A Plott Filled Weekend

Hey all,

At the gentle and vauguely parseable nudgings of one of my few readers, I will one again endeavor update all y'all as to what has been happening in my spectacularly exciting life over the last week.

The major exciting news is that Sean came up to visit this weekend, hence the title of the post. He arrive at our house Saturday evening and the lot of us (Sean, Mike, Morgan, and Myself [yes, I deserve the capital]) drove up to San Francisco to meet up with Andy, Angela, and Kevin. After navigating the heavy Saturday-evening traffic and being chased through SF streets by bone-chilling winds, my trusty iPhone and I led the group to the "Hong Kong Clay Pot" restaurant, one of the best recommended restaurants in Chinatown (according to Yelp!). We had a massive and delicious meal there (yay for honey-glazed prawns ^_^) and then navigated our way back to transportation through hordes of drunken Santas (actually, they may have been high. Andy, Angela, and Kevin ran into a gigantic Santa-rave that stank of pot before we arrived [No, I am not shitting you. Angela got it on video.]).

Through a series of unbelievably complicated steps that I will not bore you with, all of us (plus Tracy! ^_^) ended up at Angela & Andy's apartment. Once there we hung out, drank a bit, and in general had a nice little Mudd get together ^_^. I love how many Mudders ended up here.

We left at 1:30, and got home sometime around 3 (where we had a delicious midnight snack of dumplings and then collapsed). Sunday was a bit less eventful. Morgan when out to tide pools (he actually manged to wake up at 9:30am after being up till 3... :-P), Mike did stuff with his dad all day, and I hung out at home with Sean. This largely involved lots of watching Go, and me trying and failing to play Fallout 3 & Rock Band because they felt like too much work. We eventually went out for Thai food and I managed to start Mass Effect, which is the first fun-feeling RPG I've played in a long-long time (though I think the interface kind of sucks). I also realized that I miss Super Smash Brothers Melee. I think I need a gamecube, and to live closer to Joe...

The other exciting thing this weekend was a Rock Band party after work on Friday where I got to show off my (somewhat rusty) fake guitar skills while drinking Chimay and whiskey-spiked Nog, and then actually have Jack as company on the train down to Palo Alto ^_^. (Work in SF + Home in Palo Alto => at least 2 hrs of commute/day).

The benefit of my long commute, however, is that I get to read on the train. I used to read for hours ever day before college, and it is really wonderful to be reading again! I will try to keep a log of what books I've recently finished along with this blog. Speaking of which: I just finished "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell. The general premise of the book is that we as humans have an incredible capacity to make very complicated decisions very quickly with very little information. Gladwell tries to persuade the reader of this and then explore the character of this ability (particularly its pitfalls) and how it can be trained and guided. I definitely thought it was a good read, though he can be a bit causal with the conclusions he draws.

To give an example of a conclusion that I thought was hasty, Gladwell uses the statistic that an *very* abnormally high portion of CEOs are far above average height (50% are > 6', 33% are > 6'2") to conclude that people have an unconcious bias to consider tall people in a more positive light. This effect has actually been documented to some degree, but I don't buy Gladwell's conclusion. First, he doesn't give any underlying reason for why this preference should exist (the only one that I can think of is some evolutionary bias, but that smells of BS). Second, I've read Freakenomics, which talks about exactly the same effect (tall people in aggregate have higher earnings are are more successful than their shorter counterparts). However, Freakenomics looks more closely at the data and points out a study that found that that correlation only exists for people that were tall in early high school. The explanation floated is that if you are tall early then you are more likely to have more self confidence, which is much more believably associated strongly with success.

Nit-picky objections aside, I thought Blink was a good book and worth my time to read. If anyone has good economics/sociology/psychology books, please recommend them to me. I'm getting very interested in econometrics, social psychology, and similar subjects but really have no background in them.

Next book to read: "All Tomorrow's Parties" by William Gibson

One last thing: Sean's visit was awesome. It was *fantastic* to have him up here, even for so short a time. And it was *no* trouble to us. What this means is that all of you should come and visit us whenever you feel like it (or more frequently than that even. We will compensate your overexposure with free bedding and food). We like visitors. Make us happy! ^_^

Cheers,
Jason