Move over D&D, this is B&B
Tag: geek
Get your freak on
“Ask interesting and hard questions of the data and you will find the truth,” said Dubner, author of Freakonomics.
At a lab under the supervision of veterinarians and animal psychologists in New Haven, Conn., Yale economist Keith Chen taught the capuchins how to use washers as currency in exchange for treats.
“Morality is a set of ideas (about) how each of us, individually and collectively, want the world to work,” Dubner said. “Freakonomics shows how the world really is. You can't change the world if you don't understand how it really works.”
The capuchins, known for their love of sweets, were not allowed to have money when in the general population, but only when in the testing area.
Chen tested economic theories like price shocking by varying prices of favorites like Jell-O cubes in comparison with grapes and apple slices, and found the monkeys responded similarly to humans by budgeting and making the most of their money.
He also devised two games that showed monkeys could end up feeling as if they'd won or lost, even though they'd actually broken even. Their seemingly irrational preference for the “winning” game had Chen questioning how useful the monkeys would be as a touchstone for studying human behavior. Then he found that a similar study of day traders conducted by another researcher resulted in the same psychological preference. Even when they came out even, the day traders irrationally preferred to feel they won, rather than lost money.
The best of Dubner's stories involved an incident in which one of the capuchins threw a tray of washers that ended up spilling into the general population area. The monkeys, as expected, fought for the coins and, except for one, were easily bribed with the opportunity to purchase food in order for researchers to get the washers back.
“Out of the corner of his eye, Chen saw that one monkey gave a coin to another (instead of rushing to exchange it for treats.) He thinks, am I witnessing the first instance of monkey altruism? No. He was actually witnessing something he said he really wished he hadn't seen,” said Dubner.
After a brief grooming ritual, the monkeys who exchanged the coin started to have sex. Immediately after the incident, the paid monkey went over to Chen to get food in exchange for returning the coin, Dubner said.
That's a good workout!
A coworker and I went into the office this weekend and made creative use of the meeting room facilities. Get your mind out of the gutter, pervs. We plugged my Nintendo Wii into a LCD projector and proceeded to play Wii Sports for the next 3 hours on a giant projection screen :)
In other news, the cat. It was a toss-up until recently to see if our cat only had one testicle or had one that was still undescended. Turns out, he had another one hidden away so has now been snipped for the second time.
Not that going under the knife has slowed him down one bit… I caught him climbing up the sitting room curtains this morning. So yeah. Here's hoping that finally being snipped will turn him into a fat blob soon. He's a handful at the moment.
In the mood to save money
Orange has pissed me off for the last time (I hope).
I hate Orange. They're fucking evil and this will be the last time I have to deal with them or give them money. The first year of my contract was fine. Then my phone broke 1 week after my contract was renewed and it would have cost more to fix it than to buy a new one. So I did. And it sucked. Then I started traveling to the continent for work and my phone bill tripled in roaming charges. And Orange was laughing all the way to the bank the whole time, because I was paying £40 for about 30 minutes of airtime and about the same number of SMS messages. Fuck Orange. I have now switched to a pay-as-you-go phone on T-Mobile. I'm in the process of moving my phone number over so there should be no disruption on my calls and contacts.
I'm also in the process for shopping for a new broadband and phone provider, as well as looking into 0% balance transfers for the credit card. I read a very interesting article recently on how businesses make money on the laziness and inertia of people. We can save £240 a year by switching to a package deal on Virgin media and probably just as much with a balance transfer for the visa.
All things you should all be looking into :)
Today is Pi day
Happy 3.14 to everybody.
In other news, Katy and I have decided that we're out of the housing market for the foreseeable future. We've been talking/thinking about it for a while now and finally came to a decision today.
We currently pay £780 a month in rent. If we were to get a mortgage, we'd be paying £1600. That's how crazy the housing market is in Cambridge. We could afford it, but we would have no leeway in case interest rates went up, and things would be tight if/when we had kids and we'd be down to one income for a while.
We've decided to do something a bit different. We're going to stick to the budget we decided on and worked out while we were crunching the numbers. If we put away £600 month in an ISA at 5.5%, we have £7500 saved in a year. If we do that the 7 years I have left on my contract, we come out of it with something close to 50K. That's not bad at all.
Now, people will say that if we did get a mortgage, we could probably make double that in the profits of selling our hose in a rising housing market. Maybe. Yes, it is tempting to think of it that way. The housing market in Cambridge is insane and will probably only get worse. The EBI AGM this morning informed us that staff levels will probably go from 250 to 400 in the next 5 years. Then there's London commuters that are forever going further out of town in the attempts to get more bang for their housing buck (and piss off everybody else in the process). So yes, chances are good that we'd make money if we bought a house now and sold it in 7 years. The thing is that we're not sure if we could afford it now. Interest rates are set to rise. People keep saying that the housing market needs a big correction or else it'll self-implode. You have experts arguing both sides of the same situation. So yeah….
We could make more money, we could make the same amount. In the end, I think we'll go the ISA route. We might not make more, but we'll make some and I'll probably end up sleeping better at night.
There is justice after all :)
I had a look at my credit card statement online today and I found out that Natwest declined the transaction for the bastard webhost from hell. Initially, they told me over the phone that the transaction would have to clear first before they could initiate a chargeback but since the fucktards actually had our old address on file, Natwest refused the transaction. Interestingly, I've still not heard a peep from them regarding the declined transaction. I just hope that I get something that doesn't come from an automated system so that I can finally sent a vitriolic email to a flesh-and-bone human. ohpleaseohpleaseohplease :)
Disabling anonymous postings
I've disabled anonymous comment postings. I'm fed up with having to delete spam comments generated by bots or idiots. If you want to comment from now on, you need to be a registered user.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who's pissed off :)
http://www.whplawsuit.com/
WebHostPlus, the company that bought Netbunch (where I had my old web account) is a known scam company. Apparently, they pissed off so many people that there's a class-action lawsuit against them :)
Arrrr, matey!
The one thing I like about LA so far is that it's deliriously easy to “borrow” wi-fi access from anywhere. I'm sitting at a Border's cafe where, instead of using their stupidly expensive t-mobile hotspot, I'm using the connection that the hotel across the road is so kindly providing :)
More pissed off than I should be
I think I've now fixed all that was broken when my friggin ISP got hacked. I have to say that I am not impressed with their tech support. Getting hacked is bad enough, but that's forgivable. Losing all the backups at the same time, less so. Needing to migrate every user account to a new box, you're starting to suck ass. Then we get to the realms of the truly incompetent: creating my account twice, giving me two sets of DNS server information to update my domain name registration. When asked which one to use, giving me the wrong set.
Finally, everything seems to be back up, with all the content found and only one JPG file lost to the ethers. I can live with that. What pisses me off though, really really badly, is that I lost over two years of access logs!
Now I'm not really vain generally, but I liked to be able to see how my website progressed over time. At it's busiest, I was going over 10GB of bandwidth a month! Craptacular.