Inventions and Improvements

- Phones should come with a switch on the outside that turns off the ringer. I hate when I'm in a restaurant and I want to turn off my phone so I don't interrupt dinner, but I can't do that without taking the phone out of my pocket and making a big show of it. (This was not my idea, nor is the next phone thing.)

- Sometimes when I lose my phone, I call it so I can hear it ring. But sometimes it's on vibrate and that doesn't work. It would be great if there were a way to call your phone and enter in a code, which would tell the phone, "I don't care if you're on vibrate or silent, ring really loudly right now." The code would be specific to a person (a la voicemail) so other people could not force your phone to ring when you want it on silent.

- The following things should be operable by foot:
- Kitchen faucet, for washing the dishes. It would be super convenient and would save some water.
- Music stand. Ian gave a violin recital last week and in retrospect, I don't know how he was turning pages on the music stand. A foot lever would be pretty sweet. (This idea came out of a conversation with Ian's friend and fellow musician, Jesse.)

- Electronic teaching gizmo for sports. Say I wanted to improve my golf swing. First, we read into a computer what a good golf swing looks like. This technology already exists - it's used to model sports behavior for video games. The way it works (I think) is that the athlete modeling the behavior (say, Tiger Woods) wears all black spandex, except for a few dozen white spots on the elbow, the knee, etc. Then when the athlete takes a golf swing, the computer can read where the white dots move (I don't know if it does so visually or with some kind of sensor).

Now comes the trickier part. I wear a similar spandex suit and take my swing. It would be pretty useful just to visually compare where my white dots move compared to how they move on a Tiger's swing, but we can it one step farther. I have the same white dots on my spandex as Tiger did, but my white dots can provide feedback. If my elbow starts to get out of line relative to how Tiger moved his, I receive a very mild electrical stimulation on the elbow. If it starts to get really out of line, I get a bit more shock (nothing that would hurt).

I could then practice making my white dots move just like Tiger's and I would get constant feedback, even during the swing. One useful addition would be to find a way so that the white dots could communicate "the elbow should be closer to the body" rather than "the elbow is not in the right place." Maybe there could be feedback on a video screen or something.

Even if the varying electric stimulation is not a feasible idea (it does sound kind of crackpot), just displaying that information on a computer screen would probably work pretty well.

My Poker Year To Date

As you can see, it started off pretty miserably. This graph stretches from Jan 1, 2008 to June 20, 2008. The point in the middle where my year-to-date earnings crossed from positive into negative came at roughly March 25.

That's a long time and a lot of hands to not be making any money, especially since being a winning poker player is a significant chunk of how I think of myself. I would've gone crazy without Amanda being there to talk me down from the ledge (figuratively), and I'm sure I drove her a bit crazy, so thank you Amanda.

Things have picked up quite a bit, so this year my $/hand is almost as high as it was last year. It's a big relief.

so, i've decided to start blogging again, but not just about poker. poker's going great - after an extremely mediocre start to the year the last three months have been great and 2008 is almost back up to 2007's pace.

but i mainly want to start blogging about politics and some other stuff, since i think i'm wearing out my welcome on my friends' and family's inbox with links and pithy remarks.

something that caught my eye today was in an article by jim webb, a leading candidate to be the democratic vp. he wrote in a 1979 article with the unfortunate title "women can't fight":

When the layerings of centuries of societal development are stripped away, a basic human truth remains: Man must be more aggressive in order to perpetuate the human race. Women don't rape men, and it has nothing to do, obviously, with socially induced differences. As Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin observe in The Psychology of Sex of Differences, man's greater aggressiveness "is one of the best established, and most pervasive of all psychological sex differences." [emphasis added]

i think the section that i italicized would make a pretty powerful attack ad, mostly aimed at female voters who had supported hillary, but for the most part the article was not as bad as i feared it would be after seeing it described. the whole article is kind of like your grandfather saying borderline things and you averting your eyes, but there's nothing too repugnant. not exactly what i'm looking for in a VP candidate, but i'd take him over hillary. it was almost 30 years ago, although i've read that he's said some kind of similar stuff more recently.

probably the most damaging sound bite is this description of a residence after the naval academy went coed: "[I]t is no secret that sex is commonplace in Bancroft Hall. The Hall, which houses 4,000 males and 300 females, is a horny woman's dream." it's a kind of bizarre thing to say, and i'd think it would sound unprofessional even in 1979. i'd be curious if the editors of the magazine tried to get him to take that out.