Recently in Random Musings Category

I like this optical illusion. Post links to any others you think are particularly cool.

In our secular age it has become popular to denigrate our national motto, "In God We Trust", as a merely modern fabrication chosen by Congress as recently as 1956. However, it's likely origin is much earlier and can be found in the final verse of our national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, penned in 1814 by Francis Scott Key.

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Though I doubt you'd learn it or sing it in school.

(HT: SMI Blog.)

Here's a neat article about tuned mass dampeners being used to balance wobbly skyscrapers. First off: that ball doesn't look so big to me.

Second, perhaps a similar effect contributes to womens' (anecdotally supported, at least) superior sense of balance.

(HT: GeekPress.)

The world's first billion-dollar private residence will be a 27-story skyscraper in downtown Mumbai.

Like many families with the means to do so, the Ambanis wanted to build a custom home. They consulted with architecture firms Perkins + Will and Hirsch Bedner Associates, the designers behind the Mandarin Oriental, based in Dallas and Los Angeles, respectively. Plans were then drawn up for what will be the world's largest and most expensive home: a 27-story skyscraper in downtown Mumbai with a cost nearing $2 billion, says Thomas Johnson, director of marketing at Hirsch Bedner Associates. The architects and designers are creating as they go, altering floor plans, design elements and concepts as the building is constructed.

Click below to see the concept art.

It may seem like a small thing, but whenever I'm refilling my soda at a fountain I dump out my cup and get a whole new set of ice cubes. I don't like half-melted ice polluting my fresh soda.

Senator Ted Kennedy is having brain surgery right now. I wish him well. I'm not sure why the health problems of a person I don't know, like, or respect have attracted my attention so acutely. I've been praying for him though.

Update:

The surgery was successful.

I like fingernails, because no matter how badly you pick them or mangle them they always grow back and you've got another chance to clip them cleanly.

John Derbyshire shows us how to build a treehouse, with pictures! I've always wanted to build one... my wife doesn't understand why, but maybe these pictures will explain it.

The National Part Service is planning to deepen Castle Rock cut on Lake Powell in order to shorten transit times when the water level is low. Not that relevant to most people perhaps, but if you look at the lake on Google Maps at two different zoom levels you can see the effect of the water level on the lake surface topography. Neat!

At this zoom level you can see Castle Rock cut submerged. The small, scorpion-tail island to the northeast of Wahweap is Castle Rock. When the water is high, boaters can go directly east from Wahweap to the northern parts of the lake.

This zoom level shows Castle Rock cut exposed. As you can see, boaters are forced to loop through that snake-like path to the south in order to access the eastern parts of the lake, which I'm told adds 12 miles and over an hour to the commute of many lake employees.

Here's an NPS brochure that explains the plans for deepening Castle Rock cut.

"Earth Hour" is a post-civilizational effort to make a mockery of human progress and ingenuity by encouraging people to sit around in the dark and ruminate on the despoiling of our planet, et cetera. To honor this repulsive nonsense, I'm going to leave all my lights on all night -- I call it "Light Night". Feel free to join me if you're so inclined.

Here's something that's been nagging me that I can't find with Google: what's the history of "free refills" at American fast-food chains? Restaurants more generally?

I have a recollection that Subway was the first place to offer free refills, but I can't remember when it started. I think I was old enough to desperately prefer Subway over other restaurants because of the "free refills" policy, and I remember other fast-food joints quickly following suit.

Did sit-down restaurants always offer free refills of soft drinks, or did they come after the fast-food "free refill"? Is my memory that the "free refill" phenomenon began with Subway correct? Does anyone know what year it was?

"Most Awesomely Bad Military Patches". I find it hard to believe that some of them are real.

Here's an article that really made me think over the past month, which is why I didn't post it sooner. "The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors". I'm not good at this, and I've really been debating the merits of the idea internally.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

“We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.” ...

So what can be done? One answer, Dr. Ariely said, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: “In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.”

Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.

I don't tend to bite off more than I can chew, but I do like to stay extremely busy. Am I too busy? I don't know. I know I get bored if I don't have something productive to do.

Anyway, I still don't know what to think of the article, but I figured it was time to share it so I can close at least one thing: a lingering browser window.

Anyone have any leap day rituals?

A fun mental experiment called Newcomb's paradox:

The player of the game is presented with two opaque boxes, labeled A and B. The player is permitted to take the contents of both boxes, or just of box B. (The option of taking only box A is ignored, for reasons soon to be obvious.) Box A contains $1,000. The contents of box B, however, are determined as follows: At some point before the start of the game, the [infallible] Predictor makes a prediction as to whether the player of the game will take just box B, or both boxes. If the Predictor predicts that both boxes will be taken, then box B will contain nothing. If the Predictor predicts that only box B will be taken, then box B will contain $1,000,000.

By the time the game begins, and the player is called upon to choose which boxes to take, the prediction has already been made, and the contents of box B have already been determined. That is, box B contains either $0 or $1,000,000 before the game begins, and once the game begins even the Predictor is powerless to change the contents of the boxes. Before the game begins, the player is aware of all the rules of the game, including the two possible contents of box B, the fact that its contents are based on the Predictor's prediction, and knowledge of the Predictor's infallibility. The only information withheld from the player is what prediction the Predictor made, and thus what the contents of box B are.

The problem is called a paradox because two strategies that both sound intuitively logical give conflicting answers to the question of what choice maximizes the player's payout. The first strategy argues that, regardless of what prediction the Predictor has made, taking both boxes yields more money. That is, if the prediction is for both A and B to be taken, then the player's decision becomes a matter of choosing between $1,000 (by taking A and B) and $0 (by taking just B), in which case taking both boxes is obviously preferable. But, even if the prediction is for the player to take only B, then taking both boxes yields $1,001,000, and taking only B yields only $1,000,000—the difference is comparatively slight in the latter case, but taking both boxes is still better, regardless of which prediction has been made.

The second strategy suggests taking only B. By this strategy, we can ignore the possibilities that return $0 and $1,001,000, as they both require that the Predictor has made an incorrect prediction, and the problem states that the Predictor cannot be wrong. Thus, the choice becomes whether to receive $1,000 (both boxes) or to receive $1,000,000 (only box B)—so taking only box B is better.

In his 1969 article, Nozick noted that "To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly."

So which half are you in?

Tangential to the evolution debate:

Pick an encoding... the message is in there somewhere.

Billed as a "citizenship" test, here's a decently hard-but-short American history test. I got 26/30, and a couple of the ones I missed were easy in hindsight.

It's short, but watch to the end for the camera and alarm sounds.

(HT: Luke.)

For anyone out there, like me, unlucky enough to never have worked as a long-haul trucker, here's a virtual tour of the inside of a Peterbilt Model 389. Looks a bit bigger than my college dorm room, and a lot more comfortable.

For anyone out there, like me, unlucky enough to never have worked at a fast-food restaurant, here's an interactive McDonald's floor plan that shows how the non-lobby portions of the property are commonly laid out.

Brilliant and artistic: the Battle of Pelennor Fields made out of Candy.

(HT: GeekPress and BBSpot.)

Here's the accident report and video analysis of the recent Missouri Air National Guard F-15 accident in which the plane broke in half in mid-air. The pilot thankfully ejected and survived.