Category Archives: Insanity

If I Had a Million Dollars…

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…I’d buy a gas station and teach economics.

The two are intertwined, though. I don’t think running a gas station would be that fun, and I don’t know that I’d enjoy teaching economics either. But the two together could be interesting.

Gas, for example, strikes me as quite inelastic. Even when gas prices were around $3.50 out here, we bought it. I didn’t reduce how much I drove. And with gas prices still very high, I ended up taking a small hit in gas mileage when I ended up buying an SUV.

Economics is generally a boring subject. But what if you let your economics students run the gas station?

For example, what would happen if we one day, out of the blue, decided to charge $8 a gallon for gasoline at our station? Would anyone come? What would be their reasoning if they came? And then suppose, a few months later, we decided to go a little crazy and charge $1.00 a gallon, but not market it any way other than updating our signs. How quickly would the word spread? When would we have a line? Would we see an appreciable sale in other items (e.g., would sales of food and drinks inside rise?) Would absolute mayhem break loose? And could we then construct a demand curve for gasoline? And we could even note that it wasn’t as ‘perfect’ as the textbooks show it. What if we gave gasoline away for free one day?

Having successfully covered price elasticity of demand, we could move onto competition. What would happen if we opened up in view of another gas station, and always updated our price to be one-tenth of a cent less than the guys across the street? Would they catch on and update their pricing? Would we spur a price war? Who would win?

And then, what if we later (after letting things adjust) decided to charge the exact same price as the guy across the street. Would he undercut us, or would he keep his prices the same? (Some of this could get into more complex game theory stuff that I never fully grasped.)

We could also cover complementary goods by looking at trends in, say, how many bottles of oil and windshield-washer fluid we sell.

I know I’m a business geek, but tell me that doing all of this–without worrying about profit–wouldn’t be fun.

Writing Code

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A few things I’ve learned in writing code:

  • $huge_array is a perfectly valid name for a large array… Until you realize that you were actually trying to create a hash, which is apparently not a PHP feature at all, in which case you suddenly realize that you’re going to need like six $huge_array’s… In which case I broke down and gave them decent names.
  • To determine if something is sound programming practice, try it and see if the program crashes, or, in my case, if PHP throws errors. If not, you’re golden.
  • The PHP.net manual is amazing. I just learned how to use foreach() tonight.
  • Coding is like swimming: even if you’ve gone years without exercising the skill, you can pick it up in no time. And also like swimming, if you’ve sucked at it all your life, you’ll still suck at it just as much later on.
  • When you can’t think of a good way to code in a feature, just put in a comment indicating what it should do. (So far, though, the PHP compiler hasn’t done a very good job with filling in code based on my comments…)

Tests

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So I’ve got this enormous set of questionnaires on management styles, and it’s one of those things, “Rank from highest to lowest the following.” And I’m left wondering a few things:

  • Do many people try to ‘psychoanalyze’ the test? I almost always know what each question is trying to judge. (And if I don’t, I skip it and go over the others, look at the end, and figure out what it’s asking.)
  • Do many people get hung up on technicalities? On a question that was judging me on six different ‘qualities,’ including practical, economic, religious, and artistic, I ranked Mother Teresa highly as one of the most interesting people to meet. This raised my score in the “spiritual” category. I just think it’d be neat to meet her, religious or not.
  • Does anyone else almost always have their answers, on large numerical scales, gravitate towards the middle?
    • Does anyone ever think that, on a scale of 1-4, they’re really a 2.5? A 2 is too extreme one way, and a 3 is too extreme the other way.
  • Are people really so oblivious that they don’t realize that all 20 questions on these types of things are getting at the same thing, just paraphrased?
    • What I find most interesting is that the test just goes for the total… It should really look at the anomalies. I scored very low on the ‘spiritual’ category, except for the Mother Teresa question. Someone who actually cared about the results might wonder about this and wonder about it. But nope, it just means that I’m three points more spiritual.
  • Who writes these things? The questions are always so vague. For example:
    • Faced with a problem to solve, rank, highest to lowest, the following ‘methods’ of solving the problem:
      • Accomplish goals
      • Develop thoughts
      • Weigh evidence
      • Follow instincts
    • Shouldn’t you do all of them? The, err, goal, is to accomplish the goal. In doing that, you must weigh the evidence and develop thoughts, and let your instincts weigh in too. How is this any different from asking:
      • You’re driving along and a car runs a stop sign and pulls out right in front of you. Which of the following do you do?
        • Hit the brakes.
        • Swerve away from them.
        • Beep your horn.
        • Try to avoid crashing.
        The question makes no sense! You’d probably do all four. And the last one is a summary of them all.
  • The questions make no sense!
    • What ranking do I assign to “Developing thoughts.” I’m always developing thoughts, whether I try to or not. Cogito ergo sum.
    • In solving a problem, how important is “performing deeds?” What is that even supposed to mean?
    • “Being aware”–again, cogito ergo sum.

