OK, no surprise that I went running tonight. I was planning to do one more extended day of week 4, but as I was driving to the gym I changed my mind. "OK, stop being lazy. There's no reason you can't move on to week 5, so just do it."

I did it. Well, sort of. W5D1 is supposed to be three iterations of a five-minute walk followed by a three-minute run. The only thing is, I was doing this from memory rather than having consulted the schedule, so I didn't quite do it right. W5D2 is an eight-minute run, a five-minute walk, and an eight-minute run. (W5D3 is a 20-minute run. I'm pretty sure that's not humanly possible, but I digress.)

I got myself a little bit confused about W5D1 and W5D2. I wound up doing a five-minute run, a 3-minute walk, an 8-minute run, a 5-minute walk, and a 5-minute run. I'll count that as having done W5D1, even if it wasn't 100% to spec. You guys can be the judges, though. Is 5-3 8-5 5 >= 5-3 5-3 5?

I also finished it up with a pseudo-sprint-- for the last minute of the last run, I increased my pace by 1MPH. Yeah, that kicked my ass, but what can I say? I was bored. I tried running a couple of minutes tonight without counting steps, and that sucked-- I was sure I'd done like two minutes, but it was actually 45 seconds.

At midnight on a Saturday night, 24-Hour Fitness is pretty damned empty. I could have grabbed any treadmill in the house.

And for those who guessed at the lyrics from last time, yes. That's from the London recording of Cats.

Alan Grayson, who was getting kind of popular with progressives, seems to be unhappy that someone is running a (kinda bad) website criticizing him. So he wants Eric Holder to investigate her, fine her, and imprison her for five years. Yay civil liberties!

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/2009/12/grayson-wants-to-send-critic-to-jail-for-five-years.html

Also, I finished my last final today, and barring some kind of unforeseen shift in the realities of mathematics that cause me to get zeroes on my finals, I predict I will be getting a shiny new degree in February.

Well, my new desktop computer is doing well. I've got my tax and accounting software over. I was surprised that it only took two calls to customer service for the tax software. I need to call customer service for the accounting software on Monday or Tuesday (registration issue). My new computer is faster, and having two 24" monitors is great.

I was supposed to head to the desert (Palm Springs) today, but that got canceled. I decided to play the 2:30pm PLO8 tourney, and figured I'd play it on my couch using my laptop. Nope, my latop's having problems. A Vista Blue Screen of Death (it's stuck in the welcome screen). I'll let my IT person deal with it next week.

But I did play the PLO8 tournament, and with 19 players left I'm in 7th place (thanks tombayes for the hello).

I still have to move two more items to the new computer (they require reboots, so I'm waiting a while).

Flying no flag of convenience, the guy uses ice floes around the North Pole to support and cloak highly mobile capital and productive labor; with a flair for anarchy, he disregards all laws of intellectual property to create an abundance of goods that he then feels free to distribute according to a little understood moral code; his superior logistical system flagrantly disregards all national borders and crosses them with impunity...

(Mike Gibson on LATNB)

The post has a real point about economics too, but I enjoyed the vision of Santa as Anarchistic Seasteader best :).

Stephen Torrence performs Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains" in American Sign Language. So awesome. Click through if you want the lyrics and gloss of the signs used.



Also check out his renditions of "First of May" and "Still Alive".

Why, oh, why did the Google Wave folks feel that they needed to invent a brand-new document model? It's XML, sort of. Except from the robots API the document looks like a text string to which you can apply annotations and insert elements. Except that figuring out the correct offsets within that text string is all screwy.

I'm trying to write a simple robot which substitutes card images for card names inside a Wave. There are plenty of examples of people doing something like this, which should make it easy.

However, when I call Document.InsertElement to place an image inside some newly-created text, it works fine for the first image. But the second image is two characters too early, and the next is four characters too early. So I guess the answer is just to insert a 'fudge factor' of 2 characters, but I don't know why.

