Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Culture

  • Pandora for Kids

    I’ve been liking Pandora more and more. Tonight I created a station for Danielle and Victoria. I just added their Disney favorite singers to the Pandora channel, Mylie Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. They loved it and we went the whole night with no TV.

    I’m not paying for Pandora, so we get the occasional ads. It’s interesting how targeted the ads are. Pandora knows my zip code but the rest it has to infer from the music. When I’m listening, it’s generally jazz. I get ads for MOMA, which makes sense to me. Apparently Pandora thinks that jazz listeners are older Jewish folks, because I constantly get this ad for a Jewish old folks home on the Upper West Side. OK, not a good match for me, but they’re playing the odds, I get it.

    But why did my Pandora channel with Disney singers produce ads for Heineken?…

  • ZipCar after a year

    We’ve been using ZipCar for a year now. I would have to declare it a big success. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we had two bad experiences during the year. One time someone was late getting back so I didn’t get the car on time. The other time someone didn’t leave the key in the car. The last issue has been addressed. Now ZipCars have the keys attached under the steering wheel via a retractable cord, so you can remove the keys from the ignition but you have to leave them in the care.

    Over the course of the year, ZipCar has added a bunch of cars in a garage that is super close (the same garage we used to park our car in). Most of the time I can get a car in that garage.

    How much did we save? Well, here are our monthly ZipCar costs.

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    That’s a grand total of just under $1,500 for the year. But those aren’t our only costs. We often took the train up to my wife’s sister’s place when we would have driven if we owned a car (though I’ve actually come to prefer the train). Let’s say we did that 6 times over the year with a total cost of around $100/trip for the whole family.

    If we are out and our nanny is working late we need to drive her home. Last year I’d drive her myself (unless we were drinking). These days we call a car service. Let’s say that happened twice a month at $25 each.

    That’s pretty much it. Let’s assume there were a few times where we took a cab when we would have driven if we had a car. Say that happened once a month at $30 each.

    Car replacement costs in 2009:

    • ZipCar: $1,500
    • Trains: $600
    • Car Service: $600
    • Extra cabs: $360

    Total: $3060.

    What were our car costs in 2008? When you factor in the lease, insurance, garage, maintenance and gas it ran around $900/month. That’s a bit over $10,000 for the year.

    So we saved about $7,000. In a tight year, that’s a huge deal (actually, a huge deal any year). But what did we lose in terms of convenience?

    Well, we had the two bad experiences and overall the cars, while pretty nice, were not as nice as our Acura MDX. But I never had to take a car to the shop, worry about registration, state inspection or anything like that. Overall I’d say the convenience factor was a wash but there was a car quality downgrade.

    Given the amount that we drive, ZipCar was a big win.

  • No Scalpers?

    Danielle went to see Mylie Cyrus at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island last night (note to self, do not go to concerts in Long Island – traffic was ridiculous). The Mylie Cyrus tour is selling their tickets via TicketMaster using a new paperless, supposedly scalper-free method.

    You put the tickets on your credit card and when you go to the concert you have to swipe the exact credit card to get the tickets. Hidden in the fine print was the fact that you also have to show photo id.

    That last detail was a problem, because I bought the tickets but my wife was taking Danielle (with best friend and best friend’s mom). I was assuming that I could just give my wife my credit card and she’d swipe it. But I actually had to go with them to the Coliseum (hence me complaining about the traffic).

    And the photo id part seems stupid anyway. I appreciate trying to slow down scalpers. I was able to get pretty good seats at list price. But the credit card swipe part on its own limits scalpers. And what if I had the flu or something? I’d still have to drag my ass out there so Danielle could go.

    And in truth, there was still scalping going on. But when you saw tickets online, they all said “meet at venue”. So it inconveniences scalpers, it doesn’t stop them…

  • Eight Years Later

    This will be the first 9/11 where I am no longer an employee of STARS. 9/11 has always been intimately tied to STARS for me, but now with STARS not even having a NY office the tie is different. Many of the old gang will get together to toast the friends we lost. The day has become a combination of reunion and memorial.

    While the memories are painful, they remind me of the old STARS organization that I loved to work for. To remember the good folks we lost, here is my post from last year.

  • The busiest airport in the world

    As someone who grew up in Wisconsin (my brother is a professor at UW – Oshkosh), this is not news. But it still amuses me. Outside of children’s clothing (this is where Oshkosh B’Gosh comes from) has anyone heard of Oshkosh?

  • Science doesn’t know everything

    Here’s a very funny, very anti-homeopathy comedian. You can guess what my favorite line is…

  • Project Implicit

    This is a research project that has been around for a while. The purpose is to try to study people’s implicit bias on various topics (race, religion, age, sexuality, etc.) in a truly scientific manner. It’s quite interesting.

    The methodology is fairly simple. Say you are doing the straight-gay bias test. First the screen will have straight on the left, with you pressing the E button and gay on the right with you pressing I. An image or word will appear (two women together or the word heterosexual) and you have to press the appropriate button. Pretty simple.

