Jeff Stuart - Memoirs of a CPUNERD

To those doubting my theory about NYE babies, I checked all 12 months for number of births of friends on Facebook (a sample taken from 512 friends). I focused on the range of the 25th to the 5th, as some people are a few days early, and some are a few days late. So for example, for NYE, I checked the range 25 Sep to 5 Oct. So what did I find exactly?

10 of the months I checked had a max of 14, a mean of 12.1 births in that range, a median of 13, a mode of 13, and a standard deviation (stddev) of 1.8. This implies that the max is easily within two stddevs of the mean, and really close to being within 1 stddev of the mean (both are significant facts). Now, let’s also think about this from another angle. Let’s say people are equally likely to be born on any day of the year. 512 people divided 365 days is 1.4 birthday per day. Spread that out over a 9-11 day period, and you get between 12.6 and 15.4 birthdays in those ranges. Most of the 10 months fall within 1 stddev of this range, meaning 10.8-17.2 (1 month had 9 births, another had 10 births). Again, this seems to point to the fact that 10 months out of the year, birth rates appear to be normal.

But what was the number I found for those suspected of being NYE babies? Did it follow this same trend? No, the number I found was 19. That’s almost 4 stddevs away from the mean. That’s also 0.3 births/day more than should be expected, assuming every day is equally likely to see the same number of births. Again, this number is statistically significant. I then decided to check another holiday: Valentine’s Day. Nine months later, +/- 5 days would be 9-19 Nov. I was actually a bit surprised to see the number was only 13. What does that mean? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but I think that couples are expecting a certain something on Valentine’s Day and are prepared for it. On NYE, they might not be, or are too inebriated from the festivities to care.

But wait! If you read carefully what I wrote above, you’ll notice that I said 10 of the months, not 11. Why did I exclude one? Well, there’s another event that happens on the last day of a month: Halloween. And what happens on Halloween in America? Parties. Apparently a lot more happens *after* those parties. How do I know, you ask? Well, if we fast forward nine months from Halloween, we get a range of dates from 25 Jul to 5 Aug. How many people were born in that range, you ask? 23! Yes, that’s right, 23. That’s nearly 5% of my contacts on Facebook as opposed to the 3% that it should be, or the 3.7% from NYE.

Just food for thought.

After countless years of having barren walls, I finally broke down and put up some posters. I went looking online for posters of some of the national and state parks to which I’ve been. But the sizes I wanted, about 24×36, were all way expensive, like $75-$120 expensive. Then I realized, wait a second, I’ve taken pictures of all of these places, and I’m pretty savvy with a computer, why not just make some posters out of the pictures I have? So that’s exactly what I did. The GIMPing (photoshopping for those of us to cheap pay for photoshop) didn’t take too long. Well, that’s a lie. It actually was going to take a while, so I just wrote something in Java to take a JPG and shove a frame around it with some text at the bottom. It was actually pretty simple, you can get the code here if you’d like. Below are the images I used (they’ve been downsized for le web, the originals are about 27 MP each). Oh, and if you’re curious as to where I got them printed, I found this place through Google called Posterbrain. It was significantly cheaper than any other place I could find (only $18 + taxes and shipping!), by about 65%. Oh, and the other cool thing is that I think they’re located somewhere close to Davis, because even though I selected 3-4 day shipping (the cheapest option), the posters got here in like two days! w00t!

This (Washington Post) has more and more gotten to me. The story describes how Gawker (a news aggregator/abbreviator) basically excerpted the heck out of a Washington Post article. They took a story that was three days and several thousand dollars in the making, and cut in down in half an hour. They heavily excerpted the story, and barely attributed the source.

We have seen a lot of this already, traditional media outlets becoming at digital distributors, whether they be illicit, legit, or somewhere in between. P2P transactions from things like Bittorrent, Napster, Kazaa, etc. are of course illegal. So it’s easy to see why media companies don’t like them and are suing their users.

But what about a blogger/news-aggregation site that heavily excerpts news articles, runs ads on their page, and doesn’t properly cite their sources, does barely any original work, and doesn’t split ad revenue with the source? Most (including myself) would argue that this is still legal. Until you blatantly ignore copyright, you are staying within U.S. Law. These actions though are killing their food supply. Newspapers are on the decline. Digital news doesn’t bring in the same kind of revenue that the printed paper did (mainly from printed ads, but also from subscriptions). Soon, the real reporters out there will lose their jobs, and the amount of legitimate coverage of news will rapidly decline.

Sure, we’ll always have big issues being covered. People always want to know about things like presidential elections, sports, wars, large company takeovers, etc. But what will be the thoroughness of that coverage? If all you get is blogger coverage for some issues, a blogger who has no editor and does not (for the time being) have to exercise due diligence in their fact checking, what can you expect? Sure, we can have some aggregation sites filter for us, but that will only take us so far.

Local news is another story altogether that I won’t go into. But what do you think? Will there be a balance struck somewhere? Will the government decide that the news needs to be spread however it can, or do you think that congress will enact laws protecting original news sources from now? How will these laws work? Will they only require proper attribution at the top of a story? Will news sources own their work, or will they be forced to share as they are now?

I honestly can’t predict how this will turn out. My hope is that a healthy balance will be struck. I personally would like links to original news stories, but I also love the ability to have an aggregated and abbreviated reading if I so choose. I would say that I’m confident that people smarter and more capable than myself will work this out, but we’re talking about congress, and thus I have many doubts.

Last night I made massaman curry for the first time. I, being American, decided that bigger is better and thus I would make 8x what the recipe called for. I didn’t realize how much that would actually make… After two hours of cooking though, it turned out very good. If you want some, let me know.

Any suggestions for what to try to make next? I’ve made almost any dish of what Americans consider Mexican, so not that.

Facebook has agreed to let implicitly let third party advertisers use your posted pictures. While I don’t have a problem with this, some of you out there in FBLand may. If you would like to retain control of your posts, this then click on “Settings” up at the top where you see the Log out link. Select “Privacy”, then select “Newsfeeds” and “Wall”. Next select the tab that reads “Facebook Ads”. There is a drop down box, select “No one”. Then make sure you save your changes.

Note: I had trouble with Firefox, I had to resort to using Internet Explorer. You could try Opera, Safari, or Konquerer if you have the option.