The above chart shows the frequency distribution of seeds to make it to the final four. Can you see the #11 at one chance in 84? A #11 has never won the championship in the past 21 years, as shown in the chart below.
In spite of all of this impressive charting and number crunching I have no possible chance of winning my March Madness pool, but this year that is just like everyone else out there. 
As if there isn't enough rampant intellectual property protection in this country - Slate writes that The Council of Fashion Designers of America(CFDA warning flash) are lobbying Congress to gather support for a bill to offer copyrightlike protection to clothing designs.The open and accepted practice of fashion designers "paying homage" to the designs of others isn't seen as unpunished piracy, but rather as part of the normal creative flow upon which design itself thrives. And, although it is less exalted, the practice of mass retailers such as H&M and Zara selling knockoffs of high-style designs is seen as an accepted and important part of the fashion business.
Courts have traditionally insisted on seeing clothing as a "useful article" unprotected by copyright, at least in part out of fear that to do otherwise would be to create style "monopolies" that would chill creativity and increase prices.The CFDA wants to change that. They want to piggyback off of a 1998 law that is used to copyright boat hull designs. I am sure a dress shaped like a boat hull would certainly be haute couture, or would it be boat couture?
The Matrix is on television right now (as it is always somewhere in cableland) and Morpheus is (not) telling Neo what the matrix is, because as Morpheus says:"Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself."After watching this movie for the millionth time and having it seep into every bit of our culture, it is actually vaguely annoying after a while. For instance, some quotes from Morpheus showing his inability to actually describe the Matrix:
"There'’s nothing I can say that can explain it for you. Come, see for yourself."or this description:
"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."How about these quotes I just came up with, you just have to do it in threes - "The Matrix is the kleenex you blow your nose with, it is the paint you are watching dry, the watched pot that never boils." or this one "The Matrix is the dog doo on your shoe, the smell of your ruined carpet and the cleaning bill you must pay." You know, I have finally figured it out, and I volunteer this description to help out Morpheus.
There is a total solar eclipse tomorrow starting in South America, tracking across North Africa and into western Asia. I had hoped to be on an eclipse tour on a cruise in the Mediterranean and on the Libyan/Chad border to see it but visa issues and the fact that the United States isn't the most popular country in the Arab world right now would have left a high probability of a canceled trip, so we didn't try.
Electricity deregulation started in 1999 in Delaware is set to finally bear its rotten fruit on May 1st. Unless the legislature does something to prevent or delay the 59% increase in electricity rates, Delmarva Power residential customers are going to have heftier bills just as summer air conditioning begins to slurp up the juice.
Tina Farr must have received the same letter (click to the left to see) as all Delmarva power customers and I did. She points out in a letter to the editor that the rate increase only affects the supply part of your electric bill and not the delivery. Tina calls Delmarva Power to task for their obfuscation of the real increase. She calculates that the delivery portion will actually increase 75% in the summer and 104% in the winter, but that when averaged with the unchanged delivery portion averages to 59%. That is the increase we will see in our bills. In the Delmarva Power letter I received:The new SOS supply and transmission charges set to take effect May 1st are:The current winter rate from my bill is $.052372 per kWh for the first 500kWh so you can see why the above is a whopping increase. Don't bother looking for the rates (or tariffs) on the Delmarva power website, they point you to useless 114 page .pdf documents.
- Summer- $0.110382 per kWh;
- Winter - $0.122175 per kWh for the first 500kWh and $0.104943 per kWh for winter usage over 500 kWh.
"Delmarva Power has proposed a three step phase-in of the higher rates for residential customers, with one third of the increase effective May 1,2006. Another one third would take effect January 1, 2007, and, assuming no further increases in wholesale prices, the final third would take effect June 1,2007."They do include a chart showing where we will stand with respect to other electricity suppliers in the region. I have taken the data and replotted it here.
The red bar represents the estimated $144.03 monthly bill for a typical 1000kWh month vs. a low of $102.78 from the Delaware Electric Co-Op to a high of $167.84 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Let me point out again that commercial customers do have choices and hence there is competition and better rates for that market. Competition failed to materialize in the residential market in Delaware, thus there is one source for us Delmarva customers, and one price. This increase just makes me want to get solar panels for electricity and hot water generation even faster. Definitely for the next house.
We visited Colonial Williamsburg this past weekend. The Magazine and Guardhouse there is protected by a wall and a large ring of wooden spikes to prevent anyone from attacking it and capturing the gunpowder and weapons. This was much more important around 1775 or so.
