puzzling

There are a lot of utterly remarkable cognitive things to observe as I watch my daughter grow up. The one that caught my attention recently was the ability for my daughter to complete jigsaw puzzles while the pieces were face side down.

Normally one optimizes jigsaw puzzle completion by locating the edge pieces, completing the perimeter and using visual clues to build inward. This is generally the optimum strategy for completing a puzzle when you only do it once.

However like most kids, my daughter likes to do things over and over again. In this scenario there is enough time, and presumably brain power, to memorize where every single piece goes and also to recognize the location of a piece not only by what part of the picture is on it but also by the shape of the piece.

So when I sit and watch my daughter doing a puzzle (Finding Nemo has been on the menu for at least 2 months now), she simply looks at the pile of pieces and grabs the piece she is looking for regardless of if it is face up or face down. I'm sure she's not alone in this ability.

Remarkable.

performancing = spammers

Bingo. I finally got a spam hit from one of my email subscriptions. I mentioned before that I've created a separate email account for all my subscriptions via Bloglines' email service.

I finally got my first spam email for one of those accounts. The lucky winner is Performancing which makes a WYSIWYG blog editor add-in for firefox. From what I understand they are basically a defunct organization now.

At least this reaffirms my belief in the inherent sliminess of many of these 'startup' companies. Thanks. I feel warm inside now.

sketchy websites and spam

I'm sure most people are fairly religious about not giving out their primary email address when signing up for web services. My basic approach is to utilize the email generator in Bloglines. You can create an unlimited number of email addresses. I use one per site when I sign up for something. I've done this for about a year now. I have about 100 email addresses. I assumed by now I would be able to report back with a huge list of websites that compromised my email address. Sold it off to some spammer or a commercial partner. Guess how many email accounts have received spam?

Zero.

Not a single spam email. Zippo. Color me surprised.

don't do as "i do"

Doesn't it seem a little odd that the red states are the ones that have the biggest decline in the share of households with married couples? Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina... (via NY Times)

a?

I guess Armstrong did say 'a'. Good. The fact that this is such a big deal is ridiculous. Hopefully we don't have to hear about this anymore.

"coffee coffee coffee"

Starbucks & Google mashup off Starbucks locations by city.

Two comments:

First, I'm stunned there aren't more Starbucks in NY (see map above). Starbucks are to NY what cockroaches are to NY. They are ubiquitous. There is no way this captures all of them. There are 4 within a one block radius of my work building. Five if you include the reseller in our cafeteria.

Second, for all the Starbucks that are here what is up with the noted lack of Starbucks in the neighborhoods east and west of the bottom of Central Park? There's a huge gap there. I've definitely noticed this when I'm in the area (it's a shopping area). I haven't got a clue why this is. They are high rent districts but have lots of shoppers and lots of residents. This is a perfect spot for a Starbucks.

Bonus points for the person who can identify the movie the post title comes from.

bookmark - housing data

Cool little website that creates pdf files of housing statistics on the fly.

starter castles

Interesting article on the explosion of McMansions and the current backlash. However the most interesting sentence by far is this one:

The average American home swelled from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,349 square feet in 2004 -- a 140% increase in size.

I'm guessing that we also have fewer kids now and don't have our parents living with us, so on a square foot per person basis those numbers have grown even more.

wing tips

Trivia for the day. As a suit-wearing member of the work force I occasionally wear wing tip shoes. It occurred to me today that I had no idea why they are called that. Well here's the answer. It's because of the shape of the leather part of the shoe that is perforated with a design. If looked at from toe to heel (see the graphic), this part of the shoe looks like a bird with its wings outstretched and up. As to why it's not called the bird shoe I can only offer a guess - it sounds kind of stupid.

google goof

I don't know how long this will last but Google's added a bit of marketing for their desktop app. Unfortunatley the image, which I assume is a square with the upper left being transparent, blocks the user's ability to click 'next' for page 2 of the search results. This is really an issue for me right now as I'm doing a lot of searching. Time to try out a competitor.

odds & ends

Nice article on Colin Meloy of The Decemberists fame (reg req). I wrote about their last album here. Probably my second favorite album last year.

In the last few years he has quickly established himself as one of the premier new songwriters in rock, charming critics and ever-growing crowds with songs set in a fantastical world of Victorian chimney sweeps and dockside prostitutes, infant ghosts and exotic royal parades. His lyrics giddily engage a Scrabble master's vocabulary; one song on the Decemberists' latest album, "Picaresque," rhymes folderol, chaparral and coronal.

