Via the Oatmeal:
Click here to see the entire poster.
I’m surprised, btw, by the number of e-mails I get where “loose” and “lose” replace each other. I can understand an occasional “it’s” “its”, or even a “there” “their” blooper but not “loose” for “lose”.
Any typos on this blog are just that… typos! I know how to spell, but due to the speed I crank this stuff out with mistakes slip in. I’ve got a job you know!
It will only get worse! or better depending on your point of view
My daughter has a math worksheet of polynomials to do over the Christmas holiday. When doing it she asked why does “10^0 = 1” ?
Why is that? It isn’t obvious looking at exponent values:
10^3 = 10*10*10 = 1000
10^2 = 10*10 = 100
10^1 = 10
10^-1 = 1/10
10^-2 = 1/10 * 1/10 = 1/100
but how do you do something zero times? I couldn’t recall off the top of my head, so later I sat down to doodle on it. And I remembered how to sort it out.
Welcome to the tricks of math, where you use something else you know to figure out something you don’t know (yet).
First the rules of exponents…
10^2 * 10^2 = 10^(2+2) = 10^4 = 10*10*10*10 = = 10,000
So multiplying exponential numbers (of the same base) is the same as adding the exponents.
How can we use this to figure out zero? How about this expression:
10^2 * 10^-2
Expanding it out we see this:
10 * 10 * 1/10 * 1/10 = 1
and since
10^2 * 10^-2 = 10^(2-2) = 10^0
we now have proved that
10^0 = 1
It also sort of makes sense logically, after all, what is between:
10^1 = 10
10^0 = ?
10^-1 = 1/10
So there you have it Jenny… welcome to your first math proof.
Google knew
In addition to the 2000”s being the worst stock market decade ever, we also ended up with less jobs at the end than at the beginning:
On employment, there were 130,532,000 payroll jobs in December 1999, and 130,996,000 payroll jobs in November 2009; an increase of 464 thousand jobs. However the preliminary estimate of the annual benchmark revision "indicates a downward adjustment to March 2009 total nonfarm employment of 824,000". So it appear there will be fewer payroll jobs at the end of the aughts than at the beginning.
Add in national disasters like 9/11, Katrina, and Obama and the decade pretty much just sucked.
3D filter that goes in front of projector
My daughter wondered how 3-D movies worked. I explained the early ones used colored lenses and two different projectors sending different colors to slightly different spots on the screen, but that recent ones used polarization (orienting light in a common direction, so one lens of your glasses gets one view, the other another view, and the brain merges them to 3-D) and just one projector.
But Wired explains it better:
RealD cinema, currently the most widely used 3-D movie system in theaters, uses circular polarization — produced by a filter in front of the projector — to beam the film onto a silver screen. It does not require two projectors shooting out images in separate colors. The benefit of polarization is you can more naturally move your head without losing perception of the 3-D image.
In the case of Avatar, I felt the 3-D stuff helped the movie immensely and I recommend paying the extra few dollars and seeing it in 3-D.
The chart below very simply matches a purpose with a chart. I post for your benefit and my reference. Click on it to see it bigger.
Source: Done by A. Abela. I’m not sure if stand alone or as source for another article. I found it via PopUrls.com
In 1933 the President (FDR) signed Executive Order 1602 “forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates” by U.S. citizens.
Note – it wasn’t a LAW, not passed by Congress, but it did threaten 10 years in prison.
Put another way… if you got something they want, they will take it.
Nah… it would never happen again, you say. Uh huh… It was a crisis. And by gosh we aren’t in a crisis are we?
Unemployment (U3) now stands at 10.2% (about 16 million people). Total unemployed (U6) is 17.5% (about 27 million people).
This means that about 30 million people in a country of 304 million have received unemployment benefits in the last year. This drew down unemployment insurance reserves and now rates are heading north.
But how could this be? Aren’t people employed still more likely to keep employed? The rate of job loss has slowed, and if anything these people, having survived the worst would be in relatively safer positions. So wouldn’t their rates drop?
If it was true insurance, then yes, the rate would reflect the risk pool.
But it isn’t really insurance… unemployment insurance, like Social Security, Medicare, and most other government “insurance” is really a pay as it goes Ponzi system.
So, like most other government programs, unemployment insurance subsidizes those who have not prepared or chosen unwisely from those that have.
Or put another way, it is just another income distribution scheme.
Real unemployment insurance would rate employees by risk and charge enough IN ADVANCE to cover expected losses.
There is one government insurance scheme that operates as actual insurance. Workers Compensation ties rates to employer, industry sector, and job type actuarial claims. Guess what…. it isn’t broke.
The AMU camp is done, I’m home but not caught up.
Our return was interesting… Brian’s luggage with his competition pistols in it was not on the baggage claim carousel. We filed a lost luggage claim and expected it to be on the next flight from Atlanta. Instead, at 0500 this morning the Las Vegas PD called. They had found it in a ladies restroom in a distant part of the airport. It had been stolen. Fortunately, all the guns were there. I guess they aren’t easily pawned and the thief walked away from the whole thing after first clipping the locks. Needless to say a bag full of guns and ammo found at an airport, causes a bit of a stir (-: I drove down right away and got them before they went into impound. Who needs sleep?
So tomorrow, bright and early, I’ll return to my normal blogging.
