Las Vegas makes sense

I have always been an anti-las vegas guy, promising to myself never to visit there.
I broke my promise, as my kids started going to soccer tournaments and to my dismay from all places they would choose Las Vegas!.
Now first let me explain why I don't like Las Vegas.
From the 3 things that make Las Vegas special
 - gambling and casinos
 - disneyworld for adults
 - sin-sity
 I don't mind about the more liberal morality implied by the "sin-city" side of Vegas. Having grown in a country that allows regulated prostitution, and in my view having seen the positive and negative effects of legalizing vs criminalizing prostitution I am squarely in favor of legalizing it.
But the other two parts are leaving me personally un-interested and to some extent I even myself negativeling judging people that are interested in them.

But I concluded in my most recent visit that I was totally wrong - and I have really not understood what Las Vegas is and what is its role in the grand future.
In the world of tomorrow, a world where people live from wherever they want joining others in online groups for work, research, special interests, activities etc, in that world there is still the need of the occasional physical grouping. And in many cases the grouping is pretty large. Be it a gathering of fans of a certain movie, a gathering of people working together in the same company, gathering of researchers in some obscure field - gatherings, conventions, conferences is going to be the primary model of direct physical interaction for any group. And thats what Las Vegas is. A whole place that has made itself perfect as the "convention" center in the world.

Conventions have a problem: Just like the first large-scale video-conferencing attempts find out, you cannot rely on the bandwidth and available resources of a normal data center if you are to bring at a moments notice, a thousant people online to listen to something. You need a much larger infrastructure that specializes in this kind of spiky behavior. A normal tourist city like San Francisco get totally overwhelmed with oracle-world. Las Vegas has developed an infrastructure in almost every possible way to allow massive gatherings.
My kids played in a lighted soccer field complex that had 10 full soccer fields side by side all with massive lights and places for people to sit. On the way to that field, I passed several other ones like it. The variety of the convention types means a significant variety of types of entertainment:
 - Lots of fields sales of a company convention => lots of gambling
 - Comdex and computer like attendees, lots of high tech shows
and Shopping and Artsy shows and and.. In general anything to allow any convention to find its perfect setting in the area.

Why I like whys

There is a billboard in southbound 101, I think from ask.com thats says something like

"Who is teddy bear named after? Find at ask.com..."

I realized that everytime I see the billboard I get a bit agitated. I am annoyed about the fact that I don't know the answer, about the fact that I never questioned that myself, about the fact that the marketeers won and they will get their way to drive traffic by coming up with a gimmick.

But on the other hand the northbound 101 billboard has a different question.

"Why do people blush? Find at ask.com"

Somehow that annoys me less. And I wonder why. It maybe that I kind of know some portion of that answer. But the more I think of it it is because I dislike "factoid" quizes and I love logical puzzles.  I remember my disappointment when a good friend of mine knowing my interest in etymology (and tracing any possible word back to its (greek) roots) they brought me as a birthday gift a huge book the with a pompus title about words. I randomly shuffled it.  "Porterhouse steak : comes from some place somewhere that was known for the particular steak cut. "Hamburger" something about a lord .... named so and so that a few centuries ago...".  The etymology that is exciting and attractive is etymology that is logical relies on rules - its what allows you to discover and understand by yourself how enthousiasm traces back to its roots of "the state of having god inside you".
The relevance to the billboards : Who, When, Where questions are typically facts. Why is different - why is explanation. Facts take more space in my brain. And given that my brain is already practically full they just displace other facts. Explanations instead are more like, data compression, you don't need to know x and y and z because you can compute(explain) z from x and y. So my brain feels lighter after an explanation. My brain feels some anxiety when a new factoid comes in that somehow I may need to recall later.

Another way to see this is try to understand how harder it is to build an AI program that answers whys from and AI program that answers who, whens and wheres. The latter can be achieved with an oversized db of facts. But answering whys thats very hard. (We portray androids, 7 of 9s and Datas in movies as less human by just showing how they fail to answer "why questions" in satisfactorily way)
If you think about it every why does not have a single answer.

Why do people blush? Because some surface blood veins expand? No, but I mean why this happens? because some brain signals sth that causes sth else. But why that happens? Because the brain triggers that in a state of x, y. Yes but why does our brain does that? Because for state x, that gives an survival advantage in cases so and so or a mating advantage in cases y. But why that doesn't happen in chimps? Because chimps have hairy faces - so that wouldn't help. So (I am making everything up) our aquatic past resulted in facial skin exposure which enabled... blah blah..

