putative.com

The Onion, on Harry Potter, Twilight, etc.

Adults Go Wild Over Latest In Children's Picture Book Series

The perfect way to slice a pizza

Mathematicians nerd out. In part:

As with many mathematical conundrums, the answer has arrived in stages - each looking at different possible cases of the problem. The easiest example to consider is when at least one cut passes plumb through the centre of the pizza. A quick sketch shows that the pieces then pair up on either side of the cut through the centre, and so can be divided evenly between the two diners, no matter how many cuts there are.

So far so good, but what if none of the cuts passes through the centre? For a pizza cut once, the answer is obvious by inspection: whoever eats the centre eats more. The case of a pizza cut twice, yielding four slices, shows the same result: the person who eats the slice that contains the centre gets the bigger portion. That turns out to be an anomaly to the three general rules that deal with greater numbers of cuts, which would emerge over subsequent years to form the complete pizza theorem....

Why I love our president, continued

Sullivan on the Nobel Prize speech that conservatives (even Gingrich and Palin) are liking so much.

Republicans and Medicare

Ha:

 

Want to help Pioneer Square?

Vote to make revitalizing it a priority, especially now that stupid, stupid Elliott Bay is moving. 

The McGinn-related "Ideas for Seattle" site is awesome—and "Revitalize Pioneer Square" is up to #8! Please, please throw a few votes its way! It's really easy to login with your Facebook, Twitter, or Google ID. 

I spent three votes on Pioneer Square, three on expanded transit, three on helping the ID, and one on making the IFS site an official city Web site.

Update! Vote for HB's idea, too, getting green space on the waterfront once the viaduct comes down.

Rad TV ad

And the making-of video—which is unfortunately light on technical specs and heavy on brand douchebaggery. But apparently it was a bespoke biodegradable chair that burned up on Mach 1+ reentry, after a 98,268-foot ascent. 

Add this to your lexicon: "MPWDS"

Kevin Drum notes a great post about why you *shouldn't* go green. I love this sort of thing. Basically, we should stop "our faddish and counterproductive emphasis on small, voluntary actions.... [I]n the 1960s, civil rights activists didn't ask bigoted Southern governors and sheriffs to consider '10 Ways to Go Integrated' at their convenience."

The big change that's needed for reducing carbon emissions is at the policy level, that we can do *enormously* more good by *mandating* efficiency (especially in building) than relying on people to buy grass-fed beef or replace their lightbulbs or buy a Prius or whatever.

The most puzzling behavioral phenomenon to understand when it comes to building efficiency is that Most People Won’t Do Sh*t (MPWDS). “Most people” includes people who could make money by doing sh*t, people who say they will do sh*t, even people who have promised to do sh*t. I’ve heard from people who write about energy efficiency for a living, know exactly what to do to make their homes more efficient, and still don’t do sh*t. It’s hard to disentangle the reasons why — some mix of status quo bias, hyperbolic discounting, and loss aversion to begin with — but it’s clear that public surveys and polls about this tend to be misleading. What people say they’re willing to do and what they demonstrate they’re willing to do are very different things. Attitudes don’t translate into actions.

Stop the war on Pioneer Square

Great crack dealing and smoking footage via P2 blog:

And I love this comments rant from yesterday, about the "conspiracy" against Pioneer Square, from the Slog's Fnarf:

Pioneer Square is that way because the city has conspired against it for fifty-plus years. It should be Seattle's crown jewel. The disaster that's unfolding there is spilling over into downtown, too. Haven't heard McGinn say too much about that. If downtown goes, the city goes with it.

@12,
Care to elaborate on the conspiracy? Not disagreeing, just curious.

