In case no one ever told you, Monster cables are a waste of money.  It turns out, a coat hanger is just as effective as Monster Cable at transferring an audio signal.

Some astute individual has probably told you at some point that Eskimos have dozens of words for “snow,” whereas English-speaking individuals only have one.

They lie! (Warning: link goes to a PDF file.)

Also on Wikipedia.

I found this today and thought it was kind of neat.  Many northeastern Indian tribes had names for each of the full moons every year.  Here is a list of the named moons for 2008.  First up is the Full Wolf Moon, next Tuesday.

Maybe everyone else has heard about this, but I never had so I thought I’d share.  It also seems like a great idea for an elementary school teacher to have a little party for the class for each of the moons, while teaching the kids about Indian culture.

Now that 2007 is then rather than now, it’s time to look at some of the things that happened then.

The year began with a review of 2006.  Much like the one you are reading now!  By the way, I apparently write like a girl.  I got a chance to eat lunch with my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss.  I may have miscounted the number of bosses but it’s something like that.  I named a new medical condition, frigidamanus supermus.  Doctors and scientists are still trying to catch up.  My niece—only 6.5 months old at the time—learned to play the ukulele, with yours truly as an instructor.  Around Easter, Stephanie took a shortcut to the bottom of a staircase.  She saved some time but broke her foot in the process.  I made some observations last summer, and now everyone thinks I’m a racist.  Oops.  We bought a house, and just five months later got around to posting some photos of said dwelling.  I theorized a bit on human eyes, and soon reported additional evidence in a follow-up post.  My right eye dominates both of yours.

Then of course there was the big news.  Stephanie has a parasite living in her abdomen, which we found out lacks sufficient organs needed to be called a he.  So when she joins us in March, hopefully her father will be up to the task of raising her.

Some other things happened last year too.  The sixth anniversary of 9/11 occurred, and I posted my account of that fateful day for all to read.  I also visited the top-left corner of the lower forty-eight, where I worked with some aeroplanists.  Shortly after that I got a year older, something which unfortunately happens every year.  Hopefully scientists get around to inventing immortality pills soon.

Aside from that, I made several posts about things that I spend time with.  These included some video game reviews, as well as some other video-game-related posts.  I also geeked out on Lost for a couple posts.  Who or what is Jacob!?  I think he’s Superman, and Lost Island is his new Fortress of Solitude.  That’s gotta be it.  Let’s see, what else...  I made several posts regarding software development, and a couple posts to make the internets better.  I also posted some comments on pop culture in what I am calling the “OMG dju hear” series.  Expect to see more in that series from time to time.

If you like to look at other people’s photos, three photo albums were posted this year.  Feel free to check those out.

Lastly, I have to mention the series of five posts where I dug up my old drawings from middle school.  I was apparently pretty demented.

Enjoy 2008.

If you’re like me you knew there was a writers’ strike but didn’t really understand what it was about.  It finally made sense to me after reading about it on Jenna Fischer’s blog and watching the YouTube video she links to, which shows Greg Daniels, Ryan, Kelly, Mose, and Toby on the picket line (they are all writers on the show).

The gist of it is that contracts were written in a time before the Internet and before TV shows were sold on DVD.  So when someone watches a show on NBC.com, for example, the network considers that promotional material and gets to keep nearly all the ad revenue (whereas the writers/actors get paid whenever a show is rerun on TV).  Similarly, the networks keep nearly all the proceeds of DVD sales.  Ten years from now, digital downloads and DVDs could very likely be the main ways people watch television shows, and it’s not exactly fair that the networks get to keep all that cash for themselves.

And if that’s wrong, then I guess I still don’t understand it after all.

When I just did an Amazon search for “i am america and so can you,” one of the top ten results (for reasons I don’t understand) was a movie that quite possibly has the most sacrilegious title ever conceived: Jesus Christ Serial Rapist.  Wow. (Also, cover art is slightly NSFW.)

Lenny: How about the Devil’s Pals?
Ned: No.
Moe: The Christ Punchers.
Ned: I don’t think you understand my objection.
Homer: I’m the president and the decision is mine: we’re Hell’s Satans!

If you own a Wii, Nintendo just made your holiday fifty dollars cheaper by delaying Super Smash Bros. Brawl until 2008 (they claim February, but we’ll see).

In an act of unprecedented cruelty, they announced that Sonic will be playable just before telling us we can’t have the game yet.  I fully expect an apology in the form of a playable Mega Man in the final release.

That is all.

Dane Cook has a stand-up routine where he addresses the misconception that all men care about is sex.  As counter-example, he points out that every man in the world would like to be a part of a heist, running down main street with a machine gun yelling “Where’s the van??  The van was supposed to be here!!”  Even more than that, he says, every man wants to have a monkey.

This is all good, but there are other things that should be added to the list.  In particular would be to have someone break into your house, and then defend yourself with awesome ninja skillz.  (I heard in a movie once that girls like guys with skillz).  For that reason, I name Damian Fernandez, who waited in his bedroom for an intruder to enter and then stabbed him in the chest with a ninja sword, the coolest fifteen-year-old ever.

Note: you can follow this link to listen to the Dane Cook bit I mentioned.  But that link is not in any way an endorsement of the extremely not-funny-or-interesting Halo machinima.

I heard this on the radio this morning and had to share.  Director Mike Figgis (who directed Leaving Las Vegas) was going through security at LAX, when he was asked the reason for his visit.  “I’m here to shoot a pilot.”

It’s not clear if he was making a dumb joke, or if he just wasn’t thinking (I’m inclined to believe the latter).  You can read more here, if you’d like.

You’re not a pilot:  I know every pilot in the world!

Update: as Peter pointed out, this story is almost entirely fictional.  Oh well, it sounded plausible.

About a year or so ago I came across a link to this paper (warning: PDF file) in the comments to a blog.  I found it very interesting, and since reading it I’ve been able to recognize this phenomenon “in the wild” so often that I figured I should share.  I’ll warn you that the paper is a 14-page academic paper from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology... and it reads like one.  After the first page or so it gets pretty tedious to read.

Even so, here’s the gist of it:  Often times, someone who is unskilled at something is unaware that they are unskilled, because they don’t have enough skill to evaluate their own skill.  If you ask students how they think they did on a math test after taking it, for example, the students who performed poorly will grossly overestimate their performance.  They usually have some idea that they didn’t perform well, but they aren’t good enough at math to realize just how badly they did.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a surprising number of times.  Like someone a few years ago that claimed to have a “heavy graphics background”, then showed me something he made in Flash that was a bumpy model of 3D text, with a glaring shading error on one edge.  I remember someone I went to high school with, who would typically say “I didn’t miss any questions on that test” after taking a test, which would have me worried because I thought I might have missed one or two.  Then we’d get the test back and he’d get a seventy-something.  But he never quite caught on that maybe he was judging his own performance poorly.

Long before reading about this behavior, I learned to distrust confident people.  Upon reading this paper, I realized why most advice you receive is bad:  most people who feel entitled to give advice are not at all qualified to do so.  The great irony is that for most people confidence is a desirable quality in a leader, misinterpreted as an indicator of competence.  You needn’t look far into the world of politics to find dozens of examples of this principle at work.

So to conclude, I ask that my readers (all ten of you) watch for examples of this in your life.  It happens way more often than you might expect.

maybe if we’re loud we’ll stay alive