Forget quantum physics, check out Crayon Physics Deluxe.
Author: fish1964
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Quantum Physics Information Teleportation
OK, that’s not a title you read every day. If you are at all interested in quantum physics (what? some people aren’t?) the use of quantum physics for incredible calculations and for transmitting information instantaneously across distances is fascinating.
So here’s an article indicating that they’ve done it. Sort of. I must point out that if you don’t have a basic understanding of quantum physics you probably won’t understand the article.
My favorite quote is at the end,
…the efficiency of the procedure is still too low to be useful. Currently, only about one out of every 100 million attempts results in a successful entanglement…
If only I could succeed at something one out of every 100 million tries and have them write an article about me…
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ZipCar
The lease on our car just ended. For a long time I have debated the value of owning a car when you live in Brooklyn. It was a 42 month lease and the car had 18,000 miles on it. We probably drive it 2-3 a month on average.
Between the cost of the car, parking in a garage (a necessity in Brooklyn), insurance (expensive in Brooklyn) and miscellaneous costs, we probably spent $1000/month on the car. If you drive it twice a month, each one of those trips is effectively costing you $500. Crazy.
But not having a car seems a bit odd. Since I graduated from high school, I have always owned a car. Even while spending 9 months in Japan, or 6 months working on a cruise ship, my car would be parked at my parent’s house. I’ve just always had one.
Part of it is the freedom aspect. What if, on a whim, we decide to go visit my wife’s sister (about 60 miles away)? Or we need to get something out of our storage unit (about a mile away)?
Enter ZipCar. ZipCar is really designed for our case. People who need to drive occasionally but for whom owning a car is crazy. The cars are parked all over, in the same garages that I would use for my car if I owned one. You can use them by the hour. Most cars run $11/hour ($17/hour for a BMW) which includes gas and insurance.
So we’re going to be trying it for a while. And living in the city there are always trains, taxis and car service. I predict we don’t spend more than $200/month getting around without the car.
Today I appreciated the change. I’ve gone to see a friend a few times up in Westchester. If you own a car, you might as well drive it. The drive is about an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes with some highly annoying traffic (particularly getting out of the city). I do a lot of swearing as I drive. But if you already own the car, the incremental cost of the trip is just the gas.
I visited that friend today and took the subway to Grand Central and then the Metro North train. It took an hour and a half, door to door. It cost $20. I read the paper, worked on my computer, wrote this blog. Didn’t swear once.
I’ll blog later about my first ZipCar experience. Maybe I can get used to this…
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Mint
I was checking out Mint.com, partly to see how good it was and partly to check out the UI. The interface is nice and easy to use. The product itself seems great at first (if you are a Quicken user, like me, you initially still prefer Quicken but not at the price difference). Then you check out some of the details and you realize that Mint needs some good QA.
One recent example. I logged on to Mint and immediately saw an alert:
This month you spent $700 on gas. Normally you spend $50.
I like that Mint tries to analyze your spending to help you save money. But remember, I live in Brooklyn. I drive twice a month. I don’t spend $700 a year on gas. It turns out that the nearest bank to me (half a block) is Marathon Bank. Apparently Mint thinks this is a gas station (there are, after all, Marathon gas stations). I withdrew $700 this month at that ATM.
So Mint is nice, but clearly not perfect.
But my weekly Mint email had the following tip:
Three Principles of Personal Finance
Personal finance is simple.
- Spend less than you earn.
- Make the money you have work for you.
- Be prepared for the unexpected.
That’s really it. It’s not that complicated.
If you don’t have Quicken or Microsoft Money and don’t want to spend any money on personal finance software, check out Mint. It’s not perfect, but it is free and it’s pretty good.
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My New Year’s Resolutions
Hmm. None. I really don’t believe in them. I think I’ve done this rant before, but the basic gist is that it’s an arbitrary calendar date. If you think something is important, start doing it. Don’t wait until January first.
I’m a runner and I typically slack off in the winter. I hate the treadmill and the cold and the dark tends to minimize my outdoor runs. This year I wanted to try to stay in shape. So I decided to start swimming. We have a family membership at our local YMCA which has a very nice pool. I’m not a particularly good swimmer, but I am stubborn. So I started swimming.
Did I start in January? Of course not. It was late October when I decided this would be a good thing to try. So that’s when I started.
My point is that for New Year’s, people look at the calendar and decide they need to make a change. That just doesn’t work. You should decide that you need to make a change just because you do, not because you are suddenly writing 2009 on your checks.
