Something I regret not doing when I was younger is chasing after the things that I thought mattered. I either let my interest wane, or listened to the tut-tutting of others that said it was a waste of time.

I'm reading a book that examines the Interactive Fiction (IF) medium called Twisty Little Passages. Interactive Fiction is the dressed up word for text adventures. I feel as though hours of my youth spent playing these has been vindicated. I should have pushed for it to be considered Summer Reading.

...works of acknowledged literary quality, such as Robert Pinksky's Mindwheel and Brian Moriarty's Trinity...

It's neat to see a classic Infocom text adventure right alongside work created by a former US poet laureate. Moriarty's Trinity was the first time I ever came across a Klein bottle and the word perambulator.

Genius

I haven't seen the frustrations of designers summed up so amusingly before.

Some day I'll write a virus that does one thing. It finds the person's mail app, desktop or web, and disables the "Quote entire message every time I respond" functionality.

I'm listening to the podcast of Bill Moyer's Journal from 5/11 when I hear these lines from recent Regent University grad Carly Gammill:

Part of the goal of many of us who are going out from this institution from here on to make it clear and accurate what it really means to be a Christian leader to change the world, which is not to indoctrinate anyone but to share the truth and to offer the truth and to rely on the truth in the way that we handle our lives as an example to others. (emphasis is mine)

I remember when it was just called "the good news" instead of truth. She also uttered this naive understanding of the law:

I intend to help further the administration of justice and to do justice. And I believe in absolute truth, and I believe in absolutes. Not grey, you know, not relative truth but absolute truth. And that's what God's word is. (emphasis is mine)

With all that truth I wonder how one can have any faith. Truth leaves no room for doubt. Faith does not exist without doubt. As the Christian philosopher Paul Tillich put it "Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith." I'm beginning to wonder if places like Regent and Liberty might be forking a new religion from the Protestant tree.

Their religion doesn't seem to require faith as much as fealty to a central leader like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Perhaps they're growing into an American version of Catholicism?

Pilot Japan sells a 0.25mm gel pen. When I asked why it isn't sold in the US the gist of the response was this:

Due to our marketing agreement with our parent company, and in some cases patent restrictions, we are unable to either sell or stock this item.

I was encouraged to travel abroad if I wanted this pen. The closest I've found in the American market is Pentel's Sunburst which comes in at 0.30mm. The majority of gel pens in America are an obese 0.70mm, some with inferior gel inks that spread even wider depending on the paper. Practically like writing with a marker at that point.

If information about these pens can travel the world, why not the pen? If this is a patent or marketing limitation why is nobody else providing a 0.25mm gel pen in America? I'm galled that patent/marketing limitations create a desert where there could be a market.

North Texas competitors continue to underperform. The Dallas Mavericks finished first in the regular season and were bounced out in the first round of the playoffs. The Dallas Stars ambled through the regular season and hit a first round playoff exit.

Now comes news that five time national spelling bee competitor, and favorite to win it all this year, Samir Patel is out. Bummer. North Texas seems to have hit a slump. I blame the rain.

On the daily puppy they post pictures of cute puppies. They also have ratings and comments for each puppy. The ratings I've seen end up between 10 and 11 (the highest). The comments all use varying degrees of hyperbole to describe how cute the puppy is.

The ratings and comments seem redundant to me, yet I bet people wouldn't enjoy the site as much without them. (I always browse them) Why is that? I see the same kind of redundant chatter on many websites (digg comes to mind). I wonder if this fills the same role as small talk in the real world? I guess any web site looking for an audience needs to provide opportunities for this kind of chatter.

What if we used a different currency for commodity items like toilet paper or Coke. So instead of paying $1 for a Coke you'd pay say 500 credits. Or think of it as 50 yen for a Coke.

Price is a crucial piece of information for the consumer. Commodity pricing in America loses detail because our currency doesn't work well for discriminating products at the low end. But if you could price two items as 2000 credits and 1800 credits, instead of each being $2, you're adding more detail back into the price. That detail just can't be reflected with our coarsely grained US currency.

I think what happens is that commodity prices have to be inflated because US currency can't go smaller. I think we could drive prices down if we had a new kind of currency to handle commodity pricing. Maybe this is one reason why prices go down when you buy in bulk? You're getting closer to a true price of an individual item because our currency is equipped to handle those kinds of prices.

Recently I've been fascinated by microcredit, and currency exchange. In the quest for more knowledge I was talking to someone who actually has a masters in finance. I threw out the analogy that banking is to microfinance as Newtonian physics is to Quantum physics. The idea being that the laws of finance change when the dollar amounts get small.

He wasn't fully sold on it because fundamentally risk modeling is the same for big and large. But he threw out the idea that Newtonian physics might be used to describe finances of $1m and up, whereas microcredit finance would be more like an electron cloud with probability describing the electron's movement.

I like that. The analogy also works if you think about how big an impact a $50 loan can have in a microfinance situation, whereas in traditional banking it's a nuisance.

It's been a couple weeks since the Boston bomb scare. I'm staggered by the fact that nobody seems to be upset with Boston. They did a poor job assessing a threat. The idea that any kind of electronics not branded with the logo of a major consumer electronics company is an I.E.D. is an unworkable policy for assessing threats.

