Dragon Quest IX: Initial Party Composition

Most of the walkthrough guides I've found suggest that your party in Dragon Quest 9 [Nintendo DS] is whatever you feel like. This gives the impression that all starting vocations/classes are balanced.

They're not.

Since you can change your vocation at will relatively early in the game, a poor choice at the beginning probably won't do you much harm ... but it's no help either. There are two jobs that I would recommend you avoid for your first companions: mage and thief. Reasons for that below the fold:

Santa: After and Before

Part 1: Hy meets Santa (pictures to come later)
Hyrum had a good time at our ward's Christmas party. Daddy had a great time too, but that's another story. After the food [so nice to have that first and on time] and the singing and program, a Special Visitor was announced. I asked Hyrum if he would like to meet Santa Clause. He's not overly familiar with Santa yet, but he's heard the Night Before Christmas and the Grinch, and we did a family home evening about Santa ... and he did well meeting tall strangers at Disneyland ... so he might be interested.

Hyrum said yes. Great. I snapped him up and raced the big kids to get Hy back home within three hours after his bedtime. (Poor kid). As we waited our turn, I told Hy what to expect:

When you go up and sit on Santa's lap, he's going to ask you some questions. He's going to ask if you've been a good boy. Have you been a good boy, Hyrum?
"Yes."
Yes, you have. [It's so nice to believe that!] Then he's going to ask what you want for Christmas. What do you want for Christmas, Hyrum?

[This is the big question. In previous attempts to elicit information from him, he hasn't really gotten it. He usually asked for a toy he already owned but wasn't in his hands.]

"I want a decorated Christmas."

Interesting.

It was Hyrum's turn. He walked up to Santa and stood in front of the big man nervously. Santa invited him onto his lap, but Hy stepped backwards. So Santa reached into his pack and pulled out ... a Candy Cane! Aha! Hyrum knows candy canes. They decorate Christmas trees. They are crunchy (blekh). It's just what he wanted! He hopped right up on Santa's lap.

Have you been a good boy?
"Yes."
Good.

I couldn't tell what else Santa asked, but I could tell that Hyrum's response was silence. So Santa let him go and I took his hand and walked back to Mommy. Hyrum was very excited. He paused to tell good friend Jon that he got a candy cane. He played with the candy cane the rest of the night and much of the next day. We asked him how he liked the party the next day: "I got a candy cane."

And that's how Hyrum met Santa.
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Part 2: a PSA on planning for Santa
Now that the Church has gotten rid of Activities Committees, there's no risk of me be called to one when the bishopric goes bat-guano-insane. But it's worse: now anyone can be assigned to prepare things, so having a calling is no protection.* So just in case someone ever decides I need to organize Christmas, I'd like to remind myself of a couple points about preparing for Santa:

A Thanksgiving Reminder

In the words of Dave Barry (2004):

But Thanksgiving is also a spiritual time of quiet reflection - a time when we pause to remember, as generations have remembered before us, that an improperly cooked turkey is - in the words of the U.S. Department of Agriculture - "a ticking Meat Bomb of Death."

Please be sure to cook your Thanksgiving dinner thoroughly. The USDA's actual quote is that means 165 degrees measured with a meat thermometer.

Food safety website Barfblog's recommendations: avoid Whole Foods turkey "For the past couple of weeks, Whole Foods has been pushing their turkeys like some form of food porn crack..." Chapman and Powell's advice for a safe Thanksgiving turkey here. The thing we are going to be most pressed to accomplish: "Refrigerate leftover turkey within 2 hours of taking it out of the oven."

How to clean the fan

Remember those truths we hold to be self-evident? Here's another: It should be easier than this to clean the fan of a laptop. Video and song below the fold:

How to do math today

They have another New Math, only this one makes a lot more sense than the 1970s version. In his parody of the new math, Tom Lehrer mentioned that many parents were embarrassed at being unable to do their child's arithmetic homework. As a public service, let me link you to an article and video to help parents understand the new teaching terms of "gridding" and "chunking."

I was surprised to discover that when I'm doing long multiplication or division in my head, most of the time that's exactly what I'm doing: gridding and chunking. My dad didn't call it that, but those are (some of) the tricks.

