Thanks to this quick little tool, you can see the point directly on the opposite side of the Earth from where you stand. Under the left-hand crosshairs is where Emma and I live, just east of the Hudson River.

It turns out that digging straight down through our back garden (notwithstanding the molten core and all that) would lead us to a point in the Indian Ocean, off of the southwest coast of Australia (right side of the image above). Next time I talk to my relatives in Adelaide I’ll take comfort in the fact that they’re really only 8,000 miles away, just about straight down.

I’ve been using Apple Computers since around 1983. The very first Mac came out when I was in 7th grade. I took an after-school job at a store on Pico in L.A. called Computerland, working just long enough to buy a Mac with my Computerland 30% discount and my $3.65/hour wage. I’ve probably bought at least 15 Macs since then, as well as numerous iPods, and hopefully soon, an iPhone.

The problem is, Apple gear, though beautifully designed, is crappily made. In my experience, it’s been completely unreliable. Not the old stuff—the Apple II Plus I had in 6th grade is probably still going somewhere—but the newer stuff: iPods, Powerbooks… they all stop working well before they ought to, sometimes in their first year. Both iPods I bought were kaput within 6-8 months. I had one newish Powerbook die on me right as we were about to give a presentation to an early-days YouTube. Not good.

The crazy thing? I only want more Apple products. If this happened with any other brand, I’d be furious and swear off the brand for life. For some inexplicable reason, with Apple, I keep coming back for more. Something is very wrong with me.

So, short story long here, my un-trusty Powerbook (the fourth one I’ve owned) has died on me. The backlight is apparently shot, according to Apple phone support. I was planning on posting a bunch of blog posts and pics from England, but I’m now left working on borrowed computers. Borrowed Apple computers of course—machines that will surely break down well before their time, too.

The good news is, my Powerbook is still under warranty, so I’ll have it back (or a new one) very soon, and will be able to resume posting more regularly. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can post without the use of my favorite piece of beautiful, crappy technology. Thanks for bearing with me….

HBO has another home run in Flight of the Conchords. It’s a brilliant little comedy featuring two New Zealanders as struggling musicians living in NYC. The show is pitch-perfect, and the occasional little digs at the NZ/Oz one-sided rivalry are particularly great.

I found this clip of the Conchords doing “The Humans Are Dead” from one of their earlier live shows. It’s hilarious, and I’m stunned at the perfection of Jermaine’s Mac computer voice impersonation, which kicks in about halfway through.

In 1983, when I was eleven, I was suspended from school. To be precise, I was given in-school suspension, which meant sitting in an empty classroom for the entire school day. I wasn’t allowed to have anything in the way of books, pens, or paper—nothing at all to help pass the time.

The idea was that I was supposed to sit there, doing absolutely nothing at all, from 8am—3pm (with bathroom breaks and a short lunch break) to think about what I’d done. Instead, I spent a good portion of the day on a game I’d invented, which was trying to stop my digital watch’s stopwatch at exactly 6.00 seconds. The closest I came was 6.02 in what was undoubtedly hundreds and hundreds of trials.

If I had been thinking about what I’d done, I’d have been thinking about computer class. The school had recently brought in seven or eight Apple II Plus computers, and we spent an hour each Thursday afternoon learning a programming language called Basic with our math teacher, Mr. Cypher.

I still remember the first program we learned:

10 PRINT “HELLO”
20 GOTO 10

… which would fill the screen with infinitely repeating columns of “HELLO,” going on and on until you hit the Escape key.

But I couldn’t stand Mr. Cypher, and was insanely bored, so I named my program “Mr. Cypher” and programmed it to fill the screen with columns saying, “WHAT AN ASSHOLE!”

I do remember people gathering around and laughing, and I remember that laughter dying out into a few nervous titters, which is when I turned to see Mr. Cypher peering over my shoulder, with his bald head and bulging eyes. It got really quiet then, until all I could hear was him breathing through his nose.

I was reminded of this incident for the first time in many years when I came across this letter from the headmaster in a box of papers my mom recently shipped to our house. (After the letter was sent, I had to meet with Mr. Cypher and apologize to him in front of my parents and the headmaster. Mr. Cypher made me say the exact words that were on the screen as part of the apology, then still demanded that I receive harsher punishment, hence the in-school suspension.)

In any case, I left Mr. Cypher’s class behind and became increasingly obsessed with computers over the next few years. My best friend Joe and I spent countless hours dialing into “Pirate” BBS’s on our Apple II’s, trading games with people all over the country on what was essentially the pre-Internet. It looked a lot like this.

Years later, Joe went on to found Excite.com, one of the first ever Internet portals. I, on the other hand, decided to spend the entire web boom trying to become a rock star. (What an asshole!)

Ok, you have to try this now: If you’re on a Mac, hold down control-option-command and press the 8 key. Total insanity.

(If you’re on a PC, check out the chickens and rabbits below. That’s all I got for ya.)

Here’s a hilarious and brilliant (very) short story by Terry Bisson.

“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

(via kottke.org)

The BBC has a great little test on their website to see how well people can tell the difference between real and fake smiles. There’s a small collection of 2-second video clips of people grinning, after which you guess if the smile is real or fake. I scored 16/20, which brought a big fake-smile to my lips.

Being that this was a BBC study, I was reminded of this NYTimes magazine article from a little over a year ago that points out an alleged difference between British and American smiles:

On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. “I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile,” Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.

3 Quarks Daily posted a bunch of logic problems for the Thanksgiving weekend. Some of them are pretty fantastic.

There was one problem in particular that drew something like 100+ comments from all sorts of amateur and expert probability statisticians. It goes like this:

“Walking down the street one day, I met a woman strolling with her daughter. ‘What a lovely child,’ I remarked. ‘In fact, I have two children,’ she replied. What is the probability that both of her children are girls? Be warned: this question is not as trivial as it may look.”
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