Personality Types

About a week ago, Jeff Ely had a post entitled “Is This Your Personality Type?” Nearly everybody rated a particular profile as highly accurate.  I, naturally, had to go through it and see how it applied to me…

1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
7. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
8. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
9. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.
10. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
11. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
12. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
13. Security is one of your major goals in life.

Going through this, #1 is completely unlike me:  I don’t much care what others think of me…  #2, yeah, okay.  #3, nah, not really.  I tend to think of it as knowing where the margins are.  #4 is totally off-base—I don’t have personality weaknesses!  I have no idea what #5 means, but I’m offended by the insinuations.  #6 isn’t true, either—I’m as secure as the UN.  #7 isn’t the case—my decision automatically has to be the right decision, no?  #8 shows the paradox of thought:  we want rules, but on our own terms.  It applies somewhat, but not quite as much as you’d think.  #9 also doesn’t quite work out; I’m not arrogant enough [ed:  really? Shaddup.  And quit stealing Mickey Kaus's schtick.] and take for granted a lot of what others say, so long as my priors indicate that I can trust them.  #10 is true, yeah.  #11, not so much:  screw that extroversion thing.  I don’t believe in #12 because that would indicate that I have to update my priors, and that might mess up #10.  Finally, #13 is only true in passing.

So, like usual, I break the mold with a steel chair.  Great job, me!

Rosebud…Rosebud Frozen Peas

I watched Citizen Kane tonight and naturally this led me to Rosebud.  And then there’s the frozen peas commercial.  Or, if you prefer, the Brain.

Hours Wasted

On the way home from work today, I found out that my iPod (Shuffle, 2nd gen) decided that it didn’t have any MP3s on it any longer, despite the fact that there are plenty of podcasts on it.  When it was hooked up to the computer, it would play the podcasts on the player just fine, but when it was hooked up to a speaker, it wouldn’t play anything.  Instead, it would blink green and orange, indicating that there was no music on the iPod.  After adding a couple of songs, I found out that it would see the music but not the podcasts.

Unfortunately, I have no idea exactly how I fixed the problem, given that I tried a number of things.  The thing that seemed to work was that I hooked it up to my laptop running Linux and ran gtkpod, which recognized the podcasts.  After that, it seemed to work, and I was able to use iTunes to re-organize the podcasts.

When In Doubt, Just Make Up New Numbers

Hugo Chavez doesn’t like how reality intrudes on his socialist games, so he’s re-defining the figures.  Sounds like government for you…

Information_Schema

Here is a good article on using information_schema to view database metadata in SQL Server.

At work, my most recent project is to create a script to generate history for a number of tables.  Basically, we have a dbo schema and a History schema, as well as a number of tables which exist in both schemas.  The History tables have a ChangeId as the primary key, which links to History.tblChange.  That gives information such as the person who made the change, when the change was made, and a potential note describing what happened.  In order to keep this relatively generic and applicable to all of the tables, I created a script which checks the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES view to find out which tables had replicas in History and created a script which will insert a history record for inserts, updates, or deletes.

Here’s what I did (below the fold):

The Best Game Ever?

I stole this one from a Football Outsiders thread.

I have to say that it looks terrible, though Buffalo-Cleveland this year might have been even better, even though they did combine to score nearly twice as many points.

Smell You Later

Dick “7-9 is a good season, right?” Jauron is an ex-Bill.  Perry Fewell is the new interim head coach.  I don’t have a problem with Fewell, though I don’t know how he’ll be as a coach.

This is why Madden ‘11 needs the ability to fire coaches mid-season.

C’mon high draft pick!

Sundry Notes

- So Kelo screwed over property rights and the fools didn’t even get anything out of it.  Good job, government; you guys rock.

- IQ correlates with stock market participation. Banfieldian question:  is this because smarter people are less likely to buy into the “investing is hard” hype, or a biased variable (that IQ might also correlate with future-oriented behavior)?

- I don’t fault Bill Belichick going for it on 4th & 2 on his own 28.  I’m just glad that the Patriots failed…

Devalue This!

Bob Murphy has a very good article criticizing one of Paul Krugman’s bad ideas.

How to improve our technology, by Napoleon

First off, this post was not written by Napoleon Bonaparte. I apologize if I led you to think that. First, he’s dead, and zombies are notoriously inefficient at using computers. Second, only blog members are able to write posts on this blog, which means Kevin, me, and theoretically Dan. Third, I’m pretty sure Napoleon didn’t know English, although I don’t know him personally, as he is, as listed above, dead. Ha ha Napoleon! You’re dead and I’m not! Unless this is blog is still popular in the future (I use the term popular loosely) or I die in the next five minutes, in which case I would still have outlived Napoleon, making my life a glorious success.

So, now that we’ve cleared that up, I recently completed The Napoleonic Revolution by Robert Holtman. Holtman primarily argues that while Napoleon is most famous for his military genius and the Napoleonic code, he made contributions to the economy, education, and industrialization of France in particular and Continental Europe in general. One of the ways Napoleon did this was by offering large cash rewards for innovative new technologies, like techniques for farming sugar beets (as sugar cane was hard to come by) or improving the textile industry. Now, Napoleon, being fundamentally a jerk, often reneged on his cash promises, but kept the technology anyway.

I think this idea would be an excellent way to stimulate technological innovation. Announce on all the major TV stations a contest for a particular advance — say practical, efficient, reliable fuel cells as an example — and offer a million bucks of sweet, sweet cash in exchange. Tax free, in a large bag with a dollar sign on it. For a government (and only a government could make it tax free — a private institution could also pay the difference), a million bucks is practically insignificant. However, it would stimulate innovation, and not just from major corporations, but private citizens, as everyone could use another million bucks.

I only see two major problems. One, grifters. As long as a number of scientists look over the idea and ensure it’s valid, and said scientists are not also grifters, this should be easily avoided. Two, I can see corporations dominating these contests. Now, this is a problem only in the sense that it prevents some citizens from participating. They will look at the contest and shy away, feeling they have no legitimate chance to win, and the idea is to maximize the number of people working on this. By the law of large numbers, we’re guaranteed at least one good idea nobody else has thought of before. You could either exclude corporations from the contest, offer more than one prize, or simply use a website of some kind to accept entries. Sure, you’d get drunken college students at 3 am writing “BOOBS RULE!”, but you could always monitor comments. Plus, we can all agree, boobs do actually rule and it doesn’t hurt that we are reminded every once in a while.