The Half Baked Lunatic

I’ve been back in the USA for two weeks now, and I’m still adjusting to a few things. For the past year, my family has lived in Switzerland – and the whole time we complained bitterly about the high cost of food there.  Buying groceries to eat at home is expensive enough – but going out to a restaurant?  It’s completely outrageous. The hot lunch program at our kid’s elementary school is a great example of food prices in Switzerland.  The “normal” school lunch was $10 – or you could get a “small lunch” without side dish or dessert for $7.50 (but it did come with a drink).  The third option was a plain hot dog in a bun for $5.50 (no drink included). To put this in perspective: if we bought the “small lunch” every day, the cost of school lunch in Switzerland was more than the tuition we paid every month at the private school we sent the kids to when we lived in Ecuador! Even fast food is expensive – a combo meal at McDonalds (regular burger, fries, and small drin... [More]

I’ve never tried pot. It’s not that I have any moral objections to Marijuana , and I really don’t care whether it’s legal or illegal – it’s not a big issue to me.  The reason I have never smoked Marijuana is the same reason why I don’t smoke cigarettes: I just can’t understand why anyone would willingly inhale the soot and tar and ash of burning carcinogens into their lungs.  Blech.  You might as well suck on the exhaust pipe of your local city bus for all the good it’s going to do for you! Back around 1985 or so, I was staying at a friends house for a few days and he asked if I wanted to smoke a joint with him.  I politely declined, but he was persistent.  After he finished the first joint by himself, he rolled me a fresh one and offered it again.  When I convinced him I really didn’t want it, he put it in a plastic baggie and told me to bring it home and keep it – just in case I was ever in the mood to give it a go. I put it in my suitcase withou... [More]

I’m writing this blog posting whilst sitting in my stateroom aboard Cunard’s flagship ocean liner, the Queen Mary 2 – enroute from Southampton England to New York City (coincidentally, it’s the exact same route that the Titanic was taking ... hmmm.) We are moving from Switzerland back to the US.  This is our third year in a row (and fifth time in six years) that we are moving to a different country. And yet again, we will have to live out of suitcases for a month or so while we wait for the container with all our household belongings to arrive at our new home. Exactly a year ago, we moved from Washington DC to Switzerland. It was supposed to be an easy trip – a quick flight from DC to Newark, then a direct flight from Newark to Zurich, and finally an hour train ride to Basel (where we’ve lived for the past year).  However, the flight from DC was delayed by over 8 hours and we didn’t arrive in Newark till almost 1am, missing our 8pm flight to Zurich by a long shot.  T... [More]

  I just got back from a one-week excursion to Washington DC. I had two objectives for this trip: buy a car, and find a house to live in (since we are moving back to the USA next month.) Buying a car and selecting a house to lease in one week is difficult enough – but it’s even more problematic when the rest of your family are on another continent. I needed to keep in contact with my wife and kids three or four times a day as I scouted out different neighborhoods and looked at houses.  To make matters worse, I didn’t have my cell phone with me since my basic calling plan (discussed below) doesn’t have international roaming. So it was Skype to the rescue!  Calling home to Switzerland on Skype is only 2.1 cents a minute, and if the internet connection is good, the voice quality is indistinguishable from a regular phone call. The problem, however, is that using Skype while I’m out looking at houses and cars requires that I find an unsecured wireless hotspot. It’s easy a... [More]

  My eleven year old son has been fascinated with large numbers lately.  He’s asking all the typical thought provoking questions that eleven year olds tend to ask, like “how many stars are there in the universe?” and “how long would it take to walk to Alpha Centauri?” And of course, the number Googol is always a great benchmark, as in “Are there more than a Googol water molecules in the ocean?” So, how big is a Googol? I came up with the following example to explain to him how big a Googol really is. (And yes, the number Googol (10 to the 100th power) is spelled differently from the search engine, Google). In scientific notation, a Googol is typically displayed as 1×10100. Written out, this is a “one” with 100 “zeros” behind it, as such: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 One interesting thing about our ability to use symbolic notation to represent and manipulate numbers... [More]

