Daniel Gilbert At TED

Last month TED released a video of Daniel Gilbert speaking at TED in 2005. Here's the video:



And here's the video of him speaking at TED in 2004 that's been available for a while:

This has to be a joke, right?

From the Ask Our Experts section of the January 2009 issue of Consumer Reports:

I've read you should chew aspirin at the first sign of chest pain to stop a heart attack, but I hate the taste of aspirin. Couldn't I swallow a tablet?
Richard Gilbert Halifax, Nova Scotia

Chew a 325-milligram aspirin (or four 81-mg pills) no matter how bad it tastes. Chewing is the fastest way to get the aspirin into your bloodstream, where it can prevent blood clots. Should you have hest pain or suffer a heart attack, first call 911, then chew the aspirin.

Something for fans of The Office, poetry, holidays, or humor.

A couple weeks ago on Dunder Mifflin Infinity, each branch had the task of coming up with a holiday theme party. My branch, Ypsilanti, came up with an awesomely bad party that is told in an awesomely good poem along with awesome pictures. If you're a fan of The Office, poetry, holidays, or humor, then I think you'll enjoy this. Here's just the beginning of it:



All the finalists' parties, along with voting buttons so you can vote for your favorite party (the deadline to vote is January 8 at 3 PM ET), can be found here:



ETA (2009-01-08): We won!!!

Posted by DMIHumanResources on January 8, 2009 at 9:30 PM:

Official congratulations to Ypsilanti who is the winner of the Holiday Theme Party task! They had twice as many votes as the runner-up so it's apparent how many of you loved the originality of their "'Twas The Night Before Christmahanukwanzakah" party.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us!

My favorite albums of 2008

Annie - Don't Stop
Death Cab For Cutie - Narrow Stairs
Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree
Jem - Down To Earth
Juno Reator - Gods & Monsters
M83 - Saturdays=Youth
Mates Of State - Re-Arrange Us
Alanis Morissette - Flavors Of Entanglement
Leona Naess - Thirteens
Gary Numan - Jagged Edge

Awesome.

So, how to benchmark this thing?

SuperPI? Forget it.
PCMark Vantage? Nuh-uh.

So what then?



Obvious, right? Besides, what fun are benchmarks where you just press start and the computer does it all by itself?

For this benchmark, quality was set to low, and no cheats were used (e.g. level skipping and going through walls).

First, my old P4 1.4GHz:



And the core i7 920 2.66GHz:



Thoughts:

The game is much more difficult to play on the core i7. It's really fast and you slide around like crazy. It doesn't help that on my fancy new $12 Logitech keyboard you can't press up arrow, left arrow, and the space bar at the same time.

The 2008 World Series Of Poker Main Event Final Table - Finally

Today they finally play the final table of the 2008 World Series Of Poker main event. Usually of course they play it straight through in July, but this year they delayed the playing of the final table almost 4 months so that everyone doesn't already know who wins several months before it finally airs on TV. I used to always watch the WSOP coverage on ESPN, but I only watched a little of the 2006 WSOP coverage, and none of the 2007 or 2008 coverage. This is probably in part attributable to already knowing how the events play out from following the coverage online at Tao of Poker and other sites, but the main reason is that I'm simply not into poker as much I used to be. Still, I'll follow the coverage online today for sure, and probably watch the 2-hour highlights on ESPN Tuesday night.

Update (5:30 PM): It took 52 hands and over 4 hours to get the first elimination. This could be a long day. To pass the time in between updates I've been working on a sales script thing for DMI. It's been fun to work on, even though it's probably pretty dumb to read, assuming I'll even able to use it. I guess I should have made sure of that before I started.

Update (7:30 PM): 25 hands and two hours later there have been 2 more eliminations. I tested my sales script and I only had to change a few things. I had so much fun working on it, I don't care if no one likes it.

Post-Election Speeches & Indecision 2008: America's Choice

President-Elect Obama's Victory Speech



Senator McCain's Concession Speech



Indecision 2008: America's Choice

Here are my favorite moments from last night's Indecision 2008: America's Choice special hour-long live broadcast:

3. Aasif Mandvi reports from Al Qaeda headquarters



2. Larry Wilmore and Wyatt Cenac take over



1. And the winner is...



The complete hour-long broadcast can be watched (or watched again in case, like me, when you watched it live you were a little distracted since you were also on your laptop flipping through 10 tabs of different sites' election coverage) here.