@14: repeatedly knocking down stuff around the edges; trying in the 60s to turn the entire neighborhood into parking lots (foiled; the outrage over tearing down the Seattle Hotel for the sinking ship parking garage started the modern preservation movement in this city, which then saved the Market); concentrating homeless services there, to the extent of giving over entire buildings, while at the same time permitting the loss of the businesses that supported the homeless before they were homeless (like the literally dozens and dozens of SRO hotels that used to be there); permitting the expansion of a "nightclub district" so loud, violent and vomitous that it makes ordinary life impossible; building a gigantic stadium there, with a gigantic parking requirement, and then a couple of decades later tearing it down and building TWO gigantic stadiums. The list goes on. City Hall Park should be the nicest park in the city; instead it's an encampment. The buildings that are left are crumbling, but the city does nothing. The entire area is emptying out, but the city does nothing. I think the Smith Tower is about 7/8 vacant, but the city does nothing.

Lovecraft captcha?

I was making a wee donation to get some factual information out in the "final stretch" of the health care debate (something I heartily encourage you to do), and the Organizing for America site had this hilarious (to me) Lovecraftian captcha:

 

Why I love our president

Stories like these, one short (about the economy), one long (about Afghanistan). He really is a thoughtful, thorough, liberal pragmatist. You might not always agree, you might sometimes get impatient, but I am so thankful to have him in the White House.

Beatboxing flute!

Joss Whedon is going to direct Glee?

Yep. For a month at least. Read the whole interview to learn many more things Whedon.

Best Protest Signs of 2009

Check them all out, but this bit of Wikipedia humor is definitely my favorite:

  

And, the runner-up:

 

Artists' homemade Christmas cards

From the Smithsonian (via VSL):

 

("Sage, who was married to French Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, sent this typescript card to Bunce as a Christmas and New Year’s 1959 card." There is another nice card from Sage a few years later, which she made just before killing herself. Merry Christmas!)
 

The CBO says health insurance premiums will go up?

That's only true in a misleading and technical way. Premiums will go *down* for 150 million Americans in the Senate plan, and the prediction that they'll go up for the other 32 million in the individual insurance market (people like me) is based on the assumption that those people will decide to *buy better insurance* because they'll be getting subsidies:

To see this more clearly, imagine that the University of Florida decided to give incoming students who receive financial aid an $800 credit to purchase a laptop computer. You'd expect that the average computer purchased by students on financial aid would become a bit more expensive. But that wouldn't be because computers had become more expensive. It would be because people now had money to buy better computers.

So too for health-care reform. Premiums for the same policy in the individual market fall by 14 to 20 percent. But people in the individual market, who are largely low-income, will now have the opportunity to purchase better policies that cover more expenses and provide more security. That's a good thing. It's one of the reasons for health-care reform, in fact. And it is not analogous to health-care insurance becoming more expensive, any more than the fact that I could buy a nicer car after getting a better job suggests that cars are becoming more expensive.

The dishonesty of the GOP in this is flummoxing. But predictable.

Andrew Sullivan leaves the right

Or is left by it. A wee manifesto.

Hammering Man, still armless, just fyi

(There is possibly some new application of Rule 34 here. Although it might help if HM were a robot.) 

Cookin' with Coolio

The recipe for "Cold Shrimpin'" calls for a "dime bag" of salt! Just FYI.

 

How to buy a turkey

A little Thanksgiving story for y'all. In part:

A few weeks ago, I began pondering where to buy a turkey. Like all grocery shopping, this once straightforward domestic routine has lately changed for me into an ethical and economic quagmire. The calculus that now accompanies each trip to the supermarket is depressing; every decision feels wrong. If I buy the cheap milk, I'm bankrupting small dairy farmers, enslaving cows, and my son will grow breasts. On the other hand, I'm not absolutely sure he'll grow breasts, and if I buy the local, organic milk, then I’m bankrupting my family. And shouldn't we just drink generic milk and send the savings to Sudan, where people have real problems? These questions revive every time I stand in front of a gallon of milk, sack of coffee beans, or piece of farmed salmon. It's boring, nerve-wracking, and almost makes me hate food. It certainly makes me hate the supermarket.

