Your dog's called what?

I was downstairs having a coffee and reading the increasingly-feeble SMH and I couldn't help notice that both of the other outside tables were occupied by people who had brought their little dogs along. One of the dogs was called Brooklyn and its owners were - of course - New Zealanders.

My neighborhood's overrun with these little dogs. An acquaintance of mine was at a dinner party near here recently and was introduced to a couple who described themselves to her as dildoes, which took her back a little until they explained that it stood for "Dual Income Little-Dog owners".

Unneeded Complexity.

This morning, in between driving around to take number one son to soccer and number one daughter to hockey, and trying to schedule the thee or four other things that have to be done today, I almost ran out of gas. No, I don't mean in some figurative sense, I mean literally. (And I don't mean literally as in not literally, as it often does - see this blog.)

The car was almost empty; I pulled into a gas station (and I do say 'gas', by the way. 'Petrol' makes me wince. As, for that matter, does 'capsicum'.) I put $50 worth in the car and went inside to pay, and that's where it all started to get confusing. I told him "Pump 7" and handed over a $50 note and he said to me that if I bought $5 more I'd get 14c a litre cheaper, or something like that.

This stopped me cold. I don't really have much of a sense for how much a liter of gas costs, so is 14c lot? I asked him, and he said that on my $50 worth, I'd save about $1.50, which to me sounded like something worth investigating. But then he said that this saving only applied if I bought something in the convenience store for $5. Now clearly, if I was already going to buy something in the convenience store that cost $5 or more this is an unqualified good deal - by expressing a preference to buy the $5 item I've already said I'd rather have the item than have the $5, so having the-item-plus-$1.50 rather than $5 is a easy call.

But there was nothing in the shop that I really needed to buy for $5 or more. I could buy something I didn't want for $5, but then does the $1.50 I'd gain from the saving on the gas make up for the negative utility on the thing I wouldn't have bought anyway? Something I wouldn't pay $5 for, but which I'd happily pay $3.50 for? It's not easy.

And then I remembered than the man in line ahead of me had bought one of those protein drinks (and, I couldn't help noticing, a pack of winfield cigarettes - but he was that sort of guy) and I thought that might do it. I'd been to the gym yesterday and I need protein. The protein drinks were $4.65, so all I had to do was to buy something I didn't want at all for 35c and I'd still be up. Some gum or something, I don't know. They'd be paying me to have the gum and I could throw it in the bin as I went out. Gum, of course, being an absolute disgrace.

But this side-deal wasn't as straightforward as that. They were also offering these protein drinks as a deal: you get two for $6. I could, of course, buy 2 for $6, but then I'd probably leave the extra one in the car for a day or too and it'd get a bit too funky to drink. But I'd feel like a chump paying $4.65 for one when I could have had the extra one for only $1.35. I couldn't justify buying a second one... (This happens to me in the supermarket quite often. I need one of something, but they have some deal on where you could also buy 7 for the price of 13 or so and I end up not wanting to buy any. It's my professional training: if you can't tell who the sucker is in a deal, it's you.)

By this point my brain had just completely seized up. I meekly gave the guy $50 and walked out, feeling like I'd been defeated and had left money on the table. I should point out that I have a good undergraduate degree in physics and that for most of my professional life I've been dealing with complex financial structures. I'm not an idiot. I just behave like one.

Postcript: After wrote this, I saw the obvious solution. I was, I think, indifferent between $4.65 and one protein drink. $6 for two protein drinks is really $4.50 for two, so the second one would cost me negative 15c. I could just discard it as I left the shop. Or I could put it in the car on the off-chance that I remembered that it was there and that I needed it. I think though, that at a subconscious level I did evaluate all this, and realised that the extra fuss of having to manage this inventory wasn't worth the 15c I'd gain. I have quite a bit on my plate today anyway.

Airport Security. And wine racks.

On Badscience there's a link to a superb article in the Atlantic about how airport security is as poorly thought-out as it is annoying. Which is saying something. As an aside, last time I was taken aside for a random security check I asked the guy exactly how random it is, and he said 'continuous random'. Which means, he explained as he got out the glove and the car battery, that when they've finished doing someone they grab the next person who walks past.

Anyway, this article would be a great find anyway, but it also has this superb paragraph. Note the past sentence, the one in parentheses:

During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol—up to 80 ounces—into football games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. (The company that manufactures the Beerbelly also makes something called a “Winerack,” a bra that holds up to 25 ounces of booze and is recommended, according to the company’s Web site, for PTA meetings.)

See! (Oh, and if you don't know the colloquial meaning of the word 'rack' in American I suggest you get out more.)

What sort of board exactly?

Swans

I would expect this sort of thing (a hanging garden of apostrophes) from one of the rival codes, and I'm thinking particularly of the one that's had all the off-field incidents lately. But not AFL.. and not the swannies. I'm a member!

Numbers

Younger daughter asked me the other day "Who invented numbers?". And I thought for about a tenth of a second and said "The arabs", which isn't all that true but it seemed to satisfy her, and - now that I think about it - is a pretty good answer to any question of this type.

She thought for a moment, then asked a follow-up question: "Daddy, did they have numbers when you were little?"

Remix

At the gym I go to they play a lot of music which is remixed and updated versions of 80s songs. At first I thought that what this meant was that all popular music these days is just remixed versions of old songs (which span me off into a "kids these days.. so unoriginal" bender), but then I realised that the gym's a controlled environment, and that a remixed 80s song allows them to cater for a wider age range. People like me recognise the original, the younger crowd like the remix sound. Everyone's a winner, right?

They were playing a remixed version of "Another Brick in the Wall", that loathsome Pink Floyd song, which actually sounds even worse than it did back in 1979. And what struck me is that among the things the song rails against (education, thought control, whatever) is.."dark sarcasm in the classroom". Dark sarcasm? My heart bleeds.