My friend X and I were leaving a night class at Stanford University. We had been learning about “how to raise balanced children in a fast-paced world.” We were discussing some of these ideas as we left class. I had parked off campus because we had carpooled to class. As we turned out of the parking lot and drove down Palm Drive toward El Camino, her Audi’s headlights swung out onto a body lying in the road. The body’s arms and legs were splayed out in a terrible, unnatural pose. At that moment, every cell in my body was perked. I tried to attach thoughts to my observations. “This can’t be real,” my mind told me.

My friend slowed her car down, and I tried to get out. She said sternly, “Wait!” and then “OK, now you can get out.” She parked her car and turned on the hazard lights. She started to wave the cars behind her away from the scene.

I leaped out of the car and could not believe what I saw and heard. I walked past an SUV parked on the side of the road and noticed another car parked in front of it. I think it was a white BMW. I never saw the driver inside. After I noted the body’s odd position again, I saw a man in blue scrubs. He had dark brown hair and wore glasses. He was on his cell phone, intensely describing the body to someone, “Male, about 30 years old…yes, I think he is seizing.” The top of the man’s head was facing me. As I walked around to face him, the breath was knocked out of me. His head was swollen to 2-3 times its normal size. His eyes were swollen shut. The top-right corner of his forehead near the temple was a matted clump of blood-soaked hair. There was a huge dent in the forehead, where his skull was smashed. “A person’s brain should not be outside of their head,” I told myself. His arm was turned away from him, and he did seem to be having some kind of seizure. He was moaning, gasping mightily, and sputtering with each breath; his chest rose and fell heavily, and eruptions of blood and phlegm shot straight up like a geyser.

I wanted so badly to clear his mouth and turn his head to the side. I reached my arms out toward him. “Don’t touch him! He might have a spinal injury!” the man barked.

I mumbled something about his ability to breathe.

“See those bubbles? That means he’s breathing,” he snapped.

“Mean,” I thought. I forgave him instantly.

He explained to the 911 dispatcher, “I am a fourth-year medical student.” He shot a glance at me, as if to see that I heard.

I grabbed the man’s left hand instead. He had thick fingers, and his skin was rough. “It’s going to be all right,” I said soothingly. I glanced at the dark, wet hole in his head and pushed my doubt aside. “Help is on the way.”

Then something clicked. I let go of the man’s hand for a few moments, and I picked up his bicycle from the opposite lane. The thick metal handlebars were crumpled, and I couldn’t wheel it. I had to pick it up. I noticed that it was black and did not have lights on it. I dumped it on the side of the road. Then I saw his backpack. It was heavy, black, and quite far from where the bike and body were. In fact, all three items made a large triangle. I understood why his head was so damaged. The car must have hit the front of the bike and sent the man and his backpack flying. He landed on his head where a helmet should have been; he should have had a cracked helmet and not a cracked skull. I tried to ignore these disturbing thoughts as I moved intently. I had to shoo away another intrusive thought: “This is Stanford! This shouldn’t be happening at Stanford!” I flung the backpack near the mangled bike.

Then the medical student had orders. “There should be a box of rubber gloves in the back seat of my car. Get them.”

“Lucky, someone who carries around medical gloves in his car,” I thought. I retrieved the purple gloves and concentrated on the task. There was only room for one thought in my head at a time. “Get the gloves,” I recited to myself as a mantra. I returned to the scene with the box in hand. We both put them on.

A blond woman yelled to us, “Do you need help? Should I call 911?”

“Someone already called 911,” I yelled back.

“Should I help direct traffic?” I finally noticed the cacophony of honks and yelling from the cars stopped behind us.

“Yes!” I responded, and then I turned back to the body on the ground. I spoke to him once more, “The ambulance is coming. Everything is going to be all right. They are going to help you. Don’t worry.”

At that point, the medical student thrust his cell phone at me. “Here, take this!” he said. I held the man’s hand in mine as I spoke to a dispatcher on the phone.

“Where are you?” she asked.

I said, “About halfway between the Oval and El Camino.”

“Is anyone there yet?” she asked.

I told her that no one was on the scene yet except for us. She told me help would be there soon. Moments passed like hours, and then I heard the sweetest sound in the world: sirens. I told her, and she said, “OK, hang up and flag them down. They are not exactly sure of your location. Good luck.”

I hung up the phone and looked for the flashing lights. “Do you hear those sirens?” I told the man. “The ambulance is coming, and they will help you! Hold on!” Then I stood up and waved my arms at the sound and flurry emanating from police cars in different directions. The police immediately blocked traffic from both ways with their cars, and they were filled with questions. The medical student answered them curtly. I was holding the man’s hand tightly. He was struggling harder than ever to breathe.

Moments later, we heard the ambulance pull up. “The ambulance is here!” I screamed at the man. You could almost see the relief wash over the small group then, as if we were done with our leg of the race and were passing the baton to a teammate. But this relief affected the man on the ground differently. At the exact moment that I announced the ambulance’s arrival, the man stopped breathing.

The medical student and a policeman reached out for his wrists. “Does he have a pulse?” someone asked. Instinctively, I started screaming a stream of questions at the man’s face, “HEY! What is your NAME? How OLD are you? WHAT IS YOUR NAME? HEY!!! WHAT IS YOUR NAME?!!!”

The man suddenly took in a huge breath and exhaled with a giant splutter. We all sighed with relief. Then the paramedics approached with their equipment. We all took a step back to give them room. The paramedics moved with a kind of relaxed calm. They put a cervical collar on him, turned his head to the side, and put a suction tube in his mouth. It was attached to a little vacuum. Someone put a long board next to him, a sort of gurney. Then, inexplicably, they started cutting off his clothes with a large pair of scissors. He lay in his underwear, but his limbs weren’t strangely positioned anymore.

I became aware of the medical student’s cell phone in my hand. I forced myself to walk to his SUV and place his cell phone in the cup holder. “I put your phone in your car,” I told him. He looked in my eyes and thanked me. We really saw each other for the first time.

As I wandered to the side of the road, I noticed a thick puddle of blood from the man’s head that stretched several feet beside him. I placed the man’s black backpack near the paramedics and told them it was his. They accepted it. Then, my friend X was standing next to me. We both stared at the blood. Then, a policeman asked if we saw what happened. The medical student said, “I saw it happen. I am a witness.”