A lot of commenters are worried the "new" methods prevent kids from learning why they are doing it. I think that's way off base. Multiplication (gridding) is just a faster way of doing addition and division (chunking) is a faster way of subtracting something ... a lot of times. By teaching kids to solve easier problems and add the answers up by gridding and chunking they are learning how multiplication and division are just addition and subtraction sped up.

A Cold Adventure

Hi there. Hy here.

About midnight, Daddy came and woke me up. What's going on, I asked him with my eyes half shut. The furnace has gone out, Daddy explained. We're going to go sleep with James and Bruce. They're my best friends - I go over to play at their house every week. So Daddy bundled me up and put me to sleep in their kitchen. It was REALLY cold that night ... below -10 with windchill. I told Daddy, "cold."

I got to spend the whole day with James and Bruce! I was excited like Christmas morning! Mom was there too, but Daddy wasn't. He had to go talk to the Man with the Big Beard. The Man with the Big Beard told Daddy how to fix the furnace - there's a safety switch that somehow got toggled ... maybe by a 3' tall person running through the hallway? ... and when it was put back, the furnace turned on. It took 30 seconds, tops. Daddy said when he got home, he could see his breath making little clouds. Mom was really glad we didn't have to sleep at home.

Then the Man said that he could smell an odorless gas coming from the furnace. ... I don't understand that either, but it does smell kinda funny. So Daddy went to the store to get some tools to clean the furnace, hoping he wouldn't have to buy a new one. He also picked up some tools to fix the screen door and the front door locks, and he borrowed a ladder so he can clean the drains when it thaws. He tested the furnace and found NO invisible gasses that could kill us all. That's good.

Daddy thinks it's a good idea for families to have carbon monoxide and radon testers normally to keep little kids safe. They only cost about $20, and that's worth it to make sure I'm safe, he says. Maybe it's time for you to get a testing kit from your local hardware store. My name is Hyrum, and I approved this public service announcement.

Daddy was really tired when he got back. He had been sick on Friday but couldn't rest on Saturday. He laid on the couch and read to me and James for a while. Then he put me to bed and played Dominion with Mom and James' parents. Then they woke me up and brought me home.

I'm glad to be home again. I told Daddy, "home. home." Even during the day, I told Mom, "go home." I also told Daddy, "kitty" because I like to go to sleep with my white Christmas kitty this week. Mom is really happy to be home too. She never realized that without heat, it doesn't even feel like a home: just four very thin walls.

I needed to go to bed early tonight. Daddy thinks maybe it's time for me to do a lot of sleeping so I can grow really fast. Daddy said he wants to go to bed early tonight too. Maybe he wants to grow really fast like me!

Haiti Responses

CNN coverage here.

LDS Church:

We express our sympathy and prayers on behalf of the citizens of Haiti following the recent devastating earthquake. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is immediately shipping humanitarian relief, including personal hygiene kits and supplies for newborns. Efforts are underway to determine further humanitarian response in coordination with government and disaster relief organizations. Donations for relief efforts can be made at http://give.lds.org/emergencyresponse.

Blattman:

You have probably read about the devastating quake in Haiti. The FP blog names a number of place you can give to help. Normally I would not chime in, but sometimes I have a personal connection to an NGO that really makes a difference, and people appreciate the pointer to an organization they previously would not have known.

My brother Kent started an organization called Haiti Partners with several Haitian colleagues. It has one of the most fantastic operating cultures I know. They have an Earthquake Response Fund.

If you want to give to a place that you know will be effective (especially because so many funds will be choking the main pipelines) consider that one.

Marginal Revolution:

Just two days ago I was trying to convince a group of my colleagues to come to Haiti with me for a three-day weekend outing. Had we gone, we would have stayed in what is now the epicenter of the earthquake. The hotel I had in mind...I believe it does not exist any more but has fallen down the hills into oblivion. It is difficult for me to fathom what must be going on there and how it will continue to play out. In addition to thousands of lives, much of the Haitian cultural heritage has been destroyed. Here is an image of Simbi, god of healing.

Here is one reputable place to donate.

