April 2006 Archives

Woohoo!

My move to the South Bay is complete. Most of my belongings are still sitting in boxes but I expect to be fully settled in by the end of the week. Unfortunately, the length of my commute has been doubled, and I don't know where to find good food in my new neighbourhood. I'm looking forward to discovering all the tasty eateries the South Bay has to offer!

There's a mathematical problem called the birthday paradox. It states that if there are more than 23 people in a room, the probability that 2 or more people have the same birthday is greater than 50%

So at my company of about 30 employees we have 3 people named "Doug". Unfortunately, I can't assume that "Doug" is an "average" name, and that given names are equally distributed over the entire namespace. Hmmm... so statistically speaking, is the occurrence of 3 Dougs in a group of 30 people uncharacteristically high?

What ever the math works out to be, I think the real world solution to this problem is the use of nicknames. Heh, heh.

Addendum: Over the last 100 years, the popularity of "Douglas" peaked around the WWII era as the 23rd most popular male baby name. Its popularity was sustained for 30 years and has only started rapidly declining within the last 20 years. In other words, it's not that surprising to have so many "Doug" collisions.

What is surprising however, is that "Winona" actually ranked amongst the top 1000 female baby names during the first half of the 20th century.

For statistics on American baby names, visit Social Security Online.

For those who missed it, Lap-POP 2.0 was a smashing success! My favourite part of the evening was Goh Nakamura's impromptu tea bagging song.

Robert Kranzke's series of System Failure paintings can be found on Flickr, but they looked much more amazing in person. I loved them a lot. Yellow #4 was my favourite.

Much thanks to MJ for inviting me to participate. It was a great honour to share the spotlight with some of the most creative Asian American bloggers in the Bay Area.

Now that Lap-POP 2.0 is over, I can pack up all of my craft supplies. My apartment is looking like a warehouse right now, with moving boxes stacked against the walls. I can't wait until I move to my new home.

(via Ian)

It's like Netflix for handbags! With Bag Borrow or Steal you can update your handbag as often as you want for a low monthly subscription fee. I wonder if they clean out returned bags and remove the things that people leave in them. If someone leaves a matching pair of sunglasses or tube of lipstick, I think they should keep it in the bag for the next person who gets it. (j/k)

(via Rachel)

Macklin's Class of 1994 is having a 12-year reunion this summer. If you're a former teacher or student, we'd love to hear from you!