Holiday fun at my parents' house! Here's a preview:

My mom took a course in folk-art cooking, and one of the things she learned about was marzapan sculpting. She brought us a hunk of marzapan and this cool colored dye/dust stuff, and we made little mini-things. Things made include: a carrot, an apple, a fish, baby jesus, and piggies! (I made the piggies. there was some drama there, 'cause my piggie's head fell off at one point, and his snout and ears crumbled. This made me very sad. I needed to take a time-out.)

Anyway, happy holidays from my home to yours, and I hope you all get what you wanted for Christmas.

Here's a fun article for you couch psychologists out there. It's a study on incompetence, and how/why people who are incompetent (at something) are generally oblivious to their incompetence, and grossly overestimate their skills or knowledge in specific fields.

If you're not interested in reading, here's a figure from the article. The researchers asked the subjects how good they were at logic (relative to the students in their class), and then gave them a quick logic test. The subjects were asked to assess their performance after taking their test. The figure shows percieved competence, percieved test score, and actual test score. All numbers are in terms of percentile.

Hey, so I've been noticing these pyramid type thingies for getting a free iPod. Apparently there are some scammy ones and some real ones. Have any of you tried to get a free iPod? Any success? If I researched the right scheme to try, would any of you be willing to put in a few minutes to help me get it?

It seems like the way it works is you create an account and then go sign up for some deal. Most of them are something like 'sign up for our service for a year at a discount' but some are 'try our service free for a month, and if you like it, take no action and we'll bill you'. If you do the free trial then cancel (assuming you don't want the service), then it costs you nothing. Anyone?

Christmas Shopping

The Christmas Shopper:
Alone in a sea of peers,
A single snowflake

on Winter in Berkeley:

The soggy sky sobs
winedark wetness and gray gloom:
The longest of nights.

And in case lofty poetry isn't your thing, here's something funny.

For those running FireFox (browser) and Thunderbird (email) but don't keep up with the latest nerd news, FireFox 1.0 has been out for about a month, and Thunderbird 1.0 just came out. Go grab 'em if you want the latest and greatest! Both downloads are under 6 MB if you're grabbing the executables, so it's quick and easy.

For those still running Internet Explorer and Outlook, get with the program!