putative.com

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: