We had a visitor today who was interested in visiting art museums tomorrow before his flight home, and I thought a map might help. Then I got carried away and created a map of all the art museums in Basel that I could find, and figured I might as well post it for the world to see.
Note that I didn’t include art galleries, because that would simply have been too much work.
If you find “luck” a distasteful word (for theological reasons or others), you’ll have to trust me on this one, or else skip out now.
Janet picked up this book used at a bazaar and its premise looked interesting enough that I read it. Although at times redundant, the writing was good enough to keep my interest and keep me reading. I think that the author’s interest in magic tricks and illusions have trained him in knowing his audience, and it shows in little details such as the author’s name on the front cover, bereft of the academic titles he has earned. This is a book aimed at everyone, and the repetitious tendencies make me think it’s also written with the forgetful, the lazy, and the skimmers in mind.
Wiseman started with a question: What if we could find characteristics that set apart lucky people from unlucky people? For this to work, he first sets out to define lucky, unlucky, and neutral (neither lucky nor unlucky) people. He does this by asking subjects to rate two statements from 1 to 7, with 7 meaning the statement describes them perfectly. These are the statements:
1. “Lucky people are people for whom seemingly chance events tend to work out consistently in their favour [he’s English]. For example, they seem to win more than their fair share of raffles and lotteries, or often accidentally meet people who can help them in some way, or their good fortune might play an important role in them achieving their ambitions and goals.”
2. “Unlucky people are the opposite: seemingly chance events tend to work out consistently against them. For example, they never seem to win anything in competitions, or they tend to be involved in accidents that are not their fault, or are unlucky in love, or experience a great deal of ill fortune in their careers.”
To get your classification, subtract your rating of the second statement from your rating of the first. Minus three and lower means you consider yourself unlucky, three and above means you consider yourself lucky, and the scores in between show you consider yourself neither particularly lucky nor particularly unlucky. (Note that his definition relies upon perception and not peer evaluation, and that it does not claim that “Lady Fortune” or “Fate” exist. In fact, I think Wiseman would argue that we are all subject to random chance, though he does not come out and say as much.)
From there on out, the book talks about different experiments Wiseman and his colleagues ran and how they could show certain correlations between luck and characteristics or behavior. He groups them into four principles, each of which have a few sub-principles, twelve in all. I’ll skip the sub-principles - you can read the book for those - but the main principles are the following:
1. “Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their life.”
2. “Lucky people make successful decisions by using their intuition and gut feelings.”
3. “Lucky people’s expectations about the future help them fulfil their dreams and ambitions.”
4. “Lucky people are able to transform their bad luck into good fortune.”
It’s not rocket science: perception and self-perception reliably influences the direction our lives take. Let’s take the first principle: If we say hi to someone in an elevator, we have increased our chances of a “chance opportunity” coming our way; if we can relax enough to notice our surroundings, we have increased our chance of noticing a “chance opportunity,” and, most obviously, if we don’t act on the opportunities, then “luck” will never smile on us. Wiseman adds anecdotal evidence and numbers to bolster his conclusions, conclusions that may in some cases seem self-evident. Most interesting to me was the experiment he made with the lottery, getting a large number of volunteers who had been classified according to their luck to buy a lottery ticket, and sending Wiseman the numbers and their confidence that they would win. The only difference between lucky and unlucky people was their level of confidence - which I would suppose would lead a “lucky” person to play more often, and thus increase his chances of “getting lucky.”
I believe Wiseman succeeds primarily in redefining lucky people as those who are open and active and unlucky people as those who are passive superstitious whiners in denial - again, he doesn’t say that, but that is the conclusion I reached. He does include some interesting activities for every sub-principle, one of which I tried out while in Saudi Arabia. It called for me to pick six activities, assign them numbers from one to six, roll a die, and carry out the corresponding activity. I think I got more done that evening than I would have otherwise, but I put that down to having my decision made for me and having committed myself to following through. I may do that again, just for that reason.