The best suggestion I've seen so far is to insert the images in reverse order. And there's a bug open which suggests I may run into more problems when I try actually editing text rather than copying it.

Nothing like playing around with somebody else's alpha-quality software to make my work problems seem downright tractable. ;)

Also, debugging Wave robots highlights a weakness of request/response RPC (particularly HTTP-based RPC): there is no way for the client/sender to tell the server that its response was garbage.

I just noticed who got moved to my WRGPT Table:

! Table b81, Hand 29, Day 33

! bigjess folds
! Randy Collack is next to act, $1200 to call ! Unlimited raises ! Pot size: $2200 ! Next timeout set for Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:15 PST ! Betting round: 1 ! Board: ? ? ? ? ?
+-+----------------------------+--------+--------+------+----+--------+
|#| Name |Bankroll| Action |Status|Pot#|Pot Size|
+-+----------------------------+--------+--------+------+----+--------+
1| bigjess | 29325 | 0 |folded| | |
2|D> Randy Collack | 33450 | 0 | | | |
3| Rebuy McIntyre | 28525 | 200 | | | |
4| clown god | 60575 | 400 | | | |
5| ABVidale | 57350 | 0 |folded| | |
6| The Seye | 37550 | 400 | | | |
7| rtroll | 31100 | 1200 | | | |
8| Trevor Thaxter | 28900 | 0 |folded| | |
9| Shyam Markus | 26150 | 0 |folded| | |
10|V Ken | 28250 | 0 || | |
+-+----------------------------+--------+--------+------+----+--------+

This should be interesting....

---

Meanwhile, my new computer is mostly up and running. I'm reloading my tax software...and that's as much fun as I suspected it would be. I'm on my second customer service call to my software provider. On my first call (which took 30 minutes) to reload 2001, I got transferred three times with the middle person located in India. I've ben on hold for 17 minutes and counting on call #2 (for 2003). And I still have 2004 - 2009 to get up, though 2009 is a new install.

So far so good with my new computer. It is much faster, and I can do two things at once!

Even if they have no say in making most of them.

Mayor Fenty of Washington DC, a place where almost 600,000 US citizens live without having any representation in Congress, signed a bill establishing equal marriage rights for its citizens.

And in of further reminder of DC's subservient status, the law will not go into effect until Congress ignores it for 30 working days.

Nonetheless, in this season of doom and gloom, at least we know that someone, somewhere, is doing something reasonable.

There's a Walgreens near my office. It's in the middle of the urban jungle, but there's a small parking garage next door for customers of the store. It's hard to see the layout from this photo, but when you pull into the garage there are two spaces on the right, a wall, three spaces, and the back wall. On the left there are four or five spaces with a dividing wall. In this photo you can see one of the spaces on the right, the dividing wall, and then three spaces behind it. You can also see a part of one of the spaces on the left, and the dividing wall that hides two more spaces. The dark blob in the back right corner of the garage is my car.

This is, admittedly, not a large garage. And yet, most of the customers are there for 15 minutes or less, so it doesn't have to be very big. This morning I tossed my car in the garage briefly while I dropped off a prescription on my way to work.

When I came out, someone had parked smack dab in the middle of the garage, blocking in all of the cars in the back stalls. It wasn't that he had no other options-- there were two empty spaces in my section, and a few others elsewhere. There's no chance at all that all of the spaces filled and then emptied during the five minutes that I was in the store.

I looked around for the owner, then waited a bit. When he didn't show in a few minutes, I pulled out my phone to snap a photo. Just as I did, the owner came out. "I'm leaving now."

"Good!" I kept composing.

"I said I'm leaving now."

"Thank you. I'll be able to get my car out and get to the meeting that I'm now late for." I snapped the photo.

No apology for the inconvenience, no remorse, nothing. Just indignation that I was photographing his faux pas.

Dear Mr. 6KJR767: You are a flaming jackass. Have a nice day!