I can keep on moving on that thread for ever. What is the right answer to whys. Social humans understand : they understand the social context , they attempt to guess the knowledge network of the questioning person's brain, they over-impose the current context to apply weights of proximity in that knowledge network and then try to find the explanation that would achieve the best "compression" of that dataset. They do all that subconsciously, instantly.
To my kids the answer may be "Because blush when they get embarassed" - essentially a fact answer to add to their mostly empty still brain. To my doctor sister, I would answer in a wise-guy mode - something that contradicts her own medical understanding of it.

Why the sky is blue

This morning driving was a pretty moody dark cloudy day (by the way -  the colors of the cars are becoming more like the colors of refrigerators, gray, silver, whites, given that they have the higher resale value, thus driving a recursive share growth increase among car colors), and the blue sky was hidden by dark clouds, no green around in 101, no yellow sun, my whole view was rather gray-ish and that made me sad.

That took me down the path of trying to understand why blue. We know why the sky is blue, but what I was interested is why we can see blue? Is it because we want to be able to see better the sky? That seems illogical. For that matter why do we see green or yellow or red. Are they dominant frequencies and thats how the eye evolved its frequence sensing to be able to capture the maximum amount of frequency variance available?

I think not.

Here is my simple way to find out why we see the colors that we can see (again  following this methodology of assuming no computer internet wikipedia available - just our logic and our memories). Imagine everything is black and white. Imagine we are   10 millions years back in some anthrpoid form (we've heard dogs see colors different - so I am assuming we do not need to go back 100M years to mammal common ancestors).

So we are a chimp like creature that sees everything in black and white. In what way that "sucks"?Clearly we can tell the sky - even if we are hanging by our tail  upside down - it is extremely easy to tell in black and white picture.  But we can't tell the parts of the tree that are soft and green thus edible from those that are more hard and brown. That is a massive advantage when trying to pick the soft edible parts of a plant. Ok that explains green. We see green because green is the leaf color (ie its the favorite color for clorophyle (why that is so is another question))

How about red. Why would we see red? Red seems a not very natural color. It is there in some fruits but we can make the case that the fruits like red apples and berries learned that the eye can see red and become red to be more easily discovered and eaten. Maybe red - goes further back. Maybe we see red because of our blood. Red liquid on a rock, or on an animal means that there is an injured mammal. It could mean food, it could alert to an injury. So we see red because it is the blood color (ie which happens to be red because of the red cells which happen to be red because of the iron in them?))

How about blue, our first question? I had a harder time with that. The best answer I could come up was that due to our possibly aquatic past, being able to tell water that is clean from water that is not is important - and clean water has a fine blue tint (even in a lake/river). So we see blue because of the water not the sky.

Re-doable tasks

A friend came back to me having finished some work whose goal was to map all the OD skills, as available through the public od api to the SO tags as available through the so api. The work had a non-trivial crowdsourcing component - since the two lists have been developed independently with different naming conventions and different approaches in deciding what should be a tag and what shouldn't. The friend used both mturk workers as well as "trusted" od hires to perform the necessary QA as well as logistics management of the whole task.

The outcome seemed really interesting and could be used in many ways. Still my obvious first question was to what extent was the process repeatable - can we be rerunning thing once every year? quarter?
I also was interested in figuring out whether the reverse map can be similarly obtained: from so to od.
The answer to both was a non-convincing so and so..

I felt a bit let down.

I think an interesting requirement of an HS task is that you can pour a comparable amount of money , press the re-do button again and get back the effects of the task done again. Of course given that several of the inputs may be selected from the environment - the result may or may not be different.

Note that we can do (and redo )* something like -

HS TASK :
look at this code and find me any bugs, fix them and send me the pull request.

Or

HS TASK :
Go and calculate how much is the activity in quora  the last 6 months using the following methodology ( following pages , counting posters etc..)

Or

HS TASK :
Go and od hire 3 folks following this particular vetting process.


A: What is interesting is that when you start re-using scripts of the past then you are forced to make them more modular and parameterizable:

B : I see, you mean change quora for example in the task above with stackoverflow?

