David Halberstam 1934-2007

Really sad to hear of the death of David Halberstam. I've read a bunch of his books and he was a great journalist, author and speaker.

Maestro plays the Subway station

This Washington Post story is another great link gotten from Kottke. Story is very long but quite interesting. It addresses the question "Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out."

What is the most random number between 1 and 20?

I've always quite disliked the scheme for choosing a starting player by asking someone to name a number between 1 and N where N is the number of players. When I do it, I at least do between like 1 and 100 and take the mod N result which I expect is a bit more fair. Here's a simple poll result agreeing with me about the inaccuracy of this method.

Things like the Spin-4-It some use I don't like much better since it is quite rare that every person has an equal percentage of the 360 degree arc.

Obviously, all this is pretty unimportant but if you are trying to randomize something, seems strange to use something not even close to random.

Atul Gawande: The Bell Curve

Very interesting New Yorker article entitled The Bell Curve from several years ago on medical practices and issues of the exceptional vs the average vs the bad. Got to this particular article through a series of links and reading about the author, Atul Gawande, following a link from Kottke. Might even get his book from the library.