While Daybreakers comes off feeling a little low-budget and B-movie in parts, and there are a few plot holes that don’t withstand scrutiny, it’s thoughtful, stylish, gory, engaging, and well-acted (possibly excepting Willem DaFoe, whose character, named Elvis, vamps [hah!] his southern accent a bit too too much).

Star Ethan Hawke’s character has the first name of “Edward.” The movie was made originally in 2007, long before the current Twilight craze, so it wasn’t an intentional reference. But it’s very unfortunate and distracting, even when some characters refer to him as Ed.

I woke up this morning with a $50 million dollar idea that I’m giving away here, because I couldn’t live with myself if I did this. Here’s what you do:

1. Hook up with a nutritionist and come up with a vitamin cocktail formulated specifically to make up for chronic Vitamin D deficiency.
2. Frappé it, add sugar water and a whole ton of caffeine, and add your (fictional) secret ingredient, “tauro-hemine,” which you say is synthesized from cow blood.
3. Bite your tongue and a bullet and license Twilight. See if you can get away with only 20% of the gross.
4. Slap Edward’s brooding mug on an ankh-shaped can.
5. Call it “Twilight Red Thirst” and set up your distribution channel for every goth club and vintage clothing store in the land.
6. Sure you’re splitting your gross with Charlaine Harris, but after a couple of promotional campaigns and with a catchy slogan, soon you’ll be laughing all the way to the blood bank.

I believe in my kids.

• I believe that people should be treated with respect, no matter what beliefs they hold. I may disagree with certain beliefs, and even try to convince another person to change a belief, but I will always try to respect the individual, no matter how much I disagree with their beliefs. (There is an exception for believers in hatred or violence; I find it very difficult to respect holders of those beliefs.)
• I believe in following a moral code, based on one’s understanding of right and wrong, and I believe in treating others as I would wish to be treated.
• I believe in the scientific method, that theories and claims should be tested, and that beliefs should be based on testable and reproducible evidence. I believe there are no immutable truths and that everything should be up for debate.
• I believe “faith” is defined as having a certain belief despite there being no evidence for that belief. Because of my skeptical world view and my requirement for evidence to support my beliefs, I believe that “faith” has little place in my life.
• I believe that I am completely open to believing in the existence of God (or gods). If I were to find any proof that God exists, I would believe in God. I believe that the burden of proof of God’s existence should be on those who believe in God, not on those who don’t. By some definitions, this makes me an agnostic, but I don’t really believe in labels.
• I believe that the more extraordinary the claim, the more rigorous should be the proof. Belief in a benevolent creator as a conscious entity who watches over us and influences events for us is an extraordinary claim, or so I believe.
• There are several arguments for creator belief that I do not find persuasive.
1. I am not persuaded by arguments along the lines that all things have a creator, therefore our universe was created. Who, then, created the creator? The same argument that others make to me that our universe must have had some “prime cause” I would return to them, and ask what was the prime cause for that prime cause.
2. I am not persuaded by the extraordinary unlikelihood of life forming on our planet as proof that there was a creator of that life. Deal out a deck of cards. The odds of that particular hand being dealt were tiny. But it happened, and after it happened, the odds were 100%. Deal enough hands and you increase the likelihood of that hand being dealt to the point where it becomes likely. Well, I believe there are a lot of planets in our universe, and I believe that we happen to live on one where life happened to form.
3. I am not persuaded by words in a book put down by human hands as any kind of absolute proof of anything in particular, especially when the book in question has had multiple authors and revisions and a long history of mistranslations. (If you are insulted by this, please don’t be. Maybe I’m not talking about YOUR holy book, maybe I’m talking about someone else’s.)
4. I do not find persuasive any third party descriptions of impossible events or miracles, especially if they happened long ago, unless they have been credibly witnessed or recorded or reproduced.
5. Because I have never seen a credible study proving that prayer has benefits (and I have seen many that disprove any benefits), I do not believe in the power of prayer. How does God choose which prayers to answer? If one person prays for one event to happen, while another person prays for that same event to not happen, how is that resolved?
• I tend not to believe in absolutes or extremes, but instead look at life as a full spectrum of possibilities.
• I believe our brains and perceptions are often deeply flawed, and we have unbelievable power to fool ourselves.
• I believe that every individual is different, and do not expect my own beliefs to influence others or be persuasive. Other individuals have different beliefs based on their different values and world views, and I believe that that’s what makes life interesting. The world’s religions and varied cultural history hold enormous value and beauty.
• I believe that a refusal to be tolerant of other people’s different beliefs is problematic. I respect people for strong-held beliefs, but some belief systems are incompatible with my world view, and I may choose to not have such people in my life, and I believe that some people with extreme beliefs should not hold positions of power or authority over others.
• I fully believe in the separation of church and state.
• I am by nature suspicious of most organizations, and that applies to organized religious organizations as well. I believe in “live and let live” and therefore do not care for extreme proselytizing, or dogma that dismisses or attacks other groups.
• I do believe in groups that support each other and their community with acts of charity, whether those groups are religious or not.
• I believe that I should try hard not to be a hypocrite. But I believe that I am a flawed individual, and that my actions may not always be consistent with my beliefs. But I believe I should always try to be consistent and try to improve myself.
• I believe in kind actions and kind words. I believe in not taking oneself too seriously. I believe in love. I believe it’s time to eat.