Of course, the whole talk about luck becomes very interesting when we think about it in terms of faith and religious tenets. There are the basic questions such as how much influence a sovereign God exerts on what we consistently perceive as random events, such as the lottery drawing or coin flips. That question asks whether such a thing as chance exists, but it’s somewhat irrelevant to the discussion as (a) either answer produces the same phenomenology and (b) luck as defined by Wiseman is a matter of perception. Wiseman asks his readers to keep a “luck journal,” jotting down notes and answers to questionnaires to refer back to later. At the outset, he asks the reader to fill out a luck profile, rating twelve statements according to how well they describe the reader. As you might imagine, each statement articulates one of the sub-principles he later goes on to discuss. Certain of these statements - and, as a corollary, the corresponding sub-principles - are strongly influenced by our faith. For instance, “I believe that even negative events will work out well for me in the long run” almost reads like a paraphrase of Romans 8:28 and rating it anything other than 5 out of 5 would indicate that there is still a divide between our beliefs and our lives. Our rating of “I expect most of the people that I meet to be pleasant, friendly and helpful” would likely depend a lot on how strongly the doctrine of original sin shaped our life in contrast to the idea that we are created in God’s image and sin and evil cannot completely suppress that. I noticed that a lot of the principles that depend on our social behavior should be positively influenced by the command not to forsake the practice of meeting together, and similarly the ubiquity of the statement “I didn’t feel at peace about X” and its frequent approval in Christian circles indicates that many of us place a high value on intuition. We may sometimes deny the role of intuition by making the statement more EC (evangelically correct) and saying “God didn’t give me peace,” but - feel free to disagree here - I think that in that statement God is often a front that lets me do what I feel like doing.
If Wiseman is right, and luck can be influenced by our behavior, then following Scripture should make us luckier even if we discount God’s benevolent action on behalf of his children. Factor in the latter, and our “luck” should be going through the roof! At the very end of the book, Wiseman mentions that he’s running a project to investigate the relation between luck and religious belief. I’m quite interested in how that turns out: can God’s action in our life be measured by experiment? At any rate, Wiseman’s research can partially explain why many religions “work” in the here and now.
Wiseman also looks briefly at the correlations between answers to the luck profile and compatibility in love. Apparently, when given potential partners with different luck scores, lucky people chose people who scored similarly to them - similar weaknesses and strengths - and unlucky people chose dissimilar people. Although it’s pretty pointless to measure compatibility after the marriage vows, Janet and I thought it would be an interesting little experiment. It turns out we had very similar scores, so we’re keeping the compatibility check. 
All in all, my takeaway message was one I’d known for a long time: “Godliness with contentment is great gain.”
[Now that I have written this entry, we’re willing to give the book away - it’s not great enough to keep, but interesting enough to share.]
Last week I visited Saudi Arabia for an installation of an atomic force microscope at King Saud University. I won’t deny that I was a little concerned by the country’s reputation for harsh justice and the visa application form requiring me to declare I wouldn’t bring any religious publications (or porn or drugs) into the country, be it for distribution or personal use. But I figured I could manage four nights in a Hilton Garden Inn hotel.
The flight was fairly uneventful, though I managed to get some shopping tips from the flight attendant who used to live in Saudi Arabia and also alleviated some of my concerns about the strictness of the regime. My biggest difficulty in getting past immigration was my choice to get in line behind three Pakistanis; my baggage had already arrived on the belt by the time I got through. I had to have my luggage X-rayed on the way out of the airport, but nobody searched my suitcase for a Bible or fashion magazines. I would have expected a dog for the drugs at the very least - but come to think of it I didn’t see a single dog the whole time I was in Riyadh.
A driver from the hotel picked me up, an Indian, who spoke little English. Nevertheless, we tried our hand at simple conversation, and I asked him where he was from and how he liked Saudi Arabia. He frowned and said it was all money, no scenery - then asked where I was from. I felt a little guilty answering truthfully, and predictably his reaction was one of admiration. Not that it’s my merit that we have pointy snow-capped mountains… We drove past the construction site for Princess Noor University, which is several kilometers long and crowded with cranes. In the dark, with lights fixed to them to illuminate the dusty construction site, they looked like something out of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.
