I need a word for this

Amanda wants to paint the bedroom a different color. I don't really want to do this, for a combination of three reasons: it costs money, it would be a boring use of a Saturday, and it's bad for the environment. I have the same objection to getting rid of our perfectly good double bed and getting a queen-sized bed. This comes up often enough that there should be one word that captures it all, like cheap-azy-ism.

Domestic Terror Attack

There was a domestic terror attack a week ago that got basically no press. I only heard about it today. It was a pipe bomb attack against a mosque in Florida. The bomb did explode, but fortunately no one was injured. It in completely logical that this got no press while the failed car bomb attack in New York got one million lines of press coverage (?!!?!!).

Some Economics Research Ideas

I'm going to start a PhD program in economics at BU. I've been kicking around some ideas in my head for research topics.

- Names. I'd like to do some research into people with various names. Names vary a lot in popularity from year to year and decade to decade. For example, Amanda was an extremely popular name for girls in the early 80s, but less popular before and after. I'd be interested to look at the life outcomes for Amandas born while it was rising in popularity and while it was falling. My guess would be that parents who are in the leading portion tend to be better educated and wealthier than those in the trailing portion, but I'm really just guessing.

One reason I'm interested is a psych study I saw in college. Two groups were given identical stories, except the main character had different names in the different versions. For one group, it was an "old" name that was no longer popular, like Harry, while the main character for the other group had a more modern name. Participants in the study were asked how they felt about the main character and they liked him better if he had a more modern name.

It might be possible to slightly improve your child's quality of life by giving him/her a name that is on the rise in popularity. If you met a woman named Amanda who was born in 1970 without knowing her age, I would bet you would naturally assume that she was probably closer to the peak of Amandas, around 1980, than you would otherwise. This would be an extremely easy psych study - I don't know if anyone has done it.

You could also look at all of the various tricks that psych studies use to separate out the impacts of the nature and nurture: children who were named by their birth parents but did not live with them, twins where one had an "old" name and one had a "young" one, etc.

- Poker with 20 big blinds. I don't know if someone has calculated this, or even how computationally difficult it would be, but I would be curious to see an optimal strategy for 20 big blind HU NLHE with the following restrictions: the SB can min raise or fold, then the BB can 3bet all-in or fold, then the SB can call or fold. I recently read the optimal strategies for push/fold preflop HU situations in The Mathematics of Poker, and their description of how to calculate it. I have made some progress in calculating it for the 20 bb scenario I described - I wrote a program to calculate all-in equity of two hold 'em hands. I'm not sure if I'll try to follow through and figure it out.

I guess I should follow up with what happened with mapIncluded.com. Basically I paid a guy to do some work on it, and then I did a bunch more work on it to make it better (and learn some PHP in the process). But I hit a snag caused by craigslist's restrictions on what you can post that meant I could only do a much less snazzy version of what I wanted to do and I decided to drop it. I have no regrets though, I learned a lot and it was a fun hobby for a while.

I'm Engaged!

Hooray for me (and Amanda)! Sadly, someone bought our preferred wedding site domain name, amandan.com. I think we're going to get amandanwedding.com, which I argued is better than amandan.net or something similar.

We got engaged in Edinburgh, which is where she studied abroad in college and where we went together early in our relationship. The trip was lots of fun. But now for what this blog is really about: nerdy stuff.

I noticed while I was there that prices were listed including VAT, which is roughly the same as a sales tax, at least from a consumer's point of view. This strikes me as a big improvement over the typical American method, where prices are listed pre-tax, so the consumer actually pays a little over a dollar for something listed as 99 cents. In the European method, the price on the menu tells you what you would have to pay for something. In the American method, the menu tells how much money the company receives. I obviously care much about the former.

Also, most American businesses set their prices so that the pre-tax amount is a round number, something like either $2.99 or $3.00, but then with the tax the consumer winds up with a bunch of coins in change. It slows down the process at the cash register and I find it annoying to have a bunch of coins in my pocket. In Scotland, prices are usually set to be round numbers including tax. In the US, there are some places that generally include the tax in their prices and then make round number prices including tax: movie theaters, sports stadiums, and bars. You would get a reputation as a pretty terrible bar if your drinks cost $4 but came out to $4.23 with tax.

I was in a Kentucky Fried Chicken once that had an interesting/terrifying solution to the annoyance of coins. After you ordered your food, say it came out to $5.18. A screen would offer you the chance to throw in another drumstick to make the total price $6. Since most Americans, especially those at KFC, are dangerously underweight, I'm sure that public health experts are thrilled at this innovation and praying it catches on.

I would be psyched if some business started something doing a fair odds gambling game to get rid of coins in change. Your total is $3.82 and you pay with a $5. If you don't want to gamble, you get $1.12 in change. If you do, you get $2 12% of the time and $1 88% of the time. Of course, I think getting rid of pennies altogether is a no brainer.

Alright, my engagement post was 90% whining about coins. Nice.