Embracing Chaos

I’ve had my own system for interpreting that “chance of rain” numbers that meteorologists use to predict weather. Along the lines of how people say eskimos have 137 different words for snow, here in Seattle, rain isn’t a simple yes/no thing. I wrote about it here a little while ago. The basic idea is that the % chance of rain is actually the % chance that a random person on the street would consider the current weather to be “rain.” I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard…

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“May you live in interesting times.” -Ancient Chinese Proverb (actually, it isn’t.) The idea behind this saying is that times of rapid change are generally quite painful. Historically interesting times are those involving wars and revolutions — things where lots of people die. Growth and improvement have only come through very slow gradual change. But in today’s China, this is anything but true. Right now is one of the most interesting times in China’s long history, and for the majority of the country, it’s fantastic. (If we all work hard, that kind of intersting time might be behind us.) We…

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Pike or Pine? For those of us who live in Seattle, this is an eternal question. Often rhetorical. The two streets run parallel from downtown through Capitol Hill and nobody can keep them straight. This fact was institutionalized by the local sketch comedy show Almost Live in a game show called “Pike or Pine?” where contestants were asked which of the two streets various landmarks are on. “Where is the Paramount Theater?” “Oh, I go by there every day on my way to work. It’s just before the bus-stop where I get off. It’s … it’s … it’s on Pike!”…

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I’ve been installing OS’s a bunch lately. Every time I do the installer asks me what part of the world I’m in so it can set the timezone. This totally seems like 20th century technology to me. There are really accurate IP-geo lookup databases these days that can tell from your IP address where you are in the world pretty reliably. So once the OS has my network stack working, why does it need to ask me what part of the world I’m in? When it comes to installing something free like Ubuntu, it seems that there’s a real “you-get-what-you-pay-for”…

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The forecast today calls for an 80% chance of rain. Traditionally this means that 80% of the time it will rain, but that there’s a 20% chance it won’t rain at all. Here in Seattle we interpret those numbers a little differently. In Seattle, when the forecast says 80% chance of rain that means if you ask a random sampling of 100 people on the street “is it raining right now?” 80 of them will say “yeah, it’s raining” and 20 of them will say “no, this isn’t rain.” For those of you who haven’t ever been in Seattle in…

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I ran across a neat tool to build a map of all the places in the world you’ve been. Really you can use it to highlight any set of countries you want, but the suggested usage is to show the places you’ve been. Here’s where I’ve visited: I’m leaving out places I only stopped for a couple of hours or visited before I could talk coherently. This picture makes me want to visit Russia just to mark that whole big chunk of land as red. ;)

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