A : Not exactly because the instructions for collecting the quora data are quora specific. But the rest is not, so you could actually refactor the HS code so as to redo that job all you need to do is provide instruction for capturing xx  from a site...

B : I see, for example in the hiring example the parameter would not be just a change in the skill list but possibly a refactoring of the vetting process.

A : Yes, actually you may find that the whole task is really a different task but it simple shares a single flow that you refactor as a library

B : I wonder how these libraries/flows tasks are shared and found. And what makes them reusable by others not only by self.

A : It seems that best practices for writing such flows/tasks maybe rather different than normal HS tasks . For example - there should be no personal data of any sort in such a sharable task, while there probably are lots of them in a normal HS task - given its requirement that is complete/includes all context.  This doesn't seem right...


B : I have told you that we should not be thinking about modularizing / parameterizing / templatizing HS until after we have written a minimal amount of HS code. We always get tangled this way...

AmISleeping.com

Ok ,here is the problem:
A friend has atypical sleep patterns. No problem, he lives in a world that allows for flexible schedules , no mandatory recurring meetings and given that he hasn't yet a wife and children he really shoudn't care a bit. He should be following whatever patterns are making him happy and productive.
There is only one small issue: how do his friends know whether he is awake or not or when is he going to be online. For that matter it may even be interesting for him to know what has been his sleep rythm as of late.

So what is a minimal service that would solve this problem.
Lets call this service amisleeping.com  (the domain is actually available!)
The service would need to have a mobile-friendly html page with a button that says
[Going to bed] or [Just Woke up] and has after that a table of previous times that I have been awake.


The buttons would submit to a loggin data service the event. The js of the page would just read the logs data and display

The service could possibly use the openkeyval service - it may not be hard to allow for multi-user and read only sharing without any server component besides whatever is available as part of openkeyval and a github project page to host the actual amisleeping.com home page.

Enemy of the state

Even though I have been keeping myself pretty far away of the line that defines legal vs illegal, I still find myself thinking about what I would do if at some point suddenly I am considered unfairly enemy of state. I may be influenced a bit by movies, conspiracy theories or even my own view that as technological progress becomes faster it is not improbable that the simple knowledge, discovery of  something as simple as a better programming language (think HS) is equivalent to ammunition and in that, not improbable. orwelian future may very well make me at the target of an extermination order by the state.



So what someone like me would do if we were to be found in the same position as Will Smith or Gene Hackman in that movie? I hardly know people that know people that have gone to jail. I have no physical abilities. I cannot run, I cannot fight. I am against weapons of any sort, I consider it wrong to even learn to use one. I am in every way someone that is completely dependent on the system to survive. As I was telling to a friend that is biking to work once a week from Oakland... I will be the first one to be eaten in the zombie apocalypse.

Even worse, when my kids asked me: so dad you have been working all your life with computers, what can you hack? I sat there explaining that I don't do this sort of thing - the closest I can get is, I can very efficiently hire people that might be able to do sth like that. The kids said disappointedly sth like, you are not a hacker you are just a manager.

Having seen practically most spy movies, the ideas are obvious: keep in random places loads of cash and extra passports in various places, accounts in Switzerland, learn to disguise and have a bunch of Tom Cruise like membrane masks etc.  But how would I even get out of the country in the first place. And just creating these passports is illegal. So for me to protect me from this improbable future I would need to so sth illegal now. It doesn't make sense.

So last weekend I found the perfect way:
 - it allows one to stay in the country practically for ever, completely undetected
 - it allows for going places with car even airplane traveling (with significantly more wealth)
 - all the preparations are completely normal/legal
 - it requires no special physical skills, nor becoming master of disguise.
 - it requires no connections with shady characters
 - it requires strong cryptography
 - it does not require the commitment of any sort of crime after the evasion (besides the evasion itself)
 - like any good method it doesn't rely on obfuscation - the method itself can be "open source"

The downsides:

 - its preparations require some level of wealth  (possibly > $1M)
 - prolonged exposure in public areas may allow face recognition to detect
 - you cannot cross borders
 - you live a witness-protection-program kind of life, ie, you cannot reconnect with any resource of person of your past life

Hint : it requires knowing how to create minimal forms of artificial life.

