For the past few years I have been using an app on my phone called Fail Blog.  It is a series of pictures that show a ‘fail’.  A fail is when something is obviously wrong.  Take this picture:

Here are a few more:

This is what is called an ‘oddly specific’ fail.  Notice the cow falling among the rocks:

I don’t understand tattoos…

A probable math fail.  Should be 22%

For every fail there is a win:

Yahoo Answers provides excellent fail fodder.  Sometimes you have to wonder if these are real.

Wildlife fail:

This is a failing at fail.  The commentary on this was keyed on the word ‘discriminating’, as if to mean that racists drink coke.  A little education can go a long way.

Teaching fail:

I know where this place is!

Personally, I would have chalked this up to a win:

Analist?

It took this one:

This is a perfect fail.  Auto ads are famous for putting related ads next to stories.  In this case it’s pretty funny:Another failing at fail.  The commentary on this was ‘Grammar fail’.  Actually, it’s correct.

Stranger win!

Nag-a-ram?

My favorite!

This is a response win, husband fail:

Back to editing school!

Hahahaha:

How to protect your elf:

I don’t really know what to say….

Criminal stories a common fails:

I knew there was a link!

Wow:

U-haul.  I don’t think so!

Oh, kids:

Perfect fail.  So perfect that I have to think it is a joke:

Failing at fail.  I am pretty sure that who ever put ‘age fail’ didn’t see the ‘month’ under the 18+:

Beautiful…

Hungry?

I like this one:

D’oh!

But five burgers don’t stack as well as six:

I see what they mean, but still:

This is clearly a win:

Again, a little context changes this.  The ‘No Pets Allowed’ sign is probably for the patch of grass where the sign is located and it is pointing to the dog way down the way:

(note: You may need to allow pop-ups for the poll to work)

I thought I would test drive a poll that has been sitting in my drafts for that past two years.  Now, on to the show.

It is a wonderfully cool 57° this morning.  I have all the windows open and I am waiting for the milkman to show up with our weekly supply of milk and cheese.

I generally dislike talking about the weather.  It is one of the more banal topics, usually reserved for awkward moments, ice breakers or when you’ve exhausted all other possible conversations; however, this time I use it to boast.

We lived in Las Vegas for seven years.  The weather, as many know, it generally hot and dry during the summer.  Here is a snapshot as of 6:09 AM:

My first thought was that it is not really that hot in Vegas today.  I remember in July of 2002 the high was 116°.  Then it rained.  The rain did almost nothing for the temperature, but it did raise the humidity to 100%.  My dad commented that it was like he back in southeast Asia during the summer.

Here is what it is like where I am:

Aaaahhhhh…..

I will say that there are really only three things I don’t miss about Las Vegas.  The weather, the ads for strip clubs and rapid construction (though I think that has abated now).  The people, my job, the abundance of oyster bars: all very cool.

And so it goes.

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For the past five years the whole family joins my in-laws up in Bridgeport, CA for the 4th of July.  Bridgeport is a very small town in the Eastern Sierra mountains and it has a population of 843 people.  On the weekend of the 4th, there are approximately 5,000 people in town.  From what I understand, this is the weekend that the businesses make all their money.

I took a few pictures that I wanted to share.  Let’s start up top ↑:

This is a picture I took on my way back into town after my morning ride.  A great ride, right up US 395.  It was about 6:00 AM so the traffic was very light.  The shoulder of road was adequate for riding, but only for about 3 miles up.  There was some road construction, so I just did the route twice.  I found the above sign amusing because to me it suggests that Bridgeport is not scenic (the poppy in the picture is the sign for a ‘Scenic Route’ in California.  Think Route 66 from Cars’).

This is a close up of the ‘end’ sign from above:

The ‘end’ belongs to the state of California.  The way our government works here, I’m not shocked.

Finally, a ticket I can get behind!

From the fireworks show.  Great show.