Then the cop turned to us and said, “You can go now.”

I was completely torn. On one hand, the man was a vision of horror — human roadkill twitching on the asphalt. On the other hand, he was a human being: a son, a student, and maybe a husband or father. I wanted to be sure he would survive, but I couldn’t bear to ask if he would be OK. In fact, because of the smooth calm of the paramedics, I was worried that there wasn’t much they could do and that they knew something I didn’t about the possibility of his survival. So my friend and I walked back to her car, and she drove us away in the opposite direction of the man. I had to let go of my concern as abruptly as I had been moved by it. I felt shock, sadness, and anger. I was angry that the driver of the car hadn’t even stepped out to see if the man was OK. My friend explained to me that the driver was probably in shock and facing the prospect of being responsible for someone’s death. The anger subsided. Then, I noticed his blood on my hands. I started to panic. My friend gave me some baby wipes, and I cleaned off the blood. I was left with a queasy feeling in my stomach, which lasted for a week, and a wish for hope and strength among all the strangers.

Afterward, my friend and I searched the web for weeks. We even sent a detailed e-mail to the campus police. We never got a response. I searched for information about the survival rate of bicyclists who do not wear helmets, the chances of recovering from brain injury, and news stories of accidents. At first, I thought no news was good news because the newspapers would be all over a story that involved death. But then I talked to several people, and a friend whose opinion I respect simply shook his head and hugged me when I told him about the experience. I knew he didn’t think the man had survived. So I started to think about the possibility that the man did not survive. Then, two weeks later, my friend X e-mailed a news link to me. The Stanford web site had a story about a visiting researcher from China who had been hit by a car while bicycling. X’s e-mail was titled, “This is our guy!” And it was him! His name was Yichao Wang. I thought he was half black and half white, but he was Chinese! He came from the same town that my friend X’s mom was from. The story had a link to a photo of him in a coma and a request for donations to cover his medical care. I was excited to discover that he had survived the accident. I donated to his recovery fund through the Chinese Mutual Aid Society. However, the day that I donated, he died.

Now, I think about his wife and parents who must miss him terribly. They are probably in shock. He was 25 years old, married for three years, and on a promising path as a research scientist. Now, he is gone.

I feel sad, but I also feel angry. Stanford Hospital has charged one million dollars for the brain surgery that kept him alive but in a coma from which he never woke. It seems like it was an unnecessary surgery. Certainly, asking two retired Chinese parents who just lost their son to pay one million dollars seems ridiculous and cruel.

I wish that Yichao wore a helmet that day, had blinking head and tail lights on his bike, wore bright clothes with reflective stripes, or left his lab during daylight hours. I wish the driver had been more aware and careful. You have to be a defensive driver at all times in this area. I wish Stanford had a no-car zone around the campus and shuttled people in. I wish that this man was living, loving, and discovering. I wish he died after his parents and not before. But, again, he is gone.

He will not have died in vain if we learn this lesson: YOUR HELMET IS PART OF YOUR BIKE. IF YOU RIDE A BIKE, ALWAYS WEAR YOUR HELMET.

My feed in Google Buzz

If you use Gmail, you’re likely aware of Google’s new social networking service, Google Buzz, which launched this week.

It’s only the the third day of Buzz’s public existence, and I only received access yesterday, so my experience is very preliminary.

In contrast, I’ve been using FriendFeed since January of 2008, so with two years’ experience under my belt, FriendFeed feels very familiar to me, and naturally my bias is towards what I know.

As I wrap my head around Buzz, I want to like it and have it succeed, but there are quite a few aspects of the service I can’t help but find lacking. Here are the features that FriendFeed has that I miss the most in Buzz:

1. Pause. Both FriendFeed and Buzz present a feed that updates in real-time. With FriendFeed, the play button (or q key) pauses/unpauses updates. With Buzz (on a browser, not on mobile), items I’m reading suddenly getting scrolled away and I can’t figure out how to stop that.
2. Custom lists of users. With FriendFeed, I can create my own lists (“Co-workers” and “Relatives” and “Favorites”) and automatically filter their updates. That way, posts from my relatives and close personal friends don’t get lost in the noise. With Buzz, either I’m going to have not follow so many people or figure out some other strategy for not losing updates that are important to me. Most likely I’m going to have to unfollow a lot of people who followed me.
3. “My discussions.” In FriendFeed, there’s an easy link for me to keep track of items I’ve liked or commented on. With Buzz, some of the items I’ve liked or participated in appear in my regular inbox, but not consistently and not in a simple list.
4. Smart collapsing of long posts and comments. FriendFeed’s layout for keeping items compact until I click “more” or “more comments” is ingenious. Buzz wastes a lot of screen real estate by comparison. Especially on the mobile version.
5. Smart, flexible hiding, including hiding by service. FriendFeed allows very smart ways to hide updates I’m not interested in. For example, I never care about anyone’s Foursquare updates. In FriendFeed I can hide an entire service, or many types of updates from a particular noisy user. Buzz offers no such automatic filters yet.
6. Hiding duplicates. Buzz seems to have some bugs right now where an individual post by a user is displayed twice (or even more) in my feed in two separate places. It could be the user posted the item twice by accident. But also several people could post the same item (a news item, for example). FriendFeed automatically collapses duplicate items into a single line (“1 related entry from so-and-so”). Buzz desperately needs this.
7. Bookmarklet for easy sharing. The FriendFeed bookmarklet is ingenious and easy to use, a button that appears on your browser’s toolbar that lets you easily share web content, including excerpts and images. Buzz lets you share a URL but doesn’t (yet?) intelligently create an excerpt of the page. (See screenshot.)
8. Reposting to other services, such as Twitter. The absence of this one is flabbergasting to me. FriendFeed lets you bring in services and also “exports” your posts to other services, including Facebook (via an application) and Twitter. Buzz is a one-way street right now: It can bring in your items from multiple connections, but once inside Buzz, there it stays. It can’t become your Facebook status or a tweet.
9. Groups and “Imaginary Friends.” Not everyone will join FriendFeed, so you can create a placeholder account on them that brings in their public content into the FriendFeed interface. Similarly, not everyone will join Buzz, so it’d be nice to be able to get someone’s chat content into the same UI. But that feature doesn’t seem to be available. On FriendFeed you can use this to create a “group” or “room” built from whatever content you like, such as the USGS earthquake feed or the Amazon MP3 deal of the day Twitter account.
10. Plethora of supported services. Buzz currently seems to support somewhere around a dozen “connections” that can create items in buzz whenever you use the service: GChat status, Facebook updates, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FriendFeed, Picasa, blog content, Google Reader, and probably others. But FriendFeed supports 58 services, including Amazon wishlists, Reddit and lots more.
    

    Screenshot of my feed in FriendFeed

11. Customized profile page. Not a deal-breaker, but users today expect their profile page to have some customization. Maybe not to the extent that MySpace allows, but both Twitter and FriendFeed let you pick your background image and color scheme. Buzz relies on your Google Profile, which doesn’t allow you to customize the layout or color scheme or background at all. (Buzz inherits your Gmail theme, so you can control how things look on your screen, but that doesn’t display for anyone else. Thus everyone’s feed looks the same.)
12. Posting of text and photos simultaneously via e-mail. From my mobile phone I can take a picture, and e-mail it to share@friendfeed.com. The subject line of the e-mail becomes the subject of the posted item. Up to three pictures can be posted. Any text in the body of the e-mail become included with the item, as the first comment in FriendFeed. Buzz allows you to send a picture to buzz@gmail.com, but any text outside of the subject is ignored.
13. Friend of a friend discovery. In FriendFeed, if I follow my friend Georgia, and she “likes” an item from her friend Lani, then I automatically see that item from Lani and can then choose to follow Lani as well. In this manner you can expand your social network and meet new people with shared interests. With Buzz, I don’t have any option to see items that Georgia liked, unless I already follow the person who posted the item. (Note that FriendFeed is flexible and lets you hide friend-of-friend updates if you prefer.)
14. Flexible notification channels. Depending on my preferences, I can have FriendFeed notify me in several ways whenever a particular person posts, or if an item I posted gets comments. I can get an IM, a desktop popup via a standalone application, or an e-mail, either in real-time or at the end of the day.

So what does Buzz do better? Its mobile version is location-aware, and there’s a very interesting implementation with Google maps for following local updates. I was able to see someone post about a special offer at a restaurant near where I pick up my kids from their preschool, for example. Location awareness could be a tremendous change to how I interact with social media. Buzz also makes it very easy to e-mail an item to someone. Notification of new followers is handled real-time on screen, and it’s very easy to reciprocate. (FriendFeed notifies you of new followers via e-mail, so following back is less real-time and a tiny bit more of an effort.) Buzz has better keyboard controls than FriendFeed’s keyboard controls, having inherited the excellent Gmail keyboard implementation. I’m sure there’s more. But I can’t think of anything else yet.

In any consumer space, first-mover advantage is of course critical, because it builds mindshare and market share quickly via the head-start on the competition. But the competition gets a huge advantage also, because they don’t have to create the market, they don’t have to educate users on the category, and they can copy-and-paste the feature set while offering refinements and new features.

But if the competition only copies SOME of what the original offers, they can only succeed either by excellent marketing, an improved implementation on the core feature set, or because of a built-in audience from the brand name or related product. Google has copied some of what FriendFeed offered two years ago. But they really copied only a small subset, and as far as I can see even the core functionality of Buzz needs a lot of work: Counters are buggy, the layout is ugly and hard to follow, and the integration with Gmail feels intrusive and clumsy.

But it’s from Google, and by bolting it onto Gmail (which I use heavily and find to be the best web-based e-mail solution in existence), Buzz has instantly catapulted into a dominant position in the social media space, because they can make all 150 million Gmail users aware of it and even force them to try it.

The Energy to get a kid into the bath is equal to get a kid out of the bath, which is greater than the Energy to power 10,000 homes.

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.

You pull out your iPhone and start having them play around with different apps, of course. If you’re exceptionally fortunate, you may even be prepared in advance by having an iPhone for each of them. (Both iPhones in Airplane mode, of course.)

There are a range of apps my kids like, including apps related to bubbles and apps related to noise making, but their favorites (that is, the most distracting) are the different sketch apps that let them draw.

Today, we’ll be reviewing one free sketch app, Doodle Buddy, which as far as my kids are concerned is the best thing about daddy’s phone. (That opinion will probably last another week. When it changes, I’ll post another app review.)

I could talk about Doodle Buddy’s ability to let two users collaborate on drawings (which I’ve never tried), or how it has basic sketching options (in 24 colors, with variable width, plus a smudge tool and eraser), multi-level undo, lets you take a photo or use an existing photo for a background, and has several other background choices, and — its key feature — has 24 stamps (smileys, a couple of animals, and some basic symbols) that make sounds when you put them on your drawing. I could mention it lacks basic shape drawing — no circles or lines or squares. I could talk about all that. But let’s instead let my kids review this app.

Sophie (age 2): “Doodle buddy! Doodle buddy! Doodle buddy!”

I take a photo of her as the background, have her draw over it in various colors, then have her use the eraser tool to reveal her picture.

Sophie: “There’s Sophie! There’s my NOSE!”

With the multi-level undo, you can undo the erasing, letting her play peek-a-boo with her picture again. For a two-year-old, repetition is the soul of amusement.

Sophie: “There’s Sophie!”

Me: “Sophie, do you like Doodle Buddy? Is it good?”

Sophie: “Um. Yes. Um. It’s good. Doodle Buddy. Doodle Buddy!”

Me: “What’s your favorite feature?”

Sophie: (quietly doodles)

My son Sammy, age 4, has a more sophisticated review.

Sammy: “Well, it’s a game that you play with drawing. It has yellow. And there’s blue. And more colors. So that’s pretty good. It has snow and fire. And a basketball. It does NOT have dinosaurs.”

He was reluctant to make more observations because he was busy drawing something that looked just as good to me as your average Jackson Pollack masterpiece.