Zip code statistics

I have always wondered about the size of my neighborhood. Its a suburb, so it is quite spread out and hard to estimate accurately using my logical "just me without a computer" methodology. It takes 5-10 minutes with the car to go from a house to another house.

I tried to find a good site with real statistics and sources by zip code or neighborhood, that would display demographic information, # of houses, population etc. I was lost in the census databases. I did find a site that is unfortunately a google trap site - but it does have the info I was looking for (its the top result in the query "population xxxxx" where xxxx is any zipcode.

So the population of my zipcode is 40K people in about 14K homes spread across 74 square kilometers

http://www.city-data.com/zips/95120.html

Supermarket run

My wife just asked me for a favor. To bring her, her favorite curler puff cheetos.
I thought for a second, its 11:15am I am in a good working mood, ready to do something productive.
I really wouldn't mind paying $2-3 extra and have these cheetos delivered to my door.
Still, 15+years since webvan was trying to make the revolution for online grocery delivery - its definitelly not here, in spite of safeway online and the various "runner" online services task-rabbits and such.

Maybe people don't really need sth like that. I take on my coat attempting to record every one of the by-the-minute detail that this errand means - and I could have missed/avoided had my wife taped an app at her ipad and order a "hurry-up" order for curely, puffy  cheetos.

- First feeling, its a good day, coming out of the door at 11:15am - its the first time I noticed it.
would I be missing that?

- Going for groceries is an "event" - my son shouts, get _my_ chips too, and my wife adds again - one organic milk too. That doesn't seem necessary - were there an app for online delivery, my wife would have put in the order for milk - not rush , the app would have remember the default size and brand and type of milk..  On the other hand my son wouldn't have got his chips - a more organized method for parental controls would have evolved allowing some things, in some quantities but not others.

- The five minute drive to safeway is relaxing, uneventfull. I see the sunday suburbian neighborhood activity,  smile to a few folks, see a new for sale sign... would I be missing that?

- As I drive  doubt comes - what chips does my son really wants ? my salt and peper favorite or bbq chips? Quick failed speak to text effort - succeed to ask the question the third  time.  It seems any s/m errant service would need a text communication for resolving ambiguity and such. I wouldn't miss that.

- The parking lot is unreasonably full (found out later that its sth like superball day). I have to look for a parking and driving my minivan I have to park further out - things were easier with my 15yr old smaller caravan. I wouldn't miss that.

- Right when I cross the door I cringe. Reusable bags. Not being a regular shopper I forgot. Ran back to the end of the parking lot picked by reusable bag (san jose => no free bagging by city ordinance to promote "recycling"...). I woudn't miss that. The runners being an independent third part of supermarket crew would be efficient in that.

- I go to the chips aisle. No curlers just puffs. Spent some time browsing around, managed to stay focus. Wouldn't mind missing s/m aisle distractions.

- I look at all the puffs and I smile - I bet my daughter would get a kick that mom has sent me to the s/m just for her chips. I snap a photo and text to the whole family the photo. My phone keeps on buzzing all the way back with funny comments to each other from the rest of my family.
I would miss that.

- Looking for milk - I see that our regulat brand isn't any more. As always only the safeway brand is well stocked. Anyway I know the drill, has happened before and buy sth else. An evolved service would have been able to deal with that just as well. So, I wouldn't miss that

- At the cashiers lots of people everywhere. Spent time looking for minimum queue. I wouldn't miss that.

- The lady is new. So just fake small talk and attempts to pronounce my name. I wouldn't miss that.

- Trying to help the lady in front of me that panicky sees her  credit card sucked in the sliding belt. I guess I would miss a few opportunities to be helpful, get some honest appreciation and feel good. Of course doing supermarket chores seems a very inefficient way to achieve that.

- Safeway club points, coupons. I probably wouldn't have those - nor would I care. As long as the buyer gets the club prices - I don't care about special discounts and coupons. Wouldn't miss that.

- More relaxing drive back, more appreciation of the good day, the sun, the clean neiborhood, dog walking folks etc. Would I miss that?

