News You Can Bruise for 2002 February 11

Early yesterday morning I had an incredibly stupid idea (in fairness, I had it as part of a dream, but I've also had good ideas as parts of dreams): a breakfast cereal for kids which instead of (or by dint of) coming in different shapes, was associated with different point values. You would stand some distance away from the cereal bowl, throw cereal at it, and rack up points depending on how accurate your aim was.

The sad thing is, someone working for General Mills probably thought of that in 1986 and it probably made it through one or two rounds of focus groups.

Hollywood lives and dies by Internet Movie Database made me stop dead in my scan of the Red Rock Eater digest because of the headline's sheer audacity, but the article makes a decent case--for the movie industry, it's probably as useful as Google is to the population at large.

For the first time in years I'm eating one of those cup-of-noodles things, mainly for nostalgia reasons--I used to eat them frequently when I was working at MAP in college. The last step in the cooking process is "[E]njoy from cup". I always have to look back at the instructions before eating because I can't remember whether I'm supposed to enjoy it or not.

Quick! Get the mammoth picture out!

From JOHO, here's a series of thought experiments to help ferret out to which theory of personal identity one hews. Few surprises for me, as I already knew I was a psychological reductionist; I waffled a bit on the answer to #1, but either answer is compatible with PR.

The thing that disturbs me is that apparently 1/3 of the test-takers have an internally inconsistent idea of personal identity. I can only hold out hope that most of those were people trying different responses to questions to see what would happen.

Wow, I haven't worked a 12-hour day in quite a while.

My tiny hand is dwarfed by the huge hand of America's future, the youth of today!