Texts from last night: if you thought I was above enjoying this...

I know you thought I was far too cultured to deeply enjoy this blog of purported drunk text messages, but you were wrong. 

NPR cooking for 4 for under $10 series

I was in the car yesterday, got to listen to a rare NPR tidbit, and they're apparently running a series right now about $10 meals. They had a chef on, Ming Tsai, to talk about his fried rice recipe. This guy was clearly a TV chef, he told great stories. And the recipe sounds fantastic.

How to ruin Battleship

So one day I was trying to entertain my son in the car, and after we exhausted mental tic-tac-toe we tried playing Battleship using only memory.

We started off using really small grids, to make it easier to remember plays, and we also reduced the ships to single cells of the grid, for the same reason.

After we did that, it occurred to me that there wasn't really any difference between imagining the game as a grid with locations like A1 and H10, and imagining it as a single row of cells. And a single row, with cells identified solely by numbers, makes it much easier to remember the plays.

The simplest version of this we tried was with each player having just one ship in a sea of 10 cells.

You can see where I'm going here. Once you do that, the game amounts to taking turns guessing a number from one to ten.

An excuse to finally buy an Arduino, from 100 days of writing

I didn't set out, exactly, to write for 100 days straight. Instead, I tried to write every day for a month, one month at a time. Then when I hit around 80, I realized I was getting close to 100 and that was a motivator. 

But my very next thought was that I ought to come up with some way to reward myself. At first I didn't have any ideas for this, and I thought I wouldn't do much of anything. But that didn't last. After all, once I had this idea, I was basically scooting through the world with a built-in justification for anything I wanted. The purse strings were definitely loosened. 

So  when Make Magazine's Maker Shed announced a sale ending April 30 and I realized their inventory included a bunch of Arduino items, it was a perfect match. I bought a copy of Making Things Talk last year, and have been intending to get an Arduino board or seven and get started making electronic things. 

So right now, a DC Boarduino and a Meggy JR RGB are headed my way. Now, I would have certainly bought some flavor of Arduino before too long, but although I've been wanting a Meggy, it seemed too much money for my unproven electronics hobbying.

Arduino boards are programmable controller boards with open-source hardware and software. You can write the code in a free development environment on your PC and then download it to the board via USB. 

The DC Boarduino is a version of the Arduino designed to be dropped onto a breadboard for easy prototyping. I figure this is a good thing for me to start with. My past history is of hacking small things together, playing with them, and then taking them apart to try something else. 

A Meggy is a very simple game platform. It marries an Arduino programmable board with an array of three-color LEDs, a sound system, and some buttons. It allows you to do fun stuff without too much work, which is great, but it can't do high-quality graphics. Of course, I'm not going to devote the time to write code for high-quality graphics, either. It's a different approach to Arduino, because it has actual useful things attached to it, where a regular Arduino doesn't DO anything by itself.  But simple arcade game things are something I get a kick out of messing with, so this too seems like a good way to start with electronics. 

Speaking of memory

Since I recently posted about a memory trick, I bumped into someone else's post about memory work. Did you know there is a US Memory championship? The Skeptical Hypochondriac talks about a recent winner. This guy doesn't just remember lots of data, he can memorize it quickly. Like the positions of all the cards in a deck after studying it for 1.5 minutes.

_Stumbling on Happiness_ by Daniel Gilbert

I was attending some lectures on happiness, a series for alumni and students at UT, and math professor Michael Starbird recommended this book, so I got a copy from the library.

The title of the book isn't very revealing. The book is much more about how our minds work than anything else. It's about cognitive illusions and fallacies and about how we construct the future in our minds.

It begins with a great little bit about how all psychologists have to write something, eventually, that starts with -- I'm quoting very loosely here -- 'the thing that makes human beings different is' and then answer that question. His answer is our ability to predict or imagine the future.

And then he goes on to explain all the ways we can get that wrong.

The book is a fun read, full of great ideas; here are just two that I noted down:

• We think and judge things in relative terms. This is not always good. For example, we'll drive across town to save $50 on a $100 stereo, but not on a $100,000 car. But you can't spend relative dollars; you can only SPEND absolute dollars, so this is a rational choice. Offer almost anyone that choice, though, and you'll get the same answer. But you in both cases you save $50, that's $50 in your bank, that you can spend on anything, and the effort to save it is the SAME.
• The best way to predict something, it turns out, is to find someone who is experiencing it right now, and ask them. We reject this because we feel we are unique, but we are nowhere near as unique as we think, and our ability to imagine the future is hampered by several fallacies...enough so that picking a random person who is having an experience, someone who is of course different from us in many ways ...their results are a better predictor than our imagination. This is counterintuitive but convincingly explained in the book.

How to remember ten things: the number rhyming system

Here's a simple system, the Number Rhyming system, you can use when you don't have a way to write something down. Me, I'm always getting ideas, for stories, superpowers, jokes, evil pranks that end up being too much work, you name it.

I got this technique from Make the Most of Your Mind, which is a great little book about memory, but it predates the book. It's pretty simple. Like many memory techniques, it relies on making striking images. However, for this one, you also use the numbers one through ten, and rhyming words.

For each number, there's a rhyme:

one bun
two shoe
three tree
four door
five hive
six sticks
seven heaven
....Ok, I never get past seven, so I don't have rhymes for that. You can use these rhymes, or any rhymes you like.

One way to use this is to remember short lists of things. So, to remember something, you create an image involving the rhyme word and the thing you want to remember. If you want to remember how you had an idea for a book about aliens eating Austin, maybe you imagine a hamburger bun, and when you bite into it, it opens up to a bug-eyed alien that's taking a bite out of the capitol building.

Well, that's what I'd do. You do what you like. Apparently people use this to remember number sequences, like a phone number. I don't do sequences that way at all, but here's a page with a set of rhymes and some examples. Seems to me it's easier just to repeat the sequence a lot, than to create a bunch of different images. But I like this system for when I have five ideas and I'm afraid I won't remember them long enough to write them down.

Bugs in the Arroyo, short story by Steven Gould

I liked this story. It's hosted on the Tor website. It's about a future where metal-eating bugs terrorize the American southwest, and one small situation resulting from that.

Vin Diesel likes D&D

This is true. But that's not the best part. The best part is then Penny Arcade did a comic about it.

YouTube vids of Vin Diesel talking about D&D here.