Dealing with a loss (stillbirth)
There's more below, but I didn't edit this, and I doubt that it's easy for most people to read, so it's behind a cut.

( At 11:45am on Saturday September 2nd, my wife delivered Allan Frederick Lerner. He was stillborn.Collapse )

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30
I turn 30 today. It's a good day, but (maybe because of everything else going on) it doesn't seem like as much of a milestone as I expected.

I went to a casino for the first time on Saturday. It was tons of fun. You can read the trip report here if you're interested.

Cheers!

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He's a boy!

17 weeks old, seems to have the requisite number of limbs, looks good!

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SPAWN!!

Coming this August to a theater near you.

Click on the picture for a bigger version.

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Eat Me First!
( My Holiday LetterCollapse )

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My music life, on the other hand, just got awesome.
Pandora.com. This is, by far, the most awesome web-thing I've seen in a long time. Sure, "music genome" makes me cringe more than a little bit, but that's way outweighed (haha) by how utterly cool this is. It even has a reasonably good interface. Check it out. I'm listening to LeadBelly Radio right now.

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My life and career have now been redefined
In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

Right.  It was clear months ago that this was going to happen.  That doesn't make it any easier.

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Where should the money go?
I'd like to donate some money to help out in New Orleans. To whom should I give my money? The Red Cross? Some smaller, local organization?

-michael

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Attorney general, senator say easier standards will result in fewer failures
Is it a dilbert cartoon? A witty Onion article? No. It's our government in action:

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/aug/10/lower_bar_schools_advised/

Yup. We plan to improve performance by lowering standards.

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A fine bunch of news stories
It looks like my home state of Kansas is about to take a big step towards putting intelligent design into the science curriculum.

The FDA says gay men are unsafe as sperm donors.

And, finally, various religions groups are opposing an HPV vaccine.  Their rock solid reasoning includes statements like "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," and "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex."  Right-o.  If you don't know, this virus causes something like 70% of all cervical cancer, goes undetected in the vast majority of cases, and infects a huge percentage of men and women.

Otherwise, things here are good.  I expect to have a bit of free time this weekend to try to solve hgfalling's game-theory problem.  If all goes well, I may even get a chance to play around some more with my Jam-or-Fold stuff.  Are there optimal pure strategies when the blinds are big enough?

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An opponent-centric solution to the heads-up jam or fold problem
I posted this on 2+2. Is anyone who reads this interested?  After this thread, I decided to look a little more closely at the question of which hands you can push with (or call an opponent's push with) heads-up.

Andrew Prock was kind enough to let me use a command-line version of PokerStove, and I did a bunch of calculations. I came up with the Jam of Fold Calculator to visualize the results (Andrew Prock was kind enough to host it at the pokerstove site). The basic idea is this: you click on some variables to determining the game state (stack sizes, blinds, etc.) and give a rough range of hands to the opponent (any two, top 25% of preflop hands, etc.). It then shows you the equity for each of your possible hands.

I think there's a ton of information here .. some of it obvious (it would be hard to miss the gap concept, for example), and some of it not so obvious. If you click around, you can see some of my conclusions. Please: take a look at this and let me know what you think. I'm particularly interested in any trends you notice that I might not have noticed.

--

in particular, i recently noticed a few hands where i thought you had to push .. but i was wrong.  check out 200/400 blinds, you're the sb with 800-1600 chips (8000 total).  you can actually fold a few hands.  anyway, check it out and let me know if you think it's interesting.

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Slogans: as stupid as you think
It seems that Kansas has recently changed its slogan to

Kansas, as big as you think

wow. I don't know what that means, and I don't think I want to. Especially since we're next door to The Show Me State.

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no netscape radio for me
wow. i go to radio.netscape.com and see this:

We're sorry!
Your machine does not meet the minumum system requirements in order to download Radio@Netscape.
...
Software
IE 5.0 and above

that's right .. you have to use IE to listen to netscape radio.  to make it more amusing, there's a link at the bottom of the page where you can download Netscape 7.1.  no comment.

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Debbie .. how could you?
Debbie .. how could you?

(text for those of you who couldn't click on the link:

The U.S. Senate approved the almost universally unpopular bankruptcy reform bill last night, and -- thanks to the support of 18 Democrats -- the White House and the Republicans on Capitol Hill can proclaim it a triumph of bi-partisan cooperation. While you're writing the check for the minimum payment due again this month, your credit card company will be writing thank you notes to Democratic Sens. Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Jeff Bingaman, Robert Byrd, Tom Carper, Kent Conrad, Daniel Inouye, Tim Johnson, Herb Kohl, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, Harry Reid, Ken Salazar and Debbie Stabenow.

)

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Punks and Skunks
I finally found some streaming music that i like, but I think it's about to die. The stream is still working, but the website (punk4punks) seems to be dead. Too bad. Just recently, they were streaming a set that included Bad Religion, 311, and a few other of my favorites.

In other news, the skunk count is up to five (5). That's right, at least five (5) skunks were living under my house. We caught three more this morning, and at least one other skunk dug itself a path out underneath one of the traps. That means there're still more skunks to catch. Hopefully, we'll catch them all, they'll be happy living out in the country and we'll be skunk-odor-free at last.

Some of them are really cute, though. I think that if they were younger, we might've de-scented and adopted one. Does that mean I'm a crazy-cat-lady wannabe?

Edit: whee! the punk4punks website lives.

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fantastic usenet post
best usenet post i've seen in a long time

posted to comp.object:

HI everyone,
I was trying to build an antenna in C++. I don't know
where to start. can anyone help me?? if there is some code that would
be even better. I don't care about the type of antenna as long as it
communicates.
THanks
Shastri

best response (from HateKick):

 You can do that in HTML.  Why use C++ for that?

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City in Mexico bans indoor nudity
yup.

http://www.whotv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2725078

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We bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back
From a letter that MoveON sent me:

"For years, the Party has been lead by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base. But we can't afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers. In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive.2 Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."

Should be a an interesting 2-4 years.

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I'm Colin Luther Powell
Public service is my thing
Don't do it for the fame
Don't do it for the bling.

Colin Powel at the Kennedy Center

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Sticker
This sticker covers a pre-existing sticker designed to subtly undermine the teaching of evolution in your class. To see the full text of the original sticker, examine the books of children of the school board members, who mandated the stickering.

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