Ideas for Free

I went out and bought a new laptop, having succesfully proven that driving over a laptop is not a good idea.

First, I watched SlickDeals for a reasonable, cheap system.  I’ve found that laptops have a short obsolescence period, and buying near the bottom end is best.  Second, I went to Best Buy and picked it up.  Best Buy has a less than stellar reputation, so I double-checked the factory seals.

And the system had a bad wireless.  DOA.   Some hours on Gateway’s chat trying to install drivers for a broken subsystem.   They gave me an RMA number; Best Buy has a less than stellar reputation.

The next morning, I went back to Best Buy.  Ten minutes for them to poke and prod and I had a new system on the way out.   Sometimes the reputation is undeserved.

Boot up Windows; download Firefox; download Kubuntu; burn CD;  install and go.

Life is better again.

In hopes of making a more productive utopia, I share this tip:

DO NOT RUN OVER YOUR LAPTOP WITH A MOTOR VEHICLE.

This has caused a noted decrease in my productivity.   A corollary for advanced production specialists follows:

DO NOT RUN OVER LAPTOP IN THE  MORNING WHEN THE BACK-UP DRIVE WILL BE DELIVERED THAT AFTERNOON.

I hope this bulletin prevents the same mistakes that I’ve been having this week.

Problem: Sometimes frozen food melts and refreezes.

Refrigerated trucks don’t.  Freezer doors stay open.  The freezer case goes out.  Groceries get left in the car for a long trip.  The power company decides to play power line roulette.  Later, the problem is fixed, and the food freezes again.  It’s hard to know if food thawed out and was then refrozen.  For some foods, this can be dangerous.

Solution: Fancy Ice Cubes.

Put a small “safe to eat” ice solid inside each back of frozen vegetables.  If it’s missing or unreadable, the vegetables have been thawed and refrozen.  The ice solid is made from water with two or more food colorings, so pick colors like the food.

When ice melts, the liquid will mix.  If you make ice cubes out of two or more colored waters, the two colors will mix.   For the simplest example:

1. Fill an ice cube tray so that each hole is half full.
2. Put in one drop of yellow food coloring into each hole.
3. Freeze.  You now have half height yellow ice cubes.
4. Fill the rest of each hole of the ice cube tray with plain water.
5. Put in one drop of blue food coloring into each hole.
6. Freeze.  You now have ice cubes that are yellow on the bottom and blue on top.
7. Leave the ice cubes in the freezer.  Have a three day power outage and then restore power for a day.
8. You now have green ice cubes.

That’s the core idea.  You have a way to tell if the item was refrozen.  From here, you can get fancy.

• Adjust the surface area ratio to signify how much thawing is acceptable.  Use thin slices when less thawing is allowed.
• “Print” tamper proof cubes in multiple colors.   You might ship cases of vegetables with a thin slice with the date and company logo in different colors.  If it the slice arrives a melted mess, don’t accept it from the trucker.
• Use multiple fluids or widths to make a ‘gauge’ to show exactly how melted the shipment got.

This could easily commercialize as a money saver by identifying truckers making expensive mistakes or as a premium brand spiff by making the ’safety tag’ inside each bag.
Shoo, go make money.

Problem: People Fail To Understand the Whole “Gays Can Marry” Thing

Solution: A T-Shirt!  It’s Always The Solution

FIRST THE COLOREDS…

THEN THE WOMEN…

NOW THE GAYS?

LIBERALS AND THEIR “RIGHTS”

Problem: Hard to Get People Not To Smoke

Solution: Pressure sensitive ashtrays

Some people smoke in non-smoking areas.  Sad, but true.  How about putting ashtrays for their pleasure?  These ashtrays cough loudly when you rest a cigarette on the edge of ashtray.  If you mash your cigarette in the ashtray it screams “Ahhhhhh!!!! It Burns!  It Burns!”

There are worse things to build on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Problem: People balk at having online access to seldom used financial, insurance, and service accounts.