You won't find the needle in the haystack by making the haystack bigger. They've got to eliminate false positives and shrink the haystack. They need a procedure for scoring I.E.D. threats. Does it have some kind of antenna for remote detonation? What is the power source for detonation? Does it have a timer circuit for timed detonation? Are there explosives attached? Was the device concealed? (Presumably you want to hide your bomb so its not discovered prematurely) These details should be simple to assess either up close by someone, or by having a robot/remote controlled camera observe the device.

Heck if you can create a robot that follows sunlight or radio waves, why not make one that follows bomb scents (like bomb sniffing dogs)? They don't even have to be very sophisticated. You can use Ant Colony Optimization techniques to create swarms to sniff out bombs. I'm getting into science fiction here but I can imagine a day when large cities create swarms to roam the city looking for threats. Each robot would report back periodically through the municipal wifi network.

Big news in the Perplex City ARG. The Receda Cube was found by astro_random. He wins the $200k prize. I have a feeling puzzles like billion to one and riemann may go unsolved.

Season two of Perplex City starts this March.

Stories like this one about hockey phenom Sidney Crosby get me teary eyed and nostalgic.

In successive games against Tampa Bay earlier this month, he scored while sliding on his side, controlling the puck while doing so, and from his knees.

I'm a sucker for movies like Miracle, The Natural, or Field of Dreams. In particular the moment in the movie where somebody transcends what people think is possible.

Youtube has some video on this. Watch Crosby pull the puck behind two defenders, dive between them, take control of the puck again and score. Then take a gander at another leaping goal that follows him into the boards. It's great to see any athlete put that much passion into the game.

In an interview with the owner of the local comic book store Zeus Comics he offered the top five signs he knows a comic book reader is gay.

1. They touch my hand while exchanging cash.
2. Their pull-list consists solely of Aquaman and Green Lantern or conversely Strangers in Paradise and DC's 52.
3. They talk endless about their hero's outfit in City of Heroes.
4. They comment on the "bump" on the male action figures.
5. Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman.

That's me right there at number 2, just getting Strangers in Paradise and 52.

Now that I've added Garth Ennis' testosterone packed The Boys to my regular reads I'm charting new territory.

The Boys is a comic that in the first few issues has a female Christian conservative super hero, Starlight, being humiliated into performing oral sex on Homelander (Superman), Black Noir (Batman) and A-Train (Flash). As a credit to Ennis Starlight is also the most interesting character of The Seven (Justice League).

A closed room has a refrigerator with the door open. What happens to the temperature in the room?

The temperature goes up because more energy is added to the room while the refrigerator is plugged in. When Julie quizzed me on this oh so long ago I hesitated, but the real answer made complete sense.

I kept thinking about that as I read William Saletan's article in Slate about our need to refrigerate contributes to our global warming problems. I can't remember the last time an article made me feel this unpleasant.

I was walking to the grocery store this morning when I realized there was a Christmas parade one block over. I've never lived anywhere before where I could walk to the grocery store and see a parade.

Julie and I came out to see it, but by then it was wrapping up. I enjoyed being there a lot more than I ever have watching them on TV. I suppose you could say that about most things though.

The local talk show host Glenn Mitchell passed away in his sleep yesterday morning. He was one of my favorite interviewers and my day will be emptier without him.

He had great guests and commanded a breadth and depth of knowledge that enabled him to have a discussion with his guests rather than be a hapless wanderer only gleaning the surface of a topic. He did this with great humility and was always eager to learn something new. I think this anecdote from wikipedia captures these qualities best:

Shortly before his death he was praised by interviewee CBS veteran reporter Mike Wallace as being widely known for being an extraordinary interviewer. Mitchell responded, modestly as was his wont, calling himself "the man who did his homework."

I bought a portable FM tuner just so I could listen to his show in my cube. Dallas really lost a great citizen. His show was set to go national on XM this February and I would have loved for the rest of the country to be able to listen to him.

I've been snapping up Pirates card packs like they're going out of style. I finally got a fort. The experience of putting it together was somewhat underwhelming. It does add some nice variety to the game. I've also got a couple five mast ships.

One of my co-workers asked us to grab a t-shirt for him as part of some social clothing experiment. The shirts came in today. I grabbed Consumable for Bryan and Flowers in the Attic for myself.

At work I wrote a small entry about making php pages cacheable. I put it together because I used that code on the new rd2inc.com. Once you hit a page on that site your browser should never touch the webserver again until you either close your browser, or force a reload. The site is also entirely XHTML 1.1 valid. I think it could be better. I wish it handled text resizing more elegantly. I wish we used a screen font like Verdana instead of Arial.

I went to the third Conspirator's Ball last night with Andrew and his friend Christina. The event is there to survey folks about Dallas' cultural life, and provide an open venue for venting. The venting is mostly of the liberal political nature. The evening was filled with poetry from Clebo Rainey and various others from the audience.

I found the most provocative speakers were Dean from alt7.com and Chris from keep Dallas plastic. Both of them understood the need to build up an audience for Dallas' existing cultural creatives. Or maybe I'm just hearing what I want to hear from what they said since that's one of my personal goals now that I'm back in Dallas.

I think I've finally found a card game I can get addicted to, screw Texas Hold 'Em or Magic. I picked up two packs yesterday: Pirates of the Crimson Coast and Pirates of the Spanish Main. You actually construct the ships from the cards. The ships have historical details about the ships from the Age of Sails. You also get cards with forts, people, cargo and reefs and islands. Each pack is $4 and includes at least two ships.

I've realized that Adium is much better than iChat. I can login with multiple accounts to AIM and a number of other networks. It also does Rendezvous which was the main thing I wanted from iChat.