In the meantime, enjoy the funny shirts and other goodies from Despair.com
My son and I are traveling. Blogging will be light or non-existant until Monday.
Until a few minutes ago some of you have seen nothing but KenNelson.com as it was on Monday. My caching setup was only presenting new posts to some people, and most people were getting a cached version from Monday. Not sure how/why. Since I’m traveling, with limited time to diagnose the problem, I just turned it off. All better now.
My perfect day…
I see a lot of my day (and my type of thinking) in “The Way I Work” by Jason Fried of 37Signals. Read it and then come back.
Differences? Sure. I’m married with kids. Obligations and pleasures come with a wife and two kids. And some frustration, but fortunately in my case, few and far between.
But on core issues like what is important and how to handle customers we seem simpatico.
I also do not, typically, use an alarm clock. I wake up whenever. I’m a naturally early riser, so that also means I get the kids ready for the day. I like doing it.
I definitely do not look at the business stats each day… but if anybody asks I can usually spout the daily and weekly trend. How? I just know – I’ve done this a long time. Working hours… My work day is always at risk of ending when I’ve done “enough”. Early on it hardly never ended. Now, when my staff is on track, I generally leave as I’ll only be a distraction if I stay. But if something needs done, I work til it’s done. For instance, I’ve got a new manual to write next week, and I will work, fulfill family obligations and sleep little. After all, I don’t want to be the weak link or critical path of the new product’s launch.
My company is older that 37Signals and has gone through phases similar to what they are in, where the office is a gathering place but people work where they like. We are heading back to that phase as new staff becomes more experienced and requires less face time with each other and me.
Like Mr. Fried, I also used to do all customer support for our thousands of customers but now have a couple people handling that. But I still watch every issue, mainly looking to ensure timeliness and that our replies focus on customer productivity. I also share his belief that if someone gripes, they are right. Fortunately, true gripes only happen a couple times a year. We probably say “yes” to customers more than 37Signals. That may be that because we were self funded. Like Fried I abhor lengthy plans and meetings. We set directions, think, do, respond and often end up at a different place than we thought.
I also ensure that our staff breaks bread with each other every week. I think that is really important.
I share Fried’s wonder at companies that don’t seem to care about revenue or profit. We self-funded our startup and never had the luxury of not selling or making money.
Something new I’ve started is that at 11 each day my Blackberry alarms with the message “K’. That stands for “Ken” and is my reminder to do something for me today. 11 works better than 0900 because I’m still plowing through Europe and east coast business. I’m done with that and have a better handle on the day so I know how much I can devote to “me”. That could be walk to Barnes & Noble, or it could be to go to the gym, or just to walk the dogs, play tennis with a friend, or go home and have lunch with my wife. At 11 I know how much time I’ve got to play with.
I couldn’t imagine living any other way. There are stresses being in charge of your life as much as I’m in charge of mine. But the idea of working for somebody else, on their schedule and the tasks they choose, appalls me. Ultimately everybody needs a boss, and mine is our customers. But by the thousand, bosses are easier to handle.
My day…. all in all, I like it.
I rehosted KenNelson.com on a big server in the sky today. It is called cloud computing.
The site seems to work, except for my old photo site, which I’m still sorting out.
If you encounter other problems, let me know.
–The management
This year our 32”x18” cake was a bit of a family project. It was also complicated by a really inconvenient trip to the ER by my wife for ball bladder surgery. So she did, in 1 day, what she’d planned to spread over three.
The “theme’ this year was “Haunted Bajou”:
A haunted gingerbread house, with dock to alligator infested swamp. Skulls, a cemetary with vulture, and a dark foreboding forest…
Details:
Brian built a sturdy wood base with carry handles and room for electronics mounting and drive ice underneath. I added electronics, including lights and a small computer fan in the house to spread the dry ice smoke. Jenny & Paula baked and decorated the cake itself.
The cake took the top bid at the auction, for $210 dollars.
This is a sign of the times…. 2 years ago it might have fetched $600 or even a $1,000.
Jenny went as a hippy. I set a slow shutter speed on the left photo to get a “LSD” effect:
Brian went as a soldier that the hippy had put flowers in his gun:
I played guitar on the front patio and handed out candy.
I just spent a fair amount tuning my truck (6.0l Chevy 2500) to improve towing performance and gas mileage. I put a new chip in and also put a new air filter intake in. This helped my gas mileage about 20% on the highway and considerably less in town.
One of the other things I did was make sure all the crap was out of bed. I’d been driving around with folding tables, chairs, probably a couple hundred pounds of stuff. I could save even more by taking away the snow chains, but with winter coming I think I’ll leave them in.
This chart, from a Ricardo study shows what each 100 pounds removed will do for a vehicle’s gas mileage:
So my 200 lbs should improve my mileage by 1.4% in the city. Since I’m getting about 13 there that means I now get about… 13 )-:
But I’m sure it helps over a really long time, and it cost me nothing but a little sweat.
Alas, I think I may have made offsetting compromises. To help reduce wind resistance I put my Tonneau cover (weighing about 100 pounds) back on. This helps highway mileage but hurts city acceleration costs.
By comparison, though, just skipping one 100 mile trip would save me about 12.5% of my typical 800 mile driving in a month.
But that would cramp my style, so until buying gas hurts more, I probably won’t change my driving habits.
H/T Greenlings via Instapundit