Financial and insurance institutions want consumers to access accounts online.  It lowers costs and provides consistent service.

People note the potential for high cost losses, the one-sided user agreements, and complete lack of recourse for most fraud.  Some may choose online access for primary banking; the convenience outweighing the risk.  Many more will avoid online access to a 401(k) plan.

Solution: Provide information only accounts by default.

Information about an account is less valuable than the money in it.  Being a little careless with your account, such as accessing it from a computer, becomes similiar to throwing out printed statements without shreading them.

These accounts would let people see their balances and fees, make most routine changes, but not make ones that severly compromise security.  For example, transfering money from savings to checking is OK; changing mutual funds is OK; adding a newborn to your insurance is OK; changing your address is not OK; disbursing money to outside accounts is right out.  The risk of catastrophic loss decreases.

There are some implementations approaching this solution, aimed at preventing catastrophic losses.  Bank of America provides alert notifications by email when selected activities occur, such as adding a new Payee.   E*Trade uses separate passwords for viewing information and trading securities.

This idea provides lower costs to institutions, more convenience to consumers, and less loss to fraud all around.  What’s not to like?

Problem: Homeopathy lives right on the border of science.  The edges suggest It could work:  strange dosage curves,  unexplained placebos and histamine effects (see #1 and #4),  mercaptan sensitivity in the 1:50 billion range.  Working would mean bringing drug production costs to nearly zero. Failing means that millions of people are being comforted by empty promises. We want to know!

Solution: Run a double blind study already!

Homeopathy works with minute quantities of medicine, in the realm of countable molecules. The doctrine is that the dilution is to zero molecules with only a ‘memory’ in the water. It is nearly impossible to control labs to zero molecule dilution and the real effect might be in the few molecules contaminating the blank pills.

Testing becomes difficult due to the cycle of a homeopath testing several possible medications on a patient based on background, random symptoms, and responses to previous medications. Also, successful homeopathic treatment solutions cause subtle cures of systemic aliments, making traditional testing difficult. The only data on success is the subjective evaluation of the patient.

This is SCIENCE! Science works! Run a double blind anyway. Stop arguing and do the experiment!

Ingredients:

• 1 dozen homeopathic doctors (”docs”) willing to try.
• 300 or more patients (”sickies”) with various suitable allergies, gastric problems, etc.
• 1 trusted pill dispenser and record keeper that can keep a secret (”peddler”).

Recipe:

Peddler randomly and secretly assigns each sicky to one of three types: righties, wrongies, and blankies. Peddler then assigns an equal number of righties, wrongies, and blankies to each doc. Each doc treats each sicky normally: he or she interviews and pokes the sicky, prescribes a homeopathic pill, follows up with more interviewing, poking, and pills, and eventually either calls the sicky cured or just gives up.  Science!

Ah, but each time the sicky is prescribed pills, he or she needs to get them from the peddler. Then begins the fun!  The peddler looks up if the sicky is really a righty, wrongy, or blanky. A righty always gets the pill as prescribed by the doc. A wrongy always gets a random homeopathic pill from whatever spilled on the floor: those pills are small suckers. A blanky always gets a blank sugar pill. So, for example, each time a blanky goes back to the doctor with weird symptoms and an updated prescription for a carefully chosen remedy, he or she really gets a blank sugar pill.

Run for six months if you loaded up with chronic suffering sickies. For acute sickies, you might finish in a couple weeks. By now, lots of sickies will talk about how much better they are! Fill in the surveys on “Did you get better? Did homeopathy work for you? Do you feel better or worse?”. Hand them to the peddler.

You’ve Got Results!

You only get a few numbers out, like how righties compared to blankies. Time to crunch that spreadsheet to see what you got:

Happy Fun Pills: Righties do well; Wrongies and Blankies do poorly.

• Congratulations! Collect your Noble Prize in Medicine. Use winnings to evade Pfizer hit squads.

You’ve Got To Believe!: Some sickies do lots better. About even across docs and types of sickies.