Demerits that I could see: The shake-to-clear feature is sometimes a misfeature, and can’t be switched off, and you can’t undo it. As a free app it has some ads, which is fine, but if you touch them it will naturally take you out of the app. So the kids will do that from time to time, and then you’ll need to close the Safari window and go back to the app. The app should be smart enough to know if it’s in Airplane mode and that the ads won’t work.

All in all this app is worth about 20 minutes of blissful silence per child on an airplane ride, so its worth is approximately $25. At the price of free, it’s a total steal.

Doodle Buddy, by Pinger, Inc. App Store Link
Also available with a holiday theme for $0.99

I will never write another check again.

Any company or service provider who needs to be paid anything regularly can be set up for automatic billing through my bank or through their billing system. My bank will write the check for me, if need be — whether it’s for my gardener or the daycare my kids go to or what-have-you.

Anyone else who needs money can take cash or paypal or a bank transfer.

Checks had a good run (2100 years or so, if this article is to be believed), but I will no longer be a part of perpetuating this dead end of financial technology.

Why? My handwriting sucks. I hate having to wait for them to clear. I hate having to manually classify them in financial programs. I don’t want to have to carry around a checkbook. And who wants to pay other people?

I will still accept them. Begrudgingly. For now.

There’s another rule of thumb engineers talk about also: “Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.” (Meaning you can’t have everything — there’s always a compromise that has to be made with either the schedule, the budget, or the quality.)

Well, the Sky City restaurant rotates at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, where we ate this evening. It seems to defy both rules: The view is truly magnificent yet the food was good too. I had the clam chowder followed by Dungeness crab mac and cheese, and it was sublime. The other entrees chosen by our group (my wife and my sister-in-law, plus my two kids) all seemed delicious as well, if not especially gourmet. Kimi’s crab cakes were perfect, and Tomi’s French toast with espresso creme was wonderful.

As for that second maxim: The food was good, but it wasn’t fast or cheap. The speed didn’t bother us — more time to enjoy the view. We were planning on riding up to the top of the needle regardless, and since no restaurants were open nearby on New Year’s Day, it seemed prudent to eat there.

The maxim I will pass onto my kids is this: “The better the view, the more you’ll pay for it.”

Great treat to start the new year, though! Happy New Year, Zeigen.com readers. (Both of you.)

Look, I want our flights to be safe just like everyone, and I know the TSA is just doing its job, but having to check all clothing and personal items is a genuine hardship when traveling with kids. First of all, we had picked up the kid-sized robes for them from Long’s, and at first Sammy and Sophie seemed to like wearing the paper, but it was pretty cold at SJC and even colder in Washington. The cardboard slippers are really flimsy and didn’t stay on. Both kids really complained and were shivering. I swear Sophie’s knees were actually knocking. Meanwhile, Kimi and I showed up starkers as required, with just the transparent lanyard for my ID, and the modesty towels that we had to ditch in the bin upon boarding. (It was a tough juggling act to wheel two suitcases through the checkin area while keeping the towel on.) The security line cavity search was fine, finished in about three hours, but then at the gate, the new rules require you go through that cube to put on the TSA-supplied pasties. Well the cube is waaaay too small, and we were all being rushed to board. Then, afterwards, I was pretty self-conscious about having to wear basically a thong. They say they wash them between flights, but honestly it didn’t seem that sanitary to me.

Second, even for a short flight like the two hours from San Jose to Seatac, having to sit so still with no reading material or gadgets is honestly a hardship. The kids were bored after about ten minutes, and I wasn’t much better. The least they could do is put some reading material back on the planes. I know the last attempted terrorist attack involved paper cuts, but I don’t think it was really very dangerous for the flight crew. Maybe they could compromise and put on some magazines printed on tissue paper or something? At least they were playing holiday tunes. We passed the time by telling stories and by about the second hour I got used to not trying to turn my neck to look at my family while talking. And the restraint cuffs weren’t really that bad, although one ankle was a bit chafed by the end.

If you’d asked me three years ago if I thought we’d be required to sit literally stock still in an airplane with 300 other random naked people in order to get anywhere, I’d have told you you were crazy. But these are the times we live in. And to object seems like such pre-2011 thinking.

But next time, we’re just driving, I swear.

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.

Vvvv vvv vv, V vvvvv, vvv vvvv vvvvvv vv’vv vvvv vv vvv vv “v.”

(Click to enlarge)

In the collage, roughly from left to right:

1. Supermodel Anne V (Sports Illustrated photo), wearing a v-neck bathing suit, from her 5-year SI run.
2. Actress Morena Baccarin as Anna in the new “V” series on ABC.
3. The energy drink V.
4. XKCD illustrating Valentine’s Day (V Day). (Notice that the bottom half of a heart forms a V.)
5. The band Live’s album V.
6. V logos for Virgin brands as well as the TV series “V” look similar.
7. The annual music festival in the UK.
8. The victory gesture with 2 fingers; Churchill (his arm, at least) and Nixon are demonstrating here. Nixon is really demonstrating three Vs.
9. The graphic novel V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore, drawn by David Lloyd, which later became a movie.
10. In the HBO series “True Blood,” adapted from the Charlaine Harris novels, vampires are known as “Vs,” and their blood is a drug known as “V” (reminiscent of “X” for ecstasy).
11. Visitors, visitors, everywhere. In addition to the current “V” series (where the Visitors are called “Vs”), there was the original two-part 1983 miniseries, a three-part 1984 miniseries, a short-lived 1984 TV series, and various novels and comics.
12. Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V.
13. The V subway train, familiar in orange to residents of New York.
14. The Gibson Flying V, made famous by Lonnie Mack and Jimi Hendrix.
15. V Day (or V-J Day), and the world’s most famous photograph of a kiss in Times Square.

And there are probably a dozen more I could have included if I had thought of them.

Previously, Catan fans had to settle for a knock-off called Kolonists (currently not available from the iPhone App Store — pulled due to being too close to Catan without a license, perhaps?). Kolonists dressed the game in a Roman theme and did away with the random dice roll element of resource gathering, replacing the roll with a workable-but-inferior mechanic of having a single worker per settlement (and two per city) that provided guaranteed resources each turn, and a bit of jostling for position with your neighbors. It made the game faster but less interesting. So it was refreshing to go back to the original mechanic. (Other limitations of the Kolonists app are that it’s single player only, and there’s no ability to trade resources with the computer players, only the bank.)

