the corner office

This article about casino carpets being so ugly (via) gives an amusing insight into human nature. The article points to an exhibition of ugly carpets and ended off speculating why carpets are designed to be so ugly, with a not unreasonable suspicion that they're there to encourage gambling, much like the lack of windows and clocks. Fair enough, but then some bloke mailed in to say:

I have a friend who teaches at Cornell's famous School of Hotel Administration; she has a lot of casino designer contacts. According to her, the carpets are deliberately designed to obscure and camouflage gambling chips that have fallen onto the floor. The casinos sweep up a huge number of these every night. So the carpets are just another source of revenue.

Which is exactly the kind of explanation people delight in, because it affirms our belief that we're victims of greedy predators. As a fun experiment pick up a newspaper or visit the BBC website and see what proportion of articles are written in a way that is based on this premise.

Then along came someone to say no, it's actually an oft-repeated urban myth, and carpets are bright and intricate because they hide wear and tear. And as for the 'evul casinos scooping up dropped chips' argument, there was this comment:

I also asked one of my best friends, who works at the Wynn and went to school with me about it. She responded, "Trust me, if someone drops a chip and can't find it, they're not letting it go. They're coming to me demanding compensation."

I think it's altogether more plausible that most people in casinos count their chips very carefully, are likely to go to great lengths to find their chips if they drop them, and would scream blue murder if they think any have gone missing (due to theft or otherwise). Yet we're willing to believe that casino-goers are simpletons who can't hang onto their chips, because that fits in with our far-preferred sense of victimhood.

How does BiC stay in business?

BiC pens have been a part of my life as far back as the 80s when I first learned to grasp at something more sophisticated than a crayon; I remember the TV advert with Coco the Clown doing his balancing act on 2 pens and then hopping off and signing an autograph for the kid staring up in wonderment. "Writes first time, every time". Except they don't, and if I think about it, maybe they never have.

For every pack of BiC pens you buy, only about one in three will actually work. Of those that work, only one in three will last beyond a week. Of those, only one in three will write without blotches and splotches that smear across the paper and stain your hands. And then, left with one precious pen that'll write properly, it'll disappear within days. I can only presume that there's a BiC Fairy somewhere, jealously guarding underground vaults containing the world's few working-as-advertised BiC pens.

When you buy BiC pens, you're not buying pens so much as you're buying a vague aspiration of being able to commit something to paper. Yet we still keep buying them.

I'm sorry, when MI6 dude gets found in a suitcase, then 'jealous lover' is not the sort of explanation the news-reading public wants to hear.

Of course, if you're going to (literally) bump into another cyclist on the way home, you don't really want it to be the punk rocker lass in hotpants and knee-high stockings because everyone gets the wrong idea. This, naturally, is what I did tonight. I was behind her at a traffic light, she pulled off, I pulled off, looked down to get my shoe clipped in, looked up (too late) to notice she'd stopped again, slammed on anchors and bomp, left my bike with a small scratch and her stockings laddered.

I apologised profusely and she apologised profusely saying she had a migraine and wasn't feeling too great and doing silly things, and some dudes in a white van rode past shouting 'yallright love?' and I dunno how many other people passing comments or tut-tutting as they went past, and another cyclist guffawing 'you were too busy looking at her legs', to which I quite reasonably pointed out that if I'd been looking at her legs I'd actually have seen her stop.

Aaanyhow.

I like reading paragraphs like this:

Deolalikar’s paper is 102 pages long and less than about 48 hours old, so nobody has yet read it carefully. ... The consensus among the experts who have at least skimmed the paper seems to be that it is a) not crazy (which already puts it in the top 1% of papers that have addressed this question), b) teeming with creative ideas that are likely to have broad applications, and c) quite likely wrong.

(The paper in question tries to answer the P vs NP problem, a fundamental question in computer science that nobody knows the answer to, and which is quite well explained in lay terms here.)

This article on tomorrow's 'solar tsunami' tries to walk the tight don't-mislead-the-public line between We're All Going To Die and The Northern Lights Will Be Pretty And Your Transistor Radio Might Crackle A Bit.

That would a reasonable inference, if it were not for the last line of the article:

A Nasa spokesman was unavailable for comment.

To which all reasonable-thinking people would respond 'Why's the spokesman not available? Where is he? Why aren't they answering the phones?'

I love seeing robot learning. Behold a robot arm learning to flip pancakes:

By the end of the video I was hovering between 'the movements look so human, it's freaking me out' and 'hmmm, I'm hungry.'

For the past 7-odd years that I've had this blog, my about page has said "I'm a won't-get-a-haircut-I-just-won't-dammit thirty-something South African." Now it just says "I'm a thirty-something South African."

It was long overdue, and finally it was time. The barber thought he'd died and gone to tonsorial heaven. "I ain't cu' 'air this long in the 48 'ears I been a barber," 'e says. (Which says more about the average Chislehurst hairstyle than my hair, which was long, but by no means Rapunzel-esque). "I'm a barber, I like to cu' 'air, I don' like all this fiddlin' abou'", he says more than once, "nowadays every'un jus' wan's a bi' o' fiddlin' about wi' 'eir 'air, I li' ta cu'" and "I'm 'avin' fun!"

I have made a new friend.

By agreement we experimented a bit. So we started out doing the short-back-and-sides with a mop on top. Kinda slick in a Gestapo officer kind of way, but I've never really aspired to looking like a Gestapo officer so decided to give that a miss. We went down to what he said was a 'French crop, been in fashion for 20 'ears nah.' That wasn't working for me either, so we decided to try a #4 all round. After more than decade of gravity, even a #4 was looking a little unruly, so in the end we went down to a #2.

Missus likes it and Leo approves. About 5 minutes after getting home from nursery school Mom asks Leo "have you seen that Daddy's hair's all gone?" "yeah it's all gone" mimics then looks again and the shock of realisation "it's all gone!", but thankfully followed by "it looks cool!"

So that's OK then.

... which isn't to say that I'm suggesting that people who accidentally hit the wrong pedal are deserving of being dead (I've come close to making that mistake myself), nor that I think that they're stupid in a Darwin Awards kind of way: what it boils down is that in the case of car drivers, nature is selecting against clumsy people and people with big feet.

(Guilty as charged on both counts).

You may recall there was a wave of Toyota Terror a while ago. While Toyota's cars did have problems, it may come as something as a surprise (not really) that a number of the near-death experiences were a result of Darwinism doing its damnedest:

The early results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyotas and Lexuses surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes.