Star of the day: Martin Havlat

You might have heard of the expressions "golden goal!" or "million dollar shot!" from sports but Chicago Blackhawks winger Martin Havlat literally made a million dollar shot, not for himself but for a fan. This is what happened: Illinois Lottery has offer a new promotion: a fan at Blackhawks' home game will be picked randomly and if the Blackhawks scored at exactly the 10-minute mark of the second period then that fan would win $1 million. And it happened three days into the promotion!

This seems to be unlikely to happen. Oh well, not that unlikely according to Greg Esterhai of US Hole In One, a company that specialize in insuring this type of contests. He estimated the odd is about 1-in-1000 for a game, and 1-in-25 over the whole season!

And the math is not that complicated: each game lasts 60 minutes if it ends in regulation. Add 5 minutes for OT, which occurs roughly every 5th game or so. So an average game has 61 x 60 seconds = 3660. Blackhawks score on average ~3.3 goals per game. So the probability that a goal is scored in any second is about 3.3/3660 = 0.0009. Pretty close to Ms. Esterhai's estimate.

BTW, what a coincidence that I wrote about lottery two times in a week!

Topic of the day: Al Gore Ice Sculpture

Call me a cynic but I have always been skeptical about "global warming." There is not enough data points to support a clear upward trend. I am not against recycling or endorse pollutions. I just don't like to see people using "global warming" to gain political ground.

I wish I'm as creative as this guy who made a statement. Will Al Gore accept the invitation to see the ice sculpture of himself?

Topic of the day: Health Care San Francisco Surcharge

I had lunch at Boulevard in San Francisco the other day and this is the first time I notice a restaurant charging customers something call "Health Care San Francisco Surcharge" (Boulevard charges 4%) I googled it immediately and found that such practice begun early last year, after the city required employers with more than 50 employees provide health care for all staff members working more than 10 hours a week.

Obviously I'm going to be charged more than expected. So the question is: is it fair? That's no easy answer. Consider:
1) it is a good thing that people are getting health care insurance. No matter how selfish I am, I'd rather be in a city with more healthy people than sick ones.
2) if restaurants in SF didn't have to pay for that in the past, they will pass the additional cost on to their customers, just like what any business would do.
3) my employer provides me health care too but I don't think they put a surcharge on their customer.

(See more discussions at Yelp)

So it comes down to:
(a) restaurants raise food price to cover the cost
or
(b) restaurants charge it separately

Some might appreciate restaurants being "transparent" by doing (b) but I am afraid a side effect is that people will just tip less figuring there's 4% going to those waiters anyway.

Topic of the day: innumeracy

I just learned this word today from an old news: Some time in 2007 a new lottery game was introduced in UK. It was basically a scratch card type of game where you compare the number you scratched with the printed number. The theme is "Cool Cash" and the numbers are temperatures, usually subzero. It was withdrawn because so many players were confused about the result because they were not able to compare negative numbers! One player commented that she thought -6 is lower than -8.

That's a classic example of innumeracy.

Book of the day: Family of Secrets

Here is the subtitle: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America.

This is a thick book (500+ pages) and I only skimmed through it at the bookstore but it was an interesting read: the author didn't jump into any conclusion. Instead, he just revealed related facts that tied the two former presidents to various important events in the history of America. Readers should be able to decide what roles the Bush family played in those events. What amazed me the most is this is the first book I see that gets ALL 5 star reviews (10 of them) at Amazon (at the time I read the reviews). After all, it is by no mean an obscure book (ranked #506 yesterday) I wonder why no one came to their defense by writing a 2 or 1 star review discrediting the book. Not a single one!

Musician of the day: Jason Vieaux

As a long time classical music listener, I had no problem finding violin or piano recitals to go to. In addition, there are big name violinist and pianists visiting the bay area all the time (Lang Lang was here last month. Yundi Li played last week. Anne-Sophie Mutter is visiting next month and Kissin a month later.) After I fell in love with classical guitar last month, I realized that is not the case for guitar recitals. Come to think of it, guitar is just not as popular as violin or piano in the world of classical music. To confirm this, I looked at the local classical station KDFC's website. They have a 2009 Top 100 All-Star (most beloved work voted by listener) It contains only 1 guitar piece. They also have a "Top 30 under 30" list (most promising classical musicians under 30 years old) It has exactly 1 guitar player (Ana Vidovic, who is talented and pretty, BTW)

Fortunately, living in the bay area does have its advantage. We have the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts organizing guitar recital frequently. I went to their first concert of 2009 featuring Jason Vieaux. It's also my first ever classical guitar concert! And it couldn't be more perfect for me (I'll explain later)

Mr. Vieaux started with a few classical guitar "standards" by Albeniz. Those led us to a suite by the Cuban composer/guitarist Leo Brouwer. After the intermission, he played a suite from his "Images of Metheny" album, which are classical versions of compositions by jazz guitar great Pat Metheny. He concluded the show with music by Argentinian Jose Luis Merlin (like his fellow countryman Piazzolla, he wrote beautiful dance music)

What made this concert most enjoyable are:
1) Before playing every piece, Mr. Vieaux took some time to explain the background, the motif or the story behind the music.
2) I have been a fan of jazz guitar for much longer than classical. Pat Metheny's works certainly top my list, in particular, "Question and Answer." Hearing familiar melodies in an unfamiliar context (classical guitar) feels like "home" to me.

To show my appreciation, I bought my first CD in years:

(Got his autograph too!)

BTW, I found a classical guitar forum where people posts concert dates.

Tech of the day: Disney Pix Micro

This is my daughter's new favorite toy. As you could see, the reviews are rather bad. And I can't disagree. It not only requires a proprietary driver/software (which takes a long time to install) but also a proprietary cable to unload the pictures to a computer! What kind of camera still require those instead of plug-and-play using mini USB and USB Mass Storage driver? (Well, the packaging does say Windows required so Mac/Linux users should have stayed away.)

My daughter took a picture of one of her favorite book:


The above pic illustrates another problem with the camera: hard to tell what will be taken from the view-finder (let alone making the subject the center of the pic)

The workaround is leaving plenty of space surrounding your subject, like what I did for this pic:


Anyway, we didn't pay as much as the price shown on that Amazon page and if my daughter is happy, I'm happy.