Les Bonnes Choses

With all the biller notifications I've been doing lately, I've been in a considerable number of phone queues in the past week. Without exception, each wait has been interrupted by a message indicating that the call center is "experiencing a higher than normal volume of calls". This is not the first time I've called many of these numbers either, and I've heard the refrain before. To say that a particular volume, or rate, of calls is normal is to say that it is the average. To calculate the average rate of phone calls at the call center, one would sum the number of calls received over the period, and divided by the period. If, however, it subsequently becomes customary for calls to trickle in at a greater rate, the average (or normal, if you will) call volume will also increase. So either people are calling at an ever-increasing rate (and thus the instantaneous rate will always be "ahead of the curve"), or else the more appropriate phone queue interruption should say something to the effect of, "sorry, we don't feel your time is important enough to justify us spending the money to sufficiently staff our call center. Your patience is both appreciated and obligatory." Hearing this message is most infuriating when you've called a long-distance number.

So, that's my lesson on Calculating the mean. Today's bonus lecture is entitled Correlations: implied causality and zero correlations. There's an ad on the radio for Sleep Country Canada, where Christine McGee talks about supplying the Canadian olympic team with Serta mattresses. She finishes by reminding you that, whenever you see a Canadian win a medal, they slept on a Sleep Country Serta mattress the night before. The implication, of course, is that the mattress had something to do with winning the medal. Well, yes, all of the medal winners did get a good night's rest on your mattress. But so did the losers. In fact, if you really want to talk numbers, there will be far more athletes who slept on your mattress and didn't even make the finals than those who make it to the podium. Sorry, Ms. McGee, the numbers don't lie: Sleep Country Serta mattresses cause you to lose.

...And that's what it looks like when statisticians get catty.

If you're serious about crispy bacon, here's what you need to do:

1. Set your oven to to 425°F. There is no need to wait for it to preheat


2. Place a sheet of aluminum foil on a cookie sheet


3. Place a cooling rack on top of the cookie sheet


4. Lay strips of bacon across the cooling rack and put in an unheated oven


5. Place the cookie sheet on the middle rack of the oven and cook for about 8 minutes, or until the bacon looks cooked (I just did cooked bacon this way, and by the time the oven had reached 425, the bacon was cooked, but I didn't pay attention to the time)

I did some internet-based research on crispy bacon, and concluded that the secret is to render out the fat, which fast frying doesn't do very well. The relatively slow cooking in the oven, combined with preventing the bacon from wallowing in its own fat seems to do the trick. Incidentally, this is how my mother-in-law cooks bacon. It's awesome. Now, if you will excuse me, I will go make myself a BLT.

In our venerable Ford Focus, Jude was always kicking the back of the seat in front of it, unless it was moved sufficiently forward. This was possible only if Monsieur Jude was behind the passenger seat. The rear-facing car carrier for Le Petit Monsieur similarly required the seat in front of it to be moved forward, so there was no configuration in our car that would allow all of us to travel comfortably, especially for the long distances between Chicago and London. The solution was to purchase a new car. After a considerable amount of research, I settled on a 2009 Toyota RAV4. We really love the car, but we knew from Amy's experience last summer that they don't like to have people bringing over vehicles with liens on them. On the day we purchased the car, we mentioned this to the sales guy. We mentioned this to the finance guy. We were assured that this would not be a problem.

It's a problem.

Had they been straight with us, we would have done things a little differently. As it is, I have 7 days to pay off the balance with Toyota Financing and get some documentation that the car is paid for; after that, we're in the long weekend and then moving day.

Update: we can import the car whenever we want, but we wouldn't be able to get an illinois license plate until it's been imported. But I don't plan on doing that anyways, especially since I just spent a pile of cash on Ontario license plate renewal stickers that expire September 2010. So it looks like Rebecca can just bring that paperwork when she comes back at the end of August. Or something.