I want to write these things. I could have a field day.

Rank, from highest to lowest, which skills you used while reading this blog post:

  • Reading
  • Converting written words into mental images and ideas
  • Digesting lunch
  • Being aware
  • Performing deeds
  • Breathing
  • Blinking
  • Developing thoughts
  • Reading this post

Should I?

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I’m often the one to close up at work. We share a long ‘driveway’ with another business, which is now out of business. From time to time–maybe about two times a month–there’ll be a car sitting, facing us, in the parking lot of the neighboring business. They’re far enough away that I’m not too concerned for my safety: if they were to come after me, I could get into my car long before they got to me/it.

Being the paranoid person I am, though, I always worry that they’re waiting until I leave to rob the place. So I’ll typically drive away and then come back a couple minutes later, although I don’t drive up the access road/driveway, I just carry on the main road as if I weren’t snooping on them. They’re often there for 10-15 minutes, and, when they’re gone, I’ll drive back up to make sure they’re not somewhere on our property. Tonight I was able to jot down their license plate, although I worry they may have noticed that I drove by at like 2 MPH and noticed me noticing them. This time, as I drove by after leaving, I noticed another car pulling in. I drove by a bit, turned around, and went by again, as the two cars were leaving.

It’s not always the same car(s), but it is always the same spot. They’re clearly not (thus far) looking to rob me / my business, nor are they doing anything else obviously nefarious. However, it still seems incredibly suspicious to be waiting in your car in the parking lot of a deserted business at 1am.

So here’s my question: what do I do? I’ve been tempted to call the police and report it as a suspicious car, but I can never decide if I should.

  • They may well be doing nothing wrong. The police would be obligated to check it out, in which case I’m sicking the police on people who are doing nothing wrong.
  • They may well be doing something wrong. It’s not breaking into my business, and it’s not mugging me, but it’s really pretty suspicious. (Selling drugs seems the most likely explanation, although all the evidence I have of that is that they’re sitting in an abandoned parking lot and meeting someone at 1am… Hardly proof.)
    • The police would be obliged to investigate and would probably catch wind of what was going on. A vote for calling them in.
    • It’s not like the suspicious cars don’t know where I work and what type of car I drive… Even though I always park right in front of one of the security cameras, I’d still hate to come out of work a few days later and find my tires slashed and my car egged.

So do I call the cops next time or not?

Delayed Processing

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Do you ever have a nonsensical thought, but take way too long to realize that it doesn’t make any sense?

I just got some ice from the freezer, and noticed out of the corner of my eye that the tub of ice cream in there says, “Runs UNIX!” I thought it was really cool to see UNIX expanding to other markets, and was proud in some strange way.

As I was pouring my drink, though, it suddenly dawned on me that despite the power and versatility of UNIX, it most certainly doesn’t power the cardboard tub of ice cream in my freezer. The tub of ice cream, as hard as it is to believe, doesn’t run any operating system, because it’s a cardboard tub of ice cream.

FWIW, I went back in and looked, and the text isn’t even close to “Runs UNIX!”