Plutor

It’s been a very long time since a Nintendo console was launched with a bundled game. The last one was, believe it or not, the Super Nintendo (bundled with the pinnacle of platformers: Super Mario World) in 1991. Wii Fanboy has a great feature about “Wii Sports”, a collection of little games that was the centerpiece of Nintendo’s E3 demos, and has been covered in detail. Could it be bundled with the Wii? Should it be?

How console manufacturers can fail to bundle a game with the console is beyond me. Console prices have gotten high enough. Parents considering the purchase for their kids have to also pick a game or three to add to the tab? Ridiculous.

M and I just got back from a four-night trip to Shenandoah National Park in northern Virginia. I’ve been talking about it with people this week, and I’ve run out of positive adjectives. It was remarkably amazing in every way.

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Most of our trip we spent hiking: 7 or 8 miles each day. Since we generally hiked from trailheads on Skyline Drive (the main 105-mile road running through the center of the park and the roughly along the ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains) to waterfalls, just about every single one of the hikes was down for several miles, then back up. Which was a strange thing to get used to. The trails were probably the best-marked ones I’ve ever hiked on. Every mile or so, there would be a granite post in the ground with a metal band around the top. The band would say what trail you were on and how far to other side-trails and destinations and whatnot.

The lodge we stayed in (Skyland) was great (and the view from the room was outstanding). And the “Early Bird” special package (for going before their busy season) was really fantastic. The weather could not have behaved any better while we were there. Move-related problems meant we didn’t have our digital camera with us, but the photos we took with film and my cellphone are definitely excellent.

I recommend this trip for anyone. The lodge meant you didn’t have to really be roughing it, but there’s more than 500 miles of hiking to a whole lot of great mountaintops and waterfalls. There’s 75 stunning overlooks along the road alone, so if you’re not even in a hiking mood, a drive through the park is also more than worth the time it takes.

For those who aren’t aware^[1], M and I are now homeowners and Massachusetts residents. Friday evening we closed on a condo in South Boston, and with the help of a dozen strong friends and family we moved in on Saturday. There are only a handful of pre-move photos up so far, since we don’t yet have Internet access. More are pending!

Update 23 May: Most of Brian's photos taken on the 20th and the 21st plus my dad's from the 20th are of the move and related activities.

[1]: I realize this is a set which is almost certainly mutually exclusive with the readers of this blog.

My wife graduated from medical school on Sunday. For the past four years, I’ve been continually humbled by her hard work, dedication, and her ridiculously vast memory. I suppose that will continue for at least the next three, and more likely for the rest of our lives. Here’s photographic evidence. My own pictures are still pending.

Update 1 June: Just a few photos came out.

After four different positions in three different groups and two cities in the past seven years, this its my last day working for Priceline.com. I’ve had an excellent time working here. The people are friendly and excited, and we occupy an interesting place between tiny startup and mega-corporation, which allows us to do some interesting and cutting-edge stuff.

I’m sad to be leaving, but I’m excited about my new gig at Texterity, as well as the prospects of owning a condo in Southie and just generally moving to the Boston area. May is exciting!

The Revolution now has a name. Say hello to the Nintendo Wii. Pronounced “wee”. Ugh. If it didn’t immediately evoke potty jokes, it wouldn’t be such a bad name.

Some discussion and coverage: Revolution Fanboy, IGN, Joystiq, MetaFilter.

Update 28 April: Brian pointed out this great oped over at GameLife. My favorite point: "Of course, I expect the Internet to brim over with toilet humor; that is what the Internet is for. But the Internet is not real life. They've already proven this in a variety of ways related to Nintendo product announcements. Remember the almost universal outpouring of disdain following the announcement of the Nintendo DS? Nintendogs?"

Update 1 May: First mentioned to me by my dad, the theory that "Wii" is a fake name has become somewhat of a dull roar on the Internet. The theory is simultaneously ridiculous and enticing. Or is it just wishful thinking? If Nintendo changed the name at E3, would it be perceived as giving into pressure as Sony has with just about all of the PS3's design? I suppose it gives us one more thing to think about between now and next Tuesday at 9:30am.

Does stretching really lower the risk of sports injury? Sports Injury Bulletin has a really great article that discusses all of the current research, including the difficulty of avoiding the inevitable bias in cohort studies.

I wrote my first quine today, in Perl. It was surprisingly simple:

$_=q($_=$$;
s/\\$\\$/q($_)/;
print;
);
s/\\$\\$/q($_)/;
print;

Next step: ETA.

Update 13:03: Someone beat me to it. Warning: the first line of the source is 11k characters long, which crashed my browser.

