Apples to Oranges?

Good:Transparency compares the cost per gallon of several different products.  The difference, of course, is that we don't use any of these other items by the gallon.  Tap water costs a lot less than $4/gallon, for example.  To do better, you would need to try to determine the utility/$ you get for each of these.  Coming up with a way to convert between the utility of a gallon of gas (20 miles traveled) and a gallon of coca-cola (1 all-night gaming session?) is the real trick.

Accidentally waking a sleeping giant

Audiosurf is a great, cheap game that has maintained its interest for me for 2 years now.  The other day I was playing some R.E.M. songs and hit the top score on "The Wrong Child".  The problem is that artma3bk is a truly elite player who must have simply had a bad game. 

artma3bk quickly rectified the situation, and then went on to play some other R.E.M. songs that they hadn't played before...

Reactors

The Japan earthquake/tsunami and ensuing nuclear power plant problems have caused another round of teeth gnashing in Vermont over the impending closing of the Vermont Yankee power plant (which is being challenged by Entergy), presumably because we get so many earthquakes and tsunamis on the Connecticut River.  As part of this, there is a photographic exhibit in Montpelier on Chernobyl.  I have to admit that my favorite (if such a word applies to this) Chernobyl photo collection is still Filatova Elena Vladimirovna's.  My BIL pointed me to her "Ghost Town" collection years and years ago, and she's slowly added to it since.  If you haven't browsed it since it first made internet waves 8 years ago, it's worth another look.

Flowing Data posted about the NYT Rock, Paper, Scissors article, and while I work for the company that works hard to crush the humans in competitive games, there is no way a machine is going to be me at RPS**, even with a significant amount of training, because I'm learning about it while it's learning about me.  Results after 11 shakes against the expert machine below:

After snookering it rounds 4 and 5, I was impressed that it learned enough to go for paper instead of rock, and then to go for paper again, and then for scissors, and then to actually have the gall to get me in round 9.  I'm fairly confident I could stay slightly ahead of the machine (until mental exhaustion hit, which of course wouldn't be a problem for the machine), but I don't think it would be by much.

Undergraduate Grades

In my reader, I saw the Daily Princetonian reported on a recent Daily Chronicle editorial (the Duke University student paper) on grade inflation.  I thought perhaps Val's time had finally come to have his ideas implemented at Duke, but but this particular Chronicle editorial was just the latest in a long-term discussion on grades -- search on grade inflation and you get results going back to at least 1997, when Val proposed the achievement index and was shot down by fearful humanities professors.