This year, O dressed up as a bear for Halloween. It's the same costume he wore last year. It still fit (despite his 50% increase in age since then; though it doesn't fit very well with the hood up), and he really likes wearing it. Even though it's been hanging in the back of the closet for almost a year, he said "Bear suit!" as soon as he saw it.

While wearing said bear suit, he was very obliging and growled every time I asked him to. In some settings, he growled very quietly.

When he growled, invariably an adult would say, "What a scary bear!" O would reply, "I'm not a scary bear." The adult would then say, "I'm sure you must be a friendly bear." O disagreed, "I'm not a friendly bear. I'm not a bear. I'm just wearing a bear suit."

toddler slowly and deliberately One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Fourteen, Fifteen, Nineteen, Sixteen, Nineteen, Nineteen, Twentyteen, TwentyOne, TwentyTwo, TwentyThree, TwentyFour, TwentyFive, TwentySix, TwentySeven, TwentyEight, TwentyNine, TwentyNine, TwentySeven, TwentyThree, TwentyNine --

mommy Thirty

dramatic pause

toddler TwentyThirty. One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Fourteen, Fifteen, Nineteen,

mommy OneTwoThreeFourFive Ohsssssssssss!

toddler OneTwoThreeFourFive Ohsssssssssss!

daddy OneTwoThreeFourFive Ohsssssssssssss!

toddler OneTwoThreeFourFive Ohsssssssssss!

mommy OneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTen Ohssssssssss!

toddler OneTwoThreeFourFiveTen Ohsssssssssssssssss!

A few years ago, I read about natural distribution of leading digits in a set of natural numbers. The normal use of this rule is to differentiate between data sets with fabricated numbers and those with real numbers.

Today, I ended up with two sets of sixteen numbers, and was curious how the leading digits were spread out.

The first data set had values between 561 and 8224. The second had values between 39 and 576. The second set was a function of the first. The leading digit frequencies were as follows:

First Digit	Frequency				Benford's Law
	Set 1	Set 2	Total
1	3	8	11	34.4%	30.1%
2	5	4	9	28.1%	17.6%
3	4	1	5	15.6%	12.5%
4	0	0	0	0%	9.7%
5	1	2	3	9.4%	7.9%
6	0	1	1	3.1%	6.7%
7	1	0	1	3.1%	5.8%
8	1	0	1	3.1%	5.1%
9	1	0	1	3.1%	4.6%

I was impressed with how front-loaded that table is, and how closely it tracked with Benford's law. There doesn't seem to be any reason for "1" or "2" to be more common than, say, "4" as a leading digit in either set, but in both cases "1" and "2" (22% of the leading digits) accounted for more than half of the leading digits (34% and 28% respectively).

This identity has been deprecated, and will be removed in a future release of the internet. My new internetsname is longer but more self-explanatory.

Update: I still would like to migrate away from this identity, but after sleeping on it, I'm not sure that I want to use the one I started using last night. I like it as an email address, but it doesn't really work in general:

• it's too long
• It has punctuation, which means I have to use different punctuation on different sites (e.g. dots for email, dashes for domain names, and underscores for twitter)
• It's too much like my real name

So, with that said, I am trying to come up with something short and relevant but not directly derived from my name. I'd also like something easy to spell and something without punctuation. Like "squeezefarm" or "befasq". Something punny would be double-extra excellent.

I prefer not to get too into politics here (I'd really rather not increase the amount of vitriol on the internet), but I'd like to toss out my two cents on why I'm in favor of health care reform, and some of the most significant things in the current proposal.

By far, I see the most significant part of (what I've heard about) the current legislation is that it defines as policy that people in the United States will be able to acquire, afford, and keep health insurance. There are two approaches taken in the bill: (a) set minimum benefits and maximum prices for a basic insurance plan that insurers must offer, and outlawing the denial of legitimate claims; and (b) offer a public competitor. (a) says, basically, insurers must behave as decent members of society and not as money grubbing whatevers. (b) says that the government will set the bar. As a concession to insurers, every individual will be required to carry insurance (or pay a fine); theoretically, this will provide a broader population to spread out costs, so not just the sickest people are insured.