Since I switched from Bloglines to a local install of reBlog (see the Lifehacker post by Mathowie), I’ve been using it to save links to stuff that I find interesting, but don’t feel are quite important enough to post as individual things here. So I’ll probably start doing something like what Khatt’s been doing: occasional link dumps. Here’s four things I’ve enjoyed lately from Make Magazine’s great blog:

• DIY reverse lens mount for macro photography - Cheap, effective, and DIY. Basically that's my photography mantra lately. And I've been interested in trying some macro photography, especially with spring quickly approaching.
• Parking meter keychain - Invaluable for city dwellers with cars. It's got a timer built-in! Amazing!
• How to make an upside down planter - Hm, I seem to already be shifting into a living-in-a-city mindset.
• MAME + iMac - I'm considering doing something like this with M's grandpa's unclaimed first-generation iMac.

I had the chance, possibly for the first time ever, to sit on a corner in downtown New York (specifically Whitehall St and Pearl St), eat my lunch, and just do some people watching. It didn’t take too long for me to realize how much public behavior — even in a stereotypically surly city — is governed by simple respect for our fellow people.

There’s the guy in the over-crowded and entirely enclosed news stand who can hardly get his arms out the little peephole to take your money, but is apparently unafraid of anyone stealing his wares. And the couple selling produce next to him even walked away for several minutes and no one touched a thing. Everyone seemed to know exactly where the polite little line at the hotdog vendor was supposed to be. (And as an aside, why is it always right next to the server, not across from him?) And there was a startling lack of honking car horns.

I was somewhat taken aback. I wonder how much of it has to do with downtown-Manhattanite post-9/11 bonding, and how much of it was always there.

The domain GoMetric.org is expiring on April 24. Should I renew it? Does anyone use it? It averages fewer than 20 hits a day, and it’s unclear how many of those hits are anything besides robots.

Update 5 Apr - Fine, sheesh! I didn't realize people actually still used it. Gometric is now renewed for another two years, and I have some ideas for some updates and whatnot.

The GDC keynote (that supposedly might reveal the final name of the Nintendo Revolution) doesn’t start for more than two hours, but that’s not preventing the rumors from flying. Might it be the double-entendre Nintendo Go? (The Japanese word “go” means five, and this is the big N’s fifth console.) I’m not sure how I feel about the name, but I’m loving the classic-meets-modern cubed-D-pad logo.

Update 11:49: In this interview done last night, Iwata says that he's going to hold back a lot of Revolution information until E3 in May. Whether this means we won't even get a name today is left to be seen.

Update 14:44: News: You'll be able to download and play Sega Genesis and TurboGrafix 16 games on the Revolution, in addition to the previously-known NES, SNES, and N64 games. But it looks like there was no name change today. Set your clocks for the E3 keynotes!

Update 15:56: Here are detailed notes on Iwata's entire keynote.

Update 27 Mar: It's not a name, but the head of Nintendo's PR, Beth Llewelyn, verified in no uncertain terms that Revolution's name will change. She also claims to not know what the name is.

Are you reading Achewood, the best webcomic there is? Have you been following the Great Outdoor Fight, the current epic storyline? No? Start at the beginning and find out what you’re missing. When you’re done, and not quite sure what to make of it, read what Websnark thinks of it.

In response to something Chris said last night, I’d like to try an experiment. I’d like everyone to tell me what the last three albums you’ve purchased or downloaded have been. I’ll do the same. I don’t know what the goal of this is, but I intend to listen to some of the stuff mentioned, and I hope you’ll do the same. I’ll start.

1. Mogwai - Mr. Beast
2. Madonna - Music (Yes, really.)
3. Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis - Live In Swing City: Swingin' With Duke

Your turn.

M will be doing her Residency at Boston Medical Center in Boston, MA.

Pi Day is a sham. So-called Pi Approximation Day (July 22, or 22/7 in European date style) is closer to the true value of π.

22/7 = 3.142857142… abs( 22/7 - π ) = 0.001264489… abs( 3.14 - π ) = 0.001592653…

What a shame.

MetaFilter — or more accurately AskMetaFilter — is a thing of beauty. Last week, after about a month of noticable deterioration, my DSL stopped functioning almost entirely. I spent three hours on the phone with five different AT&T helpdesk people until they finally decided to send out an engineer. He showed up, plugged something into the wall, mumbled “your modem is broken” and left. They wanted $100 to replace it, which I considered (information super-)highway robbery.