But they’d be far less terrified if they sped up and used the next lane over — that way, they would avoid all the people merging onto and off the freeway.

Of course, there’s no chance they’re going to read this and change their habits. But the solution is easy to see, from the outside.

There’s some kind of life lesson trapped in there, somewhere.

As Hamlet said in Act II, scene 2, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

But this is a fallacy, and it has a name: The fallacy of the excluded middle. Here’s an example:

• Too much water, and you drown.
• Not enough water, and you die of thirst.

Therefore, water is always a bad thing and we should avoid it, right?

“You’re either with us, or against us,” I’m told. Not necessarily. Perhaps I support some of what you do, some of the time, in my own way.

Humans can’t achieve perfection, but nothing is ever a total failure either. I find that everything is somewhere in the middle.

1. A latina who says, “I’m proud to be a latina.”
2. A white man who says, “I’m proud to be a white man.”
3. All of the above.
4. None of the above.

Steve Lacy on BayDad made a nice list of ways in which his life has changed after having two small children. I have one thing to add.

Recently on Lost there was a scene where Kate was in a grocery store with Aaron. She turned her head and suddenly he was gone. For a few minutes she looked around for him, growing increasingly frantic. (I won’t spoil anything further; you can just watch the episode “Whatever Happened, Happened” for more.)

A few years ago that scene would not have had much of an impact on me. Now? I was extremely affected. I could absolutely relate to her fear and panic. My blood pressure rose. I got agitated. In short, I was freaking out. Compared to scenes where people get shot in the head, or hit by flaming arrows, or run over by VW buses, or tortured — no comparison. The missing kid is way scarier and real for me.

Years ago, 1997, before I had kids, I wrote a story called “Cynthia,” which was about a young girl who went missing. I submitted it to Xian Crumlish and Levi Asher’s book of net writing, Coffeehouse. Xian (with no kids) wanted to publish it, but Levi rejected it, in part telling me because (having three kids of his own) it was too disturbing to him. I couldn’t relate then. I can now.

My friend Sam stiffens whenever he sees someone on screen get injected with a needle. He can barely watch. “What a wimp,” I always used to think. Now I’m even worse.

So today is absolutely the best day to send out an uncomfortable truth, something that’s implausible but genuine, something that (in a passive aggressive way) causes change.

So, here goes:

• Co-worker in a different building who wears sweaters even in warm weather: Your clothes stink. Wash them more.
• Twitter users (including me): Unless you’re a celebrity, hardly anyone reads what you write and probably very few people care. Do more with less. Write to please yourself, not to please imaginary others — because the world is impossible to please.
• Tech enthusiasts: (including me): We’re sheltered in such a profound way from the real world. People are losing their jobs and their life savings, or are living in wartime or hunger around the world, yet here we are enthusing about our latest gadgets and social media sites. We need to grow more perspective. Unless you work for a web 2.0 company or spend half your day using those sites already, you probably don’t care. That’s what, 0.001% of the world population?
• Happy Birthday, Taff!
• Bring back the “____ acquires” fake press releases. I liked those.
• Upside-down YouTube is pretty funny and every video becomes more profound. I’d like it that way all year long.

I’m just kidding!

Or am I?