There is a rodeo in town, so I suppose this sign at the Hays Street Cafe is apropos.  Still…

We are looking forward to next year when Bridgeport celebrates its 150th celebration of the 4th of July.

And so it goes.

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Here is  a screen shot of my Game Center account for Fruit Ninja.  FN is the game I play when I am bored.  You attempt to slice fruit and earn points.  If you play the multiplayer, as I do, you try to slice more fruit than they other guy.  For every win, you move up in the rankings.  I am currently ranked #796 out of 1,283,153 players.  That puts me in the top 0.00062% of players.  While I think that is sorta cool to be ranked that high, I am a little disturbed by it.  I play about 20 games through out the day.  The games last one minute, so it’s not like I play a lot, I just play consistently.  I keep telling myself that there is nothing unhealthy about it.  I hope I’m correct.

On another note, we need to talk about hyperlinks.  If you see some text that is slightly blue and has an underline when you put your mouse over it (like this right here), you are supposed to click on it.  I use them in my blogs to add an extra dimension, so please, experience the treasure trove of extra content!

And so it goes.

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There are some things in life that you can count on.  Some things that you just know are going to happen.  Some things you can set your watch to.  One of those things is my father.

When I was growing up, it was not uncommon to look for one of my siblings around the house.  ’Dad! Have you seen Biffie?’  Dad’s pat answer, his go-to response, his réponse générale was ‘He got to close to barn and the hogs ate him.’

Many nights I would lie in bed cursing myself for falling prey to that answer.  You would think that after hundreds of times, I would learn.  Lamentably, no.

One evening I, right after I made the standard blunder, I asked my father why he kept saying that.  I think he could hear the irritation in my voice.  He paused and his eyes grew distant.  Having known my father for the better part of my life, I could tell that I had triggered some basal emotion and, being predicable, I knew what to expect.  His eyes squinted slightly and when he spoke there was a catch in his voice.  He asked me to sit down next to him and he proceeded to tell me the whole story…

My father was raised in Owensboro, WA.  The three biggest exports of that little burg were tobacco, hogs and plutonium-239.  Each of these exports were produced in a separate part of the city and they only commingled as they were leaving town.  As you can imagine, the storage requirements for crops, livestock and nuclear fuel carried unique requirements, posing a daunting problem for the city’s sole engineer.  Each of these was transported from the city by rail, and in a town the size of Owensboro, there was only so much room for such a facility.  The decision was ultimately made to create a giant rotating dock where the various cargo could be unloaded in a segreated way.  I did some digging at the Benton County Hysterical Society and I was able to find a copy of the engineers original proposal:

Even to my untrained eye, there is an obvious fatal flaw in this layout.  Everyone knows that when you are organizing Hogs, Tobacco and Fuel, the order must be clockwise pattern of T-H-NF, not H-T-NF.  (Before you ask, yes, I know about the NF-T-H permutation promulgated by  Black and Merton, but I think Merton is a jackass.)

The first few years of the switching yard went smoothly.  Tobacco, Hogs and Nuclear Fuel were loaded into the trains and shipped off to the four corners of the globe.  The tobacco went to Greece, the hogs to Denmark and nuclear fuel went to an undisclosed location.  It was not until the late 50′s when the sun spot activity, seen below between the double pipes, approached it’s zenith that the magnitude of the error was made evident:

=>||

                             =>||

Following the marked crest in 1959, a breech occurred in the wall separating the hogs and plutonium-239.  The fuel was partially consumed by the hogs and they started grow to gigantic purportions.  The hogs, now even more hungry than before, could sense the organic matter behind the tobacco wall and promptly used their now-super intellegence to knock over the wall.  Frankly, I think their gigantic size had more to do with it.  How smart do you need to be to knock over a wall?  Seriously.  Anywho, we now had gigantic radioactive pigs who were eating tobacco.

