- Most family home videos are boring. You film your kid doing something, like tying his shoes for the first time. It seems really exciting the first time, but years later you’ve seen your kid do that every day for years. The video is boring but it’s entertaining to notice things in the background like “hey remember when our yard looked like that before the landscaping?” So the best home videos are of things that are boring now because you currently do them all the time. Someday you will no longer be doing them and the video will bring back memories.
- “Jack of all trades, master of none.” The causality actually goes in the opposite direction than the phrase is usually intended to mean. (Take it from me.)
- Can someone explain to me why I want a ceiling fan to cool my room? The hot air is near the ceiling. I would rather it stay there. Storn, are you reading this?
- Like any other measurement, the “hawkeye” electronic line judge in tennis has confidence intervals. When the human judge calls it in, and the hawkeye’s point estimate is one millimeter out, why does the hawkeye trump?
- For any album there is a finite number N of listenings before it grows on you. All album reviews should begin by stating the smaller of the following two numbers: N or the number of times the reviewer listened to the album (before giving up.)
- Nature gives men a powerful urge for sex with a lexicographic preference for quantity of mates over quality. But when it comes to our sons having sex the preference completely reverses. But both are means to the same end: passing on genes. Puzzle.
Cheap Talk 
4 comments
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October 1, 2010 at 3:22 am
Patricio
On point (4) there’s an interesting comparison to the recently introduced ability in cricket for teams to challenge certain decisions made by the umpire on the ground. The challenge is referred to a hawk-eye equipped “3rd umpire”, but if the trajectory of the ball plotted by hawkeye means that the umpire’s original decision was not obviously wrong (e.g. hawkeye shows a ball just clipping the wicket that the umpire ruled would have missed), then that original decision is upheld.
See e.g. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/6815397/South-Africa-v-England-umpire-referral-system-explained.html
October 1, 2010 at 9:20 am
Sean
Re 3, conditional on wanting a fan in the first place, you’d like for it to be a ceiling fan because (1) It takes up no usable space, and (2) Because it takes up no usable space it can be quite large relative to a floor fan, so it can displace more air. Sure it pushes hotter air down, but it’s powerful enough so that the jet of air emanating downward from the fan displaces the cooler air on the floor, circulating it higher up. I doubt that a ceiling fan has noticeable impact on the average air temp in the “habitable” altitude of your room, but it does create a lot of air circulation, so you will definitely feel cooler.
October 1, 2010 at 10:08 am
Alan Gunn
Well, as for point 6, don’t you want your sons’ genes combining with the genes of somebody who is likely to be picky, rather than whoever they might be able to pick up in bars? And, when it’s your kids, rather than you, you don’t feel the same urgency that may have led you to look for girls in bars. Just speculating.
October 2, 2010 at 11:02 pm
Lones Smith
Ceiling fans on balance warm a room (good for winter), but I have found that they create a wind chill effect at least below it (good for summer, if you lie below it). But you are supposed to push that button to change them so the blades suck up air in the winter (clockwise?) so that it does not blow air on you. I sometimes find staring death in the eye at the edge of a bed trying to switch that damn button. I try to remember to change the spin direction in Fall and Spring….
I guess this post adds to your fan club. 🙂 Cheerio, Lones