurious random rejections to happen in parallel with our six-month weight-loss regimen; or if it'd be better to wait until we have that regimen, and all our other ducks, in a row, before we even draw ourselves to Cigna's attention, to make it harder for them to come up with ways to reject us. I wish we had a tactics guide for that kind of thing.

The other problem is getting local support. A surgery like this requires a lot of follow-up in case of problems and to make sure we're doing what we need to do. Yet it is, like many other kinds of surgeries, specialized enough that you can't get it locally, you have to travel for it. Since we can't fly out to High Point, North Carolina every few months (or even every few years) for routine follow-up, we need a way to get local follow-up, which means we need a local practitioner to agree to do it.

What exactly "follow-up" comprises seems to be hazy. Other long-distance patients of High Point seem to get by on "get my bloodwork done locally and have results copied to High Point", combined with the usual possibility of emergency care in case of catastrophe. Yet our doctor's office blanches at the idea of agreeing to provide this kind of care, perhaps because they imagine that they'd be called on to do more than they actually would, or perhaps it's me who is underestimating how much they'd have to know or do.

Why won't someone just write me a check for $34,000 so I can avoid all this insurance stuff and just get it done? It'd just be done.

Underappreciated movies redux

Today's nominee is Sneakers.

I wonder why this movie made so small a splash. It has a fantastic cast full of big names, and lots of them. It was pretty well promoted back in its day. It's got plenty of action and a cutting-edge feel, even though the pacing is not frantic, it's measured and well-crafted, rather than just piled on and ratcheted up. Seems like a sure winner. But while it didn't bomb or anything, a lot of people are not even aware of it, or only faintly.

Looking at it solely as a heist movie, it's one of the best out there. It's also one of the best computer "hacker" movies, both in terms of an interesting plot, and in terms of realism (not to say it's perfect in that regard, but most of its inaccuracies are easily dismissed as simply time-condensing things that would be boring to watch more slowly, plus there's the MacGuffin, which isn't real, but is at least plausible). It's also a very good action movie. Plus it includes a fair amount of serious thoughts about the value of information, the balance between privacy and identity, and the impact an information society can have on politics, society, economics, and justice, for better and for worse. (Admittedly, some of that takes the form of slightly heavy-handed, though still story-appropriate, exposition.)

It's one of those movies that bears up very well to repeated watching. You don't start finding flaws; the closer you look, the more the plot fits together. You don't find it becoming hollow; you start appreciating more details, more foreshadowing, more subtlety in the acting and writing. It's a movie that sticks with you, not one that boils off the memory a minute after the credits roll.

It also has good laughs, and they're very natural laughs: they don't feel like people being artificially witty, but the kind of funny that you have with normal folks who happen to be funny. Okay, on second thought, "normal" isn't the right word. Some of these guys, especially Mother, are pretty weird. But when they're funny it's because of who they are, not because of who the writer was.

Local produce on the honor system

Here in rural Vermont it's not uncommon to see stands at the side of the road selling local corn, flowers, or produce on the "honor system". There's a pile of fresh corn, probably pulled from the immediately adjacent field the previous day, and an old coffee can to put your money, and there's no one around.

Many people who come to Vermont and see these are astonished at the idea that anyone could still, in this day and age, count on people to pay for what they take in a situation like this. And yet almost everyone does.

What I find amusing, though, is that everyone's first reaction is to think, "why don't people just take the corn and not pay for it?" but hardly anyone thinks, "why don't people take the money that's sitting right there in a tin can?"

It's odd how somehow the idea of not paying for your corn is a different level of dishonesty from the idea of taking the money. On an absolutist level, it's exactly the same; corn and money must be interchangeable since the very existence of the booth proves one can be exchanged for the other at a fixed rate. Yet virtually every single person approaches the situation and concludes that stealing corn is "not as bad" as stealing the money from the can.

Including me; in some way I can't work out, that's my reaction, too. Though they're not as far apart for me, as evidenced by the fact that when I first saw one of these, I thought of the money theft almost immediately after thinking of the corn theft, while many people never get to the money theft possibility at all.

Most underappreciated movie

I could do a week of posts on this subject... actually I could do a whole blog on it, I bet. Nominate a movie that was really good, but that hardly anyone knows.

Today's nominee: Strange Days.

The whole movie springs from one single premise: the existence of a machine that can record and replay memories and experiences. It's easy to miss it in the flurry of story and breathtaking visuals and plot twists and interesting characters and suspenseful action, but squeezed into the same two hours with all that, there are explorations of not just one or two implications such a technology might have on society, but dozens of them, good and bad, individual and sociological.

It also has the virtue of having a main hero character who is not only not that heroic (let's face it, he's a coward), but who has no ability to fight or defend himself, even though he is always getting into dangerous situations. No, his one and only skill, ramped up to limit, is being ingratiatingly oily and slick -- not just when it's helpful, but all the time, because that's who he is, even when it is ruining his life.

It's just too much movie for most people.

Snobbishness

The kind way to put it would be to say that I am picky about a lot of things. I don't find amusing a lot of things that other people do find amusing, things like movies, or humor. A less kind way would be to call me "high-brow" or "elitist". The least kind would be to call me snobbish.

At times I wonder if I'm missing out on some of this stuff. But most of the time, I can be pretty condescending in my assurance that there's really nothing to be missing out on. A great example is the large number of formulaic jokes in widespread circulation on the Internet that are, as far as I can tell, "funny" by virtue of only two things: intentionally bad spelling, and excessive repetition. Sometimes, there's a picture of an intentionally irrelevant animal, too.

Most of the time I conclude "this is not really funny, people are just worn down by repetition to have progressively lower standards". A tiny part of the time I wonder if there's something to low-brow humor and I'm missing out. Is there really something funny about fart jokes? How about cruelty humor? What do people who enjoy the badness of bad movies see that I don't see? Where's the true amusement in 2.3 million videos of cats falling off tables?

I want to apologize to the people who I must seem very snobbish to, because I don't mean to come off with a superiority complex. But would such an apology mean anything? Part of it is just apologizing for my general social ineptitude that prevents me being more tactful. Part of it comes from that tiny bit of wondering whether it's not really me that's missing something. But the fact is, a lot of me still concludes that I am, in fact, more discerning, and the problem is just that I don't think that makes me "superior", but it's inevitable it will come off that way. And if it comes off that way, how can I apologize for seeming snobby? Maybe I really am snobby.

Proxy bidding

Here's another one of those "there are two kinds of people" things: those who understand proxy bidding, and those who cannot. I think it's genetic, like the ability to curl your tongue. Either proxy bidding is a simple thing that makes perfect sense, or you simply are unable to think it through, no matter how many times it's explained.

Unfortunately, the people who don't understand proxy bidding make things more difficult for everyone else, not just for themselves. If everyone was able to take advantage of proxy bidding, then when I put my bid in on something, there's a good chance I'll find out immediately whether I'm already out of the bidding and should move on to bid on some other item. Instead, I'll probably waste days riding out one bid so it can be outbid at the last minute -- literally -- by some idiot sniper who can't understand the auction would have come out precisely the same if they'd just put in their proxy bid earlier. It would just have saved them, plus everyone who lost, a lot of time.

The urge to try to explain it is strong, because it's just so simple, but I will resist. There's no point, it's either obvious or inscrutable. Maybe someday scientists will develop some kind of psychochemical therapy for this malady.