Cap’n Refsmmat’s Blog of Doom

[Note: There's basically no point to this post. But hey, it's the Internet. That's allowed here.]

Media I can use to communicate with people I know in person:

• Phone call. The highest-bandwidth and lowest-latency medium, unless you get voicemail. But somehow the least preferred.
• Text message. Annoyingly brief and usually vapid; useful for arranging meetings or telling someone you can’t go to their party when you’d rather not have to explain on the phone.
• Facebook message. Either wall post or private message. You can talk as much as you want, but in public you’d rather not and most private messages are just messages sent to groups to inform them that a party is coming up. (In my experience, anyway.)
• Instant messenger, like MSN or AIM. You will never have a group of friends that entirely uses one protocol or another; there’ll always be the one or two people using a different system. IMs are convenient and fast, you can keep logs for yourself, and it’s a lot easier to type on a keyboard than on a phone; still, IM clients aren’t as portable. (If you have one on your iPhone you have to type with the tiny keyboard.)
• Email. The original electronic communication method. It’s now basically the Snail Mail of the Internet, though emails only take two seconds to arrive most of the time. For some reason many people I know don’t use email for serious messaging at all, sticking to Facebook or text messaging.
• Smoke signal. This is arguably my favorite system, although it is difficult to find willing people to communicate with and the fire department tends to show up a lot.

I’m the sort of person that likes to keep things archived. I have all of my email since my current email accounts opened; I have all instant messages logged and I keep offline copies of the (very few, as it happens) Facebook private messages I actually deem important. Text messaging presents a problem because there’s no good way to archive it, and of course nobody likes having their phone calls recorded.

My obsessive-compulsive need to have a cohesive record of my past isn’t being fulfilled! Stupid technology.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been a card magician. I started learning some basic sleight of hand techniques with cards and I’m now producing cards out of people’s pockets and making a chosen card appear in a sealed envelope halfway across the room.

Magic isn’t just a way to make other people feel stupid. It’s a lot of things:

• It’s mental exercise. Devising card tricks requires ingenuity and a lot of cleverness. And a very devious mind.
• It’s improv. I’ve learned more about giving speeches and public presentations through magic than I have out of speech classes and years of giving presentations at school. Why? Because 95% of magic is getting people to pay attention to what you’re saying rather than what you’re doing. Without my constant chatter, people would notice every move I make.
• It’s incredibly fun. After a while, once the initial “oh my god they might figure it out” nervousness is past, magic is just fun. You know exactly what to do and you can start improvising new lines to say depending on the situation. (Protip: ask the audience to come up with their own magic words. Don’t let them pick “abracadabra.” You’ll probably hear some very interesting new magic phrases to try.)
• It’s entertainment for everyone. I’ve never gone up to anyone and said “let me do a card trick.” All I have to do is start playing with a deck of cards and everyone goes “do a card trick! That one where you make it change colors!”
• It’s a way to get out of boring card games with relatives. All you have to do is produce their card out of your pocket and they’ll be too suspicious of you to let you play…
• If you’re in a team competition, it’s a way to intimidate the other teams. Trust me. I’ve tried this one. (”We’re screwed! The other team has a guy who can make cards switch while you’re holding them in your hands!”)

Try it. If you want a good trick to learn, try this one (there’s a link to an explanation in the Related Videos box). It’s great fun, especially if you put the different-color card in a box and let someone hold it…

As you can see, I’ve been helping make science- and nerd-related parody songs recently, and I’m looking to make some more. It’s a fun way to spend some time.

Do you have any songs you think could be written? Pick a song (preferably something that can be played on guitar or piano) and a promising subject or a few funny lines and submit them in the comments here. You don’t have to write the whole song — usually it’s easy enough to finish a song if you supply a line or two or a witty chorus idea. The best/funniest ideas might be used to make a new song later this year.

A long long time ago, a friend and I wrote a document on the science of relationships. It was mostly silly, but it did have one section that wasn’t just made up. That section was on the Relationship Uncertainty Principle.

The RUP works in a fashion similar to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics. The idea is simple: at any given time in a two-person relationship, you cannot simultaneously know each party’s feelings for the other and how those feelings are changing.

Perhaps an example would help explain it.
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Can anyone explain to me why people love talking about things like they’re experts when they really don’t know anything about the subject?

Like this guy:

I’m often asked questions about things that are out of my area of expertise. Rather than make stuff up, like Mr. LHC Guy, I at least admit that I’m not sure. (My refusal to be absolutely certain has gotten me in trouble in the past, because when you’re trying to sell things it pays to be confident in yourself. Oh well.)

(To be fair, I act like an expert on things I’m probably not an expert on, but I’ve never yet caught myself being a complete and utter moron.)

Is there a psychologist around that can explain why people don’t recognize when they’re utterly out of their depth and shut up? I think that needs to be a mandatory skill.

(Video shamelessly noticed at Splendid Elles.)

If you expect me to solve your computer problem, you will have to tell me more than “I tried to go to the website and it didn’t work.”

I’d rather like to know what exactly happened when you tried to go to the website and what error message, if any, you got. Error messages, after all, do have a point: they tell you what went wrong. That can be helpful.