It took all the effort that the Washington’s Naval Reserve (America’s 17th line of defense, right between the Cub Scouts and the League of Woman Voters) to subdue the beasts.  Look to someone else for a description of the awful slaughter.  I can never repeat what dad told me.  But I can show you a video of the destruction.  Needless to say, the hogs, fuel and tobacco where wiped out.  Or so we thought…

Now, if you have ever known a smoker, you know that when the craving hits you had better get out of the way.  Nothing is going to stop them from getting their nicotine, particularly nothing as trivial as being vaporized in an atomic blast.  The pigs somehow managed to reconstitute themselves and come back to life.  Like I said, these were smart little piggies.  The newly reanimated super turbo action pigs quickly used what was left of the rail yard and constructed a humongous fortress.  A barn actually.  To the surprise of many, the hogs made a demand of a telephone so they could communicate with an unknown party.  Two brave soles from the navy reserve stepped up to take the challenge, Nicholas Bergman and Benjamin Knack.  Since the railroad was still intact enough to a handle a hand car, Nick and Ben were sent to the scene.  This particular hand car, nicknamed ‘the paddy’ was older and it would not pump well, so Bergman and Knack had to whack it with some steel rods to get it moving.  When the day arrived, Nick and Ben loaded the phone equipment on the hand car.  There was some obvious hesitation on their part.  They were being ordered to go into a hog-infested, radioactive and nicotine laced  site.  It looked as if they would not go when their Sargent started screaming, ‘Nick! Knack!  Give the paddy a whack and get that hog a phone!’

They did.  And what happened when they got to close to the barn?  That’s right.  They delivered the phones and were on their way.

Now, having a barn full of atomic hogs who were jonesing for a smoke is not all bad.  It did provide some tourist opportunities.  The constant military presence ensured a constant stream of low ranking government officials who made token visits.  As I said, it was not too bad.  They even set up a alternative fuel plant to convert the hog waste into energy.  As Pop used to say, ‘That smells like money!’  Really, it didn’t.

Years passed away and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange, of a long desert line of traps way back in the bighorn range.  Of a little hut by the great divide with a white man stiff and still, lying there by lonesome self, and I figured it must be Bill.  (I’m sorry.  I went into a Robert Service trance.  Won’t happen again.)

After four or five years of co-existing, the solution was dropped on our laps by none other than the King of Pork, Mr. Jimmy Dean.  The Dean family had been trying to figure out  a way to combine the the rich goodness of pork sausage with the rich goodness of tobacco.  Since the FDA rejected his application for tobacco flavored sausage, he turned to the town to provide them with tobacco-fed pork.  The problem was getting the hogs in a permanently deceased condition, on account’a their tendency to come back to life.  The solution was to come from right under their noses…

As everyone knows, it is common to use boron to slow nuclear reactions.  They had all these power plants that had all this boron, so the logical step was to start to flood the hogs with boron.  That process started in the mid-60s and was finished by 1972.  The hogs had lost their radioactive glow and were now fit for slaughter.  Mr. Dean came in himself to stick the first hog.  It was quite a party.  As the Dean staff winnowed through the herd of hogs, they slowly approached the barn strong hold.  Step by step, they slaughtered and processed, slaughtered and processed.  Then they slaughtered and processed more.  Now they were within inches of the barn.  The doors started to creaked open, showing only a razor thin beam of light.  As the door swung ponderously, the remaining hogs started to march out in a very deliberate pace.  There they were, face to face, the hogs and butchers.

It took many years for commission to finally establish what went wrong.  The report was over 500 pages, so I’ll just boil it down for you: The butchers got to close to the barn.  The hogs, despite their reduced girth, still maintained their super-intelligence.  No one had counted on that.  The lead pig started to bark commands (well, grunt, really).  The pigs circled the hapless butchers, teeth bared with an evil vengeance in their eyes.  Revenge would be theirs today.  The butchers got to close to the barn.  With squeals of triumph, the pigs lunged forward, eager for their meal.  The butchers pull out their knives to defend themselves.  But it was too late.  The butchers had got to close to the barn.

And the hogs ate them.

My great-grandfather was one of the butchers who lost their lives that day.  At the wake, they served Mr. Dean’s tobacco fed pork sausage, which my father felt was in poor taste.  I mean literally, it tasted awful.  People died for this?  It was on that day that my father coined his phrase, more as an emotional protection than anything else.

No one ever did find out what the phones were for, or if they were even used.  I supposed we should worry.  What’s the worst that could happen…

******************************************************************************************************

My fathers shoulders dropped, signifying the end of the story.  A deep silence permeated the air.  Could this have really happened?  Why was this the first time we had heard about it.  Had the history books been wiped clean?  We all stared at my father with a mix of respect and horror.  Unsure of the veracity of the story, we all pressed him to tell us the truth.   To this day he has maintained the story.  Sure the dates, people, location and variations of plutonium changes, be the story’s core message is constant:  Don’t talk to dad when he’s been drinking.

And so it goes.

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Happy Father’s Day to dads of all kinds.  Speaking of fathers…

These glasses belong to my father-in-law, Pete.  We hit the farmers market this week and I noticed Pete’s glasses.  I haven’t seen a pair of Vuarnets in probably 20 years.  A picture of my brother immediately came to mind.  This picture is of him wearing a blue and gold rugby shirt from the high school rugby team, his long blonde hair, his high school acne, his car, and his Vuarnets.  So to summarize:

• Rugby
• Long blonde hair
• An aqua-blue ’65 Chevy Super Sport Impala
• Vuarnets

What struck me was the way I remembered this picture.  It was not just a flat picture, but more of a multi-dimensional picture, a welter of imagines cascaded until what I was remembering was only related to original subject by implication.  Here is how that original list panned out:

• Rugby

• Blue and gold rugby shirt

• Rugby shirts have a single piece u-neck so they won’t tear when someone grabs your shirt
• They also have rubber buttons to protect the players eyes in case one comes off
• Long blonde hair

• Biffie refused to cut his hair for a long time
• My great-grandmother had very long brown hair, much like Biffie’s
• Acne

• Biffie took Accutane to help with his acne

• Accutane can result in deformed bones or cancer

• Biffie used to give his Accutane to Brett because he also had acne

• Brett played in a death metal band and I bought their first (only?) album
• Accutane also causes dry lips

• Biffie used to carry Carmex with him all the time.  We still find old containers around the house 20 years later
• An aqua-blue ’65 Chevy Super Sport Impala

• My mother bought this car brand new in 1965 after graduating from nurses school.

• Pop (my grandfather) wouldn’t let her get the big motor, just a 283
• The car had a black interior because Pop wouldn’t let her get white
• A garbage truck backed into the car and dented the quarter panel

• That dent let to a complete rebuild of the car
• Vuarnets

• Vuarnets have V inscribed on the lens
• Biffie scratch the bottom of his frames so he could identify the glasses if they were stolen.  And they were.  I don’t know if he ever got them back…

(The format of this just didn’t turn out quite right.  It is supposed be hierarchical, but wordpress doesn’t support that bullet style to well.)

Most of that came to me with 10 seconds of seeing the glasses.  I titled this posted ‘Relational Database’ because I feel like my brain built a giant query and sent me the results.

What would be really interesting is to know how much of what I ‘remember’ never really happened…

And so it goes

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]]> http://fermatd.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/relational-database/feed/ 0 Sean Vuarnet http://fermatd.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/calling-all-bloggers/ http://fermatd.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/calling-all-bloggers/#comments Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:59:01 +0000 Sean http://fermatd.wordpress.com/?p=765 ]]>

Ok, so I had fully intended to write a post inviting five people to guest blog on fermatd.  I figured the best place to start would be with the following opening:

‘It has been said that 1,000 monkeys with typewriters would eventually produce a work of Shakespeare.  Thanks to the internet, we now know that is not true.  How would you like to be a monkey?’