Pit stops to remember

On NY-88 between Binghamton and Cooperstown, there's an exit for a town called Nineveh. Turn south (right if going east, left if going west) and you'll soon find a gas station and convenience store. It's not one of the major brands I recognize. We stopped there last night on our way to CT to visit my brother for Thanksgiving and I bought one of their strombolis (pizza sandwich).

It was SO. AMAZINGLY. GOOD!

Lots of flavor, lots of garlic, hot and fresh, great crust, gobs of gooey cheese. It was pizza heaven on just a one-topping dealy. Joy loved it too. The service was friendly and engaging and the restroom was clean.

We are definitely stopping there again.

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Fun Links

Counter-intuitive advice on how to get good advice. They include (1) listening to people who hate you and (5) who give you bad advice, and, please, (2) stop thinking your problems are especially difficult and unique. I blogged about that recently too.

The Cornell Economics Department t-shirt a few years ago brazenly declares that we have been "making common sense complicated since 1866." Apparently the Japanese have a word for that, and it's Chindogu. Though they are talking about Incredible Machines.

A Pixaresque short: Pigeon Impossible. The other two links are hat tipped to MR, but I found this one on my own. :)

A good start on: child and slave labor

The US Department of Labor just finished a major piece of work identifying 122 products in 58 countries made with child and/or forced (=slave) labor. This is a good start, but far from done:
1) At 194 pages, it's more than the casual reader wants to go through.
2) Though they can give a list of suspect products, there is no 'guarantee' that the specific Christmas decoration you see on the shelf labeled Made in China was actually made with slave labor.
3) This doesn't identify the conditions under which children worked if in fact children were used as laborers in the process, which is salient to me if not to everyone. (I'm more concerned about hard labor and harsh conditions than about after school jobs or some menial housework that keeps the family from starving.)

Change.org has kindly created a convenient list of "some of the worst offenders for forced labor or slavery specifically:

* Bolivia: nuts, cattle, corn, and sugar

* Burma: bamboo, beans, bricks, jade, nuts, rice rubber, rubies, sesame, shrimp, sugarcane, sunflowers, and teak

* China: artificial flowers, bricks, Christmas decorations, coal, cotton, electronics, garments, footwear, fireworks, nails, and toys

* India: bricks, carpets, cottonseed, textiles, and garments

* Nepal: bricks, carpets, textiles, and stones

* North Korea: bricks, cement, coal, gold, iron, and textiles

* Pakistan: bricks, carpet, coal, cotton, sugar, and wheat"

Hopefully next steps will identify specific companies who are involved in this and shipping to a store near you so that people can, if you choose, vote with your dollars to not support slave-produced goods. Hat tip to Texas in Africa.

Eating for Love in all the wrong places

Okay, first to justify this as work: I work in a nutrition department and as an economist, I'm interested in signaling behavior. There, that wasn't so hard. Now the meat:

Your sandwich choices may reveal personality, compatibility

With a hat tip to Newmark's Door, this article discusses a study that finds correlations between certain personality types and the sandwiches they enjoy. Interviewing Alan Hirsch, director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation reveals the following results, revealed that they combined the psych profiles and sandwich choices to identify what type of sandwich eater you should be dating, offered here as a public service:
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We now know that tuna-salad types are competitive, easily irritated and intolerant of failure....

• Tuna-sandwich types are better off hanging with other tuna-sandwich types.
• Seafood salads and BLTs are a slam-dunk love connection.
  
• Egg-salad lovers get along with everybody,
  
• while ham-and-cheese types, apparently the players of the bread-and-lunch-meat set, "function best without strong romantic entanglements."
  

Take heed, ladies.
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A pity they didn't try out the Three Little Pigs sandwich: smoked ham, breaded pork cutlet, two strips of bacon, two fried eggs, and gruyere, on a brioche bun. Gold diggers should look for people eating this.

Year of the ...

I find it helpful midyear to pull out my New Year's Resolutions and remember what it is I'm supposed to be working on. You may recall our amazing coverage of last year's Year of the Potato, hosting by FAO. The fourth largest source of calories in the world and a major source of vitamins and carbohydrates, the potato was recently credited in new research with increasing world population by 12% and half of the urbanization that took place from 1000-1900.

