Luba Goy

I’m not sure what brought back the memory, but it crashed into my brain like a ton of bricks this afternoon.

Luba Goy.  If that’s her real name.  A little Googling suggests that she’s actually a real-life actress (Canadian, no less) who has done real-life movies and TV Shows.  But that’s not how I know her.

I know Luba Goy as the grand dame of a long-forgotten, poorly-produced set of instructional videos that taught the “youth” of America about computers.  We would watch these videos during “keyboarding” class in the Fourth grade.  Luba and her sidekick, he-who-has-a-less-forgettable-name, would show us the wonders and wizardry of computers of all kinds.

Here’s the best part.  When we weren’t watching videos in “keyboarding” class, we were practicing with our “keyboards.”  Not actual keyboards, mind you, that would have cost too much money for our measley public school budget.  No, we used laminated drawings of keyboards!  Even then, I remember thinking to myself, “doesn’t have the travel and pleasant click of a good, actual keyboard.”

Where have you gone Luba Goy?

Shift-Space!!!

For as long as I can remember, I have pressed the spacebar to “page down” through e-mail messages or web pages in many different programs.  How the hell did I never know until today that in most of those programs you can press shift-space to “page up”?!?!?!

They should teach this stuff in schools.

Amazing.

My One Cent

Word comes from CNN today that a bill has been introduced by Arizona’s Congressman Jim Kolbe to abolish the penny. I’m a fan of the idea, partly because I’m the type of person who always has too much change filling his pockets, drawers, bowls on kitchen counters, you name it, and at least the silver coins occasionally get fished out and spent. What really excites me about the idea is the sheer novelty and coolness of the event. How many times in American history has an entire denomination of coin gone out of circulation? I likey the “you are there” feel of it.

The article doesn’t mention the persistant rumor that the Illinois delegations to Congress routinely kill these proposals because of the man whose right profile graces the penny. But maybe that’s just an urban legend. (snopes was no help). That’s what I get for knowing everything I know about U.S. Politics from the West Wing.

But this part of the CNN article stopped me in my I-thought-I-was-good-at-math tracks: The bill “calls for rounding down any cash transaction that ends in in 1,2,6 and 7 cents; totals ending in 3,4,8, or 9 cents would round up.” Huh? Why the funky rounding rules? Why cause 6 and 7 and 3 and 4 to switch places in line from the traditional rounding rules?

Oh. I’m an idiot. But in a moment of blogging honesty, I won’t edit this post to remove my foolishness. I see. They’re rounding to the nearest NICKEL. Duh.

Abolish the Penny!

What a Way to Make a Living?

Here’s one of those questions that has nagged at me for a few decades.  Thank god I have a blog to finally get it off my chest.  You know “9 to 5″, the Dolly Parton song and movie?

Is there anybody in the U.S. who really works from 9 to 5?  What about a lunch break?

I’ve had a few jobs where the policy was that you took a half-hour lunch and most people took an hour instead.  Is this one of those kinds of things?

Chessboxing

I've been trolling these Internets for a long,long time, but this article about Chessboxing is one of the best things I have seen.  So screwed up, and so fantastic.  I'm not entirely sure this isn't some kind of warped practical joke.

Doily

I wasn't sure I spelled "doily" correctly in the last post. (yes, I know wordpress has a spell-checker — I wanted a second opinion.) It's a word I rarely use.

I googled "doily" and the hits seemed to be about the doily I meant. But, to be sure, I then clicked on the "Images" link. Try it — it's surprising and sublime.

You'll be greeted by rows and rows of beautiful doilies on neutral-colored background.

And at the end of the third row? If you're seeing the same things I'm seeing, you'll get a picture of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails wearing a lacy little poncho number.

Sublime.

Counting Cucumber Sandwiches

I'm having trouble sleeping tonight, and so I thought I'd pound out a blog post or two. I looked at my "queue" of topics-to-blog, and this one was entirely appropriate. It's about insomnia.

I've never been a good sleeper. Over the years, I've gotten better at it, and I'm rarely plagued by the howling thoughts that used to keep me up. It probably has something to do with being content in life and not too stressed at work. I'll call it maturity.

But, about once a week, I lay down and know that the fight to fall asleep is on. I've tried many, many techniques to lead to sleep, but I have found very little that works more often than not.

Lately, one technique has been working for me. I count cucumber sandwiches. Specifically, I picture myself making cucumber sandwiches, which I count as I complete. Now, I'm thinking the same thing you are thinking. What the hell is a cucumber sandwich? I don't think I've ever eaten a cucumber sandwich in my life, and I have no idea how I know about them at all. What I picture are dainty, little, crustless triangles served on a doily at high tea. Yes, it's a bizarre thing to count.

Here's the entire sequence:

1. Take the butter out much earlier, to allow it to soften. (I allow my brain to fast-forward the softening time.)

2. Take an entire loaf of white bread with a soft, light brown crust.

3. Take a long, sharp, serrated bread knife and slowly and deliberately cut all of the crust off of the bread. (You are getting sleepier). Try to cut only the crust off, sliding the knife perfectly into the interface between white and tan. You should cut six "planes" of crust off, leaving a perfect rectangular solid of white bread.

