• Recently watched television series and movies
• some books I read
• my cell phone
• the following video games: Dwarf Fortress, Gal Civ2.
• the tomato sauce I made the other day
• pictures.

That's all I can recall right now.

As a child I always wanted a mohawk but the idea was vetoed by my parents. I now have one. Take that, childhood. Next I need to acquire and learn to operate a jet that can transform into a kickass robot. That's pretty much the extent of my childhood ambitions.

This is a sign from my trip to Yosemite a few months back. Click for larger.

I don't think I've ever read anything written by Charles Dickens. It seems like I probably should have somewhere along the line, but for some reason I feel like it's too late to now.

I've long been bothered by the Monty Hall Problem. I understand the reasoning for why it's better to always switch doors after the reveal, but it just seems so goddamned wrong. The paradox came up in a novel I'm currently reading, and it's back on my mind's front burner. So, at the risk of personifying the old joke about the difference between a mathematician and a computer scientist, I wrote a little program to play the game over and over again, and lo and behold:

Switching doors does indeed converge to a 2/3 winning probability! Finally, we'll all be able to sleep well tonight. You can thank me later.

Lots of pics from my tucson trip are below after the jump. They could take a little while to download (~7MB), so be forewarned. I was tempted to install some gallery software with thumbnails, but screw it...

He is so sad.

There's always something you forget to take on a trip. For me today, it was my camera's USB cable. (Why don't all cameras come with bluetooth by now?) So, I won't be able to post daily photos from Tucson. Luckily, my 2GB mem card should be enough for the next three days. ;-)

That said...

I now have a mullet.

So, I got this jury summons (civil court) a few weeks ago, and this Monday was my first day of service. Since I've actually been staying busy with school related work lately, I was not too thrilled about having to spend any number of days in court only to have to get all my own shit done at night. Then at Monday's juror orientation, I learned that my fellow summoned citizens and I were extremely lucky to have been assigned to a rare one-week session instead of the usual two. Not only that, but the court officer and the judge both dropped some major hints at the week's light case load, mentioning several times that civil cases are often settled before reaching court. Yippee! Could I really be so fortunate? Why yes, I can. I just called the juror info line and found out that I don't have to report tomorrow for my final day of service. Many potential days of mindnumbingly boring civic duty were reduced to two hours of mindnumbingly boring civic duty!

My point, I suppose, is that I am awesome and this is freaking sweet.