- As I cross the door with the reusable bag and the jug of milk in my hand, watch at 11:35am 20 minutes later - I visualize these same items sitting in front of our door right after the errand person has  rang our bell (random thought : I have never in my life asked for "help out" at the s/m cashier. It must be different than saving 20 mins of my time)

So, as I retrace my steps, it seems that I would miss a few things. Social activities, event driven interactions etc, opportunities for walk/talking to people etc. But thats wrong. Even if someone is in jail they would find a way to do decorate a definitely unpleasant experience with some social interation, smalltalks, some exercising etc. That doesn't mean that jail (or s/m errands) are a requirement for that. If you were to take all the aspects of our daily routine that are associated with "human logistics" and we are left a "sitting in front of a laptop " with an I/V plugged in , obviously this looks like a dystopia. But humans would soon create apps/services/games that give folks optional environments for interaction and to create social context, events that we care as opposed to events/process that we have to obey, and disciplines that are fully custom suited to our own intellectual needs as opposed to store hours, or physical need requirements.

Losing weight

I want to think that I am not weight obsessed.

Still, the truth is I am weighing every day in the morning and I was very annoyed when Google Health decided to shut down: they were the place I would keep track all my health metrics/measurements. Now all this information resides in a dropbox folder, in an excel.

My justification of why I should care about my weight is that it is a proof of true aging.
I don't think that I care about having wrinkles  white hair or losing my hair. But somehow when I see my old pictures whithout the extra decades of fat deposits that saddens me.

It represents a different form of aging - not so much biologically necessary but probably representing the loss of character youthfullness, addition of bagage, un-necessary things that keep on dragging you down as you grow and make you lose your ability to dream and act the way you would when you were younger.
It is probably part of the same theory : weigh yourself and all your belongings (including mattreses and homes and antiques.. and the less you weight, the more you have in things that don't weight anything but matter, education, relationships, faith, dreams.

So here is my weight : I used to be 150lbs back in 1990 - and it seems that I have been adding half to one pound per year since.

Speed Limits

I read somewhere that the average american spends 30+30 minutes in the daily commute. And I read somewhere else that excluding some folks that live in the L.A. area where the situation is significantly worse of the commute times in Europe - the rest of the US is a relatively less hectic commute drive.

Still US has relatively stricter highway limits than elsewhere and they seem to be enforced more.
The taxi cab that took me from London to drive me to oxford  was doing 100mph (real miles not kilometers) - it was the first time ever I had been in a car going that fast.
I wonder if US had an 90mph highway speed limit, instead of the 65mph would it be a positive or a negative change?.
Thinking of commute time a a dead time a 10%  decrease in the avg commute time , 6mins every day time 300 days ~2000 mins, ie 30 hrs, ie 2 days in terms of waking time. In 50 years thats 100 days so we can say that the average american would have 0.3 years more to enjoy - 0.3% of extra lifetime.

On the other hand we can assume that car fatalities will increase - (they probably didn't increase when we moved from 55 back to 65mph ). Apparently every year in the US 10 out of 100K people die from car accidents (wikipedia). Even more interestingly according to that article, the rate has been dropping steadily during the last 30 years from 30/100K to 10/100K, probably due to car safety improvements in spite if worsening of underlying highway infrastructure ( I did a project with my son about this for a speech and debate lesson), in spite of increased wealth and car ownership( I am guessing here), more early age car ownership (I am guessing here), the speed limit increasing from 55 in the 70s to 65+ now etc etc.

Now, how do you compare a 10/100K fatality with every one gaining (hypothetically) .3 yrs of life?
E.g. , mathematically speaking should you be willing to gain 2 days of extra life in a year at a risk of increasing by 100% your chance to be killed in that year, e.g. your car fatality odds in the year would go from 10/100K to 20/100K?

The answer seems pretty obvious to me: increase by 10/100K my chances to die vs increase my year by 600/100K. Absolutely definitely I would.

Should you buy a coastal home

So, I read somewhere that last year 2012 was a statistical anomaly - in terms of avg earth temperature changes. Apparently most of the recent years the earth's avg temperature is inching up by less than .1 degrees - making all time official records every year. Its a big enough increase to make us more convinced about the global warming but not big enough to make us worry about what will happen to our kids.

Of course 2012 was a full degree warmer - but lets assume that it was a fluke. 

What seems interesting to me is that real estate is completely oblivious to all this talk.

So some of the most beautiful homes in altos, CA right at the beach sell at $3M following the patterns of vacation home real estate elsewhere - in no way affected by their up-coming demise.

Is this right?

So, I believe it is just a matter of lack of information dissemination.