From the government knows better that you do files: Local police in Texas went into bars and arrested people for public intoxication. They were not wearing jack boots, but undercover agents were watching people for public intoxication. On the Today show I saw that they even arrested people drinking in the hotel bar that they were staying in! Also arrested was the bartender for serving drinks to someone who was intoxicated. In my opinion, that is not too far from drinking in your own house; think of the hotel as your rented house and the bar as your rented living room.
The round of 32 is slightly more difficult to analyze because there is correspondingly less data, only 336 matchups over 21 years, and they are dependent on the results of the first round and the way the brackets are structured. Still, we can draw some conclusions. Surprisingly #10's beat #2's almost half the time, and #12's are almost as successful against #4's. The data reveal that a significant number of upsets occur in the round of 32 as well.
Saw this in Delaware the other day. Apparently the way to answer a question from God now is to put it on your license plate - "YES GOD". Do they have another car with "NO GOD" on it?
In my haste to gather my stuff and pack to go home from a recent business trip, I accidentally grabbed the arm chain cover from the chair of the lovely Victorian B&B that I stayed at. While I think the arm chair cover adds a class to my workspace and deskchair that it previously lacked (why couldn't I have gotten two!), I will be sure to send the cover back to the rightful owners. Interior decorating by unintentional kleptomania only hurts everyone involved.
This picture from the Delaware Art Museum by Howard Pyle is entitled "Caxton at His Press" and is from a book called "The Bibliomania or Book-Madness, History, Symptoms, and Cure of This Disease" by Thomas Frognall Dibdin (note: the museum has Frogall, but wikipedia and the internet seem to suggest Frognall). It is a suitable photo for a bibliomaniac such as myself.
I took the list and performed a log-log plot of library holdings vs. the book rank so that I could see the full range of the holdings (they go from 800,000 at the top of the list to about 5000 at #1000), and to do some simple analysis. The Bible and the 2000 Census definitely stand out out of all proportion to the other books on the list. The log-log slope of -1/2 is the kind of power law distribution expected for a popularity list like this one and reflects the effect of The Long Tail (see also the blog The Long Tail). The popular books are popular but there is a long tail of books that libraries still stock because someone somewhere wants to read them. For example, the power law means that for every 4 times greater ranking (#10 to #40) there are about half the number of books at that rank(39,000 to 23,000), but this means you still have 5000 holdings down at rank #1000.
Earlier, when I was waxing enthusiatic about space and our prospects for reaching it, I mentioned a secret government space plane (the articles refer to it as Blackstar). I was relieved that a secret space plane might actually exist, even as the Space Shuttle program seems to be winding down this decade. Speculation about this space plane was picked up by BoingBoing and appears to be debunked in the Space Review.
The high wind warnings inspired me to go fly a kite today, unfortunately just as the wind warnings expired. I did get a few flights of my really cool rocket ship kite with big exhaust streamer before the wind died down.
It is about 14 feet long and I only had a few Charlie Brown moments when the kite dove toward me to try to kill me. You just have to show them who's boss. It's a shame when the kite tries to bite the hand that flies it.
Today, March 14th is Pi day (for obvious reasons). Some fun things you should do today:Search for your phone number or other interesting string of digits in the first 200 million digits of Pi.Ye Olde CIT Cheer
E to the X, dy dx, e to the y, dy,
tangent, secant, cosine, sine,
3.14159
square root, cube root, log of e
watercooled slipstick, CIT!
The movie Armageddon was on this weekend (as it always is somewhere in cable space). I am amused that, given the current state of the Space Shuttle program, in the movie they pull out a super Shuttle that the Air Force has supposedly built in secret. This same idea was also used in a recent West Wing episode. I've often wished that there was some secret program producing a better Space shuttle so that we would have some hope of maintaining our space faring capability, and because I have a higher chance of flying in a space plane to space than a rocket. Aviation Week reports that not only does such a clandestine program exist but that it has already been canceled. The article is shrouded in rumor and innuendo, but it would be great if someone would suddenly reveal a finished space plane.
Another way into space is a space elevator. This is a very common theme in science fiction, I was recently reminded of it having just completed "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi in which the characters are lifted from earth to space using a space elevator. There is an article in IEEE Spectrum on the feasibility of building a space elevator. There is the obligatory requirement of using carbon nanotube fibers for the cable because no known material would be light enough to withstand the stresses required for an elevator from Earth's surface to geostationary orbit and beyond. The author of the article presents a reasonable estimate of the cost of the elevator and the feasibility of building one using current or soon to be available technologies. A $10 billion space elevator could take the cost of putting a kilogram into orbit from $20,000 down to $200 and eventually to $10.
This South American prehensile tail porcupine was so intensely eating its South American prehensile tail porcupine chow. It was the cutest thing. He remained unperturbed by the crowds, the picture taking, or even the flowers.
It may say welcome but they don't really mean that. I would have been thrown out of the place if I stepped on those "stones".