Yes I am!

Really?

April Fools!

For real?

Best to just shut down your computer and go for a nice walk.

The traditional spin is that a minor earthquake like this one is the perfect opportunity to make sure you check your earthquake preparedness kit.

It’s also when I hear from out-of-towners who express wonder that anyone could live in an earthquake zone. While California is certainly the state most associated with earthquakes in popular culture, it’s actually Alaska that should be:

Alaska is the most earthquake-prone state and one of the most seismically active regions in the world. Alaska experiences a magnitude 7 earthquake almost every year, and a magnitude 8 or greater earthquake on average every 14 years. (USGS, Fact #29.)

In fact, only a handful of states did not experience earthquakes in modern times:

From 1975-1995 there were only four states that did not have any earthquakes. They were: Florida, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. (USGS, Fact #20.)

The USGS historical list of earthquakes by state shows that the majority of states have experienced an earthquake at least as big as 4.3 in the last 20 years.

But even if you’re living in a state that doesn’t have a significant earthquake history, chances are you experience some other kind of natural disaster: Floods. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Extreme cold. Extreme heat. Zombies.

Which led me to wonder, what’s the safest place to live in the United States?

After some half-hearted exploration of CNN, the Red Cross’s site, some out-of-date government publications and a few breathless realtor sites, I have come to the not-so-startling conclusion that no place is safe. Everywhere is vulnerable to something.

So for me? I don’t mind the occasional earthquake if it means I don’t have to shovel snow off my driveway or nail up boards on my windows or make walls out of sandbags.

But, you say. At some point, though, the big one’s going to hit. California’s going to sink into the sea. Right? So how can you live there?

Possibly. But maybe it’s just as likely that wherever you live will be hit by a different “big one” — an off-the-chart hurricane or historic flood or category 5 twister or record freeze or biblical heat.

You could be the leading actor, the screenwriter, the director, the producer, the director of photography — whatever your preference.

Everything was guaranteed. It’s a real shot at the big time, your opportunity to play a major role in a movie. Plus the salary is Hollywood-sized — let’s say a million dollars just for round numbers, for a few months of work.

The only catch: The movie is Policy Academy 17.

Would you do it?

If your answer is yes, now suppose the script for movie is, in your opinion, both racist and sexist, and those elements can’t be changed.

Would you still do it?

If your answer is yes, now suppose you have to become a cannibal and eat Steve Guttenberg.

<speed>WHAT WOULD YOU DO? WHAT… WOULD YOU DO?</speed>

Based in the hidden tomb of an ancient building in a disused corner off the Stanford campus, future heads of state and captains of industry will learn the secret handshake and code phrases as they make the connections that will form the shadowy secret cabinet of those who control the world.

You, an exclusive reader of zeigen.com, are now privy to the details. Please keep the secret. Those who care, do not know. Those who know, do not care.

With its emphasis on eating hamburgers and blueberry breakfast pastries, I give you: The bull and scone society.

Blah blah blah harder for them to go to bed blah blah blah.

Yadda yadda yadda messes up their internal clock for a week yadda yadda yadda.

Rant rant rant hate changing all the clocks rant rant rant.

I like having more daylight in the evening. When are we going to settle on nationwide DST permanently?

Arizona and Hawaii, I salute you both, for your progressive stance on not changing clocks, and for maintaining consistent bedtimes of your children. Plus you’ve been looking great lately. Have you lost weight?

MIND THE GAP

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On a single day filled with staggering sums, the Obama administration, Federal Reserve and Senate attacked the deepening economic crisis Tuesday with actions that could throw as much as $3 trillion more in government and private funds into the fight against frozen credit markets and rising joblessness.

I have a hard time comprehending the very concept of three trillion dollars. After all, even if you take Bill Gates, the world’s richest man — who is currently worth $14.22 billion — and round his wealth to the nearest trillion, he’d have nothing. And I’m nowhere close to Bill; round my wealth to the nearest billion, and I get zero. (Same for nearest million, actually.) So three trillion of anything feels to me like it far exceeds any ordinary individuals’ ability to comprehend.

If you took the $3 trillion and used it for eating hot dogs that cost $10 each, and ate them one a minute without stopping, you’d have enough money to keep on eating hot dogs for 570,776 years. Or you could give about $441 to every person on the Earth. Or you could use that three trillion to buy enough ping pong balls to fill more than 1,600 football stadiums.

