First Three-Way Tie on Jeopardy!

For the first time in Jeopardy history there was a three-way tie between contestants Scott Weiss, James Kirby, Anders Martinson. (Left to right.)

Final Clue: Women of the 1930s

Answer: "One of the men who shot her realized when he saw her body that she’d often waited on him at a cafe in Dallas."

Question: "Who is Bonnie Parker?"

Alex Trebek’s reaction: "What a deal!"

The story might have ended there with appropriate mathematical and historical awe, but there’s more to the story: Scott Weiss, a Computer Science teacher, planned it that way.

Ok, not from the beginning of the game, but in Final Jeopardy he knew there was a very likely chance that his opponents would both bet their entire winnings of $8,000. Even though he held a very comfortable lead of $13,400 Weiss only bet $2,600 and thus enabled the three way tie, instead of wagering the elementary bet of $1 more for the win. But while his opponents were working on the win, Weiss was working on his own Prisoner’s Dilemma: Let’s work together so we can all go on to the next game.

As Weiss puts it: Why go for the win when you can go down in Jeopardy history with an asterisk next to your name?  [Great question.]

Stockholm’s Subway Caverns

Check out the still-exposed rock in so many stations of their underground metro. 

Advice to Young Men from an Old Man

Here’s the first five points from a listing posted on the Best of Craig’s List, click thru for the rest.

1. Don’t pick on the weak. It’s immoral. Don’t antagonize the strong without cause, its stupid.
2. Don’t hate women. It’s a waste of time.
3. Invest in yourself. Material things come to those that have self actualized.
4. Get in a fistfight, even if you are going to lose.
5. As a former Marine, take it from me. Don’t join the military, unless you want to risk getting your balls blown off to secure other people’s economic or political interests. [Tell me about it!]

Clicky: Free Website Statistics

Clicky is a free website statistics analyzer that works by pasting a short line of code in your template or sidebar. Their services stand out for the refreshingly clean and simple interface, innovative features like RSS feeds and Spy (featuring *live* looks of your site), and an unrivaled per visitor level of detail.

To those of you who are thinking "But I don’t want to share my traffic with a third party!" Clicky says this:

Put away the tinfoil hat, we are not out to get you. We have no reason to secretly look at your visitor traffic and/or use it against you. That mindset will limit you to a very small subset of analyzers out there.

 

TED Talks: Malcolm Gladwell and Ben Saunders

Gladwell speaks of the impact one man had on humanity with his revolutionary research on spaghetti sauce.

Saunders speaks of his solo trip to the North Pole, and the hardships he endured.  Both are very fun!

Plastics: Less Is More

Here’s a left-over photo from Gerry & Laura’s wedding reception at the National Plastics Museum.

NYCs ‘Actual’ Population

Must-read humor from A (Conservative) People’s History of NYC:

"The city’s population is often reported by the mainstream media to
be as high as eight million — but a rigorous count of actual Americans,
using the methods of Adjusted Freedom Demography pioneered by
Smorgensen in the Patriot Census of 2005 (i.e., excluding immigrants,
Jews,  non-representational artists, and ivory-tower communists; while counting only three-fifths of descendants of African slaves, as
originally intended by the Framers), reveals that New York City’s
population of legitimate Americans is actually only 312."

Apple Tattoo from Movie Wild Hogs

John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Tim Allen, and William H. Macy hit the wide open road as middle-aged men on a mid-life crisis motorcycle tour.

Here’s what happens when white computer programmers go bad:

William H. Macy: I’m a biker, dude. I got a tat!
Tim Allen: It’s an Apple!?
William H. Macy : I know. "Trademarked." But what are they gonna say? It’s in my skin, bitch!

(Audio Clip courtesy of FreeMacBlog here.)

Mac OS X vs. Windows Vista: A Non-Hostile Argument (in two parts)

Robert Scoble, at PodTech.net, invited four geeks representing both sides of the OS aisle to sit down and discuss the importance of each OS: Fred Davis, co-founder of Wired Magazine; Harry McCracken, Editor in Chief of PC World; Sam Levin, founder of Stanford Mac User Group; Jeremy Toeman, with Sling Media.

Holi Festival at SRA Orphanage

Here’s a slideshow of Sri Ram Ashram’s Holi celebrations, where everyone in India paints their faces, throws colored chalk and soaks each other with water!

Why can’t we have such cool festivals?!

These images were taken at the orphanage that we recently did a documentary of.
(Click here to view the trailer.)