So, lets be specific:

Excluding a post singularity technological feat, most probably our kids will never be able to see what is a natural sand beach by the sea.

Sand takes millennia to be created from the waves breaking sediment. Sand only exists where the waves break, so it is an extremely thin zone, 

less than one meter above the sea and 1-2 meters below the sea surface. We are currently expecting the sea to rise by 1M by 2100 (double the earlier 2005 estimates). The availability of cheaper natural gases more or less guarantee that for at least a decade more earth will be satisfying its energy needs by converting into c02 the carbons that have been pushed into the ground over the last 10s or 100s millions of years of phyto-plankto photosynthesis. 

While it seems (I haven't done that math) mathematically impossible for that mass of ice to melt - it doesn't have to.

To put this into perspective: 

Greenland's ice => 6 mtrs. 

Antarctica's ice => 60 meters rise.

North Pole Arctic Ocean => 0 meter rise.

The later is the most scary. It is typical for a large iceberg that flows into the ocean to takes years and years to melt - single large iceberg can change aggregate earth level temperature and cause global climate changes. Relevance?

1. Melting Floating ice causes NO sea level rise (its obvious if you think why it floats in the first place)

2. The ice doesn't have to melt. It simply has to flow into the oceans.

3. Massive rivers of flowing ice is our picture of the end of the last ice ages. So that is the picture here as well. The ice caps will start flowing into the sea and while it may take centuries to melt they may affect sea level earlier. Of course they may have cause a first negative effect by cooling down the earth before fully melting delaying the "catastrophe" by a few more centuries.

Still all we need is a single meter of sea rise and practical all the beautiful beaches are beautiful no more.

Today's projections make that a probable reality within a generation.

So the Altos coastal homes in 2050 will have no sandy beach in front of them and they will have clear knowledge of their demise within 30 year later.

So this means that in 30 years from now that Altos home will have significantly lower price than today, right?

So it cannot be thought as a long term investment. That should have affected its price TODAY. It will probably start happening 

as soon as the seal level rising rates show some acceleration (from the 20-th century norms) - we can't tell yet.

In my view within 5 years coastal home market is in for a significant swing.

And the Lake Take Sand beach will be even more unique.

How the moon is making the days longer

I was talking the other day with a friend, he was telling me that his biological day cycle is approximately 25hrs long as opposed to 24.

It was the 2nd person that was telling me something like that. I argued a bit with him that night-shifting is probably the result

of eager left-brain wanting to steal more of the night and lazy right-brain wanting to sleep longer in the morning - which results in people going later and later to bed when left in their own devices.

Still my friend was convinced that his clock is actually slower - and it is not the result of what I was explaining so jokingly I told him that he is then the man of the future - he just needs to wait for a bit longer for the earth to reach that period, just like the moon, locked facing us in the same way. He looked at me puzzled and at that point we said goodbye.

The long drive after that is an interesting opportunity for me.

I have 40 minutes, unable to use laptop, internet phone, armed exclusively with logic, memorized facts and various brain tools. 

And I have problem to solve. I am not that different from a post-apocalyptic survivor or someone that landed on a new terra but without any of the equipment. 

So the problem at hand: explain how the moon affected and will affect the earth. Prove any points you make.

1. Memory: the moon was something that came from elsewhere and was captured by the gravitational field of the earth.

2. Observation : The moon always looks the same when lighted up - shows always the same face towards the earth.

3. Memory : Geosynchronous satellites are close enough to earth that allow for communication use

4. Memory : Sending a photo-beam to the moon and getting it back here takes more than a second

5. 1 => the moon is smaller than the earth 

6. 3,4 => the moon is turning around the planet much slower than the planet's own rotation 

7. Memory : No rocky planet is perfectly spherical or perfectly homogeneous.

8. Intuition : Due to the quadratic drop by distance of the gravitational field, a round ball turning around an egg shaped ball, laying flat but with an axis on it center will be pulling stronger the closer part than the further part of the elipsis - as a result it will attempt to pull it so as it aligned with it. It is a matter of time for the ellipsis to start rotating locked with the ball around it. If the ball that turns around the other is  also an egg turning around itself it will also eventually be locked in. In the process the turning ball will be slowed down so as the total rotational momentum of the system will remain constant.

Q: The earth isn't egg shaped.