EBay has hundreds of DSL modems listed for a lot less, and I decided I’d get one there. But I didn’t know what to look for. There are a lot of acronyms and whatnot, and I wasn’t really interested in doing hard research and studying for a twenty-dollar piece of equipment that I only need for a few months. So I asked MetaFilter. I got better answers than I expected. Two people offered me free modems. One lived in New Haven and I met him last night.

It works like a charm. The Internet is a wonderful place. Thank you, horsemuth.

My pinhole photos came on Saturday. Several of them came out pretty well, and I was surprised that my camera had virtually zero light leaks. M’s mom is scanning them at work and emailing them to me today, hopefully they’ll be up later. (They’re up, as of 12:30.) I’m planning a second 110 pinhole camera, but I thought I’d share what I’ve learned from my first attempt:

1. Make the pinhole smaller much bigger! Even the ones that are good came out pretty fuzzy.
2. Make sure the pinhole is centered and parallel to the film plane. The photos were all more up-and-to-the-right from where I thought they were.
3. Compensate for reciprocity failure.
4. For that matter, I just need to get better at judging light conditions.

A round-up of the pinhole camera links that I used (and others that I just found interesting) while building mine:

• Pinhole Calculator, possibly invaluable for an experienced pinholer, but also a good reference for a newbie.
• Pinhole Spy, the source of the original directions for the 110 camera. I modified the shutter and had to slightly enlarge the entire thing.
• Estimating exposure for those without a light meter.
• A garbage can pinhole camera, the biggest example I've seen.
• The SPAMera uses 120 film and is surprisingly advanced.
• Dirkon, a notoriously complex paper pinhole camera.
• Matchbox pinhole, the directions that inspired my project.
• Chris' photos taken with a matchbox pinhole camera.

Well, it’s done. Last night, at 8:30pm, M’s ranked list of residencies was locked. It’s all in the hands of the algorithm, now. I’ve been asked not to publish her entire list, but last time I mentioned this, I fairly accurately represented the top of the list. She got personalized “thanks for applying here” letters from at least a couple of the programs that she says generally indicates that she’s ranked highly, which is good.

Only three weeks until Match Day!

There’s a company called DNA11 that makes up big, nice looking, (expensive) pieces of art based on your own genome. I was perusing MetaFilter last week when I came across a question about finding a place that would do the same procedure, cheap, and just give a digital scan or a standard print that could be blown up. I liked the idea.

When I saw that one of the answers was offering to do it, I sent him an email post-haste. A few days later, he sends me (and several other Mefites) how to participate, along with a layman’s introduction to polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis.

The biggest disadvantage to building your own desktop is that when things go wrong, you actually have to figure out what it is. A couple weeks ago, in the middle of a game, my desktop shut itself off. It would no longer get so far as POSTing, and sometimes the power supply wouldn’t do anything when I hit the power button. After some fiddling, I determined that it was most likely the motherboard, and since I had a three-year warranty, I sent it back to MSI for repairs.

When a different motherboard (of the same model) came back, it still wasn’t working. This narrowed it down to the (cheap) power supply or the (less cheap) processor. I randomly came across a great rebate deal on a 350W power supply at CompUSA, so I ran there and purchased it. I was lucky, and that did it. It only cost me ten dollars in the end, and my computer now seems quieter, too.

I only wish it hadn’t taken a month.

Every time the Powerball Lottery breaks two-hundred million or so, people at work start talking about it and emailing appeals for joining a lotto pool. After I got sick of shaking my head at these people, I realized that it could possibly be worth it to buy a ticket. Since the ticket price stays the same even as the jackpot grows, there’s got to be a tipping point, beyond which the payoff from the average ticket is greater than one dollar. But what is that point? Should I be queuing up at the gas station right now? Or should I wait until it hits ten digits?

Powerball tells you that the odds of getting the grand prize are 1 in 146,107,962. This gives us a good starting point. In a universe without taxes, annuties or interest, a rational person wouldn’t want to purchase a ticket until the jackpot was $146 million. But we don’t live in that universe, nor do I believe we’ll be travelling to it to play the lottery.

To figure out the answer for us, we’ll need to start by answering one quite difficult question: When they say “estimated jackpot of” whatever, how much of that is going to end up directly in your pocket? The Powerball FAQ talks a bit about how the payoff works (towards the bottom). The advertised estimated jackpot is the annuity, and it’s usually about double the actual cash they have on-hand. If you go for the lump-sum choice, you get that amount of cash (this week, about $150 million). Interestingly, if you choose the annuity, they put that same pile of money into government bonds, and they pay you in 30 yearly installments, funded entirely from that investment.