So what are we celebrating this year?

Year of animals!
In the Chinese calendar, it's the Year of the Ox, aka buffalo. Check out the link for ideas on what this means and what to do about it. The UN has declared it the Year of the Gorilla, with Jane Goodall as the obvious choice for advocate, to preserve the species. It's also Year of the Shark according to environmentalists who aren't satisfied with saving one species a year. Which one should we celebrate? Maybe we should decide by cage fight... Year of the Gorilla vs. Shark Grudge Match!

Year of science!
To celebrate 40 years since a giant leap was made for mankind and 400 years since Galileo first used a telescope to study the galaxy, it is the International Year of Astronomy. We've already celebrated by repairing Hubble and launching the world's largest telescope to find earth-like planets around other stars.

Year of trench workers!
Two professions, actually. His Holiness is celebrating the Year for Priests while the military rejoices in their non-commissioned officers (Year of the NCO).

Semi-honorable mentions
In California it's the Year of the Olive, while the Jewish Zodiac celebrates the Year of the Pickle. The pickle demonstrates its seasoned maturity over the days when it was just a cucumber. [The Jewish Zodiac ("Remember the Sabbath Brunch and Keep it Holy") tells me that I was born in the year of the Lox, meaning I am thin, rich, and very high maintenance. "Consider retiring to Boca. Compatible with bagel and schmear, although you top them." Happily, Joy and Hyrum are both bagels.]

And the FAO winner:
The Food and Agriculture Organization, to whose data and conferences my dissertation owes its life, has actually decided to abandon the food side this year in favor of ...

A Wild and Wooly 2009: Natural Fibres Year
[Picture of Douglas Fairbanks in Wild and Wooly (1917)]
By this announcement and attendent celebrations, the FAO hopes to assist impoverished natural fibre farmers. The list of the privileged includes:

cotton [Harvested today by machines called cotton pickers and cotton strippers],
flax (Worst comes to it, eat your shirt and get 100% of your B1 and Magnesium)
sisal [from a plant in Africa and China],
hemp ('It's not just for smoking anymore'),
abaca [related to the banana],
jute [in India and Bangladesh],
silk ('I'm wearing discarded worm housing!'),
wool ('Clothing for the sheeple'),
alpaca [llama hair],
camel ('Without us, some lawyers would be naked, and we wouldn't want that'),
angora [Do you mean the Angora rabbit, the Angora goat, or the Angora cat?],
coir [coconut hair! Dude, where can I get a coir hat?]
and cashmere [Persian wool actually from Kashmir originally]

"England’s rise as a world power was built on wool and textiles, while silk for centuries held a central role in international trade. ... Celebrations of IYNF will include conferences, exhibits, and fashion shows in many countries, including an International Mohair Summit in South Africa and a Creative Fibre Festival in South Caterbury, New Zealand."

So remember, if you see a non-comissioned priest in a mohair suit sitting on a pickle-eating ox while he tries to find constellations of a gorilla and shark dueling in the heavens, offer him an olive. This year's for him.

Changing of the Phone

Hi there. Hy here with an important public service announcement coming to you live from the Baby Desk.

The Watsons are dropping a phone line.

Mama talked to the nice people at Lingo who have been providing our VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) phone service through the internet the last couple years. They were offering us a new contract to lower our price again.

But the rates just keep going up (mostly taxes), the service has been spottier and spottier - dropped calls, loss of connection - and recent test results confirm that internet connectivity has suffered from it as well.

So we are NO LONGER using our land line home phone. It's now my play thing. We have a cell phone only. If you want that number, please send us an email or drop a comment in the blog.

We'll be looking forward to hearing from you on our cell phone. Until next time everybody, mwa!

You could already be a winner: The choice is yours

If only I were original enough to come up with this. But I like the idea and will pay it forward too.
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The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you. This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

1. I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
2. What I create will be just for you.
3. It'll be done this year. [ie - before Easter 2010]
4. You have no clue what it's going to be. It may be a song. It may be a [comic collection] or maybe even some creation I haven't yet dreamed up. I may draw. I may bake you something and mail it to you. It may not be big or impressive. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure! But lets be honest here. This is me and I will likely do something amazing. =) So come on, sign up!
5. I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

The catch? Oh, the catch is that you must re-post this on your blog and offer the same to the first 5 people who do the same on your blog. The first 5 people to do so and leave a comment telling me they did win a FAB-U-LOUS homemade gift by me!

