mgroves

If you're not a regular reader of PostSecret, I highly recommend that you add it to your reading list and/or RSS reader.

It is a relatively famous blog that has received mainstream attention, even being used as a plot device in the TV show "Cold Case".

The premise is this: people send in an anonymous (homemade) postcard with some secret on it. PostSecret then scans them and puts them on the blog. Some of the secrets are really dumb, some are touching, some are shocking. Really shocking.

It's entirely possible that many or most of these aren't true secrets at all. But since it's anonymous, there really isn't any incentive to lie. Keep that in mind as you check out some of the recent shocking secrets:

New secrets are posted weekly on Sunday, and they also have various galleries and live events. You should check it out, and maybe you'll see my secrets on there someday.

Rick Astley will never:

1. Give you up
2. Let you down
3. Run around
4. Desert you
5. Make you cry
6. Say goodbye
7. Tell a lie
8. Hurt you

Shamelessly stolen from a random post on 4chan.

I smoked for almost 10 years, but now I'm clean. How did I succeed where my friends failed? Because I stopped hanging out with my friends.

You smoke because you're addicted, everyone acknowledges that. But you also smoke because you like smoking. It's relaxing; it gives you something to do when you're just waiting around; and it's social (I can't count the number of people I've met smoking outside a building). So, this is a sacrifice of something you enjoy.

Physiologically, there's only about 48 hours of addiction you need to overcome. That's the toughest part. You'll be stuck in a traffic jam with nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs, wishing you had one. A nicotine patch is great during this time. A 14mg one should do the trick. And you don't need to use them for the recommended two weeks - you'll just become addicted to the patch instead.

The psychological part is the trickiest. Remember, you like smoking. It makes you happy. You'll fight yourself, and barter with yourself, and you'll trick yourself. I remember posing the hypothetical situation of quitting smoking and still getting lung cancer 25 years later. That was 25 years I could've been smoking! Don't trust your brain. Your brain is a chemical-hungry monster. If it starts messing with you, poke it with a q-tip.

Here are a couple more difficult but effective tips:

1. If your spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend smokes, they must quit with you.
2. As soon as you quit, take a shower and wash your clothes.
   Otherwise, residual nicotine will seep into your skin.
3. Stop hanging out with your friends.
   Of course this assumes your friends smoke like you do, but more often than not, that's the case. They may have even been the ones to get you smoking in the first place (because you're a follower - admit it). If it wasn't those friends it was probably another set of friends. You're not going to have any luck quitting if you have to keep watching them light up. And once you're clean for a couple days their odor will be repellent to your born-again nostrils.
4. Stop going to bars.
   Smoking and drinking go hand in hand. Depending on your city or state's drinking laws, this may no longer be the case. But even that smoker's patio will be an unnecessary temptation.

My wife and I now pursue smoking recreationally. If we go out of town for the weekend, we might decide to buy a pack. Medically, smoking one or two packs of cigarettes in a year is a lot different than 365 packs. We understand it might be difficult to let go come Monday, but quitting has given us the confidence that we're the ones in control.

That's an important lesson. If you only quit for 2 weeks or a month, know in your heart that you can do it again. You may be weak but you are not powerless over your actions.

And whatever you do, don't flick away your last one and say, "This is the last cigarette I'll ever smoke." Monumentalizing it only makes it harder. It's like taking your sick dog out to the woods to shoot (I'm, of course, speaking to the hill-folk out there). What you need to tell yourself is that you'll, in all likelihood, smoke another cigarette in your lifetime; if you stop for a month, a year, or a decade, it's no big deal.

Once you quit, you'll be healthier, wealthier, and more attractive to the sexiest people in the world: the healthy, wealthy ones.

Development of Amarok 2.0 is well underway now. At long last, all you poor bastards using winamp or iTunes will find out what it's like to use a -good- media player.

Winamp was good back in the day, when mp3 collections were small and single playlists were king, but it's long since fallen apart with its clunky collection manager and miscellaneous oddities. iTunes is,... well it's iTunes, and it's bad enough to make mac users want winamp clones.

Enter Amarok, something Linux/KDE users like myself have enjoyed for a few years now.