So, imagine this:
You're in your driveway one weekend afternoon, washing your car, when some random dude walks up your driveway and into your house. Moments later, he comes out with your car keys, and hands you a piece of paper, gets in your car and drives away. As you stand there dumbfounded, you look at the piece of paper that you're holding and see that it's from some authority, say the federal government, and it gives the bearer permission to have a turn driving your car around town.

I think we'd all agree, that would be messed up. Is it any wonder, then, that kids have a problem sharing their toys? I'm trying to think up remedies. Maybe it would be a good idea to allow kids to have some set of favourites that they don't have to share, and the rest of the toys can be public property. It would probably help if they don't have as much crap as we do.

I came on here to see if anything new had been posted in the last few days and was disappointed. Being the author, however, I realized I had only myself to blame.

I am presently at the university, for what will certainly be one of the last few times. I had tried to do some statistical analyses on my fMRI data but alas, my home computer didn't have enough memory. I have lots of personal effects in my office, and haven't even begun to collect them. Most of them, I suppose, can be tossed out anyways. The rest I may donate to Coco, just as George before me had passed on an extensive collection of philosophy books and a toy basketball net. I'll also have a few bucks coming my way as I return my office keys to get my deposit back. If only it collected interest over the last 7 years.

But that's not the resignation I'm talking about. As the family prepared to leave the house this morning, I was holding le petit monsieur, who has the opposite of a cast iron stomach. The little guy spits up half of what he takes in. I had just rummaged through my drawers to find the perfect 3/4 length t-shirt to wear on this middlingly tepid day, and had been wearing it for no more than 5 minutes before it got barfed on. So I wanted to reflect on my decision to go ahead and wear the shirt today because it was "just a little bit of puke."

You may or may not recall the concern I had about a month ago regarding my impaired hearing. The problem remedied itself during the visit to Chicago, on the same magical day that our house sold and we found a kickass place to live. At the time, I complained how weeks had passed since leaving the doctor at the UWO walk-in befuddled, and I hadn't heard a thing (no pun intended) about the promised follow-up with an audiologist. An appointment was eventually made, and, even though my hearing was now back to normal (or, at least, what I remember as being normal), it was useful to get a baseline in case the problem ever cropped up again. Unless I misinterpreted the photocopy of my report, I passed with flying colours. As one ages, one's hearing begins to decline, so that frequencies one can hear in their youth, can no longer be heard later on in life. Some businesses had taken advantage of this and started blaring these frequencies over loudspeakers to dissuade mobs of teens from loitering. Today's youth being clever, it was soon realized that ringtones using these same frequencies would not be heard by most adults, and would be ideal for classroom shenanigans. I came across a website this evening where one can download tones at various frequencies to be used as ringtones. Each tone can be previewed, so it was interesting to test my hearing on the frequencies. I got as high as 17.7 KHz, well beyond what would be expected of someone my advanced age, though I could only hear the tone if I tilted my head just so. Tones in this range are what my tinnitus sounds like, so perhaps I don't have tinnitus after all; maybe I have just always lived around dog whistles. If this is some kind of superpower that I have, I must say, I sure have been ripped off. Super hearing must be just a step above the ability to make a pink dot appear at will. Exceptional hearing, of course, only gives fodder to my nasty uncle Dave, who cruelly teased me for having big ears all my life.

Anyone who has ever entertained (or been entertained by) Jude for any length of time knows that he prefers playing Cars to any other activity, save for maybe getting new cars. It can be good for a hoot for a few minutes, but you probably wouldn't be surprised to find that reenacting scenes from the movie with die-cast 55:1 scale cars gets a bit tiresome as the day wears on. This afternoon, aunt E has been doing a fine job keeping Jude occupied. To say that E has a bad memory would be an understatement, but considering she's missing a good chunk of her left hippocampus, she's adapted amazingly well. Always one to look on the bright side of things, it occurred to me that someone with even worse memory would be absolutely perfect at entertaining such single-minded kids. With the ability to reset by just leaving the room, I bet HM, rest his soul, would probably have happily played Cars all day long.