(via Sullivan)

Palin and the press

This Taibbi joint is hysterical:

What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it’s not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin. For those of you who can’t connect the dots, I’ll tell you what it means. It means she’s been cut loose. It means that all five of the families have given the okay to this hit job, including even the mainstream Republican leaders. You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s “winnability.”

And do you know what that means? That means that just as the antiwar crowd spent years being painted by the national press as weepy, unpatriotic pussies whose enthusiastic support is toxic to any serious presidential aspirant, so too will all of you afternoon-radio ignoramuses who seem bent on spending the next three years kicking and screaming your way up the eternal asshole of white resentment now find yourself and your political champions painted as knee-jerk loonies whose rabid irrationality is undeserving of the political center. And yes, that’s me saying that, but I’ve always been saying that, not just about Palin but about George Bush and all your other moron-heroes.

The devious algorithms of pinball

And here I thought that you always had a one-in-ten chance of matching. Oh, I was so, so wrong, about so many things.

The other tool is the match probability: you win a free game if the last two digits of your score match an apparently random draw. While adjustments to the high-score threshold is textbook price theory, the adjustments to the match probability is pure behavioral economics. Let’s clear this up right away. No, the match probability is not uniform and yes, it is strategically manipulated depending on who is playing and when. For example, if the machine has been idle for more than three minutes, the match probability is boosted upward. You will never match if you won a free game by high score. And it gets more complicated than that. Any time there are two or more players and they finish a game with no credits left, one player (but only one) is very likely to match. Empirically, the other players will more often than not put in another quarter to play again.

MAX train leaves 3-year-old stranded

See, I always carry Silas on and off Metro buses, just because one of the first times that I tried to let him be a "big boy" and climb on himself, the door almost closed on us and cut him in half. But this possibility never occurred to me.

Palin 2012: The Trailer

(This is even funnier for me because we just saw 2012 in the theater yesterday—totally worthwhile cinematic experience—after realizing at the last minute that Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn't out yet here.)

Baby otter!

That is all.

How to raise your IQ

By about 10 points on average. Just change your e-mail preferences to check for new mail every 15 or 30 minutes—or I'm sure the longer the better. 

I was just reminded of this study and I'm finally changing my damn settings to at least every 15 minutes. I'm curious to see if  I even notice, maybe I'll bump it to 30. (I figure if I'm in a quick back and forth over something, I can always temporarily set it back to every minute, or just check manually or move to IM.)

Funny, this a.m.

• "Heyyyyy, baby! Show us your 40%!" 
• El Baile Nuevo
• What's better than eternal life?
• a horrifying MS promo made complete by inept astroturfing
• and an awesome AT&T rep: 

Bill Simmons has a posse

Update, tweet from Bill: "Unbelievable Seattle signing. My favorite of the tour. Sonics fans showed up in force. STILL AN NBA CITY. Thanks to everyone." (thanks, Hunts!)

Um, this is safely Seattle's biggest reading tonight, ESPN's justly celebrated Bill Simmons at the restaurant Sport, down by the Space Needle. Except there are so many people that they've canceled the reading and gone right to the signing. So if you were planning to catch the end of the reading, don't bother.

Sport is full, like fire department capacity--and then the line goes out into Fisher Plaza, spirals around inside a bunch, then goes out onto the street and up the block and around the corner. I'm sure there are at least 500 people here. Maybe a thousand? Getting there. 

And here, the eye of the storm, poor old hard-working Bill hisself:

Proud, young, hilarious nerd won't say the Pledge of Allegiance

Awesome:

A young Cornelius Bear!

College age, to be precise:

 

Cute. If you haven't ever had to hear me go on and on about Achewood, I don't know why. You can get acquainted by visiting the source of this illustration, a weird new Onstad joint for Time.
 

Duplicate book covers

Thanks to Photoshop and public domain art, humanity now has access to infinite book covers. E.g.: