The Kindness of Strangers

1. My little sister is a Rhodes Scholar! Woot!

2. Is Nancy Pelosi pissing you off, too? I thought we had moved beyond ignorant, crony-favoring politicians. Let’s hope she doesn’t screw things up for 2008.

3. And since I seem to like using my LJ to launch web sites, here’s a new one:

Bill and I have been slaving over this site for months, and we’re finally (slowly) releasing it to the public. We think it’s (by far) the best Sudoku web site out there… for once, it’s more fun to solve Sudokus on the computer than it is with pencil and paper!

We wrote everything from scratch (puzzle generator, hint machine, solver UI, etc.), in javascript, c, perl, and python. It was a lot of fun but also lots of work.

So, if you (a) like Sudokus or (b) like any of my previous LJ posts, please link to this site yourself! Or send it to some friends. I mean, and send it to some friends.

My plea is desperate and shameless: that much javascript should never go to waste.

Of course, site feedback/comments are definitely welcome. Huzzah!

RIP, Crocodile Hunter. A sad day.

Since I’m Indian, people occasionally ask me about arranged marriages (Indian-style) versus “love” marriages (western style). Invariably, and to my surprise, these people express their admiration at how well arranged marriages seem to work out.

Of course, no one really knows how well arranged marriages work. Sure, the divorce rate in India is much lower than it is here, but that’s partially (and I’d say mostly) because social pressures there strongly disfavor divorce. To get a more accurate test of marriage strategy success, you’d have to poll the happiness of people who remained married as well.

There’s still the question of why arranged marriage works as well as it does. (Especially since, despite the common misconception, families don’t really seem select partners with any measure of personality compatibility in mind.) … and also why love marriage doesn’t do so hot, despite its seemingly perfect ideal.

Naturally, having experienced no form of marriage at all, I have some theories.

Arranged marriages, when they work, succeed because of well-placed expectations.
You’re more comfortable with the fact that you’re getting married than you are with the person to whom you’re getting married. But maybe that understanding helps you survive the institution regardless of who that other person is.

Hrmm, I guess that’s all I can figure out about arranged marriages. But what about marriages in the US? How does that famous 50% divorce rate come about? Of course, there are the common reasons (infidelity, etc.) but here are some less obvious ones that might still be significant.

There is a tendency to believe that being in love is the prerequisite for marriage.
You’re in love. You get married. Makes sense… in the idealistic abstraction of American values that you absorb from TV and the movies during your formative years. Obviously a successful marriage requires some significant personality- and belief-based similarities as well. (And perhaps they’re more important, in the long run?) But when you’re love it’s harder to see that, so out come the wedding bells — and the subsequent disillusionment and failure.

Some people are not built for marriage.
Well, that sounds controversial. But consider the following points: (1) Humans evolved for polygyny, not monogamy. (As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, monogamy puts most females at a disadvantage.) So it’s not a given that the requirements for a successful marriage are inherent or expressible in all humans. (2) It seems (to me) that for a marriage to last half a century or longer, the couple involved needs to be under significant social pressure — or share a large measure of patience, forgiveness, and who knows what other qualities. It seems conceivable that some people just do not possess these traits. (And it takes only one person to ruin a marriage.) And yet, as in the previous point, it’s easy to overlook missing traits and get married. And then reality sets in.

A family friend of ours, Steve Bethune (roughly my age, incredibly nice guy), is running across the country. 30 miles a day, every day, until he gets to California from New York.

It’s pretty amazing, especially since he’s 6’5″. Check out the website, his blog, and pictures.

He’s doing it all for charity, the American Heart Association. It’s a truly remarkable feat. If you’ve been thinking about making a charitable donation but need some impetus, here’s one. He’s a long way from his modest goal, and it’s too bad. Help out if it moves you.

It’s Friday afternoon and fourth period is almost over.

“Okay, just a reminder — there will be a surprise quiz sometime next week on the last three chapters!” the teacher brays as the bell rings and the students begin to shuffle out.

In the hallway, Alice looks to Bob and says, “Dude, what a crock. Mrs. Trunchbull sucks. I hate surprise quizzes!”

“Me too! You can waste the whole week studying. I’d rather just cram, take the text, and expunge.”

But then a thought occurs to Alice. “Wait a minute — she said there’s going to be a surprise quiz sometime next week, right?”

“Right…” Bob slams his locker shut, and they walk down the hall towards their fifth period class.

“But we know the test can’t be next Friday, or else there won’t be a surprise!” Alice exclaims.

“What do you mean?” Bob asks.

“Well, say she’s secretly planning on giving the test on Friday. But we know that the test is sometime next week only. So by Thursday afternoon, when she hasn’t given the test yet, we’ll know that the test has to be on Friday — no surprise!”