This detail is important for two reasons. First, even if you buy the same bonds the Powerball folks would have (which you can’t, since you’re a nobody schlub who thought the lottery was a decent investment decision), you end up with a lot less money by picking the lump sum. They’re able to buy the bonds without paying income taxes — which means far more interest. Since it’s income for you even before you can buy anything with it, you aren’t so lucky. Second, they don’t say “estimated jackpot” because they’re lazy; they say it because it’s impossible for anyone to say how bonds are going to behave for the next 30 years. They couldn’t tell you how much money you’ll end up getting if they wanted to. Which they probably don’t.

Unfortunately, this also makes things impossible for us to calculate accurately. So we’re going to have to be estimated it about it as well. So let’s say their double-the-lump-sum (L = J/2) guess is accurate. Accepting the annuity, you end up with J/30 per year. This is (obviously) going to put you in the top tax bracket: 35%. Which means that only about (1 - 0.35) * (J/30) is yours, per year. A little simple arithmetic brings us to the conclusion that J must be at least $224 million.

But what have I forgotten? I’ll give you a moment to consider what I’ve looked at so far. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Decades of interest. A dope with a little slip of paper and Hurley’s numbers. Got it, yet? It’s Carter’s Bane, better known as inflation. The Department of Labor follows inflation using the Consumer Price Index, a complicated formula of a whole bunch of items that pretty much everyone pays for: food, gas, housing, clothes, silly hats, medical care, etc. Looking at a summary table of CPI indexes, the average inflation rate for the past decade has been just over 2.5% year to year.

What does this mean? It means that in 2036, when you’re getting your very last annuity, although it’s (more or less) exactly the same number of dollars, it’ll be worth less than half as much as your first one ((1-2.5%)^29 = 0.48). And your total? Knowing that we want $146 million at the end, we can calculate for J in Σ(n=[0,29]) of ((1-2.5%)^n)((1 - 0.35)(J/30)), and we get a final answer of $316,822,280.

Don’t run out to buy any tickets right now. But if no one wins tonight, you might want to get some for next Saturday’s drawing.

Update, 16 Feb: Last night, mulling this over, I decided that the probabilities of winning non-jackpot prizes were significant enough to consider. Also, I decided that I was calculating from the wrong direction. Knowing (almost) all of the outcome values and probabilities, it should be easy to setup an equation for the value of the average ticket and solve for when that value equals one dollar. It was easy:

So when the pocket value of the jackpot is over $117 million, a ticket is worth more than it costs. The pocket value is equal to the inflation-corrected post-taxes estimate we made above (about 46.117% of the advertised estimation). An estimated jackpot of about $254 million would satisfy these conditions. No one won last night, and they're advertising above $360 million for Saturday.

This is a really strange development that requires some pondering and discussion. An expansion for Half-Life 2 has been in development for a while (previously named Aftermath). Reportedly, it follows Alyx (and, some reports say, Gordon) escaping from the devastation immediately following the end of Half-Life 2.

But last week, things got weird. Valve renamed Aftermath to Half-Life 2: Episode One. Doug Lombardi is being terse at the moment, but this appears to indicate intent to release regular episodic content. In general, this is a good thing, but I have a number of concerns.

The first concern is with naming. What is the “original” Half-Life 2, chopped liver? Episode Zero? Does anyone remember the naming scheme of the series that started with Dark Forces? First, there was Dark Forces. Then, there was Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. Then there was Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast. Then, well, they decided to stick with Jedi Knight, which I think was a good idea. I predict that it won’t be long until there are sub-subtitles (Half-Life 2: Episode Three: Return of the Snarks) or they abandon the episode number altogether. (As a side note, for the nerd subculture, the “Episode Foo” scheme invokes too much Star Wars Prequelism to be anything but unsettling.)

But the bigger problem I see is Valve’s rampant perfectionism, and thus their inability to deliver a game on time since, well, the first Half-Life. Sure, this is inarguably a Good Thing™ when it comes to game quality. But when you make a promise to release regular content (especially if you charge per-“episode”), you need to do it. And that means cutting corners. It’s taken them a year and a half to release Aftermath. How long will Episode Two take?

I apparently haven’t seen enough movies this year. Of the top categories of 2006 Academy Awards nominees, I’ve seen:

I’ve got five weeks. I wonder how much I can improve those numbers.

Update, 6 Mar - I saw only a single additional top-Oscar-nominated movie in the five weeks since this post was made: Match Point, nominated for Best Screenplay. Out of the Oscar winners for all of the categories, I saw only two: The Constant Gardener (Rachel Weisz won Best Supporting Actress) and Wallace and Gromit (Best Animated Film)