I love the people who decide to diet as a New Year’s resolution, but to totally indulge over the holidays. It’s one of the more common resolutions, but totally goofy in it’s execution. You decide that moderation in eating/drinking is something that is important for your life. So to prepare for this life change, you do the complete opposite for a month. Oh yeah, that will work.
Have you ever been around someone who quit smoking? How often did they quit on January 1st? Most of the time something just clicked in their life that it was time to quit. The truth is that most resolutions are a bit hard. You have to be committed. The fact that you bought a new calendar does not equal commitment.
Anyone who goes to the gym regularly will tell how much they hate January. Because it’s the month when the gym is jam packed with people who you know will not be there in February.
Be honest. How many New Year’s resolutions have you really kept? …
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Happy New Year and enjoy the extra second
Happy New Year to all. But 2009 will arrive a second later than we all thought. An extra second is being added to 2008 to keep things in sync.
If you want to understand why, check this out…
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Best Jazz CD of 2008
I was ready a recent “top 10 jazz albums” article (funny that they still call them albums) and was surprised by one that I had missed. And a big one.
If you have no interest in jazz, music, or history, you should probably stop reading now.
Sonny Rollins is one of the great jazz musicians of all time. He is one of the few that you can refer to in the present tense (78 and going strong). The jazz greats of the 40’s and 50’s (golden era of jazz) tended to have various vices, most common and deadly among them heroin. Many jazz greats died young (only the good, right?).
Sonny Rollins got busted for heroin in the 50’s and was sent to a (then) experimental Methadone treatment jail. In the 50’s John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins were the premier jazz tenor saxophone players (their only recording together, “Tenor Madness” (circa 1956) is a classic). Coltrane would die at 40 of liver cancer (believed to be caused by heroin use). Sonny would keep on going.
Sonny Rollins has always had a reputation for being better in concert than in the studio. I’ve seen him a few times and he is always awesome. The album released this year is a collection of live recordings that Sonny finally consented to be released (he is apparently hugely self-critical).
One of the things that I’ve always loved about Sonny Rollins was his musical sense of humor. In jazz there is a technique called “quoting”. For those that know little about jazz, in general the group plays the melody of the song (called the “head”) and then improvises using the same chord changes as the melody and then they play the “head” again. There are obviously many songs that use the same or similar chord changes. “Quoting” means playing a different recognizable melody that fits the chord changes of the song you are improvising on.
You can be listening to Sonny Rollins doing a solo over some jazz tune and suddenly he’ll be playing the Looney Tunes (Bugs Bunny for those too young to know Looney Tunes) theme song because it happens to fit the chord changes and then he’ll go back to improvising. That is his sense of humor.
If you ever get the chance to see Sonny Rollins live, you need to go. It doesn’t matter if you like jazz or not. It’s like having the chance to see Pavarotti. Even if you don’t like opera, it’s a once in a lifetime chance. When Sonny Rollins dies, there are no more jazz greats left. Sure there are new jazz musicians who are great, but Sonny Rollins is a pillar of jazz history. Enjoy him while you can.
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Merry Christmas
Or Happy Holidays depending on your preference. This year the holidays totally seem to have snuck up on me. But we did manage to get Danielle and Victoria to see Santa at Macy’s.
We were pretty confident that Tori would be fine with Santa. She is totally not shy (unlike Danielle). If you’ve seen Santa at Macy’s, they have an amusement park like method of winding the long line around. At one point you walk through the inside of a “train” which is supposed to be the train to the north pole. When you come out on the other side there are all sorts of cool things for the kids to see while the line continues to Santa (actually multiple Santas, but they do a very good job of hiding that fact).
Right at the beginning of the “north pole” there is this huge tree with a big face and the eyes move. Kind of cute. Freaked Tori out. All the sudden we weren’t so sure how it would go with Santa.
Thankfully we got past the big tree and then Tori got into all the other cool things. And when we finally (actually the line wasn’t bad, maybe 20 minutes) got to Santa’s little building, Tori saw Santa and started yelling, “Santa!, Santa!”. We had to hold her back until it was our turn. She went right to Santa’s lap (Danielle, of course, is an old pro).