• Eh. Publish an article in Popular Science. Keep trying for tenure.

That Winning Smile: Sickies of some docs do much better than others. About even across types.

• Recruit docs into multi-level marketing selling time shares for the astral plane. Retire rich and wanted.

They Be Shamans: Righties of some docs do really well. Everything else about even.

• Oh, those docs know good things. Go figure it out. Live on research grants forever!

That Black Pill? Not so good: Blankies do average. Wrongies do really bad. Might mix with above results.

• Homeopathy does something! It makes you sick! Win as above, but also sell sickos’ stories to People.

Total Muddle: Everyone does about the same with the usual statistical minutiae.

• Embezzle remaining research funds. Publish paper no one reads. Teach at Yale or Brigham Young.

So, go do it?

Well, it’s hard. Studies in the United States may require providing test subjects with real medical care during or after. Also, there really isn’t much money in it. Look how excited the makers of Tagamet were about rumors of H. Pylori? Think of how excited those generous big pharma will be to your University when you hint you might do the study if you have no money for ‘real’ research.

Great for some small country wanting to make a name for itself.

I spent over a day writing a silly Python program to read in a Civilization 2 Technology Tree.

I learned:

• Python assert statements tend to fail silently during common misuse. Blogged about it. Suggested fixing it on the Py3k mailing list. Guido says there is a SyntaxWarning now.
• Google docs appears to use the python csv module to export to csv. Their spreadsheet works fairly well. I like the auto-save/auto-versioning.
• The csv package is pretty inflexible. It cannot discover the dialect of comma-separated-vague file it is passed. It works for, and is designed for, times when the export is either excel or Python. The Dialects do allow you to set some other basic options.
• nose is a great testing tool. nose.tools confuses pylint because of its on-the-fly playing with __all__. I should probably write a Wikipedia article on it.
• Whenever debugging recursion, make a note both when calling the recursed function and when returning. It makes digging through the log much easier.
• Nothing tests your code like a large, real world, example.
• The logging function rocks far less well. I filed bug on it: it picks up the wrong %(filename)s. This bug has apparently been going back and forth for years.
• Reading a correctly validated input file is about 10x the effort of reading an incorrectly validated one.
• Testing code is fairly easy and a bit bulky. It’s real cost is that it forces that 10x effort in validating the input in order to pass the tests. I could get behind Test Driven Development.
• The Civilization 2 Technology Tree has five errors, including two “Destroyer” units and a bunch of redundant dependencies, such as Fusion Power doesn’t need to depend on Nuclear Power.
• Sets in Python work well.
• WordPress has syntax coloring plug-ins that work fairly well, and it can handle arbitrary files.
• Programming is still fun.

So, with no plans to do anything with this:

tech.py — This is Python code. It loads the technology tree and doesn’t do anything with it.

civtech.csv — A CSV file with the Civilization 2 technology tree

CivChart — A GoogleDoc spreadsheet with that same technology tree

This post cleverly delayed for a few days to space out my postings.

Problem: People yell “Help!” when confronted with an emergency. No one comes.

Solution: Yell something with meaning. “Fire!” works.

Seriously, “Help” needs more information. The common use case is “Help!” being shorthand for “Help! My boyfriend is tickling me!”. Yelling “Fire!” has more information. It has a common use case of “Fire! Something is burning and assistance is needed to put it out, rescue people, or call professionals! Come evaluate!”

This is about information. People do care about their fellows; people have jumped out of bed one too many time for “Help! My boyfriend is tickling me!”

Problem: Python assert statements are prone to silently fail in obvious misuse.

Solution: Modify Python assert statement to “assert condition as message”

Python usually does the right thing ™. That is, usually a programmer’s code does what is expected without odd language gotcha’s. Here is one of the gotcha’s:

Seems reasonable? Sorry, that assert is equivalent to:

because your parenthesis made a tuple. You meant to type this:

Python 3.0 should be modified to require this:

or just make assert a built_in function and, therefore, require the parenthesis.