The next day there was a bit of confusion getting to the university, when the driver from the hotel decided to go via King Abdullah road, which they’re tearing up for kilometers on end to put in a train to the university. He also had no idea where the building was that I needed to get to. Finally, I made it, and the following days a university driver took me there and back in a GMC suburban.
The installation proceeded well, with the biggest challenge being occasional language barrier issues. It was particularly interesting to begin to understand the daily routine of a devoutly Islamic country, which is structured around the calls to prayer. I suppose that is why I was always brought back to the hotel around 3:30 pm, as three of the five prayers would follow soon after that.
There are no women at King Saud University - though with the headscarves many guys look slightly feminine in silhouette when viewed out of the corner of my eye and often caused me to do a double-take. The professor I worked with was an Indian Muslim who’d previously worked in Liverpool, spoke fluent English, and was very helpful in explaining cultural subtleties and not-so-subtleties. According to him, it’s hard on his wife, who can’t see a lot of upsides to Riyadh except for the cheap restaurants - “I can’t even go to the bloody library,” he quoted her. I also asked him about the several plastic surgery clinics and the lingerie store I’d spotted. He said plastic surgery was relatively popular (and not because Saudis injure themselves to a disproportionate degree) and so was lingerie, though his wife disliked having the sales clerks being men.
Saudi food doesn’t hardly exist, and instead is a hodge-podge of imports from across the region, especially Lebanese food and Indian food. There are some Saudi dishes, which I tried at Saudi House, thanks to the recommendation of a hotel employee, who said that restaurant was where he went to eat when he really wanted to eat. The menu he wrote down for me was lamb on rice and a bowl of a white cream somewhat reminiscent of tapioca pudding in consistency and clearly prepared with plenty of butter alongside thin slices of bread in a red sauce. The rice was prepared with a bit of cloves and cinnamon, and some of it was yellow. I ate in my own booth, sitting on the floor; they had pity on me and served me plastic cutlery so I didn’t have to eat with my hands. It all tasted good, but there was no way for me to finish it - see for yourself.
Saudi Arabian food.
The Pakistani driver who brought me there and an Indian guy I met at the restaurant both asked me if I was Muslim because of my beard. When I told the driver I was from Switzerland, he said it was heaven; I tried to point out that it was nice, but far from perfect. He later told me that Switzerland used to be a Muslim country and had two large mosques, which baffled me no end. I suggested he might mean Turkey - I knew he wasn’t confusing us with Sweden - but he insisted. Later it hit me that he must have meant Spain. The same driver joined in the chorus of all the drivers I spoke to: “I’m a good driver - the others are crazy.”
On the way home I noticed that there were also a bevy of dentistry supply shops lining the streets. I never got around to asking anyone why.
On Thursday, before I flew out, I took the professor’s suggestion to visit the Taiba market. It’s a covered array of little shops all specializing in jewelry - the flight attendant had told me that jewelry was reasonably priced and a good buy as far as souvenirs went. The taxi driver brought me there, dropped me off, and then told me that the stores wouldn’t open for another quarter of an hour at least - it was 3pm. So I strolled through the abandoned alleyways and finally sat down, watching the place slowly come to life. First came the Bangladeshi cleaning guys, then, slowly, one by one the Saudi shopkeepers, carrying their freshly ironed headscarves on wire hangers. To my surprise, women started showing up as well, many of them unaccompanied in groups or even on their own, and a few without the total veil.
Taiba Market in Riyadh before opening time.
I bought a small gold chain in the shop you see in the center of the above image and thought about calling the taxi driver who had brought me there, but decided instead to hop in a taxi that happened by just then. The driver was older than all the other drivers i’d had, but that didn’t mean he was slower. On the contrary. As soon as we were out of the Taiba Market grounds, he accelerated down Olaya street and quickly reached double the speed limit - then he had to brake for traffic lights. Every time lights came up, he’d pick whichever lane was shortest, regardless of which direction he planned to take. One time he picked the right turn lane, and once the light turned green bolted out of the gate and crossed four lanes of traffic before he crossed the intersection. I obviously survived both that ride and the flight back to tell the tale - but I sure am happy my country runs the way it does.