A: No but it is covered with water. Even though the cover is extremely thin (less than paper thin if earth was an orange) the gravitational pull is shaping the water so as the earth's shape is more like an egg

Q: Water around the earth may be adding an egg-shaped skin but its not hard - it fluidly follows the moon. Isn't that different that the egg example above?

A: Yes it is different. Probably it is more intuitive to think of the tidal move of the water as a wave that keeps its crest toward the moon going around the dart. The wave isn't really circulating the water mass but it should be causing a continuous friction similar to that of a rolling ball on  a surface (the static friction that gives the torque to turn the ball is equivalent to the opposite force (and thus tork towards the surface).

Q: Can we calculate how much was the earth's period before the moon?

A: We know the rotational momentum of the system and the ratio of the masses . We don't know what was the original rotation of the moon around the earth (its now 28 days). We know the rotational speed of both moon (28 days - from (2) ) and the earth (1 day). We don't know the moon's initial rotational speed, neither do we know when it reached its stable point. So overall I don't think we can deduce from the above the earth period before the moon arrival. Given however the huge difference (1 vs 28) of the two periods we can estimate that during the past 4B yrs the earth has been decelerating uniformly (slows down by the same amount (absolute or proportional?) every billion years.  

If I am doing the right things I should be happy - independently of the outcome

The last weeks I feel pretty negative. I am not unhappy, but my continuous integral of my very happy, happy, sad, very sad (note that there is no neutral) moments is quite lower than usual.

I know why. My efforts at work are not meeting the success I would have hope - not in terms of actual work but in terms of the people-stuff. People are unhappy with other people and most of my efforts to fix/improve that have been having moderate if any success.

And I know I am not good at doing that - managing people. I don't really understand people. There too many hidden variables the complexities are not the sort I can abstract. 

So this morning I told myself something that I have said to me in the past and it worked. I am happier. It may be the morning vs evening but I am storing for further reuse.

I should be happy with myself given that I am doing truly all I can do - even if I am doing something that I am not the best at it.

The way this is consistent with my theory that "one is only happy if they are happy with their work

and one is happy with their work if they feel that they are really good at what they do" is that your time both at the short and the long scale

has to be spread in myriad of activities. I am an awful typer - I am a moderate driver - I am a less than average speaker - still I have to do all those things every day and I am happy as long as I am doing my best at them - even if my best is not "good enough" for the situation at hand.

As long as I am maintaining a long term perspective under which I am putting a significant/sufficient part of my time in what I am really good at …. then I should be happy with myself

the suicide of the activist

I usually have a way to shield myself from bad stuff that happens around the world - no matter how horrific they are.

I don't read newspapers. I don't really watch news. I just talk with a very narrow circle of friends.

But this particular event keeps going back at the center of my focus.

In part it is because it is a very sad case about someone that could be happening to any of my friends.

In part because I cannot fully understand it. There is no good and evil here.

It would be nice to assume that this happened because 

  bad people 

    having powerful positions, 

      ignorant about technology, about change, about the new models/ethics that are underlying every single positive trend in the world today

        only caring about their own self-rightness or 

           even worse their own personal bureaucratic ambitions or 

             even worse because they are being financed by evil corporations, modern variants of rober-barrons….

did that.

But in this case the persons behind the state's prosecution are intelligent, knowledgable people, that truly care to do what is the right thing.

How will these folks feel today? They can't be feeling good. They will be feeling horrible and guilty. They won't be using the excuse - the activist was a depressed individual - its not my doing.. because then that would be a good enough excuse for any internet/social network bully. 

I think until society finds a way to deal with the sensitivity that is required in handling people like Aaron, some of the most unique minds will not have a chance to bloom.

Most of the people I know that belong in this category need to fight a massive battle every day just to wake up.

Just to find the courage to deal with the complexity exposed by the brain in every single step. 

They have to deal with people laughing behind their back.

They have to deal with parents that give them pills to get better. 

They have to deal with friends abandoning them because they are a burden.

They have to see the world and all their colleagues around them doing sub-optimal decisions every moment of the day and they have to deal with it.

They have to deal with the loneliness of nobody understand them.

They have to see people become rich from their inventions. 

They have to see others attract the girls/guys that they would like.

And in spite of that they manage to be philanthropist. Create software for the common good. Solve everyone else problems. Bravely defend online those that are weak - even without a hint of body-building in their body.