It's got the only media manager I actually like. You tell it where to find your music, whether it be on a hard drive or a removable device, whatever. It lets you browse and search however you like by tags, or just browse the filesystem. No music gets added to your library if you don't tell it to, which is something winamp and itunes used to do that bugged the hell out of me. Then it has its context window displaying information about the song, lyrics, wikipedia pages on the band / album / title. It's fully extensible with scripts, useful for transcoding songs and albums. It works well with most any portable mp3 device imaginable (and can use the aforementioned transcoding scripts to convert as it transfers). And it ties in with last.fm to suggest songs for you to listen to, and even use that information to build playlists for you with its nifty 'dynamic playlist' feature, which constantly appends relevant tracks as you listen.

It's a wonderful music app, and with 2.0 on the way, it'll soon be available on windows and OSX as well. Huzzah!

In the little city of mgroves.com blogging city this is a pretty bold statement. Never afraid of angering people, I'm making it.

Two years ago I watched an episode and was disappointed. It didn't seem funny then. After flicking through the channels I settle on Family Guy, good episode. Then I see it, Up Next: Aqua Teen Hunger Force. In a frantic rush not to burn my eyes I reach for the remote, it's not there! I search and search, checking down the sofa, under the sofa, in the fridge. It's nowhere to be found. I then realized, as a 250 pound fat lazy human, I just used all my energy trying to find the remote. I'm screwed!

The show starts. I see it takes place in New Jersey, oh cool I figure. Any show that takes place in Jersey gets a few points from me. That's where the fun stops. The story was so hard to follow I can't even give you a recap. All I know a glowing square parked its ass on their lawn and refused to leave. Compelling story to say the least...

I don't know if America has just become that retarded, or I just don't get the show. I'll leave you with this, how the hell does anyone understand that meatball?

I remember when Adult Swim was just a small handful of shows. It's since blown up into dozens and dozens of shows, and now it's finally about to take over the whole week.

Adult Swim will begin to air on Fridays, starting on July 6th, at 11pm.

The only logical step from this point on is for Adult Swim to get their own channel. I think they have enough programming for it, but if they don't, they can always get some syndicated Simpsons, South Park, The Critic, etc, to fill time.

The "Imus situation" continues. This time, unfunny dopes, JV and Elvis have been suspended indefinitely for playing terrible prepburger material that contains some racial references. Specifically, Chinese restaurant jokes like that old gem, "flied lice". Cuz you see, Asians have trouble with "r". Oh man, what a hilarious duo!

JV and Elvis are awful, and normally I'd be happy that their non-humor is gone. But not like this.

Hannity and Colmes had an interesting exchange with someone from a group that filed a complaint against JV and Elvis (which lead to their suspension).

[Begin transcript]

SEAN HANNITY: ...I'm getting concerned here. Are we going to get to the point like, for example, both of my grandparents came from Ireland. If somebody tells an Irish joke, am I supposed to get offended? I mean, are we at the point where we can't and this isn't my type of humor, but I'm getting very nervous about the environment that's being created here.

SMOLIN: Would you want your wife, you know, somebody to call you...

HANNITY: You don't have to listen to it.

SMOLIN: Do you want someone to talk to you the way the DJ talked to them?

HANNITY: Read the first thing you -- if you Google, Sean Hannity, you know what's going to come up first? HannityisaMoron.com.

COLMES: I'm sorry I started that site, by the way.

[End transcript]

Aahahaha, oh those two. They are a regular Laurel and Hardy!

And here's the latest issue of Time.

It looks like it's coming down to fear of the slippery slope, again. The slippery slope argument is used too much, but sometimes there really is a slippery slope. Is the Imus slope a real one? If so, where does it end?

Also, how is it that Time gives Imus a whole cover, but puts Jackie Robinson in the corner? I think that Robinson has had more of a racial impact in the US than Imus or "flied lice" ever will.

Lost has a history of offing its characters, particularly when their character arc has run out of steam. Here's my list of eleven characters and their odds of dying before the end of Season Three.

