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Thursday, May 23, 2002 |
Dragon-Slayer
From Anthony Holden's Big Deal:
Jack Straus was a lifelong dragon-slayer. At sixteen, in a high-school poker game, he won a car before he could drive. At six-foot-seven -- hence his poker nickname of "Treetop" -- he was a college basketball star who went on to vent his competitiveness at the poker table, where Jack's refusal to quite became legendary. In 1970, for instance, a lousy run at one point reduced him to his last $40. Far from quitting, he took it over to the blackjack table and ran it up to $500, which he took back to the poker table adn converted into $4,000. Back at blackjack, he transformed this into $10,000, all of which he proceeded to bet on the Super Bowl, taking the Kansas City Chiefs at 2 to 1 against. The Chiefs won, converting Jack's original $40 into $3,000 in less than twenty-four hours.
Of course what Holden doesn't do is start the story twenty-four hours earlier, when, who knows, Jack might have been up $5,000 or $10,000 before he was reduced to$40, or extend it another 24 hours. Straus has a good line in the book: "If the Lord had wanted you to hold on to your money, he'd have made it with handles on."
5:04:04 PM Permalink
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Name-O-Meter
Virginia Postrel links to this page on Parenting Magazine's site. Enter a name, and it displays a graph showing the popularity of that name in the US by decade in the 20th century. From Social Security data. Lots of fun.
3:49:09 PM Permalink
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Microsoft Changes Homail Preferences?
Accoring to the Eastside Journal, Microsof recently changed the Options on Hotmail accounts so that they can share your personal profile and email address with other companies. This is similar to what Yahoo did a while back. I checked my account, and sure enough the boxes were checked. I don't remember the settings before, but I always uncheck these things. If you have a Hotmail account, be sure to go check on it.
[from Brian Livingston's "EBusiness Secrets."]
2:32:27 PM Permalink
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Powers of Ten
Like the developer of this site, when young I was fascinated by a "book called The Powers of Ten, written by Philip and Phyllis Morrison and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. The idea was to examine the relationship of the size of things from the atom to the entire universe. For some time I have felt that the Internet would provide an effective means of reaching a much larger audience for this concept. Hence, this website."
This site contains a series of 42 drawings and pictures, illustrating a universe that is currently estimated to be 13 thousand million years old, at least 1026 meters in diameter, and made up of quarks that are smaller than 10-16 meters. Each successive image shows a view ten times wider or narrower than its neighbor. In either direction, new information is found at each step: Outward, new vistas appear as the view widens; inward, the expansion of an image allows the resolution of more detail. That relationship is emphasized in each picture by outlining a small central square whose edges are one-tenth the width of the whole frame.
At the center of each image, whether visible or not, are the quarks within a proton within a carbon atom beneath the skin of a man sleeping on a blanket in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on the third planet from the star Sol -- a small unregarded yellow sun in the western spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, an average galaxy within the Virgo Cluster. The journey occurs along a straight line originating within that proton, proceeding directly upward from the park, and out of the Milky Way into deep space.
There's an interesting lesson here. The site is copyrighted 2000, yet throughout it there are references to changes the author is going to make to the site. The lesson is that if you're going to change stuff, do it, or don't mention it. Make it as good as you can at the time you're working on it, and if you improve it, then that's great. But these constant notes about what he's going to do mar an otherwise very useul site.
Thanks, Gary.
2:00:51 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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