I'm in favor of this for two reasons: (1) I think it's the right thing to do. Like Jacob, I'm skeptical that the government will be the ideal guardian of anything. But, at this point in history, if I have to choose between the government and the private insurance industry, I'm picking the government. I'm a bit uneasy about the constitutionality of it, but I'm all for the practicality of it. (2) I think it will remove hurdles for aspiring/potential entrepreneurs. Imagine that you or your family have had expensive and/or chronic medical conditions in your past, and you have kids or your condition might come back at any time. Would you step out from under the (somewhat) sturdy and wide umbrella of group coverage, without at least some confidence that your own little umbrella for your family isn't made of paper mache?

This is obviously a huge issue, and three paragraphs probably won't sway anyone else's opinion. I just thought I'd try to voice my sane (at least to me) opinion on the matter, since there's so much ... unhelpful information flying around about it. (Let's just say I should forget the cows and just take a radio out to the pasture... then it'll be really fertile for next year's veggies.)

At present, my main non-home activities are work, church, small group, farmers market, soccer, and charles_hanon's band concerts. Half of those activities are scheduled to geographically converge in 2011.

Status quo

Here's a rough map of work, band concerts, and the farmers market. The farmers market is about 1.5 miles northwest of where I work. Concerts have been happening all over the metro area, but most of them are about 6 miles west of where I work. About half of the summer concerts are on the other side of a building from where the farmers markets happen.

This is all in two suburbs on the north side of the city. It's relatively close together. I know this area pretty well.

Rumors

The city I work in is building a fancy performing arts center, and I think charles_hanon's band wants to call it home. I'm not sure if that's going to happen, but it would be pretty awesome if it did. It looks like it will be a very nice venue (politics aside). Assuming this happens, some of the summer concerts would be in the same spot, and the normal season concerts would likely be in the PAC, which is less than 0.5 miles northwest of the farmers market.

I've heard rumors that my company might be moving offices sometime, and one of the possible locations is in the same development that contains the PAC. So that puts my rumored office less than 0.25 miles from the PAC, and less than 1/2 mile from the farmers market.

This is quite a convergence.

Announcement

At today's all-company meeting, a tentative announcement about where we're moving was made. It wasn't quite where I had imagined... it's about 0.25 miles northwest of the farmers market, and just south of a park that's just south of the PAC.

As if that weren't enough, the development is claiming that the farmers market and summer concerts will be moving to the park that sits between the PAC and my new office.

(In the photo at the left, the green box highlights the south edge of the PAC, and the orangish box highlights where my company is planning to move.)

If I didn't have to grow vegetables for the farmers market, it would be awfully convenient to pitch a tent and live on the green (while it's warm, at least).

I guess this way, when Oliver gets bored at the market, I can bring him upstairs and we can play video games... er, I mean, do our homeschool programming classes.

my family: 0.075 people per acre

my county: 0.1306 people per acre

indiana: 0.2648 people per acre

usa: 0.1351 people per acre (who knew that my home county was average?)

world: 0.17 people per acre

(h/t @mdoherty83, who did a much more interesting query than I did.)

The second half of last week was spent in La Crosse, visiting my brother ("Uncle Mick") and his wife ("Aunt Whoah"). We planned our trip around a professional conference that charles_hanon ("Mommy") attended. The visit was very nice.

For the first two days, Uncle Mick had some work to do from home while Aunt Whoah went to work. So the little guy ("You") and I played with his toys, tested the two-year-old-readiness of my brother's house (e.g. "You" pulled out some glasses from the bottom shelf of the living room TV cabinet), and went with Uncle Mick to a park and the store. (I was amazed how often Uncle Mick goes to the store. I think, in the three days we were visiting, he must have gone 7 or 8 times. This is unthinkable here, where the nearest store is 15 minutes away. For him, a trip to one of 5 or 6 stores and back only took 15 minutes.)