I’m a visual person, so I took some time to come up with a graph that I think clearly demonstrates what $3 trillion looks like.

The first question I answered was: Name three songs you’d put on a road trip mix tape. Here’s my answer.

Way too literal

I believe PETA does a great job of being intentionally outrageous in order to attract publicity. (Naked supermodels, modest proposals, screedy and divisive comics worthy of Jack Chick — the list goes on.)

Would people really change their eating behavior over just a name? Sweetbreads don’t seem to be very popular, despite their very appetizing name. But it’s true that I’d probably not chose to buy a brand of jam called “Nastyvomit’s Famous Rhubarb Preserves,” so maybe PETA is onto something.

As an experiment, I’ll be saying “sea kitten” instead of “fish” when I remember to. My suspicion is that no behavior will be changed. (Which reminds me, sometime I need to write about the Sapir Worf hypothesis.) The entire PETA campaign is very sea kitteny. But as they say: Give a man a sea kitten, and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach a man how to sea kitten, and you’ve fed him for a lifetime.

Which leads to the question: What other animals need to be renamed along kitten lines? My friend Brian has already dubbed birds as “sky kittens” (as in, “those sky kittens downed that plane yesterday, so glad everyone got out of the Hudson alive”) and Rachel has started using the phrase “land kittens” to refer to regular, um, kittens.

I hereby declare:

• “Cows” are now “land puppies”
• “Pigs” are now “furless sty kittens”
• “Chickens” are now “flightless sky kittens”

PETA needs to go the other way, too. In order to get people to eat more vegetarian food, it should sound appetizing. Therefore:

• “Tofu” is now “soma”
• “Soy burger” is now “yummy burgah”
• “Tempeh” is now “bacon”

However, for scientific or factual claims, I demand objectivity.  Isn’t that a contradiction?  No, and here’s why.

As far as human spheres go, I believe everything is subjective. If I have a bad experience with a cow as a kid, for example, that’s going to color my decision of whether or not to work on a dairy farm. When deciding if killing cows for hamburger is moral or not, my experiences shape my judgment.

When it comes to claims of fact, it’s entirely because our brains are such subjective messes that I demand an objective approach. The scientific method — of ruthlessly testing assumptions, using double-blind studies, bringing in as many observers as possible to try to decode — is necessary to try as much as possible to eliminate subjective biases. But when it comes to morality, that approach cannot work, because each individual human has so many diverse opinions about what is/isn’t moral and “right.” You can’t develop a double-blind test to “prove” whether or not cannibalism or gay marriage or euthanasia or abortion or adultery or anything else is moral or not. By definition, morality is a human concept.

One thing that humbles me when it comes to how little we understand about the world is the placebo effect. The human mind has immense powers over the bodies containing them, and in many cases, we can think ourselves well or unwell. So many quacks and charlatans in the world prey on that with their miracle diets or herbal remedies or snake oil. If you can convince someone that your $500 sugar pill is actually a super secret cure, and they part with their $500 and believe you fervently enough as they take it, for some percentage of the time, those people actually can get well (for a while, at least). A perfect example of why anecdotal evidence — subjective opinion — in no way substitutes for a rigorous, peer-reviewed, detailed study of an issue.

Remember that cold remedy Airborne? Our former nanny would swear by the stuff. It definitely had a placebo-like effect upon her. But it was basically overpriced vitamins and sugar, and I think the courts were right to rule in favor of the recent class action suit. She would have been better off taking regular vitamin C (which has been shown to have an effect on your vulnerability to cold/flu) and saving her money.

So it’s one thing to objectively show that Airborne is useless. It’s another thing to judge whether or not the people selling it were immoral. I don’t know if they knew it was junk or not, but I suspect the Airborne manufacturers thought it was a worthwhile product.

In the one case — is this product effective? — that’s a matter of objective, scientific debate. In the other case — are the makers of this product immoral to sell it? — that’s a matter of subjective opinion.

• oranges
• cyanide
• sunsets
• tornadoes

Things that are “unnatural”:

• Agent Orange
• twinkies
• symphonies
• waterboarding

Item 101 on Nicole’s list is “complete 95% of the list” which hurt my brain. But then, today, as I was contemplating doing a list of my own, I realized I could make it very simple.

