a data-driven life

My Google+ Account

samwyse — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:02:13 +0000

Just a note that I’ve moved a lot of my blogging to Google+, but I intend to keep using WordPress as a repository for my “greatest hits”.

My Tonsillectomy, Eight Years Later

samwyse — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:13:46 +0000

I guess I’m a little late with this update. I referred someone on G+ to my original page, but reading it I realized that it’s more than a bit out of date. Let’s start by looking at what I said to my acquaintance.

Here’s an explanation of the procedure, and a physician finder. Eight years ago it only turned up one name in St Louis (Alan Wild), now it finds several.

And here’s way more than you probably want to know about me. I guess I need to post an update because things mostly turned out OK. On the one hand, I healed very fast with no complications. Every adult I knew who had a similar procedure (a small group, to be sure) was very jealous. On the other, I was one of those (45% if I recall correctly) for whom it made no difference in the long term. Short term, though, it worked wonders.

With that out of the way, let’s get into what’s happened since then. Within a week of that posting, I felt great! My second trip to Russia was a success. No CPAP, no problems sleeping on the plane or in hotel rooms. OTOH, after a year or two, I started snoring again and eventually had to go back to my CPAP. Now my CPAP is getting old (and noisy!) and the insurance company wants another sleep evaluation before they replace it, so maybe something will turn up.

The tonsillectomy means that sore throats are almost never a problem any more.

The UPPP means that “stuff” will occasionally go up into my nose or down my windpipe. This only happens once a week or so, so it’s not major annoyance, but when it does happen I wind up wanting to cough for a minute or so. Carbonated drinks are by far the worst offender, so I’ve largely switched to iced tea with meals but still drink canned diet sodas from time to time. Talking when my mouth is full (yes, I know I shouldn’t!) will rarely (every two or three months?) cause a tiny bit of solid food to go the wrong way. This leads to major coughing fits as my body tries to expel the irritant for several minutes after it’s actually gone.

The last issue is that the turbinectomy means that when I get a runny nose, all the little nooks and crannies that used to accumulate snot are gone This means that I have to blow my nose a lot more frequently, almost continuously. On the other hand, a head cold doesn’t result in nasal congestion, because there’s no tissue to get swollen. Over all, things are, well, different; not really better or worse, just different.

That last sentence pretty much sums up the entire experience. The positives and the negatives seem to balance out. Since I eventually wound up exactly where I began, I’m not sure the procedures were worthwhile. On the other hand, I don’t regret them. Should you get it done? That’s up to you, but I’d say go for it. You’ll be incredibly miserable for a short while, but then life will be great for a much longer while, even if not permanently.

Why taking notes (especially by hand) matters

samwyse — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 10:47:59 +0000

Lectures work best if you take notes, especially by hand. Note-taking prevents information from going “in one ear and out the other” because, like discussion, you activate more areas of your brain as you take notes; think of it as having a discussion with your notebook; I don’t know anyone who can write as fast as a lecturer talks, so you have to be constantly deciding what to write down instead of letting your mind drift around. This doesn’t just work at school. When I go to a baseball game (for pleasure, anyway, rather than to schmooze with clients), I try to get a scorecard and track every play. I’ve found that I remember the details of those games much better that the ones where I kicked back and drank a beer. (And I remember *any* game that I actually attended better than the ones I watch on TV, so try to actually attend class, not depend on someone else’s retransmission.)

Baseball scorecards are optimized for taking notes on baseball games. Likewise, at a lecture you should use Cornell Notes, a tools optimized for taking notes at lectures. There are thousands of web site dedicated to this, so research it yourself at http://www.google.com/search?q=%22cornell+notes%22.

Finally, if you don’t believe me then look at what others have to say. For example, http://brainz.org/brain-hacks/ claims (in bullet point 3) that “Taking notes by hand instead of typing them, will help you retain the information more effectively, as the pressure points activated by holding a pen are linked to the creative and memory centers of the brain.” If that sounds a bit unbelievable, research reported at http://www.mpiweb.org/magazine/pluspoint/20110124/Taking_Notes backs up the claim.

