The Fix

Chad Orzel has a great idea on how to fix the economic mess we're stuck in: Physicists Can Fix This.

You should read the whole post, it's not that long. But this is the gist presented in Q/A format, with me providing the questions, and Dr. Orzel responding:

Q: What's your plan?
A: "fire them. All of them. Every trader who bought or sold a mortgage-backed security, every manager who signed off on the buying and selling of credit default swaps, every CEO of every company now in need of a federal bailout, everybody who ever shook hands with Bernie Madoff."

Q: And who should we hire to run things?
A: "I've thought of the perfect replacements: physicists."

Q: But won't physicists screw it up because they don't know about business and economics?
A: "the people who are pushing that line the hardest are the people who stand to benefit most from large windfall payments to the current financial industry. Which is to say, the people who have wrecked the economy by failing to understand the most basic facts of the underlying market. They have lots of experience, to be sure, but the bulk of their experience is in being wrong about everything. They lost billions to a Ponzi scheme, for God's sake. And, seriously, do you really think that these transactions are too complicated for physicists to figure out? We're talking about people who have spent the last several years thinking about folding and twisting strings in eleven dimensions."

Eragon and Eldest

The 3rd book in the Eragon series came out a while ago. As it had been a while since I read the first two books (and regrettably saw the movie) I decided to re-read them to refresh my memory before I read the third. Then I would put a nice conclusion to the whole thing and be done with them all.

Unfortunately, it turns out there will be 4 books, not 3. Hopefully he writes #4 quickly, because I am not reading the first 3 over (again) before reading #4.

Anyway, if you haven't read Eragon, here is my fairly spoiler-laden review:

Eragon was written by a kid. He was like 15 when he started the book, perhaps 17 by the time he finished. Google it if you really want to know. It is very impressive that any teenager can write a coherant book. The best way I can describe the book is that I think he watched the original Star Wars trilogy, read Lord of the Rings and then thought: "Hey, I have a fabulous idea for a book!"

We have Eragon, an orphaned child living with his uncle. He doesn't even know who his father is, and his mother dropped him off as a baby and was never heard from again. He ends up coming across a dragon egg which hatches for him, and names the dragon Saphira. Some bad guys who work for the evil king come looking for him, and he ends up leaving his backwater village with kinda crazy old guy who lives nearby, pretending to be a story teller. But, as it turns out!, kinda crazy old guy isn't who he appears to be! He's been hiding that in the past he was a feared warrior with magical powers who happens to be nearby and can now teach Eragon to use his magical powers! The book is largely a travelogue of their adventures as they get captured, escape, kill some bad guys, learn about Eragon's destiny, and eventually make their way to the small alliance of rebels. Sadly, this group isn't known as the Rebel Alliance, but as the Varden. Along their way, we see that their world is made up of humans, elves (who have magical powers and live forever, but like to keep to themselves in their forest), dwarves (who are excellent miners and live in the mountains) and urgals (who are disgusting, horned brutes who work for the bad guy).

Really, the book isn't bad, though I do like to poke fun at it. It is entertaining and goes quickly. It's not great literature, but it is a good distraction from life, and is better for you than watching reruns of 'Friends'.

The second book in the series is Eldest. Begin spoiler fest:

Having defeated the urgal army at the end of the first book, Eragon travels to the elves' forest to train where, lo and behold, a very old dragon rider and his dragon have been hiding for all these years waiting to train the next dragon rider (Eragon). We also discover that Eragon's travelling companion from the first book, Murtagh, who we thought died is really not dead, and has been put into the service of the evil king. Oh, and he's Eragon's brother. Oh, and their father was the evil king's right hand man before Brom (the kinda crazy storyteller who died in book 1) killed him. So, it's all one big happy family.

I'm currently half way through book 3, about 1500 pages into the adventure. While there aren't many surprises, it still sucks me in. (Just ask Shannon.)

Yard Work

I've got a friend who apparently likes yard work.  I guess I need to invite him over more often.

Last night we cranked up the sprinkers for the first time.  We probably could have done that a week ago, but oh well.  Luckily the sprinklers all seem to be working in reasonably good order.  One is somewhat broken, but still puts 90+% of the water out on the lawn where it should go, so it certainly isn't a crisis.

I also repaired the spigot in the backyard.  Look how handy I am!  It was leaking out of the knob when turned on, so I took it apart, applied Teflon tape and cranked it back together good and tight.  No more leaks!  Now I can return the new one that I bought under the assumption that I wouldn't be able to fix the old one.

Also, we've been weeding fiends lately.  Apparently the difference between a plant and a weed is that a plant is what you want to grow, and a weed is what will grow.  I think we should just declare that we are trying to grow the weeds.  Then, we will either succeed, or the weeds will decide to shrivel up and die, which wouldn't be a bad thing either.

Now the top priority is to get the garden planted, and the water all hooked up for it.

Made in America

You might think that I've stopped reading, what with no more book updates lately.  That is far from the truth, which is that I've been wanting to write a summary of this book for so long that I've finished 3 books since.  All in good time.