• 1. Create a list of 101 things to do.
• 2. Do item #1 on this list.
• 3. Do item #2 on this list.
• n. Do item n-1 on this list (where n=4 to 100).
• 101. Complete 95% of the list.

In other news: Done!

In Mountain View, California early this morning, FBI raided an apartment complex after intercepting a page believed to refer to terrorist activity: “It goes down tonight.”

No arrests were made. After reviewing phone records, FBI announced it was a false alarm, as the page of concern was sent in response to a previous, more innocuous, message: “What night is trash night?”

The above isn’t a true story, but go ahead and tell it as if it is. I’ve always wanted to start an urban legend.

I. The argument from Implied Practice:
1. If ethics are objective, then we should expect people to recognize which actions are “really” wrong intuitively.
2. But invariably, people find situations where they do not know if an action is right or wrong.
3. Therefore moral values are subjective and not objective.

II. The argument from Underlying Moral Consensus:
1. If morality were an objective matter, we would expect to find universal agreement on fundamental moral codes.
2. But there are disagreements concerning fundamental principles amongst moral codes.
3. Therefore, morality is subjective rather than objective.

III. The argument from reformers:
1. If moral values were objective, then moral codes cannot improve, since there any given moral code would immediately be known to be imperfect when compared against the theoretical objective standard.
2. But the work of people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks shows that moral codes can be made more just according to a particular subjective point of view.
3. Therefore, moral values are subjective rather than objective.

IV. The argument from lack of clear cases
1. If moral values were objective, then there should exist clear cases of wrongness, where all people can say that an action is either true nor false that an action was wrong.
2. But even actions as reprehensible as the Holocaust are not universally condemned.
3. Therefore, moral values are subjective rather than objective.

V. The argument from human rights.
1. If moral values were objective, then there would exist inalienable human rights. (A right is a moral obligation on the part of someone not to do something to you. If I have the right to free speech, that means someone has the obligation not to forcibly shut me up.)
2. There are no inalienable human rights.
3. Therefore, moral values are subjective and not objective.

Now — is this more or less credible? All I did was take the original arguments and assert the opposite.

To me, it comes down to burden of proof. Whichever side has the burden of proof is sunk. If the burden of proof lies on objectivists to prove objectivity, they cannot meet the challenge because I have yet to hear an argument that is convincing, logical, and complete.

If on the other hand, moral relativists like me have the burden of proof to show that moral relativism is superior, I don’t think we can meet that challenge either.

It comes down to: People believe what they believe. I think it’s almost impossible to use Aristotlean logic (If A, Then B) when it comes to morality. There are far too many shades of grey.

Web 2.0 today is in a state similar to the state of the web in 1998. Back then, four years into its rapid growth period, the “World Wide Web” (as we still called it then) had proven itself to be much more than a passing fad, and the vast majority of major organizations had created a presence. URLs had become a common sight on billboards. While mainstream and popular, there were still many people who had not really used the web extensively.

Today, almost everyone has heard of blogs, and most have used one or more of the vanguard web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, etc. But even the most popular of these sites sign up only a small fraction of their visitors as users.

The central dilemma I see as a barrier to future growth is an adoption paradox: Coming up with incentives for users to create accounts and to start generating the content that in turn attracts more users to sign up. Peer pressure is an effective motivator, but many potential users don’t sign up because they don’t get what their role is, what the site is about, or how it would benefit them. In the meantime, they either avoid the site or lurk there.

(The lurker phenomenon is prevalent: A popular Flickr photo will have tens of thousands of views, but very few comments or links. A popular Twitter user’s page might be read by 100 times more people than actually sign up to follow that person. YouTube has hundreds of millions of viewers, millions of registered users, but less than a million users who have uploaded a video. For zeigen.com, according to my server logs, more than 5,000 unique visitors came to this site last month, and an unknown number more viewed the content via an RSS reader — but only 20 unique users left a comment.)

A user’s role at a web 2.0 site falls along a continuum between what I’ll call “public” versus “personal” personas.

