now with 33% more sanity!

Updates are good every now and then. October came and went without one, as did the first half of November, but we're back in business now in some limited fashion. How neat.

In this issue, the focus will be gaining tangible progress toward achieving my goal of cumulatively posting 95 idiotic postulates.

Postulate #12: A wish for an ironic death has a higher chance of being realized than might otherwise be expected.

If you truly want to go out in an ironic fashion, and instead the grim reaper takes you by more conventional means (like having a stroke in your 80's), the fact that you were hoping for something more unusual makes the situation ironic in another way. However, this doesn't decrease your chance of having a "normal" ironic death, such as when Atkins died of a heart attack, or when an NRA lobbyist is killed by an assault weapon used in an armed robbery.

Postulate #13: At the time a pizza is entirely consumed except for a single slice, the survival prognosis for the last slice improves considerably. This effect is generalizable to all partitioned shared food items.

The consumption of community food is more complicated than you might think. There are multiple barriers that must be overcome for an entire (unit of whatever) to be consumed in a social setting. Consider a pan of brownies, cut and set on a table. The risk for an individual brownie of being consumed at time t is fairly low until the first brownie in the pan is taken. At this point, the hazard function for all brownies in the pan increases dramatically, and levels off until the brownies are nearly gone. At this point, it falls suddenly, as nobody wants to be the jerk who ate the last brownie. This last brownie will probably not be eaten until somebody needs to wash the pan the next day (or the next week in the case of my house).

Postulate #14: Facebook is becoming too bulky to sustain itself.

Facebook has been a widely adopted innovation among anybody who still has a chance of being cool. But as it has changed over time, it has become an increasingly more complicated organism, to the point where its utility is becoming compromised. The amount of advertising you'll have to suffer through while using it is only going to increase, that's a given. Also, the addition of hundreds of new "applications" (many of which serve nearly the same function but are incompatible with each other) overwhelm the news feed and notifications functions. Furthermore, the event feature is in danger of becoming a less formal craiglist of sorts, with three of the six events on my docket currently being equivalent to flyers for an apartment sublease deal, a cat needing a home and a moving sale. This effect is the most worrisome of the three to me, because I have a medium-sized social network and I am becoming desensitized to messages and events, but how much more so must it be for the people with 800 facebook friends? They must have an unquenchable stream of social spam coming at them. It is these people with 800 friends that are mostly responsible for the large-scale adoption of facebook (this is the so-called 80-20 rule, where 80% of the work is being done by 20% of the population. Read more about it in The Tipping Point.) Sustainable trends must not betray the original adopters, lest they go the way of Airwalk shoes.

Don't get me wrong, I still think facebook is great. I just worry for its future, that's all.

Postulate #15: The mechanism behind the widespread hate of the MS office paper clip character is classical Pavlovian conditioning.

Whenever you ask for help or are having trouble with something, there it is. And it appears at nearly the same time you notice that you're feeling frustrated with the stupid program because the stupid thing won't realize that I want three columns all the way down, or I really am trying to say beta sub-2, not vitamin B2, or something like that. The pairing of the office assistant with this feeling of frustration then continues when the unconditioned stimulus is removed, thus, we hate that damn paper clip whenever we see him now.