On Friday evening, we went bowling. I had one of my worst games in a long time (89) and Uncle Mick had his best game ever (199). On Saturday, we went to the Children's Museum. It took a while for "You" to get in the groove, but he did, especially once he found the Mississippi River exhibit/splash area and the wooden model trains. He likes playing with water, and he really likes pushing things with wheels around. When he gets tired, it's not uncommon for him to lie down on the floor and stare at the wheels of a toy car while he drives it back and forth.

I was a little envious of my brother's toys for his new job: a new MBP and an iPhone. While I was there, Aunt Whoah discovered a whack-a-mole game, and we spent a lot of free time whacking over 1000 critters on it. Quite entertaining. Fortunately, there were no serious fights about whose turn it was to use the iPhone (read "play whack-a-mole").

"You" also learned a new name for my brother's dog, Malibu. Aunt Whoah at one point called the dog "Mally Pally", and "You" immediately picked up on it. It was extremely cute. We spent almost as much time trying to get "You" to say "Mally Pally" as we did playing whack-a-mole.

It also sounded like the conference was good. Mommy took lots of notes, and came home with a giant stack of paper with Good Information on it. Since the conference was in Wisconsin, there were a fair number of dairy farmers there, but small organic farming is still small organic farming.

My sister asked me to remind her of some details of how I proposed to charles_hanon, so I thought I'd see if I could dig it up and post it.

Step 1: buy a ring. The soon to be Mrs. Spraints knew that a proposal was coming, so there were some casual conversations about what type of ring she wanted. Armed with that information, I picked one out. I got a sweet no-interest-for-six-months deal, so I added a todo item on my PDA to pay for it in 5ish months.

Step 2: Propose. I had the ring for a couple of days before I came up with a plan. The plan started as just a nice dinner at my place, with a proposal, but it grew.

Friday, I sent L four emails:

• My will power leaps
• Muddy ewe Lives in kayaks every Year or under
• The Merry Men of Mattington
• To Me To night will be To deful... i mean, wonderful

She didn't see the message! I guess that's not too surprising, because they were spread out throughout the day.

That night, she came over for dinner around 6:00. I put on a tie, lit a candle, made something nicer than usual, and put a picture of the ring as the desktop wallpaper on my computer. I also got a window open with the mail I had sent to her that day, in order.

I'm such a dork.

Anyway, she came over, I showed her the list of emails ...

• My will power leaps
• Muddy ewe Lives in kayaks every Year or under
• The Merry Men of Mattington
• To Me To night will be To deful... i mean, wonderful

... (read the bold words ... read it out loud if you need to) ... so, I showed her the list of subjects and the picture and the ring, and she said yes.

The rest is, as they say, history. A very blissful history. A very blissful, nerdy history.

Oh yeah, and the thing about the PDA... that wasn't irrelevant. A couple days before the big proposal day, I left my PDA at her place accidentally. I turned the car around and got it, mostly because I used to use it to help me be on time for meetings and things (or at least not to forget about them completely). It was there, unattended, for only 20 minutes, tops. It turns out that was long enough for my "pay for ring" reminder to be observed, so the imminence of the proposal was discovered in advance.

Jr. has a tendency to repeat things that charles_hanon and I say. For instance, when he calls a spatula a spoon, I'll say, "it's like a spoon, but actually it's a spatula." This leads to him saying "actually, it's a spoon" whenever he sees it again. "actually" and "probably" have become important parts of his vocabulary.

Here's a funny (to me) incident, where Jr. not only used the same word, but also the same inflection.

Jr Daddy go get wee-bo.
Me not understanding Go get the what?
Jr Daddy get wie-bwo.
Me You want me to get the window?
Jr Daddy get eee-wo.
Me stares blankly, trying to figure out what he's asking for
Jr as if he's just had a revelation OHHHHH, you said Daddy get weeeee bwoh!

Eventually, I figured out he was asking for the toy wheel barrow that was in the car and that I'd said earlier that I would bring in for him at some point. In the meantime, I was entertained that he copied my "Ohhh, you said <whatever>" when I understand some of the harder-to-understand things he says.