See, I was waiting until I had the book with me to review Made in America by Bill Bryson.  You may be familiar with Bryson books, which are often humorous traveloguey type books.  But rather than being straight humor, he likes to add in lots of detail about whatever he finds along the way.  This book is no different.  Made in America claims to be "an informal history of the English language in the United States".  I suppose it is, but I would have bolded and italicized the word informal.  (In fact, I just did!)  Bryson heads off where ever his interest takes him on minutae about words that are used or invented in America.  This is a good thing, because otherwise, he would have spent the whole book just listing words and when they first appeared: to scoot (1841), highfalutin (1848), underdog (1887), rip-roaring (1834), sitting pretty (1910), dope fiend (1896), jet lag (1966).

But, it's all worth it, just for Bill to provide us all with this nugget of information in the section about candy: "Equally improbable was the Chicken Dinner candy bar, so called because it was supposed to engender the feeling of well-being provided by a steaming roast chicken dinner.  Though few people were able to make the leap of imagination necessary to equate a 5-cent chocolate peanut roll with a well-balance meal, the Chicken Dinner sold well and survived into th 1960s."

Hold Still

Now, I know the acapella performing segment of my readership is rather limited, but I still feel it is my duty to help inform the world.

I'm a Ben Folds fan, and apparently he's got some sort of contest going for people to sing acapella versions of his songs. There are some of the better ones on his website. (Remember, better and good have two separate and only loosely related meanings.) Watching some of them, I realized that acapella groups are:
1. Usually too big.
2. Incapable of holding still.

And it's rather distracting to watch 12 bodies wiggling, 20 guys trying to look cool, or this bevy of girls who, if you watch with the sound off, all seem to be playing on a Wii.

So please, if you're going to sing, hold still. It's not that hard. This guy does it four times!

One of these things . . .

My mind is swimming with things I could say about this.  But I'll let the graphic do the talking.

Pasta Ridiculous

So, I'm making Pasta Roni today, and I find something that's just ridiculous.  It's right there in step 1.

"In a medium saucepan, bring water, milk and margarine, butter or spread with no trans fat to a boil; reduce heat to medium."

It can't just be "butter", or even "butter or margarine" anymore, no, it's got to be "margarine, butter or spread with no trans fat".  Is there someone out there who's been wondering "It says 'butter' but I wonder if I can use my no trans fat butter substitute?"

If they are going to go that far, I suggest them further revamp the instructions:

"In a medium saucepan, bring water (tap, filtered, distilled or de-ionized), milk, soy milk, powedered milk, or milk substitute and margarine, butter, spread with no trans fat, or leftover bacon fat to a boil; reduce heat to medium."

Silly

Yay!  Cougars are the MWC Men's Basketball Champions!

Woo!  Utes are the MWC Men's Basketball Champions!

Yipee!  Lobos are the MWC Men's Basketball Champions!

BYU, Utah and New Mexico ended the regular season in a three way tie for first place in the conference.  So, logically, they all cut down the nets, and all paraded around with banners declaring themselves champions.  75% of the conference games played Saturday ended with the winning team declaring themselves champs.

And it's not out of the question that a different team wins the conference tournament.  SDSU and UNLV are both capable of it.  If so, that would be a fourth team cutting down the nets this year.  It's all just a bit silly if you ask me.  Utah, BYU and NM are all good teams and have earned their positions, but it just wouldn't feel quite right having a championship party knowing that two other teams are declaring themselves champs of the same thing somewhere else.

Chrome

I downloaded Chrome a few weeks ago, and have been using at home.

I like:

1. Shannon can be logged into gmail via Firefox, and I can be logged into gmail via Chrome at the same time.  This isn't specific to Chrome, I think it will work with any two programs, but it doesn't work with 2 windows of the same.

2. Very little of the screen is taken up with junk like toolbars, print buttons, etc.  Of course, when I actually wanted to print something I had figure out how to do it, as it wasn't blindingly obvious.  However, that was the first time in weeks that I had wanted to print something.  It's perfectly ok for a feature to be a bit out of the way if I only want to do it once a month.  And, frankly, pretty much all I do on the internet is look at sites and open new tabs to look at other sites.  New tabs are instantly available, and that's about all I need.

3. I can get to websites I visit often 1 keystroke faster.  In Firefox, to get to espn.com, I have to type 'es' and then hit down to highlight the site from the list firefox has just made.  Chrome just assumes I want espn as soon as I hit 'es'.  Over a lifetime, this could amount to whole minutes of savings!

I don't like:

1. Chrome seems to be a little bit slower than Firefox.  I can't prove it, but that's what it feels like.

2. No spell check.  It claims to have a spell check, but it doesn't seem to work.  And I'm not a great speller.

Summary:

I still prefer Firefox, but Chrome is serviceable for what I do, which isn't much, really.  My expectations are low, so it isn't surprising that Chrome can basically hit them.  It's way better than Internet Explorer from Microsoft, which no one should use.

Aggregation: It's anti-impressive

I don't actually visit very many blogs these days.  I use Google Reader to do it for me.  I even pulls out comments on blogs, so I don't even have to go look for those.  As a result, I don't see any of the special things that people have done lately.  I guess what I'm telling you is: if you've been trying to impress me, you can quit wasting your time.  In a similar vein, I don't look at my blog regularly either, which is why it doesn't change; I guess my objective isn't to impress any of you with my bloggy-aesthetics.

The exception to this is, of course, people who have made their blogs private.  I understand why people do it, but it makes life harder for me.  What I can't figure out though, is why Google Reader (run by Google) can't figure out if I'm allowed to look at a private Blogspot (run by Google) blog.  It ought to be super easy for them to do, but they don't.  Apparently Google's objective in life is not to impress me.