Pretty decent opening.  Short, funny enough for a chuckle, a common enough reference that your average person would get the context.  I had to tweak the quote a bit to make it fit my purpose.  Standard stuff.   The next step was to insert a hyperlink to a random webpage about monkeys and typewriters.

And that is when the wheels came off the bus.  I mean completely off.

If you enter ’1000 monkeys’ into Google, the first page that come up is a wiki page titled, ‘Infinite monkey theorem – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia’.  (cue poor British accent) ‘Ello, what’s all this then?  My first thought was that this is a token page with the theorem and a few anecdotal examples.

I click.

What follows is a very thorough summary of the typing monkey theorem, followed by the statistical proofs to attempt to support or refute the idea.  Here is my favorite part of the article:

Even if the observable universe were filled with monkeys the size of atoms typing from now until the heat death of the universe, their total probability to produce a single instance of Hamlet would still be many orders of magnitude less than one in 10^183,800. As Kittel and Kroemer put it, “The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event…”, and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed “gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers.” This is from their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys.^[1]

Am I going to quote the above the next time I become embroiled in an asinine problem at work?  Oh yeah.

And there you go.  I start my blog by poking fun at a ridiculous concept only to be humbled by the amount of work a group of people put into to proving that monkeys can’t write Shakespeare.  Those are some damn industrious monkeys, er, people.

And so it goes.

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1. Kittel, Charles and Herbert Kroemer (1980). Thermal Physics (2nd ed.). W. H. Freeman Company. pp. 53. ISBN 0-7167-1088-9.

G?

No, GE!

No, G-Free!

Both my wife and the Alpha Child have a gluten sensitivity.  It isn’t full blow Coeliac disease, it is enough to floor both of them in different ways.  Alpha has a very severe eczema.  We put her on a G-free diet about five months ago.  Her skin went from being broken, split and irritated to irritated and hivey.  Believe it or not, that is a big improvement.  She used to have cracks in her skin that would bleed and become infected.  She still has scratching fits, but overall there is an improvement.

My wife had a attack of diverticulitis.  It runs in the family.  For the past year she was really struggling with the aftermath of the attack.  A few months ago I was reading and article in the WSJ about gluten sensitivity.  It was as if the journal interviewed my wife and wrote an article about what she was going through.

Now that both of them have successfully transitioned to a G-free diet, I have found myself doing more food prep to support that.  Key in this endeavor is making bread at least once a week.  You would be appalled at the amount of money you can spend on a loaf of gluten free bread.  My daughter will buy some from the baker at the farmers market for $3.00 a loaf ($4.00 for everyone else).  I get a box mix and use it to make two loaves at a time.  I also make flax bread for my wife, as well as deyhdrated almonds.

The new hit in the house is rice pasta.  It cooks differently, but once you throw on some sauce, you’d never know the difference.  I used to make a pound for dinner, but the boy eats so much of it that I have had to switch to at least 1.5 lbs just to keep up.

Since going G-free, Alpha has lost about five pounds.  She has never been overweight, but losing five pounds made her look healthier.  I guess that is a common G-free side effect.  Maybe I should do that too….

My wife has started reading a book by Elisabeth Hasselbeck, from that Afternoon Yak show, about how to be G-free.  An interesting aspect is that it covers the social aspect of how to inform a party host that you won’t be eating their yummy spread.  Or how to handle the situation where someone shoves a piece of sourdough bread in your face and tells you that you must try this!  Food is such a part of people’s identities that you can offend someone if you don’t take the proper approach.

The comforting part is that she is not alone.  There are a great number of moms-with-kids-who-have-gluten-problems-have-blogs-that-tell-you-all-about-it.  Wifey always has lots of ideas to that are gleaned from those blogs.  My MIL even sent a great cookbook.  Come to think of it, I think she sent the G-free book as well…

Great ride this  morning.  5 miles.  It’s a start.