Let’s take Flickr as an example. When you sign up for Flickr and begin publishing photographs, you’ll be doing one of these things:

• Publishing artful or beautiful or technically proficient photographs intended to be appreciated by a general audience
• Publishing photographs of a particular subject matter (such as, say, model airplanes) intended to be appreciated by fans of that subject matter (such as model airplane enthusiasts)
• Publishing photos of your friends and family, intended to be appreciated by people who know you
• Some combination of the above

YouTube follows the same pattern: Many users are uploading family videos, others are uploading things they find generally amusing or interesting, or a series of videos on a particular topics, or anywhere in between.

Similarly, blogs can be personal and intended for friends/family (journal sites), or public but general (such as a celebrity’s blog), or public and focused on a particular topic.

With some sites, such as Digg, the expectation is that there is no “personal” content — everything is for public consumption. You’d never promote stories about your family, only stories of interest to just about everyone.

Other sites, such as Facebook, are the opposite: Other than corporate or celebrity profiles, everything a user puts there is personal, about you, so almost no Facebook profiles are for artistic purposes. It’s all about your personal life.

Some Twitter users highlight the personal even to point of banality (“Ate lunch at sandwich place again. Had Turkey. Was good.”) while others spread breaking news, one-liners, observations, or punditry in an effort to attract more followers and support their public persona as a blogger or artist.

I’ve written about FriendFeed previously. and it continues to be the web 2.0 site I’m most interested in. The dilemma for me (and therefore I presume for most users) is where to draw the line.

For example: A friend posts a picture of their new haircut or has a status of “sad.” Because it’s a friend of mine, I want to compliment the haircut or ask them why they’re sad. Sometimes I just want to post what I had for lunch.

BUT — I have a few different types of followers on FriendFeed (co-workers, friends, business acquaintances, online contacts, random strangers). The people who subscribe to me who don’t know the person involved won’t want to follow that conversation. Sure, it’s fairly easy for them to skip it, but if my goal is to acquire more followers, I need to do so by keeping my persona public. So part of me becomes reluctant to post “personal” comments or links on FriendFeed, because the role I’ve so far taken on there is more public than personal. (I’m usually interested in starting conversations with a wide variety of interesting people about topics that I care about, and the items I share there are generally not about me.)

One prolific FriendFeed user, the notorious Robet Scoble, discussed creating a second account that’s more private, just for personal items — but that’s far from an ideal solution. Fragmenting yourself into different accounts is difficult to manage (especially when you start getting into the weeds of managing duplicate feeds, remembering to unsubscribe or subscribe to different people and join certain rooms on both of your accounts), and the UI of the site presumes that you only have a single account.

Yesterday FriendFeed launched a beta test of their new interface, and it’s a great improvement. In addition to improved aesthetics, there are a plethora of new features. The most important is the ability to categorize the people you follow into whatever labels you assign (Personal, Coworkers, Interesting, Noisy — whatever). Two of the default labels are “Personal” and “Professional,” which supports the observation I’m trying to make here.

However, I think FriendFeed has it almost backwards: It’s not so much that I want to categorize my friends based on how I know them (although I do want that) — much more, I want to categorize what I publish. Let me label the things I share as “Personal” or “Public” (and use even more tags if I want to assign them). That way the people who subscribe to me can decide if they want the full feed (complete with my lunch plans and haircut comments) or to automatically excise those parts they won’t care about.

For all web 2.0 sites, the first job is to clearly explain what the site is about, show how it benefits the prospective user, and ease new users up the learning curve. Once that’s done, helping users understand and manage their role along the public/personal continuum is essential to making the site sticky and successful. Tagging and categorization is the answer for that. Smart tools and good design will be needed to make this task intuitive and easy.

With Flickr, you can subscribe to a user’s entire photostream, or just to an individual series (as tagged by the user). The next step for many other web 2.0 sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and most of all FriendFeed, is to catch up to that concept.

A simple question to ask someone who believes in astrology is why it works. What method do the planets or stars have of influencing one’s behavior, personality and future? It’s certainly not gravity, since the doctor who delivered you had a larger gravitational effect on you than Pluto did. (Assuming the doctor weighs 5kg and was 5 centimeters away from you; Pluto weighs 7.15×10⁹kg and was at least 2.76×10¹⁴ centimeters away. Plus it’s not even considered a planet anymore.)