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all…
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Google Sync Put to the Test
I woke up this morning to a dead Blackberry. Low level hardware failure. Not recoverable. OK. I’ve been using Google Sync to keep my calendar and contacts in sync with Google Calendar. The phone is insured. Should be no problem, right? In theory anyway…
Well for once theory meets reality. I go to Verizon, they hand me a new phone and get it connected. I immediately download Google Sync directly from the Blackberry and connect with my Google account. Before I got home, my entire calendar and contact list was restored. No issues.
Sweet.
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Where have I been?
OK, I’ll admit it. I’ve been a blogging slacker. And I’m unemployed so you’d think I’d have tons of time.
In an attempt to catch up, this will be a fairly random posting.
Fist of all, what have I been up to? Hmm. Not telling. There are some things going on that might work out or might not and for now my answer is no comment. I do not currently have a job, I am not currently making any money, I am strangely busy and having fun. Create whatever rumor you like based on those minimal facts. You are unlikely to be correct.
To get in shape, I’ve been trying to get into swimming. We belong to a new YMCA with a nice Olympic sized pool. I take Danielle there, but when I’m with her I basically stand around trying to teach her to swim. My running tends to slack off in the winter (between the cold and the dark I am just not motivated) so swimming seemed like a good approach for someone with some free time (though lately not as much).
So I’m still a fairly lame swimmer, but I’m to the point where I can do 20-30 minutes of lap swimming at an easy pace with no breaks. It is really good exercise. The strange thing is that as a runner I expect to be sore after a workout, but swimming is so low impact that I’m not. So I feel like I didn’t work that hard. Until I walk home. Then I realize that I’m exhausted.
What else? Football season has been interesting but not so great. My Packers are just beat up and lame. I’ve been following the Jets as a Favre fan, but they are all over the place. I’ll root for the Giants if they aren’t playing the Packers, but they are starting to show major problems.
The past few years have taught me (as a Knicks fan) to not pay much attention to the NBA. This year the Knicks are actually watchable, though they are clearly laying the groundwork for 2010.
Normally I’d be gearing up for college hoops, but Indiana is going to be so bad this year. I like their new coach but he has a couple years of rebuilding to do. I’ll be doing a pool for March Madness so if you are interested enter your information here.
It will be a mild Christmas this year as we try to be frugal, but we’ll do the usual. We always go to my wife’s sister’s place for Christmas morning. That’s a good, casual Christmas day. Close family, minimal stress, fun with the kids.
The girls are doing great. Danielle just turned 6 and Victoria just turned 2. Victoria has started to (occasionally) use the potty which is awesome. She has a while to go before she’s doing it for real, but I can see the end of Pampers forever.
Victoria is a piece of work. In many ways she is the total opposite of Danielle. Dan is a typical first child. Generally well behaved, smart (OK, I’m biased), a bit shy, always wants her parents.
Tori gets into everything she shouldn’t. Just today she managed to get to the power strip with the plugs for cable/phone/cable modem/router and turn everything off. I think she’s smart like Dan, but at 2 it’s hard to tell. But shy? Forget about it. If I’m staying in the apartment and a random stranger is going outside, she’s going with the random stranger.
Danielle is starting to read on her own which is huge fun. She’s really into it and will try to read every book we have. You realize how wacky many English words are when you are helping someone learn to read. When she sees a word like “right” telling her to “sound it out” just isn’t that effective.
My mom’s Alzheimer’s is a bit worse. She’s to the point now where she forgets words so often her sentences are total gibberish. It’s hard being far away because talking to her on the phone is largely pointless. She was given hospice care a few months back which is supposed to mean that she has 6 months or less, but I think she’s going to be around a while. Which is somewhat ironic because I know that she wouldn’t want to stick around in her condition. Probably the hardest thing this fall was not being able to discuss the election with her. My mom was a hugely political person and extremely liberal. She probably would have voted for Hillary in the primary to try to elect a woman, but she would have been incredibly happy to see the first black president elected. Sad that she has no clue.
But otherwise our family’s health is good. My wife’s brother (who smoked like a chimney) had a mild heart attack and then had triple bypass. That turned out to be the best possible thing because now he’s quit smoking, is exercising and is really turning his health around.
2008 was definitely a challenging year, but 2009 should be much better. I am definitely looking forward to the new year.
And I’ll try to blog a bit more…
Random links:
Might only be funny if you’ve been in NYC cabs…
A tremendous "year in pictures" page. The last surfing picture is amazing, but there’s something about #23. It looks like a bunch of guys at a park until you look close and realize they are shooting bows and arrows.
And finally, I’ve said this before, but the best Christmas album ever…
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 