12 Myths About Hunger

This excellent page from Food First debunks 12 common myths about hunger. There are some fascinating and startling statistics here, and it does a very effective job of driving home the point that the majority of starving people in the world are doing so not because of environmental or market forces, but because of someone's greed.

Myth 1:
Not Enough Food to Go Around

Reality: Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - ­vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs - ­enough to make most people fat!

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The MIT Blackjack Team

Four years ago, Wired ran a great story on a bunch of math wonks from MIT who used an amazingly clever blackjack strategy to clean Vegas out of millions of dollars. It's a bit long, but definitely worth the read.

The Wired article was actually adapted from the novel Bringing Down the House, which is available for download as an ebook (or, I suppose, as a regular book; but like Cory Doctorow, I prefer being able to read things on my Palm).

"One mistake can cost a team a large amount of their expected advantage," Lewis says. "We had these charts calculated out that could tell you what a single error in play costs in terms of profit."

After passing the BP exam, Lewis moved to real world application. During Lewis' first weekend in Vegas, the team made $100,000. He was hooked and soon became one of the team's premier players. Personally, he didn't have problems with the ethics of the venture. "It isn't really even gambling. It's no different than the stock market. We use our brains to earn a profit. It isn't illegal. And it isn't cheating."

Link to Wired story
Link to Bringing Down the House ebook

Homebrew Mosquito Trap

We've all heard the joke: the mosquito is [insert province/state]'s official bird. Here in Saskatchewan it's just short of being true, and quite frankly, I'd do anything short of hanging a big bucket of blood outside just to keep the pesky little critters off me. So you have to understand how intrigued I was when I read about this DIY mosquito trap.

I've mentioned Hammacher Schlemmer before because of the cool stuff they carry, and I'd seen this mosquito trap there long before I caught it on BoingBoing. My friend Wendy has a similar contraption called "Skeeter-Vac" in her backyard, which I believe she picked up at Costco. It runs on propane to generate the carbon dioxide, and, as far as I remember, it does a decent job of keeping the outdoors relatively mosquito free. But it's expensive, and I'd prefer to spend my hard-earned cash on slurpees during those sweltering summer days.

The instructions for building the DIY trap are very simple, and I was able to put one together in less than 30 minutes. The most time consuming part, especially if you're a perfectionist like me, is getting the water to 40 degrees Celsius. We already had most of the necessary materials lying around the house, so my total cost was $1 for two huge sheets of construction paper from Dollarama.

Although there's nothing preventing mosquitoes to come flying out of the bottle, they're thankfully too stupid to know that. The carbon dioxide apparently gives them direction into the bottle, but once inside there's nothing to provide them with direction out. I'll post in a week or so with what my results are: personally, I'm wondering how this stacks up against more natural solutions, like bats and dragonflies.

Link (via BoingBoing)

Edit Aug. 10/06: Well, I regret to inform everyone that this experiment has failed miserably. I did not catch a single mosquito, but I did catch three daddy longlegs, some kind of crazy-ass beetle, and half a bottle of dandelion seeds.

Final tally: Mosquitos 2, Deron 0.

Cool and Frustrating Puzzles

I came across these Grow puzzles a couple of years ago, but they were weird and I didn't spend a lot on them. Returning to them now, they're still weird, but brilliantly weird: like the guy you meet on the subway who does your math homework for a pouch of Pop Rocks, not like the guy you meet on the subway who carries a duffel bag with his wife's severed head in it.

The premise of all these puzzles is the same: there are a number of items along the left and right sides of the screen that must be activated in a certain order. The twist is that different orders give misleading results. A lot of times you'll think you're making progress only to find you're straying dawn a misleading path. In Grow 3, for example, the tornado attaches to the windmill to provide the globe with electricity; but if the tornado is activated too early, it destroys the windmill -- and then a misleading "bonus" pops up, suggesting you've done the right thing.

These puzzles are perfectly crafted and great fun to watch, even if you're not trying to solve them.

Grow v2 (via Kent's Blog)
Grow v3
Grow RPG
Grow Cube

Update: It turns out the all knowing, all seeing Wikipedia has a link to Grow and a mysterious fifth puzzle called Glow Ornament. Solutions for all the puzzles are also listed, so don't look too closely or you'll ruin the fun!

Link to Wikipedia article

Free Text Messaging Service

I think I may be one of the last people on the face of the earth without a cell phone. The problem is that I want the gadgets but I don't want to be in constant contact. I leave my house to get away from the phone, not to take it with me.

"You should get a cell phone," my buddy Rob said, "so I can text you." Texting has somehow become the "killer app" of cell phones, which I find especially hilarious because cell phones already have a brilliant and perfectly natural method of communication built in. But texting is fun, so they tell me, and in some places it's far cheaper than standard cell phone rates, so that explains much of its popularity.

But even without a cell phone, I can use txtDrop to text message my friends for free. The site is very straight-forward, with only three fields to fill out and a button to push. Now I'm half-way home: if I can find a good site that will let me receive texts, I may not need a cell phone after all (but I will need a wireless card for my Palm).

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