Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Saw this game linked from Lore. Mildly addictive; it’s easy to win, but there’s a lot of replay value in trying to get your time down. I’m not sure what the lower limit is; I’ve done it in 15 days/rounds (solution below the fold) and think it would be difficult (but not necessarily impossible) to do better. Strangers on the Internet do claim to have done so, and it is possible that they’re not all lying scoundrels.

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Rules are funny things. I’ve recently been looking closely at the rules governing boxing matches. Under those rules, there’s a special case carved out for low blows, which are treated more leniently than any other foul. This might be a little inside-baseball, but I think it’s kind of funny.

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So, apparently there is some nude video of ESPN professional hottie Erin Andrews floating around on the Internet. She, her lawyers, ESPN, their lawyers, et al, are officially appalled. The thing is, they also seem to be doing everything they can to draw attention to a (reportedly) blurry, obscure, ambiguous video that probably would have been lost amidst the Internet’s vast archive of low-quality soft-core pr0n if no one had said anything.

Call me cynical, but I can’t stop thinking of the old adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. I’d never heard of this gal before this story broke, and I haven’t thought about ESPN in years. Now I’m writing about both. Ah well.

This, however, is the last moment I will waste on either of them.

The U.S. GDP is approximately 14 trillion dollars. U.S. net worth is approximately 60 trillion dollars. Were production to stop in the U.S., its accumulated wealth would only sustain its rate of consumption for 4 years. The point of this fanciful (and somewhat absurd) thought experiment is that the prosperity of the United States, or of any nation, or of any individual, is primarily related to what that nation or individual produces, and only secondarily related to what that nation or individual owns.

If you want to prosper, the only real way to do it is to enhance your productivity. The primary importance of wealth is that it enhances productivity, either your own, or, when loaned out, that of other people.

(In passing: “working hard” isn’t the same thing as “being productive”.)

I once purchased a “bagless” vacuum cleaner, thinking that it would be convenient to not have to worry about keeping up a supply of vacuum cleaner bags. (To be fair: that part went according to plan.) What I did not consider carefully enough was that a vacuum cleaner collects dirt. Large volumes of dirt. Large volumes of fine, powdery dirt. And, when you open the vacuum cleaner to dump out the “dirt cup”, clouds of the stuff get everywhere.

To make matters worse, the model that I bought featured two filters that also required cleaning. Some people claim that newer designs have addressed the shortcomings of earlier models, but I doubt that you can engineer your way around the clouds-of-dust problem. Without, you know, trapping the dust inside a bag of some kind.

Seth Godin has got a pretty good post up on “the law of the little shovel”. (Basically, if you have limited resources, and want to make a big impact, you need to concentrate.) It’s a good metaphor. And since I pick on Seth from time to time, props seemed in order.

Today marks one year since I began regular posting on this blog. It also marks the 200th post, which is the sort of coincidence that makes me happy. So, some brief reflections.

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As in the XKCD comic to the left, sometimes I just can’t resist a good rant. I hope you’ll indulge me. Scott Adams has put a post up on his blog that contains a large number of wrong-headed notions. In fact, they’re so wrong-headed that I wonder whether or not he’s engaged in one of his periodic efforts to wind his readers up. Nevertheless, some criticism follows, possibly including naughty words.

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