“Dang, I see.” Bob’s eyes open wider. “Hold on — it’s crazier than that. It can’t be Friday, right? But then it also can’t be Thursday either! Since when Wednesday afternoon rolls around, and she hasn’t given the test yet, we’ll know it can’t be Friday — as you just explained — so it must be Thursday. But if we know it has to be Thursday, that would eliminate the surprise too!”

“Wow, this is awesome. And by the same logic, it can’t be Wednesday either…”

“… or Tuesday …”

“… or Monday!”

“Holy smokes… it seems like she can’t possibly surprise us,” Bob says with a grin.

Alice frowns. “And yet I still have no idea when the quiz actually will be.” The bell rings for the start of fifth period, and the pair make their way into the classroom. “We’ll have to figure out what this means after class.”

Here are some pictures of Hawaii; click to go to the slideshow. (Some pictures were taken by Grant, Matt, and Siobhan.) Pristine beaches, beautiful sunsets, a great wedding, and best friends. Totally awesome.

Culled from my own thoughts and discussions with various others over the years.

• Add more refs. There should be a minimum of two on-field refs, and ideally three.
• Put a fourth ref in the booth to decide via video replay. Purists complain that replay slows down the game. But how many times have you seen a game decided by a bogus PK, because the refs just didn’t have the right angle? I’d rather have a slightly slower game than an illegit one.
• Retroactively punish diving. The number of dives per game can be drastically reduced by drastically increasing the cost of diving. A committee should evaluate game footage afterwards and issue cards for obvious dives that the refs have missed.
• Have an intermediate penalty between yellow and red cards. Make teams play a man down for a specific amount of time, as in hockey. It sucks when the balance of a game is horribly skewed after a marginal foul because the ref had no option but to issue a red.
• Modify overtime to avoid penalty kicks. PKs are incredibly exciting, no doubt, but if you’re an actual fan of one of the teams playing, they’re a horrible way to decide the game. (Imagine if tied NBA games were decided by free throws instead of overtimes.) Instead, when overtime starts, and every five minutes thereafter, each team should remove a player. The fewer players there are on the pitch, the more open the game will be, and the more likely someone is to score. At least this way, the outcome is decided by a soccer-like mechanism.

My emotional investment in the World Cup ended when England bowed out yesterday. Perenially content to meet expectations, they did so once again, cementing their horrible record in penalty-kick shootouts. Some English players will no doubt claim that penalties are a crapshoot, etc. Of course, they are wrong. Penalties are unfair, for sure, as they don’t accurately determine which is the better side at playing soccer, but they are not a crapshoot — some teams (that practice penalties, and study the penalty habits of opponents) consistently win, while others (that offer up excuses) consistently lose.

It’s sad that England’s in this latter category. I am somewhat fanatical about English football. I’d rather have them win the World Cup than the U.S.A. Their premier players now — Beckham, Gerrard, Owen, the Coles, etc., are, on a good day, a joy to watch. They’re honest on the pitch and earnest off of it. How can you not like them? They are the Red Sox of the World Cup — enormously talented, with great potential and a fanatical fan base, but (nearly) always insufficient in the final tally.

After tough losses you sometimes find yourself reeling for days afterwards, your daydreams (or conversations) randomly interrupted by brutal memories of the losing game that you quickly try to quell. Luckily, this loss wasn’t tough: it was well-earned (Rooney’s total idiocy) and quite expected (England’s miserable penalty performance, Eriksson’s passionless and ill-conceived managing, Rooney’s total idiocy). It’s like everyone knew the Sox had a terrible closer. How bad can you feel when he blows the final game for you?

So instead, there’s just the feeling of pointlessness. This didn’t have to happen. Well, there’s 2010 to look forward to.

The snacks I consumed at work yesterday:
* 4 Nutter Butter Cookies ^
* 6 Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers ^
* 4 Nature Valley Peanut Granola Bars +

That’s over 1000 calories of peanut-based food. Now, granted, I like peanuts, but this is just too much. Sadly, it’s simply another result of my deterministic tendencies.

Not sure if I’ve described this phenomenon before, but it turns out that I have too many green shirts. It so happens that I like the color green slightly more than I like other colors. So you might expect that I have slightly more green shirts than shirts of other colors. But noooo. Instead, when I’m thinking of buying a shirt, the green one always looks slightly better and so I often (but not always) end up buying it. That is, my slight green preference manifests itself every time I buy a shirt, rather than just in aggregate. The result: I have more than twice as many green shirts as shirts of any other specific color, even though I only like green a little bit more.

Similarly, with snacks. The peanut butter snack always looks just a bit better (especially when I’m at the grocery store, where I got these snacks on subsequent trips, and I haven’t been gorging myself on peanut stuff recently). Oof. Now I’m paying the price. Next time, I’m going to make decisions probabilistically.

^ (“Made with real peanut butter!”)
+ (“Dipped in peanut butter coating. Bursting with peanuts!”)