1. Anthony Cooper - 1:1
   Locke's biological father, mysteriously transported to the island, is a goner. If Locke doesn't kill him, Sawyer (whose namesake he, in all likelihood, inspired) will.
2. Charlie - 2:1
   Desmond's premonitions place Charlie squarely on the chopping block and his flashbacks are at a dead end. The only thing that might keep him alive is that his death seems so obvious. The writers might zig when you expect them to zag.
3. Sayid - 5:1
   What more is there left to say about our resident Iraqi torturer? There's that girl who got away but that's about it. I think he's got a date with the smoke monster before season's end.
4. Jack - 10:1
   Mathew Fox is their marquee name but his arc has run dry. His flashbacks now seem inconsequential, explaining the back story of his tattoos. Rather than have an entire episode detailing the early days of his 5 o'clock shadow, they might just call it quits. On the other hand, there is that dangling thread with his unknown half-sister to keep him around for the payoff.
5. Carl - 10:1
   Ben is not going to let this punk kid get his daughter pregnant. It would also keep him and his arc exclusively in Season Three; nice and tidy.
6. Sun - 20:1
   Since all pregnant women who conceived on the island die, we can assume her days are numbered (abortion and rescue not withstanding). I give her a couple more months on island, which could stretch out to two seasons more on the show.
7. Jin - 25:1
   Since he is inexorably linked with Sun, it's difficult to see him stick around if/when Sun leaves.
8. Kate - 30:1
   With sperm-counts five times higher on the island, Kate is bound to get preggers soon. And since pregnant equals dead, it will take a lot more than a toy plane flashback to save her. In addition, Evangeline Lilly's relationship with Dominic Monaghan might necessitate her departure in relation to Charlie's death.
9. Locke - 50:1
   Locke is easily the most complex and interesting character on the show. There's still some ground to cover with this guy who just couldn't catch a break. As long as they keep Terry O'Quinn happy, he should be around for a while longer.
10. Sawyer - 75:1
    I predict the dangling thread about his daughter will tie in with him knocking up Kate. And being the primary draw for the show's female audience, he's just too sexy to die.
11. Desmond - 100:1
    Lost may go down in history as the only show to introduce its main character in season two. By all accounts, this is Desmond's story. He is the mythic hero, like Odysseus, cursed by fate, who will be reunited with his love against all odds. We, at the very least, still have some military and prison flashbacks before we see him in another life. I don't see him going away anytime soon.

Hurley? Claire? Ben? Juliet? Where do they fit on the list? They could all go either way. Michael could come back and shoot them all.

It will be interesting to see how completely wrong I am in the next couple of weeks.

You're not seeing double. Brittany and Abby Hensel are conjoined twins. But unlike typical conjoined twins, who are either deformed or immobilized by their condition, these two function perfectly as two heads on one body.

Other than the grotesque shock you get when you see them for the first time, they're attractive, normal girls. I imagine if one were to see them naked; other than a back like a Cardassian (damn me and my Star Trek references); it would look like a normal body: two arms, two legs, two breasts, and one genital region.

Physiologically, they have just the right amount of organs to sustain a two-headed body. They each have their own stomach, so they can get hungry or full independent of each other. They each have their own heart, which is much better than one heart working overtime to pump blood up to two brains.

They each have their own driver's license too (and I imagine the photos look like a cropped-out ex-boyfriend on Match.com). If they were to ever be pulled over by a cop (excluding the fact that the cop would in all likelihood kill them on site as the first shot of a perceived mutant apocalypse) would they get one ticket or two? That's a question they themselves pose in the Discovery Channel documentary Joined for Life. But I have a few questions of my own:

• Can one get sick but not the other?
• Can one of them draw a picture while the other writes an essay?
• If they're intimate with a guy does it count as a threesome?
• If they're raped, does the perpetrator get charged on two counts?
• They each control half of the body, so do they alternate wiping duties?

Although they're forever cursed to have an asterisk on their World Hot Dog Eating Championship trading card, they seem to be happy, and fortunate given their odds. I hope they can find a place for themselves in the world... and hope they both agree on the place.

I came across Shattering the Bell Curve while reading one of my favorite economics blogs, EconLog.

When talking about assumptions for predictive statistical models, David A. Shaywitz suggests that there is a lot inconsistency and inaccuracy in many statistical models, due to incorrect assumptions about distributions. Specifically, using a bell-curve instead of a power-law.

Arnold Kling, from EconLog, applies this specifically to models proclaiming various scenarios of significant man-made climate change, of which it certainly applies, but that's not what I found the most interesting.

I found this quote from the conclusion of the article interesting:

If we accept Mr. Taleb's premise about power-law ascendancy, we are left with a troubling question: How do you function in a world where accurate prediction is rarely possible, where history isn't a reliable guide to the future and where the most important events cannot be anticipated? [emphasis mine]

I don't find it troubling that I can't perfectly anticipate or predict the future. Well, okay I'm lying. I'm scared of the future just like everyone: it's the human condition. But to somehow think that faith in a predictive statistical model was somehow holding back the now-shattered dam separating fear and functionality seems ridiculous.

How can you function in a world that can't be statistically predicted? We all do it every day, all the time. I think rather than fearing the future, we should embrace it and look forward to it.