Escalators - why no progress there

I must have been a small child 40 yrs ago? when I first saw escalators.

I remember they were scary, and I avoid making the first step on them for year. I actually think I remember the first time I let go and step on it.

40 yr later escalator are identical. Not a single change in that invention.

The pattern used for the "merging" of the steps, the elastic handle, even the color everything.

It seems like the perfect invention one that never needed again to be revisited.

But still today I don't like escalator. The vertical lines confuse the depth sensing of my eyes and I am less confident about how far they are.

I don't know the etiquette. Should I pass or not. Am I standing on the way of others or not.

Is this an appropriate distance from someone else but or not. Aren't they going too slow? why don't they accelerate, I guess its impossible by design.

Why are they open? are they only made for stores where you are supposed to be browsing as you are sliding?

The reason that I dislike them the most is I think that I can't think of an obvious way to improve them.

They are standing as an annoying argument against my ever accelerating progragress and change of everything

And so are revolving doors.

Hair teeth and nails

Every morning I am spending any time between 5-30 minutes in a routine that I would have rather not being a necessary %percent of my waking life.

I take a shower, optionally (50% freq) I shampoo my hair, I brush my teeth, optionally shave (50%), optionally clip my hand nails (5%), same for toe (3%). Also at the 4% frequency (once every 4 weeks) I visit the hairdresser to cut my hair, trim my eyebrows (since 45yrs old) (and possibly after a certain age I will be trimming my ear and nose hair. I put gel in my hair to minimize subsequent position change and avoid need for brushing and put antiperspirant in my armpits.

I weigh myself - trying to calculate the amount of fuel net change (i.e. not food in my stomach/interstine) but actual yellow fat=fuel in my body) in a digital scale that requires about a 1-2 mins to calibrate and scale properly.

I exchange smalltalk and pleasantries with whoever is awake make a frappe and go online

The common element on this waking up routine is that they are dealing with the care of the dead parts of my body - where I am describing as dead the nails teeth and hair - even though they are in some sense part of a live bigger cell[s] system.

The live parts of my body are self healing/managing. The dead ones are not. There is still hygiene needed for the daily removal of sigma from the skin

(shower) but even that is primarily concentrated where sigma and dirt more commonly arise (head armpits genitals).

I would rather not have to cut my nails ever.

I don't gain any satisfaction from it.

I would rather if my hair never grow - even though I like my hairdresser the monthly visit to her is a similar annoyance to the quaintly visit to the garage shop for my  oil change.

I have been organize these above routine so as I can be jumping out of bed to online - in anywhere from 5 mins to 25 minutes - and I am very happy about it.

The amount of time/overhead that I have to spend dealing with my dead cell as well as with the dead excrements and byproducts is health-progress indicator

of the "ogt" machine.

Generalizing a bit I would be happier if I were to urinate with half frequency (or not at all) , or that I don't need to daily put antiperspirant to make my human pores excrete less human smell and sigma.

I have recently (last couple of years) stopped eating lunch. I still go to lunch with friends but while they are busily munching I can talk with whoever is not, getting the most of these encounters.

Maybe it is a more general trend.

Why did revolving doors were invented

Climate Control?

  enable caping the air coming with every person to half a cylinder

Traffic Control?

  caping the # of people that can enter a building to avoid mobs, enable a person internal to monitor etc

  (a simple tournike would do)

Easy Lockin / stops the door

me vs not-me blog posts : GL Health Status Indicator

Reading the blog of my friend gl I think I know when he is up or down. I can tell that because he captures in his blog all concrete thoughts of his, and my simplistic pattern matching is that when the frequency of posts about "introspection" increase he is really a bit depressed and he tries to understand why and that put him in an introspective phase. Its a noise weak signal… but then I thought the frequency of the blogs is steady and sufficient so my friend can actually start monitoring the extent of the time that he is introspecting himself over which is obviously an introspecting activity in itself but it could help in regulating it.

So what needs to be done, possibly with the help of a crowdsourced tag is for my friend to get an neutral assessment whether the blog was an Introspective blog or not. then he maintain a chart of the percent of blogs in a week/month of blogs that are about introspection, see the long term pattern and as long as the observation doesn't affect the actual experiment (by avoiding to post introspective blogs to avoid being observed)

etc.