The good thing about astrological claims is that they’re testable. If someone says that Aries are supposed to be fearless and impulsive, one can design a survey and then check if those who answer the survey about impulsiveness who are Aries answer the questions differently. There’s a fair bit of research into the claims of astrology, and the most significant debate centers around the so-called Mars Effect, which claims those born during times Mars is ascending are more likely to excel at sports.

A fair amount of research seems to confirm that birth month has a significant correlation with excellence in sports.

Victory for astrology? Not so fast.

In the last few years, research into “relative age” has shown interesting results. Let’s start with soccer. Each soccer club and soccer camp has an age requirement. Imagine, for example, a summer soccer camp that requires the campers to be nine years old when the camp starts in June. So a kid born in May nine years ago will barely be able to make it in, while a kid born in September nine years ago will have to wait a year. It turns out that the “older” nine year olds tend to do much better in camp. Since they’re older, they’re generally more coordinated and can run faster and longer — which makes them tend to be picked first, which gives them more self-confidence. That early experience often seems to carry through the rest of their soccer career. This chart, for example, from a University of Alberta study, shows how world cup youth soccer players born in the first three months after the eligibility cut-off blow away those born in the other nine months.

I have little doubt that relative age affects a lot more than just sports. Parents tend to want to push to have their children moved up a grade, but it may be the exact opposite approach (thus having your child be among the oldest in the class) will have profound benefits that affect your child throughout his or her life.

I certainly believe astrology is junk. But I also believe we should pay attention to the research showing that the month of a child’s birth is actually quite important.

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• left-handed
• single
• gay
• African-American
• retired
• Hispanic/Latino
• foreign-born
• a single parent
• poor

or

• non-religious

Of course, many people you meet will be more than one of those things. Some people you meet will be none of those things.

My score is 3 (left-handed, foreign-born, and non-religious). What’s yours?

(Sources: left-handed source, gay source, single/single parent source, religion source, all other facts source. I rounded some of these statistics ranging between 9% and 14% to be 10%. Some of these figures, especially the homosexual data, are in dispute.)

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While I was feting twins, Kimi took Sammy and Sophie to the Hiller Airplane Museum, which never gets old for Sammy.

Me: Sammy, what did you see at the airplane museum today?
Sammy: Airplanes.
Me: What kind of airplanes?
Sammy: Old airplanes. With wings!

* * *

Yesterday was Sophie’s eight month birthday. She babbles incessantly now, has the tiniest of teeth buds coming in, gives a smile to everyone, likes to wave somewhat erratically at people, and can roll over, but seems to show no interest in crawling. We’ve started the ferberizing to break her of her 3 a.m. feedings, and so far so good; she slept through the night for the last two nights.

* * *

Yesterday was also photo day at Sammy and Sophie’s school, and in addition, teachers’ lunch out for Sophie’s class. This semi-annual event asks the parents to donate their time and a little money for the teachers to get an escape, while parents come in during the lunch hour to watch the kids. There are eight kids in Sophie’s class, ranging from four months to almost a year old. For the noon to 1 shift where I helped out, we had five parents. When we first started our shift, the teachers had left us well-fed, happy, clean-diapered kids. Within about, oh, ten minutes, half of the kids were bawling, and most had dirty diapers. We parents just looked at each other and laughed. What a profoundly difficult job. The two teachers handle four infants each, with aplomb. We parents were having difficulty with less than two each. Things soon settled down though, and the hour ended up flying by.

* * *

While the photographers set up outside the school and we lined the kids up to have their individual and class photos taken, smoke and haze filled the sky from the nearby Santa Cruz mountains fire. Yesterday morning over 3,400 acres had burned, dozens of homes were destroyed, and the fire was less than 1% contained. Even though we were fifty miles away, kids rubbed their eyes and coughed; and the strange air reminded me of a smell from my childhood, in London: walking down the street in winter evenings, with seemingly every house having a fireplace with a blazing wood fire, smoke pouring out of chimneys, getting on your clothes.

Chim chimminee, chim chiminee, chim chim cheroo.

I was very glad to see the unexpected and unseasonable light rain today, giving the firefighters the break they needed to control the mountain blaze. The dull weather was not so much fun for five-year-olds attending a birthday party, but everything in life is a trade-off.