This is a preliminary review of Catan, having just three-and-a-half games under my belt, but that’s enough experience to offer the following points. First, the good:

• It’s Catan. The rules are implemented faithfully, the terrain and icons are familiar, and the gameplay is smooth. If you’re a Catan fan, you can stop reading here and just go get it now.
• The music is excellent, and the sounds are good (but I could see them becoming annoying over time). There are options to switch off either or both.

And the bad:

• This is just basic Settlers. No expansions, no 5- or 6- player options. You do have a few options when creating a game, however. These options are: fixed or variable setup, random vs. stacked dice, optional friendly robber (no attacking players who haven’t earned any points yet), changing the victory requirement from the default 10 points to either 8, 9, 11 or 12, an optional catch-up “resource bonus” to players who haven’t earned any resources in five turns, or starting with a settlement and city instead of two settlements.
• Even switching the option for “quick animation” on is not quick enough. You get bogged down in transitions and long dice roll animations and the resource assignment animation. Kolonists had a faster pace.
• I don’t like the UI. All the commands (building, trading, etc.) are hidden in a slide-out menu to the right, guaranteeing that even a simple “end turn” is two gestures. Building a settlement is needlessly complex: Slide out menu, tap build, slide left in the build menu to choose to build a settlement, tap a checkmark to confirm, tap on screen where you want to build the settlement, tap a second checkmark to confirm. A better option would have been to dedicate some of the screen real estate to action buttons.
• No undo.
• While there is a good in-game statistics section (keeping track of dice rolls and other interesting data), it doesn’t keep track of your overall win-loss record. Kolonists offered a campaign mode, awarding points for each game that earned you new (cosmetic) titles. Catan would have done well to offer something similar.
• The AI does not seem great. I’m 3-0 so far (but might have lost another game that crashed). You can choose either random computer opponents or select different characters, which are rated by skill. I’ve seen even the best-rated AIs make some questionable moves. And they all trade too much in the end-game.
• You can only save one game at a time. If you save a game and then start a new game, it doesn’t warn you that your previously saved game is lost.
• It’s a bit buggy. For example, I chose to switch off the insipid comments that the AIs make when building items, but sometimes they still make comments anyway. And one game had to be abandoned when it was a computer player’s turn but it took no actions, with no options to continue or skip.
• Multi-player is only done via pass-the-phone (hot-potato style) — no networking support.
• Picky: The random setup of ports isn’t in accordance with the rules, randomly putting ports closer together than the official random setup rules allow. (Unless something has changed in the fourth edition that I’m unaware of.)

Despite the limitations, I recommend this anyway. I’m hopeful that all of the above problems will be fixed over time.

For players not familiar with the board game of Catan, they offer extensive tutorials and help. I didn’t go through them all but they seemed exhaustive, which should help a bit with the learning curve.

I’ll give it 3.5 stars for now.

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.

Google Wave UI has a 'New Wave' button -- Gary Numan would be proud.

I have played with it for all of twenty minutes, so I don’t have any impressions of import to share yet, but:

1. This is a bit buggier than other betas from Google I’ve played with during the invite phase, like Gmail. (Occasional crashes, buttons not working, things not archiving when I say archive.)
2. It’s not really that hard to explain. It’s chat combined with e-mail in a post format, except each exchange can be edited by the participants and can be rich in media, and you see the other participants making their edits in real-time, typos and all.
3. More than anything else, it reminds me of a bug system (such as Bugzilla).

I hereby boldly predict that — for groups collaborating on projects together — this will win. But for non-business uses, regular e-mail will remain more popular for, oh, the next ten years or so.

I’m estephen@googlewave.com. Wave me.

Right now about 100,000 invitations have been sent out to early adopters. And in turn each of those 100,000 users have been given 8 more invitations, but those ones are not yet distributed. Speculation — and gnashing of teeth — abounds as to why those invitations haven’t arrived yet.

But I have my own suspicions. Here is my understanding of why you (yes, you) haven’t received your Google Wave invite yet.

1. You didn’t respond to Google’s last invite to you, Google Rave.
2. You’re doomed to repeat today over and over until you learn how to truly love and be worthy of being loved. Only then will you receive your Wave invite.
3. You aren’t worthy. You smell. You dress funny. You think strange thoughts.
4. You don’t type fast enough. 130 wpm, minimum. With 99% accuracy.
5. Your invitation was sent to Evite by accident. Yes. No. Maybe. Tragically, no one ever reads Evite invitations anymore.
6. You don’t read item 6 in list posts.
7. You are unable to describe Google Wave using actual words. In your defense, “Unfortunately, no one can be told what Google Wave is. You have to link in an 8 minute YouTube video.”

Did I forget any?

I forgot to post yesterday (oops!). Sunday was a busy night, with one new show (The Cleveland Show, a spin-off from Family Guy) and many returning shows (60 Minutes, The Amazing Race, season 21 of The Simpsons, Family Guy, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Californication on HBO, Desperate Housewives, American Dad, Cold Case, Brothers and Sisters, and Dexter on Showtime).

For the rest of the week, here’s what you can catch.

New shows:

• Monday: Trauma (NBC drama from Peter Berg of Friday Night Lights, a San Francisco-based medical drama focused on paramedics in the field)
• Wednesday: Hank (an ABC comedy starring Kelsey Grammer as a suddenly-unemployed CEO) and The Middle (ABC comedy about a middle class family, starring Patricia Heaton)
• Friday: Stargate Universe (another Stargate series, this one with Lou Diamond Philips, Ming-Na, and Robert Carlyle)

Returning shows:

• Monday: Lie to Me
• Thursday: Private Practice (third season starting only two weeks after the second season, airing during Summer, ends)
• Friday: ‘Til Death
• Sunday: America’s Funniest Home Videos

Here’s what you can find this week. First, for new shows:

• Sunday: Bored To Death (HBO comedy with Jason Schwartzman and Ted Danson)
• Monday: Accidentally On Purpose (CBS comedy starring Jenna Elfman as a mother-to-be)
• Tuesday: NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS extending the franchise), The Good Wife (CBS drama starring Julianna Margulies, and the forgotten (ABC forensics drama with Christian Slater)
• Wednesday: Mercy (NBC medical drama with Delroy Lindo), Modern Family (ABC comedy with Ed O’Neill), Cougar Town (ABC Courteney Cox vehicle), and Eastwick (ABC adaptation of the Updike novel, with Rebecca Romijn)
• Thursday: FlashForward (high concept ABC SF show with an impressive cast)
• Friday: Brothers (FOX comedy with Carl Weathers)

And for returning shows:

• Sunday: Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO — lot of press over the Seinfeld cast reunion)
• Monday: House, Dancing with the Stars, How I Met Your Mother, Heroes, Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Castle, and CSI: Miami
• Tuesday: NCIS
• Wednesday: The New Adventures of Old Christine, Gary Unmarried, Criminal Minds, Law & Order: SVU, CSI: NY
• Thursday: CSI, Grey’s Anatomy, The Mentalist
• Friday: Ghost Whisperer, Smallville, Law & Order, Medium, Dollhouse (woo!), Numb3rs
• Saturday: Dateline NBC, 48 Hours Mystery

Chase Bank, where I have a home equity line of credit, tells me my home value has decreased, and they are thus forced to regretfully (yada yada yada) close said line of credit.

Since I am not going to sell my house, and since nobody has sent by an appraiser, it’s impossible for either organization to really know the value of my house. I’m sure I don’t know its value either — but I know that it cannot both have increased and decreased in value simultaneously.

There are four possibilities of what the County and the bank can think:

Finding myself in the most unfortunate of the four boxes, I must appeal. I neglectfully missed the deadline to appeal to the county; that deadline was yesterday.

Chase’s appeal process is ridiculously unfriendly: Call them, they’ll put you in touch with a third party appraisal agency, which you have to pay for. And as they say, “Any reinstatement of the credit line will be at our discretion and may be subject to other conditions that prevent reinstatement.” They don’t, by the way, accept the County’s assessment as evidence. Nor do they seem to have any method for me to point out to them that I used money from the HELOC to pay for work that improved the value of my home.

All evidence I can see based on property values from nearby home sales is that my house probably did increase in value (but not by nearly as much as the County seems to think). Yet Chase does not offer any details behind why they believe my home lost value.

Last year, under Bush, Chase received $35 billion in bailout funds. There has not, so far that I could find, been any accounting of how that money was used. I doubt it was used to make more money available to consumers or small businesses.

Is it any wonder that banks have a P.R. problem?

I’m told there are 99 new shows this Fall (many more than last year, which was stunted by the after-effects of the writer’s strike of 2007). I’ll be curious to see how many of those 99 new shows make it. The one I’m anticipating the most is probably Flash Forward.

Last week, the first two new shows for Fall 2009 debuted:

• The first was Melrose Place, on Tuesday.
• The second was on Thursday: The Vampire Diaries. (I recorded it but haven’t had a chance to watch it yet.) If you missed it, you can get it for free (either to watch online, or to download to your DVR) from Amazon.

(I guess you could count Glee as a new show as well, even though it first appeared last year.)

This week, Jay Leno’s new show starts tonight, and it’ll be fascinating to see if NBC’s gamble of scheduling a talk show in primetime from Monday to Friday pays off.

Also this week, on Wednesday, a new show from the CW will debut, The Beautiful Life, starring Mischa Barton.

On Thursday, you can check out NBC’s Community (with Chevy Chase) — a 30-minute comedy about a lawyer who has to return to law school.

Also on Thursday, a primetime version of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update starts on NBC.

Returning shows that start up again this week include:

• Monday: One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl
• Tuesday: The Biggest Loser
• Thursday: Bones, Fringe (yeah!), Survivor: Samoa, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (busy night!)
• Friday: Crash (on Starz)

TiVo’s Fall TV Schedule calendar is a big help. We’ve also put some work into a Fall TV Guru Guide to make it a bit easier to find the new and returning shows using your DVR.

You can also check out the Premiere Dates thread on the TiVoCommunity forum.

While the new shows appear, I’ll be posting here each Monday with a list.

Of the four new shows this week, I’ll definitely give Jay a chance, and have already set a Season Pass for SNL. I’m not hugely into fashion, so I’m not too sure about The Beautiful Life. But I’ll give Community a watch or two.

Finally, I know I’m biased, but the “Build Your Own Network” Game is fun and worth checking out. My own network isn’t doing so well yet…

Just as a reminder, I picked one movie from each of the 18 weeks of the Summer movie season (between Memorial Day and Labor Day). Entrants had to guess the movie from that list with the highest opening weekend U.S. box office, the highest worldwide box office as of Labor Day, and the highest Rotten Tomatoes score.

(Box office data comes from The Numbers and was pulled as of the evening of September 10th.)

Here are the results for each of the 18 films:

And the same results plotted as a graph:

18 Summer movies plotted to show U.S. box office for opening weekend (blue line), worldwide box office (green bars) and Rotten Tomatoes score (red triangles); data from The Numbers (as of 9-10) and Rotten Tomatoes. Click to enlarge.

So, for the three questions, the correct answers were:

1. U.S. Opening Weekend Box Office: Transformers 2 with $108,966,307.

   Second place was Wolverine, but it wasn’t even close; Wolverine took only $85 million in its first weekend.

2. Worldwide Box Office: Harry Potter 6 with $917,436,218.

   Surprising to think a film that some consider to be a kids’ movie can take in close to $1 billion. Even more surprising is the second place finisher: Ice Age 3, which edged out Transformers 2. (Separately, I was not expecting Star Trek to be so far behind, ranking sixth out of 18 for worldwide take.)

3. Rotten Tomatoes score: Up with 97%.

   Star Trek was close with 95%, and third was Inglourious Basterds at 88%.