My taxi driver, the Stig - and my thumb.
It appears stimuli are turning into a commonplace economic tool of the US government, so why not weigh in now to give our President time to consider my proposal, which is as follows:
Let the US adopt the ISO standards for paper sizes.
All you need to know about these sizes Markus Kuhn has already written down and made available to anyone with internet access on his A4 paper format page. (Richard Nixon - no, not that Richard Nixon - describes Markus Kuhn as a “polymath” who knows more than just paper sizes, so don’t be too harsh on the man who writes an expanded encyclopedia entry on paper formats.) What struck me upon skimming the page was that what I consider a normal function of any copying machine - enlarging a sheet of paper to twice its size - is rendered impossible due to the unfortunate standard sizes of US and Canadian paper.
So let’s join the rest of the world and adopt the beautifully rational (and yet irrational, as my wife points out) ISO paper formats, where all A sizes have the same L/W ratio. Kuhn estimates that “such a project can succeed only if the national executive has the political will to accomplish this. The transition period of about a decade is necessary to avoid expensive equipment replacement costs for printers.” Surely the US printing machine industry could use the stimulus the change to the new formats would bring, and with the right arguments and stimulus bills we could change over even faster. It would reduce costs for companies doing overseas business and eliminate the frustration of PDF documents being in an awkward format unsuitable for our printer paper.
If you like this idea, why not write your representative? I’ll mail you the A4 paper.
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a classic car. When several such men satisfy their wants and band together to transform an old storehouse of a construction company into a swank garage for their swank cars, complete with a restaurant with chandeliers made of oldtimer headlamps, you get the Pantheon Basel. This is where Nanosurf invited its employees for a New Year’s dinner. I’ll keep it short: a few pictures should let those who want to see more know to write me, and save bandwidth for those who don’t. Suffice to say that a good guide can really make the cars come to life.
Who made this car, and why does it have a sunroof?
Who made this car, and why does the roof open?
An overview of the Pantheon Basel. Many of these cars are privately owned, driven up the large ramp purpose-built around the outside wall. The roof, which used to hold a large crane for moving stockpiled wares, is held up by the tension of thousands of wires attached to the central torus and drawn outward, down the outside walls, and underneath the building to its center.
It’s certainly a great place for car lovers, though I’d only recommend the restaurant once the smoking ban has taken effect later this year. As to the questions above, the yellow car was made by BMW, and it has a sunroof for safety reasons. If the car has a frontal collision, its refrigerator door risks being shut permanently, trapping the passengers inside - hence the emergency exit via the sunroof. The green car was manufactured by Messerschmitt, better known as purveyors of fearsome WWII fighter planes. The roof opens because that’s how Messerschmitt knew how to build a door - never fix a working system!
I first registered the www.thduggie.com domain with Yahoo! in late 2004 and paid $24.90 for five years of registration. When in late 2009 I saw the renewal bill of $34.95, I figured it must also be for five years - a slight increase in price, but the $24.90 deal was a special offer back then anyway, so I didn’t worry about it.
Then I looked up my domain name on whois.com, and saw the registration expired in late 2010. That meant that my yearly rate had increased by 600%, enough that I called Yahoo! customer support in Portland, OR. I aborted the first call when the machine told me the wait was going to be under 30 minutes and we were getting ready for dinner, but a later call gave me an estimate of 15 minutes - good enough for me.
I asked the support guy if the $34.95 were indeed for only a year, which he confirmed. When I mentioned that this represented a 600% increase, he confirmed that the $34.95 a year was the third highest going rate. When I asked why, he said the official script he ought to give me was that the rates had risen “to maintain [their] 24/7 tech support.” (That’s 24/7 as defined by “Please contact our support team at (800) 318-0870, Monday-Friday, 6 a.m.–6 p.m. PT.”) Later, he would also say that “at [that] level of tech support [they’re] lucky to have comfortable chairs.”