4. Slice two pieces of white bread from the rectangular solid.

5. Using a silver butter knife, and spread butter on each slice.

6. With a sharp chef's knife, cut the cucumber into very slender discs. (So sleepy…)  If you have an English cucumber, leave the peel on. If your cucumber has a tough peel with a bitter aftertaste, carefully pare it off.

7. Place the discs on one piece of buttered bread, overlapping them enough to create an unbroken field of dark and light green.

8. Place the other slice of bread on top of the cucumbers.

9. Using your sharp Chef's knife, cut the sandwich into quarters. (Can barely keep my eyes open…)  Serve two, but no more, on a doily on a small, white plate.
I have NO IDEA why this works for me, but it does.

Bad Googlers

My wife, god bless her, is a smart and talented woman.  She is better educated than me, more level-headed than me, and full of patience.  But she has a significant flaw: She can't google to save her life.

What I mean by this is that she is very bad at finding information online.  Given a quest for information (What was the name of that fantastic lebanese place we used to live near?) she will never construct the correct Google query to find the answer on her first try.  She would probably look for (lebanese restaurant "los angeles") when she'd have more luck with (lebanese "westwood boulevard").  Sometimes her searches are much too general; other times they're too specific.  The funny thing is that not only are my searches much, much more likely to yield the right result, but I am also usually able to predict that her search will fail based on the search terms, before she even hits "Search."

My question to you, fair reader, is what kind of intelligence is at play in constructing a good search string?  What else are people who are bad googlers likely unable to do well? How many people out there are bad googlers?  Is there a support group for this kind of thing? 

Answer This Quickly: What is 8 + 6?

The answer, of course, is 14. The fascinating tidbit I learned a little while ago is that there are many, many ways to come up with that answer in your head.

The topic of the conversation that led to this discovery was memory. Most of us (at least of my generation) memorized their single-digit multiplication tables. 7×6 = 42 is locked away in our brains, and we don't use a "method" to compute it. We just remember it.

But we typically don't do that with addition. Sure, we've memorized many single-digit sums — most of the +1, +2, +3 sums for example — but there are some sums that we compute on-the-fly. In my brief, empirical look at this question, I've concluded that 8+6 is one example.

So how do you compute 8+6? Among the three people in my conversation, we used three different methods!

Person A uses the "Get to Ten" method. She takes the larger number (in this case, 8 ), pulls out of her memory the distance from that number from 10 (2), subtracts that number from the smaller number (6 – 2 = 4) and then adds that difference to 10. It involves a lot of steps — subtraction, subtraction, addition — but many of the steps involve the magic number, 10, which lends speed.

I'm not sure I understand completely Person B's method, but here is what he claims he does. First, he adds the smaller number to 10, or in this case, 6 + 10 = 16. He then remembers the rule that +9 is +10 – 1, so 6 + 9 = 16 – 1 = 15. Finally, he remembers that +8 is +9 – 1, so 6 + 8 = 15 – 1 = 14. This seems very convoluted, and there are lots and lots of operations. I think his bottom line is that he does this very quickly in his head.
 

My method is what I call the "double then add" method. I first take the smaller number (6), double it (12) subtract the smaller number from the bigger number (8 – 6 = 2) and then add that difference to the doubled sum (12 + 2 = 14). This also involves many steps multiplication, subtraction, addition, but the "doubling" step, at least, is very quick.

So how do you add 8 to 6? (Or if you have that one memorized, 7 + 8 or 9 + 6?

[Updated to include Person B's method, which I had originally forgotten.]

R.I.P. Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs died Tuesday. Her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is my favorite book. I won’t be equivocal about it, because for me the book has no close second. I grew up in suburbia, and I grew up to appreciate the pleasures of suburbia. I went to college in a gritty, urban environment, complete with crime and dirt and homelessness. In my senior year, I took an urban planning course, and the central text was Death and Life. The thesis of the book — that the best lived environments are the ones full of random interactions with strangers living shoulder-to-shoulder in a dense environment — has become dogma in my life. Dogma is the right word, because I tell people about Ms. Jacobs’ book and her ideas with something approaching religious fervor.

In my most religious moments, I have begun to construct a worldview where everything comes back to urban life and density. Some things are harder in the city, but most of the problems in American society stem from the fact that people live in little enclaves and never bump into one another randomly on the street. If we all lived in dense, Jacobsian cities, we’d probably have harder lives, in some ways, but we’d probably have less racism and religious intolerance as well.

I know cities aren’t perfect, but I also know that suburbs are deeply imperfect. It’s a not-very-profound idea that many since Jane Jacobs have echoed, but she was one of the first. It’s not fitting for me to say something like, “The world is worse for losing Jane Jacobs,” because I never followed what she did after Death and Life. But I will say that the world is much, much better for having had Jane Jacobs.

Rest in Peace