- A perfect specimen of Venus Fly Trap (Dionaea muscipula) captured up close at the Philadelphia Flower Show. I am glad these things don't get as big as Triffids, nor did the owner name it Audrey II. These were only about an inch across.
The president of the class of 2008 at Lehigh University was arrested for robbing a bank back in December. Look how rosy cheeked and full of potential he is. How could this happen? There are the usual "best friend since high school couldn't believe he could do this" stories. Did these friends not know of his $5000 in gambling debts? His lawyer is playing up the gambling addiction angle, but I am not sure if he is playing up the "addicted to robbing banks" angle. Those college kids and their pranks.
Often when a professional golfer changes his or her golf swing they get worse before they get better. I heard it described chiastically this way today:When they are struggling they are -The same applies to teaching card games, scrabble, or chess. You win at the beginning, but eventually your student becomes the master.
"Great to play against because they are terrible"
but eventually they become
"Terrible to play against because they are great."
Science, in their NetWatch section, points Conusophiles to the Burke Museum site with information about the 3000 or so catalogued Conus species. Someone loves these little mollusks. Here is an example of the many type specimen pictures chosen, of course, for its name. (Conus richardbinghami) Go and pick your favorite.
I just finished reading "So Yesterday" by Scott Westerfield. He writes smart books for young adults. This one is about a cool hunter that finds the coolest shoes in the world. The shoes and his employer go missing and this leads him on a merry chase to find the kidnappers, or is it to find the maker of the shoes. The Westerfield books tend to be a fast read for me, but I enjoy them because he certainly doesn't talk down to his young adult reader. I might even say that he talks up. As an example, every so often Scott Westerfield puts in an aside as a short chapter with some facts that are both interesting and help to move the story along. These asides have caused me to do more research on the subjects of the book, I can't imagine a young reader incurious enough that they don't do the same.
Portable radiation detectors used to detect radioactive materials in trucks were sensitive enough to catch a woman on the way home from a medical procedure. The woman had just had a stress test which required the injection of radioactive material and was driving down the highway after the procedure when she was detected by inspectors in a parked vehicle. (from FARK)
During one of our trips to NIST, where the experiments were performed, one of the group had just undergone a medical test similar to the one of the woman above that involved injecting a radioactive tracer. The sensitivity of the radiation detectors at NIST was so high that this newly radioactive group member could set them off from 40 feet away. His residual radioactivity was so high that he could make you fail the test (proclaimed with loud alarms and flashing lights) while you were in the machine and he was far away. It was great (if a bit geeky) fun.
Tonight another intrepid band of trivia wizards, some veterans some rookies, bested 17 other teams at the St. Ann's Trivia Night in a display of supreme intellectual pugilism the likes of which Wilmington has rarely seen. Careful readers will recall the jubilant news from last November, the first trivia contest win of this team. Well we did it again - the first team ever to repeat a winning performance. The questions seemed harder, there are ten rounds of ten questions each, but our score was higher than the last time and was the highest of the night. Soon the thinker trophy will return for more adventures.
As part of our intimidation strategy we created a T-shirt for the team. The team name, "Seven Smart People and Paul", served as the inspiration. The back of the T-shirt has seven smart people (and Paul) on it. See if you can think (without clicking on the links) of the claim to fame of the people on the list, remember they are all smart.
Clockwise from the top: Albert Einstein, Mary Shelley, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, James Joyce, and Rosalind Franklin.
A Irishman comes into a bar and orders four beers all at once. The bartender is a little shocked and not sure if he is allowed to serve them all, so he tells the guy that he doesn't have to take them all at once. The Irishman, Patty, explains himself, "I'm one of four brothers from County Cork in Ireland. The oldest is Seamus, and he stayed back in the old country to take care of Da and Ma. Sean went down under to Australia to make his fortune, Francis is traveling Europe, and I came to America to live with my cousins. Back at home we always went down to the pub together, so we made a pact that wherever we were, we would lift a pint to the others health, in the hopes of being together again someday." The bartender was touched and of course serves Patty all his drinks.tags: Lent, religion, joke
As time goes by, the bartender gets used to Patty coming in and ordering his four beers all at once, til one day Patty shows up and only orders three beers. The bartender doesn't know what to think so he goes up to Patty and asks what's the matter. He asks, "your oldest brother Seamus hasn't passed away has he?" "No", Patty replies. Out of concern the bartender presses, "was it Francis or Sean?' Patty says, "Me brothers are fine, why are you asking?" The bartender points out that Patty only ordered three pints this time instead of the usual four for himself and his brothers.
Patty answers, "Don't worry, my brothers are doing well, I'm just giving up drinking for Lent."