Nice article on VHS/Beta wars and implications for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray (sub req). There's some more here at Wikipedia. I think I've always heard the 'porn' argument for VHS beating Beta and never believed it. Neither article mentions this as a driver for VHS's eventual success. In fact the main driver is that VHS could store more hours of video. Beta couldn't hold all movies on a single tape.

While I'm here. Cool word of the day: Locuna - gap or missing part. As in Locuna Mattata. I keed, I keed.

piggy banks

A few of the sites I read are talking about the U.S. savings rate today. I decided to go look at the data they were using myself. Savings rates are defined as total personal income minus total personal consumption over income. So spending a lot of money on your mortgage doesn't count. It's an amazing set of data. Not only because we are at zero savings rate but also because the trendlines change only over massive timescales. I would have though that 4 years ago or back in 1987 we would be saving a lot (after the market crashes). But that is not the case. Spending seems to be more related to some collective personality of the U.S. that has slowly changed over time. We have gone from a saving nation up until the mid 80s to an increasingly consuming nation ever since. Along the way we've used stock market asset increases and housing asset increase to fund this spending. But we are now at a limit that now requires us to borrow against our future earnings or our net current assets. Given the long time frames to change behavior it's not like we will be able to stop this increased consumption any time soon.

cbgb

It's strange in this day and age, with Google at my fingertips, and data everywhere, that I still have nagging questions I don't know the answer to. It's not because the data isn't out there. It's either because I'm lazy or I am only reminded of the question at times when I don't have access to the web. One of those questions is, 'what the hell does CBGB's stand for?' I pass by the club every now and again in the city and then promptly forget that I'm interested in the origins of the club name when I get back home.

If you are not familiar, it's a club that became famous for promoting punk bands back in the 70s. Groups like Blondie, Talking Heads, The Ramones, The Velvet Underground all cut their teeth there.

Well I finally looked it up. Actually as you can see from the picture above, it also has the tagline OMFUG. What the hell does that stand for? I felt sure it stood for something off color. As it turns out I'm not alone in that belief. Ironically the first acronym doesn't stand for anything to do with what the club became and the second acronym is not in fact off color in any way.

CBGB - Country, Blue Grass, and Blues
OMFUG - Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers

Apparently the club, when initially formed, was to be a showcase for country, bluegrass, and blues bands. "Gormandizers" means to eat voraciously but here it means people who consume music voraciously.

And while I'm here, here's another thing I didn't know. Where the hell did the phrase "cut your teeth on" come from? As far as I can tell it's a reference to a baby's first tooth. It's really the gums that are getting 'cut' but we'll let that slip. Hence cutting teeth refers to a time when something was transitioning from a 'baby' to something more accomplished.

entertainment market trends

I have heard a lot about video game growth and music sales declining in the press lately, but I rarely see all the data in one spot. Here is most of the entertainment industry in billions of dollars of revenues per year:

	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	CAGR
Video sales & rentals	19.9	18.7	20.4	22.2	24.5	5.3%
- Video sales	11.7	10.3	12.1	14.0	16.1	8.4%
- Video rentals	8.3	8.4	8.3	8.2	8.4	0.5%
Source: VSDA
Music	14.3	13.7	12.6	11.9	12.1	-4.2%
Source: RIAA
Cable	29.4	32.3	34.0	34.2	36.2	5.4%
Source: Regan Research
Movie box office	7.7	8.4	9.5	9.5	9.5	5.6%
Source: MPA
Video games:
- Software	5.5	6.1	7.0	7.0	7.3	7.5%
- Console software	3.4	3.7	4.7	4.9	5.2	11.8%
- Portable software	0.8	0.9	0.9	0.9	1.0	6.2%
- PC software	1.4	1.5	1.5	1.2	1.1	-5.0%
- Software rentals	0.9	0.6	0.7	0.7	n/a	n/a
Source: NPD
Concerts	1.7	1.8	2.1	2.5	2.8	13.3%
Source: Pollstar

All caveats apply on this data (as in it could be all wrong)

Console software and concerts have clearly grown the fastest over the last 4 years. I rarely hear concerts as a growth industry. Given the drop in CD sales maybe people are forsaking recorded music for live music.

I'm surprised that video sales are both larger and faster growing than rentals. I haven't bought a movie in years. But then again it seems most people have issues with 'renting' content as I've discussed before.

PC gaming seems like a dead end. That's a precipitous drop since 2000. Unfortunately for video game publishers that translates to higher costs as there is no license fee to write games on the PC.

And finally the weirdest part of this data. Home video sales and rentals are 2/3 the size of all cable revenues. Now I don't own cable, and I haven't in a while. But I hear an average cable bill approaches $100 a month now. Are people really spending $66 on DVD purchases and rentals? That seems so high.