I just recently found out that almost all of Penn & Teller’s “audience participation” card tricks involve the three of clubs. It’s some kind of an inside joke that's been going on for years. It's funny, because I remember that specific card. They had a show in Seattle - on December 18, 2002 - which was SUPPOSED to involve the three of clubs. Unfortunately, the trick was foiled by a certain Half Baked Lunatic dressed in a tuxedo :-) It was our anniversary, and my wife surprised me with a night out on the town. We started with a nice dinner, accompanied by an expensive bottle of wine. After dinner, she directed me to the parking lot in the back of The Moore Theater where we had previously seen a few shows, such as “Stomp” and “The Flying Karamazov Brothers.” I couldn’t see the marquee in front, so I didn’t know what kind of a treat we were in for; but before we went inside she produced a brown paper bag, seemingly out of thin air, which contained a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin, ... [More]

Here’s an old high school physics puzzle, let’s see if you can get the right answer: You have perfectly insulated room (i.e., no heat can escape).  Inside the room is a refrigerator, plugged in and running – but the refrigerator door is left wide open. As the refrigerator runs, does the room: A – get colder B – get warmer C – stay the same temperature Think about it for a minute ... (and yes, I first heard this from my high school science teacher back in the late 70’s) The answer is ... (drum roll please!) ... “B” – the room will get warmer.  In fact, the room will get hot. So hot that the refrigerator will likely catch fire and the insulation will melt off the walls. Why? Because a refrigerator doesn’t “create” a cool environment, it just transfers heat from the inside chamber to the outside environment. And since it’s not 100% efficient, it actually creates substantial heat while doing this.  (Don’t worry, I didn’t get it right the first time ei... [More]

I consider my family to be a fairly “healthy” eaters.  We consume a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables and eat very little fast food (only a few times a year). My kids are never allowed to drink soda, except when they are at a party or some function where there are no alternatives.  We eat a lot of fish and pasta.  And although I love beef, lamb, pork, and chicken, we limit our portion sizes and try to stick to lower fat recipes. However, I have mixed opinions about the “organic” food movement. I admit it’s important to openly discuss better/safer/healthier/environmentally friendly ways of feeding our growing population, and there are many organic products and processes I agree with wholeheartedly – but many of the organic guidelines are based on emotion rather than facts and real data. The use of synthetic fertilizers, for example, is one of the hottest topics. I liken the use of fertilizers to indoor plumbing. In the 1800’s, many people thought that the idea of def... [More]

The star studded 1983 movie "The Big Chill” was about a weekend reunion of a bunch of old college friends – now in their early 30’s – who all get together for the funeral of Alex, one of their classmates who committed suicide. The movie is poignant, intelligent, very funny, and somewhat disturbing all the same time. It’s about rekindling old friendships, coping with the shock of their friend Alex’s death, and wondering what happened to the social idealism that they all shared when they attended the University of Michigan in the late 60’s. They were all anti-establishment, idealistic, smart, enthusiastic, with a vocal desire to change the world and make it a better place. Alex, now deceased, was a charismatic science major. Everyone thought he was the most intelligent one of the bunch – and their mutual friendship really survived through the years because of him. He was the glue that kept them all together, but he was never able to get his own life straightened out. Now, in 1... [More]

  I met with James Cameron a few times when I worked in the Windows Media Division at Microsoft.  Mr. Cameron had just finished the 3D IMAX documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” and was looking at different technologies to use in an upcoming “big budget 3D production”. This was back in 2003 or so. In the first meeting, we just provided a broad overview of the technologies that Microsoft was working on, and had a general discussion on what he was looking for.  I must say, I was exceedingly impressed with Jim’s technical knowledge. Most “Writer/Director” types I’ve interacted with are great on the creative side but fairly light on the technical side. I pointed out that the digital camera that they used for the “Ghosts of the Abyss” had a subsampled horizontal resolution, and he jumped right in and told me how they solved that problem ... by tapping into the actual image sensor itself, bypassing the rest of the stora... [More]