My other Google baby

After a very long time, my other project finally has something out the door. To see it, try searches for a restaurant or bar or whatnot that has a homepage. e.g. babbo, and look at the little plusbox under the first result.

(Also, while I'm discussing work, I'm excited that Mondrian is public. It's just one of the snazzy new tools at work that make me wonder how people get anything done anywhere else.)

Bugs fixed in partychat

We have this chat room tool Akshay wrote that just shows up as a buddy in Google Talk called Partychat. But it's had some bugs for a while. In a fit of boredom Sunday, I fixed them. It was kind of fun to work on an open source project again, even if it was a little-used one powered by Googlers. The hardest part turned out to be getting the Sourceforge CVS to cooperate with Eclipse. For some reason, the initial checkin mapped src/ to C:\users\... and weirdness ensued from there. By deleting the src symlink, creating an actual src directory, and then running a CVS update, I made the weirdness go away, but boy was that obscure. I also had to manually download the library files. For some reason the CVS ones showed up as empty inside of Eclipse. If anyone has seen this before and knows why, we're all ears.

The Official Drink-all-week Week FAQ

Q. What is drink-all-week week?
A: When Kushal went out on Tuesday (who can resist Klong mojitos and good company?), after going out on Monday (who can resist band name pictionary at Flight 151?), and he knew he would be drinking on Thursday (beer tasting at work!) and Friday (holiday party!), he figured he might as well go out on Wednesday, too.

Q: What's all the fuss about?
A: Kushal was surprised to be informed that he would also have to drink on Saturday and Sunday to complete the week, and that he had to buy the drinks for them to count, voiding his Thursday and Friday plans.

Q: Isn't this stupid, or even borderline alcoholic?
A: It did become clear at point that this was sort of a foolish undertaking, but, as with so many things in life, it seemed like Kushal might as well follow through. At least all of the drinking was social, although the person who was supposed to be present at all the events (we'll call him Lame Brian) did end up flaking on Wednesday.

Q: What happened on the other nights?
A: On Thursday, mosh dragged Kushal to a Vienna Teng concert at Union Hall that ended up being pretty good. (The other acts were also good, but all the updated calendar pages mean there's no easy way to figure out their names now.) Vienna is sort of a calmer/funnier version of Tori Amos or Regina Spektor. Kushal had a wheat beer called Grandpa's Wheat. On Friday, Kushal didn't actually pay for extra drinks, but he tipped a bartender in exchange for water at some random bar, and he was drunk enough on free booze that we're going to cut him some slack. On Saturday, Kushal had mimosas at Essex (and some shockingly good peach beer later). And, on Sunday, he had Monkey Puzzle Pinot Noir with dinner at Temple and some port at a nearby creperie.

Q: When will the next one be? I want to participate!
A: Hopefully not for a long time. Drinking all week is exhausting!

The Paradox of Choice

I randomly picked The Paradox of Choice out of Catherine's bookshelf (during an awesome Thanksgiving weekend that also featured a hike in the Blue Hills, a hike up Mount Liberty, the very awesome Stranger than Fiction, the surprisingly dark The Prestige, the tasty BV Rutherford and Roederer, and pumpkin curry soup). I had read some articles about the book, but unlike so many of these sorts of books (e.g. The Wisdom of Crowds), it actually had many more ideas to convey than I had seen in the reviews and excerpts. It was really a whirlwind tour of a bunch of interesting psychology results: things like how people remember the peak and end of experiences, how quickly people adapt to changes to their lives, how the enjoyment of something is reduced by the sum of the opportunity costs of other options considered, how the nature and number of options can increase or decrease the tendency to make a decision at all, how marginal enjoyment diminishes and is less than marginal displeasure, how framing matters, how we're averse to losses and risk, how we refuse to part with whatever we already have. Some of these were ideas I'd encountered before, but it was interesting to see them all in one place. It's hard to say how easy it is to change myself in response to the book, though. There are some decisions I just get unreasonably compulsive about.

Can someone PLEASE explain the ambiguously gay British concert hooligans?

I've been to, like, five concerts this year, and at two of them (Starsailor last month, and the kickass Radiohead-esquely dissonant Modest Mouse concert last night) there were a pair of intoxicated and muscular young British men with several orders of magnitude too much enthusiasm. In both cases, they threw their arms around, groped each other, and pushed each other into the crowd every five seconds. The problem, as you can imagine, is that in a crowded concert venue, bulky Brits blindly falling in every direction are incredibly distracting and scary. Where's security when you need them? This time, they nearly picked a fight with some people before wandering to another part of the venue. Thank goodness.

But the question is - what's up with this weird trend? (Sarah said the same thing happened to her at another concert, and everybody knows three examples make a trend.) Is this standard concert behavior in England? Are gay men in England so repressed they take it out on American concertgoers? Is this some sort of death-by-a-thousand-cuts terrorist plot? Someone please clue me in.

Update: Dolapo says the same thing happened at the Goldfrapp concert, but he's too lazy to post. Also, I forgot to clarify that the thugs at the first concert were not the same as the thugs at the second.

Bill Clinton rocks

Have you ever read one of those books that sort of seems to contain all of life in it? Bill Clinton's speech to the Slate 60 philanthropy conference is sort of like that. Deep thinking, interesting facts and figures, eloquence, gravity, emotion—everything our current president lacks. One of my favorite parts is where he compares the Kyoto Protocol to jobs or marriages, pointing out that if the requirement for uniting with others were perfection, we wouldn't join anything. I can't find a transcript online - but this is absolutely worth dropping onto your iPod and going for a long walk.

In general, the Slate podcasts are great.

I don't know why population density keeps coming up

but first there was this fun map of population density from Time (which is much more information dense than the poorly-presented religion graphs, which in turn sent me wondering about how this could be better presented (probably a bar chart would be fine, although sieve diagrams also look interesting?)), and then we were talking about the number of users Notebook has from Japan, which led to the discovery that Japan had 1/3rd the population of the US in what is clearly much less the area. Everyone looked at me like I was a moron at work, I guess I was the last to know. Anyway, I made this little table (Wikipedia has bigger lists.)

	population	area (km^2)	density (per km^2)
japan	127 million	374,000	340
us	300 million	9 million	31
tokyo	12 million	2,000	5,796 (13,000 in the "special wards")
new york	8 million	785	10,000

All of which is to say that I really want to go to Tokyo sometime and see all this density in action (although Wikipedia claims New York's densest area (Manhattan, duh) has 25,000 people per km^2, exceeding Nakano's 20,000). I'm pretty content with my small patch of land in New York (less to clean!), but I'm not sure I'd be happy with something too much smaller.

Speaking of cities, I'm enjoying paging through The Works in random moments. Thanks, peopleatworkwhorecommendedit!