prod & ponder

Remember my photo of the photographer at the Cherry Blossom Festival? Well the topic of the festival came up in a discussion at dpreview, and it turns out that the photographer in the shot was in the forum and recognized himself. It’s a small, small world.

On a totally unrelated front–the cool tech stuff front–here are two new tidbits:
37signa, the same folks who make the very cool Basecamp project management resource, have introduced a nifty online resource for keeping your schedule, to do lists, and whatnot, complete with the ability to send to-do reminders to your cell phone via sms messages: Backpack.

Since I was a registered user of keyhole before they were bought out by Google, I just got sent a beta version of the new Google Earth Plus software, which aside from the usual cool sat image goodness you associate with such programs, now let’s you superimpose all sorts of GPS linked data–roads, websites in proximity (like doing a local google search superimposed on your sat image), webcams within the map sat image you’re looking at, and even RSS fed links to messages in the keyhole forum that relate to places or events in the territory being looked at. Very nifty. I’ll try and post a screengrab to illustrate what I mean sometime soon.

After about a decade away from the game, I’ve picked up tennis again. It turns out that I live in a great place for it. Nearby Cabin John Park, just a mile away, has nine lighted outdoor courts and, better yet, an indoor tennis center with six courts, a pro shop, and a great schedule for lessons and tournament play. There’s also an active Montgomery County Tennis Association. It’s refreshing to see good public tennis facilities. Back when I lived in Mt. Pleasant the nearest courts were down this chained off dirt access road and in terrible disrepair.

The photo is of some new tennis shoes I picked up. They’re plain white, to match the blog, because it’s all about living the bloggable life. (sarcasm friends, sarcasm)

Thankfully, I found them at DSW, because when I stopped by the mall later that day a woman was going on a crazed knifing spree at the shoe department of Nordstrom, which is where I would have been if DSW had let me down. Instead, I was picking up some books at Waldenbooks, totally oblivious to the fact that elsewhere in the mall there were people getting stabbed. You’d think that with all our color-coded security zeal that there’d be some kind of mall-wide alert when shoppers turn on each other.

Plans are in the works for a summer vaccation, and so the question of trip insurance came up. Now since I’ve taught graduate research methods courses and play poker with a vengance, to my mind this is actually a fascinating, rant-worthy issue. I also figure that I should do a bit more to live up to the blog’s name of “prod and ponder”. So here’s my provocative statement:

Insurance is for suckers.
(more accurately: many forms of insurance are a sucker’s wager, though some are vital… but that’s less enticing as a remark)

People look at large casinos and go “my, look at all the stupidity that feeds those companies,” and yet they rarely pose that same scrutiny at insurance companies and their customers. And yet, much insurance is nothing other than a very bad (negative expectied utility/value) wager. It’s a profit making venture where the insurance company calculates odds in favor of them making profit–sound a bit like the casinos? Essentially, taking insurance is often akin to sitting at a very high stakes blackjack table, though usually with even worse odds.

It only makes sense when… 1. The law requires it, 2. You have a positive expected utility (which insurance companies stay in business by not providing), 3. When you’re already involved with a policy and the law requires an insurer to keep you on even though you’re a money loser for them (health insurance), or 4. When a loss, though unlikely, would equal financial ruin. There’s a whole poker-oriented stats lecture in that last point about financial ruin, the difference of betting “all in” at a tournament–where out means “game over!”–versus a no limit table where your entire bankroll isn’t at risk and you can buy back in when you get “unlucky”.

It would seem to be far more profitable for consumers to offer calamity insurance–insure what would be a crushing financial loss for an individual or family (an amount which would vary by their income & monthly expenses) and for everything else have the family invest in an “emergency fund”.

The problem with insuring relatively minor costs (doctors visits, fender benders, missing a trip, etc.) is that
a) You are betting against the odds in each of your insurance deals.
b) The money you ‘invest’ in insurance isn’t fungible. i.e. You can’t take money put in insuring your car into medical costs if it turns out that’s where you run into problems.

Sadly, I don’t think that’s a financial service that’s going to be offered anytime soon. People make all sorts of irrational decisions. Vegas doesn’t make its money by offering “better wagers”, it makes money by encouraging and exploiting bad decisions born out of consumers’ irrational hopes and fears, and there’s little reason to expect insurance companies to behave any differently.

(note: my hope isn’t that folks go out and drop insurance policies, just that they choose their wagers with a bit more critical thought.)

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Since you waded through all that musing and ranting, without any pictures, here’s a bonus nugget…
Perhaps the best use of the web, ever: the official ninja webpage

They have every reason to celebrate. On Sunday Northwestern’s women’s lacrosse team won the NCAA Championship in Annapolis. Their final round win against UVA capped a perfect 21-0 season for the Wildcats.

In a sport dominated by east coast schools, this was the first time a team outside the Eastern Time Zone won an NCAA national lacrosse championship. It was the first time Northwestern has won an NCAA championship of any kind since 1941 (men’s fencing back then). Go Wildcats!

Here I’m doing some new school scoring of the Nationals-Brewers game this evening (5/18) on my Palm Pilot. Pencil and paper scoring still has its charm, but my palm includes up-to-date stats on all the players, and afterwards I can kick out my scorecard in everything from pdf to web & xml output. Lots of folks ask me about the program at games, so if you’re curious too, it’s scorepad. Apparently it’s also what’s now backending the jumbotron at Braves games.