In the end, he put me on hold for a while, talked to his manager, and came back to tell me that he could apply a $25.00 coupon to my charge, so that it would be $9.95, the same rate that I had previously had. (Lest you do the math and discover a discrepancy of a factor of two, I’ll disclose that the $24.90 was a rate discounted by 50% because I paid for five years at once.) Great, I said, thanks, but would I be able to apply that coupon again next year? I would, said he, because this was a lifetime coupon that would ensure a constant yearly rate of $9.95 till death or better business doth us part or Yahoo! somehow loses my magic reference number (#10041420, just in case they lose it).
So, I asked, does everyone who calls after this rate increase get the magic lifetime super coupon? No, they don’t. Most folks just call to cancel their domain and ask for a refund.
I hung up happy for the friendly customer support and the rebate, but confused about the business model. My guess is Yahoo! jacked up the rates in 2008 and figured a number of folks wouldn’t mind or notice being bilked, but why they let folks just cancel instead of routinely trying to retain them with a discounted offer I don’t know. Perhaps they didn’t want the $25.00 magic lifetime super coupon to become common knowledge and spur a coupon rush of the bilked folks.
So if you’re paying $34.95 a year for your domain registration at Yahoo!, give them a call, talk to their service and support guys. They’ll be pleased to talk to the folks putting the butter on their bread. And if you’re in the Portland area, maybe they’ll even let you take them out for coffee.
A while back I posted a brief description of how Nanosurf AFMs can be used in the quality control process of an everyday item, the ball-point pen. This time I can present to you a 90-second video on the benefits of atomic force microscopes for surface analysis. It’s hard for me to gauge how easy it is to understand for someone not directly involved or if the information presented is adequate and appropriate in its depth and amount, so I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.
I recently went through some old printouts, and found an e-mail from a friend detailing the rules of the game “You Blew It,” which I had requested because I first played it when visiting her family way back when. The e-mail’s dated 2005, so here’s to recycling paper and posting the rules online instead. Here are the rules:
a) Play with two teams, six dice, a legal pad, and a pen.
b) The goal is to make points with every roll of the dice.
c) The player rolling must save at least one point-worthy die of every roll. If he rolls a combo, he must save all of the dice that are part of the combo.
d) Ones are worth 100 points per die, fives 50 points per die.
e) Three of a kind are worth 100 points multiplied with the number of eyes on the die (equaling 200, 300, 400, 500, or 600), except for three ones, which are worth 1′000 points. Four ones are worth 1′100 points, four fives 550.
f) Rolling 1-2-3-4-5-6 in one roll is worth 1′500 points.
g) Failure to roll any points results in the loss of all the player’s points of his turn and those of his teammates who rolled before him in that round. You Blew It! The player passes the dice to the person to his left.
h) If the player has rolled points, he must decide which point-worthy dice to keep from the roll, and then must decide whether (i) to roll again and risk blowing it or (ii) to end his turn, take the points he has, and pass all dice to the person to his left. (As a rule of thumb, an average turn is 350 points.)
i) If a player makes points with all six dice, whether in one roll (see f)) or sequentially, he must gather up all six and roll again.
j) Play is in rounds, with every player taking turns. Teams can sit together or, to add to the complexity, alternating around the table.
k) A round is completed when the dice have passed around the table once, that is, all players have taken one turn. (Optional: The following round begins with the player who went second in the previous round.)
l) Points the team gained in a round cannot be lost, even when a team member blows it in the following round.
m) Play continues until a team reaches a predefined score at the end of a round. 5′000 points is considered a short game; 10′000 points a normal game.
n) Pick a responsible scorekeeper with a solid understanding of the rules and little fear of chaos. Ideally, he will have two sheets: one for a tally of the final sum of points accumulated by teams in their respective rounds, and one scratch sheet to keep track of the points players gain or lose in their turns.
Have fun playing, and if you have questions, ask me, and I’ll ask the expert!
A further variation of the game is here.