*Edit* I copied this off of someone else's blog... but if you don't have a blog... then you are exempt from the catch... but only those people who I know don't have a blog...
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Let's Hear it for UTAH!

The Derrill Watson, Newly Self-Annointed Defender of UT Series kicks off this week with an interesting paper by Peter J. Rentfrow, Samuel D. Gosling, and Jeff Potter. They studied the geographical distribution of 5 major personality characteristics and ranked their relative prevalence in the United States. States were then grouped into roughly 10-state blocks [sometimes a large tie for 1st is found] representing most to least of that personality type. I'll only report the four states my family really cares about right now and the top 10, but if you want the others, you can find them here. (Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Extravertedness (sociability, hanging out with others)
Top 10: Utah (plus the northern plains states, Fla, Penn, Maine, and TX)
2nd 10:
3rd 10:
4th 10: CA, NY, Conn
5th 10:

Agreeableness (warmth, compassion, cooperativeness)
Top 10: Utah (plus the eastern plains states, the South minus 'Bammer, and Oregon)
2nd 10
3rd 10: CA
4th 10:
5th 10: NY, Conn

Conscientiousness (Responsibility and duty)
Top 10: Utah (plus AZ, NM, mid-plains, Fla, GA, and NC)
2nd 10: CA (Land of the flakes? whoda thunkit?)
3rd 10:
4th 10:
5th 10: NY, Conn

Neuroticism (stress, antisocial, poor coping)
Top 10: NY, Conn and most of the northeast
2nd 10:
3rd 10:
4th 10: CA
5th 10: Utah (much of the west scores very low stress)

Openness (curiosity, intellect, creativity)
Top 10: you guessed it ... no, you didn't. CA, NY, Conn and a bunch of seaside states
2nd 10: Utah
3rd 10:
4th 10:
5th 10:

So what good can we say for NY and Conn? Well, they're curious and intelligent, but that comes at the price of neuroticism, introversion, disagreeableness, and a noted lack of responsibility. Good places to get an advanced degree, perhaps. We Californians are more responsible than our stereotype, curious, and we're chilled out enough to avoid neuroticism, but we're much less open to strangers we like to pretend to be and are only middlin agreeable. Utah and Florida are about the best places to live if you care about the quality your neighbors. On the other hand, if you like your privacy, maybe you'd be happier out here in the northeast. ;)

Please note UT- bashers, UT is not neurotically stressed out and is much more intellectually curious than you give it credit. In fairness to my own neighbors, I would add that Ithaca is more extraverted and friendly than this report would indicate.

A Request for Ithaca Drivers

Please don't give pedestrians that little extra bit of room when it's snowing. Please.

It's wonderful behavior in spring, summer, and fall. If it's sunny out, the extra bit of room on the road we share with you because Ithaca doesn't believe in sidewalks is appreciated and comforting. In rain, that extra bit of room means you don't splash us. In snow, it's a different story.

You see, the wheels of the cars that have come before you have cleared the snow off the road in two straight lines. Underneath your car and in between the lanes is a thick pile of sludge: half-melted snow, ice, salt, and dirt. When you move over just a little bit to give the pedestrians and bicyclists room, you inevitably drive over that line, spraying sludge up to the waist (if you're going slowly) or even dousing us from hat to boot in sludge. For someone hiking 3 miles to work, it doesn't help as much as you intend it to. I know you are being considerate and trying to ensure our safety. This is just to let you know that there are other factors involved as well.

Please and thank you.

(PS - If you swerve far enough that your left tires is in the other lane and your right tire is now in the line where your left tire was, that's okay too, as long as you're safe.)

(PPS - In case anyone is wondering, I did eventually dry off today. Thanks for asking. I comforted myself that I had stored a pair of nice, dry socks and a second pair of shoes at work after the time I walked to work in the pounding rain.)