The last two posts have talked about folding KK as an overpair on the river to the third postflop bet after calling the previous two streets. jnala commented:

Folding KK on the river might be appropriately exploitive against some real-world opponents, but I can't imagine it's optimal play. That makes your range for calling the river after calling the flop and turn... what, just JJ? 99 if you happened to raise over a limper with it? Maybe AA, though your argument seems equally strong for folding that? Seems like you're making it profitable for the BB to lead every street with any two on a ragged rainbow board.

So there's two sides to the optimal play argument here. If I fold the river, that encourages my opponent to fire every street with any two. But if I call enough, then he has a very simple winning strategy.

So let's make some simplifying assumptions here. He's going to fire two thirds of the pot on every street, and I'm going to call him until the river, then fold unless I have a set, say. So he's putting in, for a pot after the preflop action p, 2p/3 + (2/3*7p/3) + (2/3*49p/9) = 5.85p, which wins him 3.2p in money he didn't bet postflop when I fold. So in order for him to be indifferent to bluffing that way, I need to call on the end about 40% of the time. (Feel free to check my math.)

But actually sometimes I have better than a pair. I have a set sometimes too, so I can reduce my calling percentage by that much. So if my distribution is JJ+ on the river on a J high raggy board, I have 21 hands and I need to call 8 or 9 of them to make 40%. I'm certainly not folding the three top set hands (remember if he's bluffing a raise is the same as a call), so I need to call say 6 more hands of my remaining 18. Well, I could call with aces and fold kinds and queens -- and this strategy is also good in that it means if he played QQ or KK or even AA in a weird way, I don't lose money by calling with my queens.

Ok, so folding the KK and calling with AA is looking reasonable. How does this change if my distribution is wider? Well... it depends on how much wider it is in what way. The more hands that I have, the more I have to call on the river. So if I got here with TT (932 J 8 board), now I need to call with a couple of the KK hands -- but if I got here with 99 as well, that balances that out. Both those hands probably would have raised at some point already though -- the TT on the flop to protect against overcards, and the 99 on the turn for value, though it flat calls sometimes too. I'm not getting here with AK or 88 I don't think.

Ok, let's look at this from the other side. Suppose I will pay off all the way with a big pair. Then an opponent can call with certainly any small pair and just bet it all the way, since he stands to win 6.85p -- and since he's calling something like 1/3p preflop, he's getting over 20:1 implied odds. That's pretty good when he flops a set once every 8 times or so.

Now, it's not actually that bad because sometimes I have AK and just fold when he flops his set (though sometimes I hit my A or K as well), and sometimes I have random suited connectors and so on which also won't pay off, and in fact the more of those hands that I have, the worse his implied odds are. But agreeing to pay off 20:1 definitely sounds like too much. Calling the river a third of the time with my big pairs means he makes only 14:1 when he wins, plus some of the time he gets stacked when I flop a set, and sometimes I get to just fold. So that's a strong argument for folding some of those one pair hands to the third postflop bet.

Visiting the Plants vs. Zombies game website from India today, I was surprised to see it offer to sell me the game for 99 Rupees. That's $2 USD. I paid like $20 USD for the game back in the states. Go price discrimination!

Downloaded software is a great place for price discrimination, because there is zero marginal cost, therefore the "bargaining range" between marginal cost and value to the consumer is maximal. And country-based price discrimination totally makes sense, as per-capita income varies widely by country.

Any suggestions for 2-player Mac games for Shannon & I to play? Keep in mind that neither of us are very big on computer/video games - we prefer board/card games. Colossus (open-source version of Titan) is the first idea that comes to mind. I guess we could play boardgames on BSW, but last time I tried BSW the interface sucked and the community was unfriendly to noobs.

I did enjoy Plants vs. Zombies, so there is some chance that a non-board/card game would work for us.

I ran again tonight... just got home from the gym. W4D3e is in the bag.