* * *

Earlier in the week, I caught Speed Racer and then snuck in to a showing of Prince Caspian. It took me about thirty minutes to catch on to Speed Racer’s vibe, but once I did, I loved it. I think this is a vastly underrated movie. The critical smackdown is somewhat intense; I guess most of the critics never watched the original cartoon, because I think the movie catches the goofy tone of the movie pretty much perfectly. And the visuals do not disappoint, exceeding even the hype.

Prince Caspian, on the other hand, is a dreadful bore, missing all spark of charm and whimsy of the first Narnia movie, laying the religious theme on over-thick, and really missing the point of the book (which I read probably twenty times before I was 12).

Speed Racer is over two hours but feels like 60 minutes. Prince Caspian is over two hours but feels like three or four.

* * *

Rob and I have been playing a new card game, Race for the Galaxy (which Steve and Larry introduced me to when they visited a couple of months ago). We play whenever we get a chance. I love this game. It’s a bit fiddly to learn, and the fact that you’re not directly interacting with your opponents takes a few plays before you understand how you can actually have a huge effect on your opponents’ play — but it’s such a short and intense game, I find myself even dreaming about it. Get this game!

* * *

Kimi gave me the new Flight of the Conchords CD for my birthday (among a lot of other CDs, thanks sweetie!). Although I loved the first season of the HBO show, I had thought some of the songs were hit or miss. But I was able to really listen to the lyrics (thanks to the iPhone making it easier for me to carry around music), and now I love all the songs. Buy this CD. Please mister, you won’t regret it.

* * *

There’s a friends-and-family deal at TiVo right now for a TiVo HD. If you’re a friend or family and want a new HD DVR, drop me an e-mail.

* * *

While I do aim to generate content, rather than pass along content from elsewhere, here’s a link. I have to say I applaud these two for their convictions and avocation.
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Kimi: “Your blog is so random. No one likes all the content. No one!”

Guilty — variegated miscellany is what this is. I do tend to be all over the place. Everything’s connected, somehow. Just think though — there are half of the categories listed on the right not even touched by this post. But comments are what I like best, so let me know what you’d like to see more of, and less of.

Whenever anyone asked him about Zen, the great master Gutei would quietly raise one finger into the air. A boy in the village began to imitate this behavior. Whenever he heard people talking about Gutei’s teachings, he would interrupt the discussion and raise his finger. Gutei heard about the boy’s mischief. When he saw him in the street, he seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and began to run off, but Gutei called out to him. When the boy turned to look, Gutei raised his finger into the air. At that moment the boy became enlightened.

I would have liked to explore more, but based on our babysitting arrangements and when Tracee and Rafique could join us, we only made it there at around 9pm. The main attraction for Kimi was seeing Amon Tobin perform, which was around 10:15. The immediate problem was food: There were only a few booths, what they sold was a bit weird, and the lines were extremely long. Kimi and I waited in one long line, only to arrive at the front just as they ran out of food. So we bought some overpriced organic juice. Repeat again at the next line, where all we ended up with were some bizarre chips made from weird roots, and some chocolate. That was dinner. For an event of this size, they clearly didn’t plan the food situation well enough. More vendors, more choices, and adequate food supplies at each vendor would have helped a lot.

We spent a bit of time near a fire sculpture, talking with friends, and gradually made our way around to see different displays, some aeronautical, some environmental, and a few rides. We waited in line for the psycho-bike ride, which was a lot of fun: Four people pedal on bicycles, which spins around four seats in a merry-go-round. First you pedal and then you ride (or vice versa). I haven’t ridden a bicycle in a while, so it was a bit of a workout.

We had to relieve the babysitter at midnight, so we weren’t able to stay too late, but we did enjoy the performances, and I thought the light installations were very well done. The music was so loud, though. I guess the kids today can’t have it any other way, but I was very glad Kimi remembered ear plugs. I was a little put off to see one dad had dragged along his (approximately) seven year old daughter and plunked her down by the speakers. She didn’t have ear plugs, and clearly wasn’t enjoying herself. Same kind of parent who drags toddlers to horror movies, I guess.

Amon was outstanding, and did make the evening worthwhile. There was a bit of cognitive dissonance in wandering past hangars and flight trainers, across a parade ground and runway, only to arrive at a rave on an airstrip. I would love to attend this event next year, prepared with having eaten at home and being able to attend more of it.

(Apologies for the bad picture quality; the only camera I had with me was the iPhone.)