the corner office

This article about casino carpets being so ugly (via) gives an amusing insight into human nature. The article points to an exhibition of ugly carpets and ended off speculating why carpets are designed to be so ugly, with a not unreasonable suspicion that they're there to encourage gambling, much like the lack of windows and clocks. Fair enough, but then some bloke mailed in to say:

I have a friend who teaches at Cornell's famous School of Hotel Administration; she has a lot of casino designer contacts. According to her, the carpets are deliberately designed to obscure and camouflage gambling chips that have fallen onto the floor. The casinos sweep up a huge number of these every night. So the carpets are just another source of revenue.

Which is exactly the kind of explanation people delight in, because it affirms our belief that we're victims of greedy predators. As a fun experiment pick up a newspaper or visit the BBC website and see what proportion of articles are written in a way that is based on this premise.

Then along came someone to say no, it's actually an oft-repeated urban myth, and carpets are bright and intricate because they hide wear and tear. And as for the 'evul casinos scooping up dropped chips' argument, there was this comment:

I also asked one of my best friends, who works at the Wynn and went to school with me about it. She responded, "Trust me, if someone drops a chip and can't find it, they're not letting it go. They're coming to me demanding compensation."

I think it's altogether more plausible that most people in casinos count their chips very carefully, are likely to go to great lengths to find their chips if they drop them, and would scream blue murder if they think any have gone missing (due to theft or otherwise). Yet we're willing to believe that casino-goers are simpletons who can't hang onto their chips, because that fits in with our far-preferred sense of victimhood.

How does BiC stay in business?

BiC pens have been a part of my life as far back as the 80s when I first learned to grasp at something more sophisticated than a crayon; I remember the TV advert with Coco the Clown doing his balancing act on 2 pens and then hopping off and signing an autograph for the kid staring up in wonderment. "Writes first time, every time". Except they don't, and if I think about it, maybe they never have.

For every pack of BiC pens you buy, only about one in three will actually work. Of those that work, only one in three will last beyond a week. Of those, only one in three will write without blotches and splotches that smear across the paper and stain your hands. And then, left with one precious pen that'll write properly, it'll disappear within days. I can only presume that there's a BiC Fairy somewhere, jealously guarding underground vaults containing the world's few working-as-advertised BiC pens.

When you buy BiC pens, you're not buying pens so much as you're buying a vague aspiration of being able to commit something to paper. Yet we still keep buying them.

What BBC boss Mark Thompson doesn't include in his broadside against Sky is that Sky, regardless of its shortcomings, has become a behemoth because it makes paying customers happy. The BBC, regardless of its merits, is a behemoth because the government can throw people in jail if they don't pay their TV licences.

The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer.

Libertarian (leaning*) Republican congressman Ron Paul.

I'm not sure I agree with the notion that the Islamophobia is purely down to justifying wars in the Middle East, I think a reasonable proportion of the most devout in any religion/tribe aren't happy unless they've got an enemy.

(* the man is not without his conservative views, socially)

I'm sorry, when MI6 dude gets found in a suitcase, then 'jealous lover' is not the sort of explanation the news-reading public wants to hear.

The LA Times has done something which is causing a bit of a stir in the USA. Instead of the usual ranking of schools and districts etc etc, they've taken school data and are ranking individual teachers. Teachers are ranked based on the progress of their pupils, based on how pupils' own marks improve or deteriorate. The article (via) makes for interesting reading.

The harshest part of it is what it means for teachers (the article has a good few examples). What if the data suggests that you're one of the worst teachers in the district? How do you step into a classroom and face children who know this, and are likely to make sure you know they know, how do you even try to teach effectively or improve when parents are flocking to the principal insisting that their kids be removed from your class? Unions are already rather unhappy.

Yet if our education systems really are all about the children, if education is really that important, then are these problems not worth the benefits? On what grounds could you really object?

One criticism which could be levelled is that the ranking methodology isn't fair or representative of real performance. It may result in unfair ratings for some teachers. A counter-argument would be that these sorts of systems would improve over time, especially so as they get used and researched and refined. The main one comes back to the thing we like to believe the most: if education is that important, should such systems be derailed or prohibited because of a few false readings?

I like reading paragraphs like this:

Deolalikar’s paper is 102 pages long and less than about 48 hours old, so nobody has yet read it carefully. ... The consensus among the experts who have at least skimmed the paper seems to be that it is a) not crazy (which already puts it in the top 1% of papers that have addressed this question), b) teeming with creative ideas that are likely to have broad applications, and c) quite likely wrong.

(The paper in question tries to answer the P vs NP problem, a fundamental question in computer science that nobody knows the answer to, and which is quite well explained in lay terms here.)

Few topics lend themselves to such rich imagery. 'Milk snatching' Tories with fangs and red veiny eyeballs and pointy tails, horned shadows cast large on the wall, long, searching fingers reaching to take the sippy-cup from the plastic-lined table in the nursery, while little Alphonse sits, powerless, traumatised, wailing at the sheer injustice and impending malnutrition of it all.

So no surprise that Dave nixed the idea. Yet the majority of UK parents can afford to keep their kids tanked up on plenty more than a third-pint of moojuice a day, and all this free milk to those who don't need it reduces how much is available to help those who need it most. Given these two things, I'm hard pressed to see what moral justification there is for providing such a 'universal' benefit.

This article on tomorrow's 'solar tsunami' tries to walk the tight don't-mislead-the-public line between We're All Going To Die and The Northern Lights Will Be Pretty And Your Transistor Radio Might Crackle A Bit.

That would a reasonable inference, if it were not for the last line of the article:

A Nasa spokesman was unavailable for comment.

To which all reasonable-thinking people would respond 'Why's the spokesman not available? Where is he? Why aren't they answering the phones?'

I love seeing robot learning. Behold a robot arm learning to flip pancakes:

By the end of the video I was hovering between 'the movements look so human, it's freaking me out' and 'hmmm, I'm hungry.'