A few points of interest:

• Final Destination 4 was initially slated to open August 14, but moved to August 28, same week as Halloween 2. (It trounced Halloween 2, although both did pretty well for horror movies in Summer.)
• I didn’t give District 9 nearly enough credit. With an unknown director and actors, and scant plot details available at the time I made the contest, I didn’t pick it as one of the 18. If I had known about Final Destination 4 changing weeks, I probably would have selected District 9 anyway, but as it was I made a bad call. District 9 out-performed about half the films on the list, but wasn’t close to the top, so it didn’t ultimately matter.
• The worst performers of the 18 movies were Halloween 2 (taking both the lowest opening weekend and also lowest worldwide box office, although it has had less time than the other movies for that latter metric) and Year One, for worst Rotten Tomatoes score (16%). The three that performed the worst on the three metrics when combined were Land of the Lost, Year One, and Halloween 2.
• Including District 9, there were eleven other Summer films not on my list of 18 that did well. They all are in The Numbers’ list of the 50 films that have grossed the most in the U.S. so far in 2009 — and all of these 11 out-performed Halloween 2. (None of these films beat out the winners listed above.) These films are (in order of worldwide gross):
  1. The Hangover — June 5 ($440,227,055)
  2. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian — May 22 ($410,687,642)
  3. The Proposal — June 19 ($285,837,964)
  4. Public Enemies — July 3 ($192,103,415)
  5. District 9 — August 14 ($126,517,464)
  6. The Ugly Truth — July 24 ($116,065,314)
  7. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past — May 1 ($96,736,445)
  8. Julie & Julia — August 7 ($83,260,082)
  9. Drag Me To Hell — May 29 ($79,525,024)
  10. My Sister’s Keeper — June 26 ($69,147,713)
  11. The Time Traveler’s Wife — August 14 ($63,728,728)
• There’s a good correlation between U.S. opening weekend box office and worldwide box office: r = 0.79.
• There’s very little correlation between Rotten Tomatoes score and either U.S. opening weekend box office (r = 0.15) or worldwide box office (r = 0.11). Some movies with bad reviews, such as Transformers 2, did very well, while some movies with good reviews, such as Inglourious Basterds, did relatively little business.
• Looking at production budget data from The Numbers, the three most expensive films to make were Harry Potter 6 ($250mm), Transformers 2 ($210mm), and Terminator 4 ($200mm). The three cheapest to make were Year One ($60mm), Brüno ($42.5mm), and Halloween 2 ($15mm).
• Only three films lost money: Land of the Lost (lost $35.4mm), Funny People (lost $12.2mm), and Year One (lost $2.4mm).
• In terms of percentage of investment return, Ice Age 3 pulled in an impressive 846% return, Harry Potter 6 returned 267% of the production budget, and Angels & Demons returned 223%.

So, who won the contest and can claim the free movie tickets as a prize?

Twelve people entered the contest.

For the first question, only Dave Zatz guessed the correct answer of Transformers 2, with some sterling analysis in his comment where he correctly pointed out that the first movie did enormous business worldwide despite being horrible.

For the second question, nine of the twelve entrants correctly identified Harry Potter 6; the franchise has always done well worldwide.

For the third question, four commenters (Dave Z., Lani S., Ken G., and Jim G.) correctly predicted that Up would have the highest Rotten Tomatoes score.

So, overall, no one got all three correct. Two entrants got 0 correct answers. (Roger’s guess of Land of the Lost for all three questions may have been less than serious.) Most people got at least one correct answer thanks to question 2. Four people ended up having two correct answers. Dave Z. got question 1 and 3 right. Getting question 2 and 3 right were Lani S., Ken G., and Jim G.)

In the comments, I identified that the bonus question — who would win in a fight? — would be used as a tie breaker.

(If I had used the metric of who was closest on the one they got wrong, Lani S. would have won. But I went with creativity of bonus answer.)

Dave Z. and Lani S. both failed to answer the bonus question, so get zero points for creativity. Jim G. answered Wolverine, but didn’t back up his answer with any creative analysis. I award him one point for creativity. Ken G. answered that the Transformers would destroy all the others, and gave a tiny bit more analysis, but his answer was still very skimpy. It was more than Jim’s, though, so I award Ken three points out of ten for creativity. (Personally I think magic is a huge advantage, so I think Harry Potter would be the sole survivor. I’m open to hearing counter-analysis.)

So, with the highest score for creativity, winning the two free movie tickets is Ken G. Congrats, Ken!

This was fun, so I hope to do this again next year, and perhaps a few more folks will enter. My thanks to everyone who entered!

Two final personal notes.

First, if anyone wants to play around my spreadsheet with the analysis, please let me know.

Second, here are my brief capsule reviews of the movies I’ve personally seen this Summer, in order from my favorite to least favorite:

• Up: Beautifully made, heart-warming, creative, funny, and very effective in 3-D
• Star Trek: The only movie for years I’ve seen in the theaters twice; full of plot holes, but enormously engaging and entertaining
• District 9: Unconventional, surprising, and intense
• Inglourious Basterds: Very well-acted and effective
• Drag Me To Hell: Chilling and fun, but too predictable
• Harry Potter 6: Not bad, and entertaining, but felt cramped and should have been better
• Terminator 4: Lackluster yet still worth seeing; has its moments — not as bad as most critics say
• G.I. Joe: Awfully mindless, and preposterous even for G.I. Joe; I literally fell asleep in one part
• Wolverine: Stupid, boring, poorly made, poorly acted, bad special effects
• Transformers 2: Repellent, juvenile, insulting, incomprehensible, offensive
]]> http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/summer-results/feed/ 14 18 Summer movies plotted to show U.S. box office for opening weekend (blue line), worldwide box office (green bars) and Rotten Tomatoes score (red triangles); data from The Numbers (as of 9-10) and Rotten Tomatoes 18 Summer movies plotted to show U.S. box office for opening weekend (blue line), worldwide box office (green bars) and Rotten Tomatoes score (red triangles); data from The Numbers (as of 9-10) and Rotten Tomatoes. Click to enlarge. http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/aircrash/ http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/aircrash/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:41:56 +0000 Stephen http://www.zeigen.com/blog/?p=1392 A few minutes ago, I saw the following news flash from Breaking News Online jump across my screen:

BULLETIN — FAA: MID-AIR COLLISSION [sic] IN THE PHOENIX, ARIZONA AREA.

My immediate reaction was, “Wow, what an awful tragedy, and what a terrible year this is for American airplane safety.”