    They will mix it up left and right to make sure there’s no random bias due to being right handed or left handed.

    Then it gets more interesting. On the left will be “straight or good” and on the right will be “gay or bad”. So if the picture is of a man and a woman you press E (left) and if the word is “horrible” you have to press I (right).

    Then they’ll switch it to “straight or bad” and “gay or good”.

    What it ultimately tests is whether you have a hard time associating “good” and “gay” together (or vise versa). They record how quickly you can complete the tasks and how many mistakes you make. If it takes you a lot longer to do the “gay or good” test, the conclusion is that you have a harder time associating the two concepts and therefore you have an implicit bias towards straight people.

    I’ve tried two of the tests. I consider myself a liberal person with few biases. But when I took the black/white test the results indicated that I had a strong bias. And while I don’t like to admit it, I have to be honest, “white or good” did seem to be the easier part of the test. I’d like to think I’m not biased but I grew up in a 95% white neighborhood so I probably am.

    Interestingly the straight-gay test indicated that I had a very slight bias towards gay people. In this test I actually found that the old definition of gay as “happy” made the “gay or good” association easy in the test. Though I have to be honest. When I’m reading an old fairy tale to my daughter that describes a prince as feeling gay, I do stumble a bit…

    I guess the truth is we all have biases.

  • A bad start to a beautiful wedding

    We went to a formal wedding on Saturday. I broke out my tuxedo and we planned for a nice fun day. It was in New Jersey so we needed a car. ZipCar has some nicer cars so we went with a BMW for the day.

    It was going to be a long event with the full Catholic mass/wedding in the afternoon and the dreaded lull between the wedding and the reception. So a good friend of ours came over to stay with Danielle and Victoria.

    I went to get the car. I unlock it with my ZipCard and hop in. Nice. But where’s the key? The way ZipCar works is that you can only open the car and start the car if it has been programmed to your ZipCard for that time. So you always leave the keys in the car.

    The previous driver didn’t.

    Ultimately, ZipCar is a very cool concept that totally fits with the Brooklyn lifestyle. But it is totally dependant on everyone following the rules. No keys, no functioning car.

    Thankfully our friend drove over to our place to be with the girls so we just borrowed her car. Saved us some money, really, but I really wanted to drive the Beemer.

    So we’re off to the wedding. A few minutes late but not bad. Until we hit Jersey. Someone decided that Saturday afternoon would be a good day to do major work on one of the bridges and close all but one lane. There was a five miles stretch that took us about an hour. We arrived as the bride was exiting the church. Nice.

    The reception made up for all of it though. It was at a totally spectacular spot in New Jersey. Apparently the pool scene in Cocoon was filmed at this place among other things. No expense was spared. I don’t even want to think about what this event cost. Six figures easy. Everyone had a great time.

    So a lousy start turned into an excellent night.

    I did manage to get lost driving home though…

  • Anti-Vac, Blogs and Jenny McCarthy

    I’m a science guy, so I like the science blogs. One of my favorites has been Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy. I’ve actually become a bit annoyed at his blog because he rants so much against the anti-vaccine crowd. I guess I feel that this crowd has so few facts on their side that you don’t need to give them that much attention.

    But apparently I’m wrong. The anti-vaccine movement has a prominent spokesperson in Jenny McCarthy. She has a son with autism (perhaps cured?) and the anti-vaccine crowd blames autism on vaccines despite all evidence to the contrary. But she is, after all, living with Jim Carrey and he’s really, really funny. So she must know what she’s talking about.

    Are we all idiots?

    Jenny McCarthy is famous for (pardon my language) having nice tits. She posed for Playboy and did very well, getting named Playmate of the Year. She is clearly not stupid, and she turned that fame into an MTV career. She has performed in a fairly extensive list of really bad TV shows and movies.

    So clearly she is an expert on medicine.

    The science on vaccines causing autism has so completely been shot down it’s crazy. The anti-vac crowd initially blamed the mercury in vaccines (Thimerosal). But vaccines stopped using mercury in 2001 and the autism rate has continued to climb at the same pace. Denmark stopped using Thimerosal in 1992. Continued increase in autism. The original UK study on autism and vaccines has been rebuked by co-authors and it appears the data was fabricated (and the main author apparently in cahoots with lawyers looking to sue on behalf of parents of children with autism). 

    Hmm.

    Is anyone paying attention here?

    This would normally just be a case of people listening to the latest fad with no real consequence other than keeping magazines like People around. Stupid but harmless.

    But the truth is that people are taking this seriously and the level of non-vaccination is rising to dangerous levels. Children are actually dying of routine diseases due to lack of overall vaccinations.

    And yet we get our science education primarily from hot chicks.

    I’m all for hot chicks. But for entirely different reasons…

  • I’ll take $500,000 a year

    This article cracks me up…