i found the comment on groupthink below interesting. in general i agree, a conclusion independently reached by numerous people is much stronger than a conclusion reached by persuasion. but how often does that really happen? and in human society, it is not really encouraged. most people share and discuss ideas, invariably influencing the other party. in a evolutionary sense, this is probably a big part of mankind’s development. but is it still serving its purpose or is this tendency too easily taken advantage of by mass media?

you may have seen the news item of the collapsed freeway near the bay bridge. it is big news here. obviously everyone was talking about the enormous impact on people’s commute and how long it would take to fix. but i was wondering if the company would be held liable for the damage. i had heard anecdotally that if you crash into a guardrail or something, you get billed for the damage. i thought the same could apply here, but of course instead of a few hundred dollars, this is a few million. i found this article today: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/30/BAGSNPIHMQ3.DTL. Towards the end, they mention that if the driver was found negligent, the company would be held liable. i agree with this finding. i am assuming the driver will be found negligent, i can’t see how a professional crashing a truck in perfect conditions with no mechanical failures would be anything but.

as a side effect of the freeway collapse, all public commuting options were free today. caltrain dutifully turned off ticket machines and posted signs on them saying caltrain free today. of course, they forgot it was the end of the month and everyone needed to by a monthly pass for april. so they were smart in putting up the signs but stupid for forgetting about monthly commuting tickets. they “pulled a columbia” as i like to say now.

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yesterday i went to berkeley to play tennis with a friend. i took bart over there, but since i never go to the east bay i had no idea where i was after exiting the station. i asked someone for directions and luckily the person was headed in my direction. she was somewhat chatty so we had one of those small talk conversations that we engineers try so hard to avoid. apparently she was about to start law school at UC berkeley. she asked me where i was from (since i didn’t know where i was going) so i said the peninsula. i asked her where she was from and she said columbia. so i said, “like missouri?”. and she said “No, like south america.”.

so i went from feeling pretty smart to knowing there was a columbia in missouri to feeling pretty stupid about forgetting the one in south america. to be fair, her accent was very slight so i think she must have lived in the US for awhile.

concerning Nina’s chocolate comment below, yes i do love chocolate and am against loosening requirements. europe is very stringent about this. if you buy parmagiano reggiano from italy, it must meet strict geographical and quality requirements. same with prosciutto di parma or most any regional european product. the US usually is much more lax, which results in all of us squinting at labels at the grocery store trying to read the 4pt font ingredient list. there are a few controlled products, the one i know about is salmon from alaska. if you buy alaskan salmon you can be sure it is wild and the salmon stock is well managed.

concerning the post below, i was trying to get more into how we should weigh group opinions vs. our own. many people will say forget what everyone else thinks, just do your own thing. for music and things this is probably ok, but for most other areas you are usually throwing away a lot of built up knowledge by doing that. there are a lot of recent efforts to mine this data more efficiently. the motley fool CAPS program is one example. there was also some ill-fated program where the govt was trying to get people to wager on when the next terrorist attack was going to happen or something. forgot the complete details. i remember reading the article on cnn thinking how absurd the headline sounded, but often times group think is more powerful than you would imagine.

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I have been listening to this song lately. Is this a good song or mass marketed crap? I usually can’t tell the difference. And should I care?

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the trip to kansas was cancelled today due to difficulties at the processing plant. apparently we are still going to go at some point later. no pictures of the luxury box, i forgot the camera. but in the end, it was just a room. don’t get me wrong, it was a great way to watch a game, but you can just imagine moving your living room to a stadium and watching a live game in it. the food was basically unlimited stadium type food. a good time, but i don’t think i would ever shell out the money. if you go to a game to watch the game, it is superfluous. if you want to go to socialize it might be for you. i guess the best thing about it was a totally unobstructed view of the rink. you are up a few feet from the uncivilized masses so you get a complete view.

my cousin sriram forwarded me an email about this tailor, the “needle king” who was coming to san francisco for a few days to do fittings for tailored clothing. i thought what the heck, my suit doesn’t fit so i went in. he seemed to have a lot of happy customers and his prices were good. anyways, the guy was super busy, i had a 3pm appointment and didn’t leave til 4:15. the suit should arrive in a couple months. the guy operates out of thailand so who knows who actually makes the suit. for $250 for a suit and dress shirt, i am guessing most people don’t ask too many questions.

also yesterday i saw a woman biking in the city wearing a surgical mask. it was a little surreal. i hope for her sake she is a severe asthmatic.

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One of our vendors at work is treating our engineering team to a NHL game (san jose sharks) in their luxury suite. score! i don’t really like hockey and the game is all the way in san jose but i have heard so much about luxury suites i said i would go. As it is likely that I and most kireetreddy.com readers — no offense – will never see the inside of a luxury suite again, I will try to take some pictures and post them (obviously a couple pics of the food spread for nhi).

biking to work went ok today. No real issues, turns out i can cut down my apt to caltrain walk from 9 minutes to about a 3-4 minute bike ride. I can bike from caltrain to work in about best case muni time so that seems to work nicely also.

sometimes public transportation is weird though. today this guy got a nose bleed and started bleeding all over himself. instead of going to the bathroom, he stands in the aisle and pulls out a wad of napkins from his pocket (at least he was prepared, probably a former boy scout) and starts stuffing them up his nose. Still his hands had quite a lot of blood on them. finally he goes off somewhere and cleans himself up. then he comes up with his nose still (more neatly) plugged with napkins. and we have to sit on the same seats with these people. that reminds of this guy at work who just splashed his hands with water after using the bathroom. then instead of getting a paper towel at least, he dried his hands on his hair! that’s like peeing into a perfume bottle and then misting your hair with it. that was sick. i think i have been dating nhi too long.

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Tomorrow is my first day of biking to/from the caltrain. I am a little worried the bike cars on the express trains are going to fill up and I’ll be stuck on the local. I’ll let everyone know how it goes. Hopefully I can regularly take the express so I can get home in time to work out before dinner. I have only been working out a couple times a week since I got the new job and this saturday at ultimate frisbee it really showed. I was really straggling towards the end.

Also, I watched erin brockovich on tv this weekend (exciting life i know). Am I the only one who was rooting for her to lose for about 1/2 the movie? Her character was so annoying, I would have fired her 10 times over.

Also, it’s pretty lame to make a blog posting that just links another blog, but I thought this one was quite funny:
http://waiterrant.net/wordpress2/?p=435

also, i’ve been having some issues with spammers lately, so if your comment doesn’t show up or you are a new commenter, please email me and let me know there is a problem.

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