But once I saw the details behind that alert, and learned that fortunately it was only a crash between two small planes with only one fatality (instead of the hundreds I feared), I wanted to check my impression that we were having a bad year.

I found a site that tracks airplane crashes, and filtered their database for U.S.-only crashes.

In 2009, there have been 6 incidents so far. All told, 81 have died this year in plane crashes, and the year is not yet over. Everyone is probably familiar with the events in New York on January 15, 2009, where, thanks to the heroic landing in the Hudson by Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, 149 lives were saved following an engine strike by birds. Less than a month later, a horrible accident during bad weather on February 12, 2009, in New York claimed 49 lives. And a little more than a month after that, on March 22, 2009, another terrible accident in Montana killed 14. Then things were quiet until August 8, when a helicopter accident in New York led to 9 more fatalities.

Together, those four incidents created an impression in my mind that 2009 was a terrible year for air travel.

However, then I looked at the data for the previous four years.

In 2008, there were 15 accidents recorded in the U.S. The worst was on August 5, 2008, in California, and caused 9 fatalities. In total, 60 airplane accidents caused 60 fatalities last year.

For 2007, there were 11 accidents causing 46 fatalities, the worst being a crash in Washington state killing 10 in October.

In 2006, there were 9 accidents killing 65 air travelers, and the worst was a crash in Kentucky that killed 49 people in August.

2005 was a relatively safe year, with 7 accidents causing 37 deaths (20 from a crash in Florida in December).



Charted data (from planecrashinfo.com) for 2005-2009 showing U.S. airplane accidents: Number of incidents and number of fatalities. Click to enlarge.

(I shared the spreadsheet on Google docs if you want to see the raw data.)

So, while 2009 has seen some terrible and tragic accidents, it’s not really the case that it’s orders of magnitude worse than previous years. It’s true that there have been more fatalities this year (and there are still three months to go until 2010), but the number of accidents was actually higher in the previous three years.

Airplane travel remains much safer than car travel and other travel in terms of passenger miles. The III analysis of NCHS statistics for 2005 shows that your odds of dying in a car crash in a year are 1 in 6,539 while in a plane it’s 1 in 502,554 (compared to the odds of dying in a “cataclysmic storm” which are 1 in 339,253).

]]> http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/aircrash/feed/ 3 airplane-accidents-2005-2009 Charted data (from planecrashinfo.com) for 2005-2009 showing U.S. airplane accidents: Number of incidents and number of fatalities. http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/3d-horror-movies/ http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/3d-horror-movies/#comments Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:44:15 +0000 Stephen http://www.zeigen.com/blog/?p=1389
]]> http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/3d-horror-movies/feed/ 5 Prevalence of Things that are Gratuitous in 3D Horror Movies http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/human-body-1-1/ http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/human-body-1-1/#comments Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:33:39 +0000 Stephen http://www.zeigen.com/blog/?p=1376 I work with engineers, and most of them are driven to improve things. When they spot something that’s inefficient, most of them don’t hold back in offering suggestions, whether it’s about HR, facilities, lunch plans, the design of everyday objects, you name it.

As I was working on bugs today, I got to thinking about these meat shells we wear. If you had the ability to make minor improvements to the design of the human body, what would you change? Body hacking has been around since ancient times (ear piercings have been found in Egyptian mummies, for instance), and we’re entering a world where people can change their appearance profoundly. As genetic engineering advances, ever more startling possibilities are emerging.

So suppose you could tinker with the design of your body. We’re not talking about Human Body 2.0 — no mutant superpowers, not adding two more arms, no Gattaca here. Instead, here are some tweaks that would improve things — point changes and bug fixes, in other words, moving us from the Human Body 1.0 we use today, to the next minor release.

Some of my top priorities:

1. Bug #551: Single breathing tube is critical bottleneck. It’s just poor design to have no redundancy for breathing pathways, given how critical oxygen flow is. Choking is a very frequent hazard of eating, because food has to go down the same narrow tube that air has to go down. Having two separate tubes (one for food, another always-on for air) is the solution.
2. Bug #3103: Excessive sleep downtime. Our brains seem to absolutely need at least a few hours for mental health, but if we could compress those REM cycles down and cut out some of the lighter sleep cycles that seem to be useless, we’d increase our overall productivity. I know many who agree that any time spent sleeping is wasted time. We’re not going to get complete sleep removal in 1.1, but if we could improve from 5-8 hours down to 1-2 hours, that would be a critical advance.
3. Bug #1199: Knees have low MTBF. The knee is an impressively engineered joint, but it too easily wears out under even moderate usage, requiring expensive and invasive surgeries. We seem to have mastered artificial hip replacement, but we’re a long way away from knee replacement. So we’ll have to improve at the source; knees will need some reinforcing and strengthening so that they last longer.
4. RFE # 60: Bounds checking: Need smart and safe calorie consumption limiter. We’ve all been there: You eat an excellent holiday meal, but afterwards feel like you ate too much and wish you could go back in time and be more restrained. Bulimia is a tragic condition, and could be avoided if there were a safe way to undo eating too much. But instead of something messy, I’m picturing a new system whereby the body calculates how many calories it has taken in for the day, compares that to the desired number, and then for all excess calories, the body would no longer store the excess. Instead, strip out the nutrients normally but then dispose of the rest without storing any excess.
5. Bug # 1114: Intermittent freezes during flight or flight processing. The other night, as I was putting my nearly-two-year-old daughter Sophie to bed in her crib, my wife and son came in to her room and I turned my back on Sophie. In that time, Sophie started climbing up over the rails of the crib. My wife made an inarticulate shriek, and I turned and froze in horror as Sophie continued to climb over the edge and tumbled head-first to the floor. Fortunately she landed safely on carpet, and was not injured. But my fight-or-flight routine totally failed me. I was paralyzed. This is a sub-optimal response. Fix please.

And one more thing:

6. RFE # 714: Variable pigment widget. User control for skin color — darker for protection on sunny days, lighter for blending into snow, and any shade desired for fashion and style. Body paint is so messy. Think what a world we’d live in if every single person could set the exact color (purple!) of their skin, anytime they wished.
]]> http://www.zeigen.com/blog/2009/09/human-body-1-1/feed/ 24 leonardo-da-vinci-bones