And so it goes.

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So, I work at a bank.  I have to admit, it is a nice gig.  We get every federal holiday off and the most vacation I’ve ever had.  My department doesn’t keep banker’s hours, but we don’t work a crazy schedule either.  The poor accounting department though…

We don’t have a lot of exposure to residential real estate, so we escaped the slaughter that has infected other major banks.  Almost.

In statistics there is something called survivorship bias.  The premise is that if you are measuring, say, mutual funds, and you only include those funds that didn’t shut down, you will be overstating your performance because those funds that didn’t survive aren’t around to drag down your average returns.  Or the winner’s curse, where a company tries to take over someone else and outbids everyone to the point where they win the company, but have over paid so much that they will never find value in the transaction.

I’d like to steal those two phrases and reuse them.

Survivorship bias is a bias against the banks who did things well.  If you have a bank account then you are probably familiar with:

Well, the money that is used to pay that $250,000 comes from insurance premiums paid by member banks.  As more banks fail, more money is needed to fund the insurance.  Since there are fewer banks, the surviving banks need to pay more to make up for both the increased risk and smaller pool of premiums.

In the same vein, the winners curse applies because we didn’t lose, we are cursed with higher premiums.

I wonder what the word is for people who purposely misuse existing phrases to fit their own agenda.

Another aspect of the increased government oversight of banking is that we are required to keep more capital on hand to meet expected future losses.  Basically, we are required to reserve our profits from today in anticipation of losses tomorrow.  As a result we would have posted a profit of $30 million for 2010.  Then the regulators came in, shook the magic 8-ball and read:

A quick reference to a random number generator told them that we should reserve $50 million against future losses.  All of the sudden we had to post a $20 million loss.  (Needless to say, these are our real numbers, but you get the idea.)

I admit I am being flippant about the process, but at the end of the day, it’s our accounting mumbo-jumbo against their regulatory mumbo-jumbo.  Some day, we’ll recover from all of this and get back on track.  What I  am most interested to see is the new financial crisis that results from the rules imposed from this financial crisis.  I predict that the new regulations will cause a spike derivatives, led by midgets taking a short position on Bonds, who they think he won’t be prosecuted for PEDs.   Cattle growers will then be bullish on futures, fooling the dance teachers into thinking the markets are in contango.  Naturally, this will lead the auto manufacturers to invest heavily in the ABS market, not realizing that it won’t keep the credit markets from seizing up.

I’ll bet all of my WaMu stock that this happens.  Any takers?

And so it goes.

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For the past four years, my father and kids and I attend the local farmers market on Saturday morning.  I try and get most of our fresh fruits and veggies there, along with bread and flowers.  There is an olive oil vendor, Mr. Bariani, who always comes out to talk to the girls.  This past Saturday, he gave our youngest a pink rose with all the thorns taken off.

One of my hobbies is preparing (and consuming) raw food.  I buy my dill and cliantro from the Vang family.  Onions and apples from the Mendoza’s.  The flowers from a booth I don’t the name of.  Oil olive from Mr. Bariani and strawberries from a farm in Oxnard.  Just about everything I need is at the market.

Generally speaking, the food we buy at the market is purchased from the people who grow it.  Most grow within 100 miles of where we buy.  Most of the food sold at the market is what is in season at that time.  I can’t buy apples in the summer.  Asparagus is only available for two, maybe three months.  Squashes are just coming in now and the carrots are now long and skinny, instead of the winter variety, which are short and fat.

These are great lessons for the kids as well.  The earth was designed to produce certain things at certain times.

There are now two markets as well as a store that is supposed to be an indoor, full-year market.  I’ll have to check that one and see if passes the hippie test.

If you have a market around you, I encourage you to check it out.

Anyone have any good farmer stories?

And so it goes.

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]]> http://fermatd.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/717/feed/ 1 Sean