It was a great game tonight, with a tie of no runs going into the bottom of the 9th. Then, with two outs and the bases loaded, Hammonds came through for the Nats and hit in the scoring run.

I’ll be at tomorrow’s (Thursday’s) afternoon game, which means I’ll have attended (cough, smirk, trying not to look too much like the cat who just swallowed the canary…) six Nationals games in the past seven days. Life is good.

The first pitch of the game, Vargas’ first pitch for the Nationals, and… it was socked for a home run. Not a great start to Vargas’ first appearence, where he gave up six runs in the top two innings. The Brewer’s Obermueller, on the other hand, gave a phenomenal performance, giving up only 2 hits and throwing seven (of eight) perfect innings on the mound.

Despite the thorough beatdown, it was a very fun game to be at. Watching a potential perfect game unfold is always fun, even if it is being thrown against the team you’re rooting for, and I lucked into sitting in a section with a great set of knowledgable and rowdy fans. I was keeping score with my palm pilot, and so here’s my score for the game: nats vs brewers 5/17

One of the nice perks of IG working with the spouse of a regional manager of a big movie theater chain in the area is easy access to opening-day screenings. So after tonight’s game we’re off to catch Star Wars Episode III. Considering the monumental catastrophy of episodes 1 & 2, I have the lowest of expectations. May the force be with us all.

Since I was just writing about good design…

It’s the unique little things. I like how from this small snippet of textures and features the scene is unmistakably identifiable as the DC metro.

And this parked car, just off Dupont Circle, was just oozing cool and character. From Flickr folks I learned that it was a 1970s Chevrolet Malibu.

The practicum in conflict resolution course that I’m wrapping up included a group presentation assignment that yielded predictable results: lots of bad powerpoint presentations, and this coming from a group of otherwise really great students.

The deep critique of this is that power point presentations often represent lazy thinking, with a litany of bulleted lists that offer limited information because of screen dimensions and no relationships beteween the concepts represented with the flat list format. Edward Tufte covers these angles in his essay on the cognitive style of powerpoint.

But even at the superficial aesthetic level, the powerpoint presentations lack creativity and any evidence that good design was ever seriously considered or valued in their creation. There’s a mix-mash of templates and clip art that everyone has seen already and that have no discernable relationship with the topic being discussed. It’s “gosh, this is fast and looks kind of ok” as design ethos.

Now ideally, good design should be a core competency in general education, but it isn’t, and so we stumble along in a cruddily-designed world. Bad presentations, bad signage, bad living and working spaces, bad voting ballets, you name it.

Thankfully, in the multi-discpiplinary “unit 1″ course at GMU’s New Century College (which it looks like I’ll be on the teaching team for again in the Fall), design gets to be a topic. So while students do create powerpoint presentations, they are also taught and evaluated on the quality of design in those presentations. There’s only so much you can cover in a small section on presentation design, but it’s amazing to see just how much better presentations get when you simply rule out using pre-done templates and clip-art. Suddenly the layout choices are made with some attention and thought, and illiustrations and photographs actually made for the presentation are a much better and supportive fit (go figure).

And in that spirit of created design is better than design by Microsoft template (’cause really, does it seem to you like M$ really has much competency around good design?), here’s an idea: make your own color-palette. And when you need some inspiration, get ideas from photographs, because mother nature whoops Microsoft when it comes to creativity and excellent choices for complementary and contrasting colors.

Here’s how: Open Photoshop (or similar paint program) and pull up an image you like and that you think fiits the mood–color-wise–that you want to set for your presentation. Use the eye dropper tool and you can quickly sample the colors you like from the image and make a color-palette of them. Alternatively, just pixelate the image: filter -> pixelate -> mosaic and then adjust the size of the blocks up till you get the sample of colors that fits your need.

For example, this image…

yielded this nice muted, earth-tone color-palette…

Credit to YourTotalSite for the tip on using the mosaic filter.

Yeah, so first the blog gets overrun with Nationals commentary, and now I’m making commentary on college ball? Errr, yes. But see, here’s the thing: in today’s Flordida State game against North Carolina, part of a crucial series in ACC conference play, something wonderul happened…

It’s the bottom of the ninth, FSU is behind by two runs, with 2 outs, and nobody is on base. This is commonly a good time for lesser fans to start packing up and leaving the stadium. But then we get two men on base. And up steps Ryne Malone. He goes down by two strikes, things are again looking grim, and then… he hits a bomb of a home run straight over the heart of center field, winning the game. Everybody goes wild. It’s fantastic.

So in honor of the celebration of FSU baseball fans (known as “the animals”) that I’m sure is going down in Tallahssee right now, I offer a round of The Beer Song, which is sung to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame:

Take me out to the beer bash,
Take me out to the beer.

For it’s one, two, three kegs are down,
and we feel no pain.

(While FSU is best known for our football, when it comes to fans it’s baseball that really stands out, being easily the most oraganized, fanatical, and loyal fans in all of college baseball. You can find the complete songbook–yes, songbook–of the FSU Animals of Section B here. And to explain the reference, Jax is the second biggest place to get booze in Tallahassee, behind only Mike’s Beer Barn. Mmmmm… the drive-thru beer barn. )