Japan’s Nuclear Incidents

samwyse — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 03:20:39 +0000

After reading Robert X. Cringely’s “Is anything nuclear ever really super safe small and simple?“, I have a question that I’ve not seen asked anywhere. Filling the coolant system with seawater must be like using seawater in your steam iron. Yeah, it’s going to corrode things to the point of never-be-used-again, but it seems to me that there’s a shorter term problem. As all the water is boiled away and/or split into free atoms, you’re going to have lots of salt left over accumulating in the reactor, and eventually preventing the free flow of water. You saidin the previous column that it should take a week for the reactor to cool down, so maybe it’ll be ok, but I’m still wondering.

Home-school articles from the NY Times

samwyse — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 21:07:04 +0000

As part of a family that home schools our kids, I have a more than passing interest in anything that could improve the educational process. Here’s some recent articles from the New York Times.

Do Home Schoolers Deserve a Tax Break? – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com

Champlain College Makes Financial Literacy a Priority – NYTimes.com

The Argument Against Headphones – NYTimes.com

Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say – NYTimes.com

Theora vs H.264

samwyse — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:11:56 +0000

Here’s a Reddit discussion from about a year ago of the technical merits of Theora. It features several people who actually implement codecs for a living, so it’s pretty in depth, as opposed to “Theora is inferior for technical reasons” and “probably isn’t of sufficient quality”. The Executive Summary: Theora *was* designed with hardware in mind (albeit not “modern” hardware) and is roughly equivalent to the way H.264 is normally used.

HTML5 not working in Chrome?

samwyse — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 04:56:49 +0000

It all started when I wanted to make some screen shots of DVD Flick. I wanted to show how to make a fairly complicated video, and I wanted to use material licensed via Creative Commons. ”Elephant Dreams” and “Big Buck Bunny” seemed like a good place to start, so I headed over to the Blender Foundation, where I was eventually redirected to a download page. The “USA #2″ link seems to be dead, so I went to the Germany site. Then I went looking for the “Making of …” video, but it seems to only exist in YouTube which is problematic since I don’t have Flash installed in Chrome. On the other hand, I don’t really want the Flash version, I want to try to capture the HTML5 stream, so off I went to enter the YouTube HTML5 Beta. Unfortunately, something seems to have broken the HTML5 magic, because all the pages still want me to install the Adobe Flash Player plugin. So, I tracked down what may be a bug report and added my thoughts (comment #9).

posting via email

samwyse — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:08:26 +0000

This is a test. Makeuseof.com has recently pointed out that you can use Google Voice to phone in your blog posts, so I’m setting things up for that.

Four Things I Hate About Wave

samwyse — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:24:33 +0000

OK, I’ve had my Google Wave account for a few days now, and played around both by myself and with a friend. Here’s what I’ve discovered.

The first time I used Wave, it wasn’t obvious that adding someone to a wave makes that wave show up in their in-box. Maybe I’m just too used to having a “Send” button, but I’d like seeing feedback that relates my actions to older ways of doing things. Video games frequently have a “training mode” with lots more feedback about what’s happening, and give you a way to take off the training wheels as you begin to understand the idioms.

What’s the best way to IM someone? I guess each participant is supposed to keep adding new blips. Two things that don’t work are having each participant keep updating their own blip and having everyone update a single blip. Both of these work, but aren’t very usable: The former makes it hard to pair statements with responses (especially after the fact), the latter makes it hard to see who said what. But adding new blips all the time seems inconvenient. I guess I’d like a mode where hitting the Enter key opens a new blip at the bottom of the conversation. Is there a gadget for that?

How do I send someone a URL to a wave? Yeah, it’ll be sitting in the Inbox when they look, but some people don’t want to spend every waking moment within Wave. I’d like to see something that I can email or embed that other people can click on and be brought immediately to the conversation. Maybe Wave has this already and it just isn’t obvious. Let’s run a test by dragging something frfom the inbox into this blip: Four Things I Hate About Wave OK, that creates a pseudo URL (googlewave.com!w+4n77V6MDF) that I don’t think can be used anywhere outside of Wave. Fail!

I can make a wave public, but only by allowing the world to edit it. Again, maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I’d like to be able to use Wave as a blog platform. I’m like to make this blip editable only by myself (and maybe a few co-authors), while allowing the possibility of other people making comment blips that are only editable by themselves.