This time, I managed to do a full W4Dx precisely as scheduled, with no extra long walks. I'm not sure what changed, but things sort of felt easier. Pushing my way through the long running sections was still boring and annoying as all hell, but my heart rate seemed to come down much more quickly during walks. Maybe the ten-minute run did something? Or maybe I'm just getting into shape a little bit more? Who knows?

Today, rather than counting the steps for five minutes, I counted the steps for one minute and then did that five times. It's just mental games, but it seemed to help at least a little. Maybe. Or maybe I just wasn't working quite as hard.

This is also the first week 4 day that I haven't gotten off the treadmill feeling like I wanted to curl up in a corner and collapse. That has to be a good sign.

I think I'll do at least one more day of W4 before trying to move on. If it still feels doable, I'll try W5.

Oh, and here's a slightly obscure showtunes lyric-- one I'd never heard until tonight. Without searching, can you identify it?

The usual dog about the town
Is much inclined to play the clown
And far from showing too much pride
Is frequently undignified

A small hint: it's from the London recording of a show. The Broadway lyrics for this song changed quite a bit.

Thalidomide, a famous drug responsible for large numbers of birth defects in the late 1950's, banned, and subsequently found to be valuable in the treatment of a number of medical conditions and so resuscitated, comes in right and left-handed isomers. Only the left-handed isomer causes birth defects. Unfortunately, the two isomers can somehow mutate into each other. A patient given only the right-handed version will later be found to have both within him or her.

The protagonist, a chemistry teacher on the TV show Breaking Bad, notes this fact to his class as an example of handed molecules in an episode we watched yesterday. While I knew of thalidomide, and its somewhat recent re-emergence as a valuable drug, I had no idea about its chiral Jekyl-and-Hyde property.

I also didn't know they made a musical about someone with a thalidomide-induced birth defect, including the musical number Monster Babies. Anna Winslet, the older sister of Kate Winslet, starred in it.

via Naked Capitalism, a rant from August. Things have only gotten worse: Obama: knowing when to be an asshole Including this great summation from Nate Silver: Remember, this is all from FOUR MONTHS AGO.

(In this case, human cellular technology)

Scientists Discover Natural Flu-Fighting Proteins


U.S. researchers have discovered antiviral proteins in cells that naturally fight off influenza infections...a family of genes act as cell sentries that guard cells from an invading influenza virus...

They ... showed that if they make the cell overproduce the protein, they become more resistant to the flu. "If you crank it up, it really shuts down the flu,"...

The findings offer new insights into the body's natural defenses against influenza and other viruses, Elledge said. "We really did not know how our bodies were stopping the flu."

Someone on my backgammon server just shouted this:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

1. Why in the world is anyone surprised by jobless claims rising "unexpectedly?" Small businesses almost always lead economic recoveries; given the current business and regulatory climate, and the possiblity of legislation on health care reform, cap & trade, etc., no intellligent small business owner will be hiring unless it's an absolute necessity.

2. Is anyone surprised by this report that the British Meteorological Office manipulated temperature figures? The report alleges that 40% of Russian territory was 'left out' of temperature figures used for agw calculations, and the reasons had nothing to do with nonexistant data and everything to do with bias.

3. During the 2008 election, Black Panthers allegedly patrolled outside of Philadelphia polling places with clubs and other weapons, intimidating voters who wouldn't do the right thing. There was a Justice Department investigation, but it was dropped on orders of a political appointee of the Obama Administration. The US Civil Rights Commission has subpeonaed DOJ investigators to learn about this; the DOJ has ordered the investigators not to talk to the Commission. It's likely that the DOJ can't stop the Commission. One of the investigators' attorney (perhaps more, but one is quoted in the article) thinks that's the case, and the attorney is wondering if he must defy the DOJ because of the possibility of criminal prosecution.

As always, it's the cover-up that gets you. This will end up being a big scandal for the Obama Administration. It will likely take a year to three years to percolate through the courts, but this is dumb.

4. Nancy Pelosi to the President: I won't help get your funding for the Afghanistan surge.

5. Poetic Justice: Greenpeace gets a taste of its own medicine.