Pardis Parker » Social Welfare

Eat swordfish, wait for cops.

pardis — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:29:20 +0000

This is a great story from the New York Times published back in 1994 about a homeless man who repeatedly refused to pay for his meals at upscale restaurants so that he could be arrested and enjoy the comforts of prison. At the time this was published, the man had successfully been imprisoned for refusing to pay for his meal more than 31 times.

Mr. Mahes does 90 days for stealing fish.

It costs taxpayers $162 a day to feed, clothe and house Mr. Mahes at Rikers Island. His 90-day sentence will cost them $14,580, to punish him for refusing to pay the $51.31 check. In five years he has cost them more than $250,000.

I’ve always wondered why homeless people didn’t do this more often. And the sick, I guess. I mean, if you live in the US and you can’t afford hospital bills, it seems like the easiest/smartest thing to do is to go to prison for a petty crime. Free medical care, free prescription drugs, and people who are responsible for taking care of you. I’m not suggesting that prison’s the best option for everyone, but if you’re in that zone where you either go severely into debt or you die, I’m not sure why you don’t do it. So what? You have a criminal record for repeatedly refusing to pay for dinner. Do you know the only reason why that’s a little embarrassing for you? Because you’re alive. Die with no criminal record or continue living without losing your home, and occasionally having to dine on fine (stolen) swordfish. Not sure why we make such a meal of it. Seems like a no-brainer.

Related posts:
I can’t wait to get old.

I really want to know what they’re saying.

pardis — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:39:36 +0000

Whatever it is, it appears at times to be both intense and hilarious.

Video of twin babies having, possibly, the most amazing conversation ever:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Isolated incident? False:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m not sure I would have ever been able to predict that finale. These kids are something else.

Related posts:
From my brother: We are not alone.

From E: The man who cracked the scratch lottery code

pardis — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:45:32 +0000

Jonah Lehrer wrote a pretty great article for Wired about Mohan Srivastava, a statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, who figured out the patterns behind a bunch of different scratch lottery tickets and could, as a result, predict the winners (without scratching the cards – just by looking them) with up to 90% accuracy.

Here’s an excerpt:

The tic-tac-toe lottery was seriously flawed. It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off—the ticket could be cracked if you knew the secret code.

The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.

The next day, on his way into work, he stopped at the gas station and bought a few more tickets. Sure enough, all of these tickets contained the telltale pattern. The day after that he picked up even more tickets from different stores. These were also breakable. After analyzing his results, Srivastava realized that the singleton trick worked about 90 percent of the time, allowing him to pick the winning tickets before they were scratched.

His next thought was utterly predictable: “I remember thinking, I’m gonna be rich! I’m gonna plunder the lottery!” he says. However, these grandiose dreams soon gave way to more practical concerns. “Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited,” Srivastava says. “I’d have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That’s not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets.”

The article goes on to talk about the Lottery Corporation’s response, and the lottery’s connection to the mafia and to money laundering. Really, really worth the read.

Go ahead. Make sense of this dream.

pardis — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:27:14 +0000

So this is my dream from last night:

I went back to school.
Taking like a 12 week course or something.
Sitting in a huge auditorium the first day.
Realizing the course ends in mid-February.
Wasn’t happy about that.
Chatted with some students in front of me.
Then the class ended and I walked into a gymnasium.
And we were playing this really intense, low-flying game of basketball.
Like more rugby than basketball.
Then my little brother showed up.
Just kind of lurking in the corner of the gym.
And the coach said that if anyone wanted to stay back and do some work on a new jacuzzi, they’d get paid well for it.
Apparently they were putting in a new jacuzzi in the gym.
And my brother was involved with it.
But I didn’t stay back.
The amount we’d have gotten paid, after the coach did the math, was like a million dollars, except not dollars. It was a different currency. And I thought I was being ripped off.
So I didn’t do it.
And then I asked my little brother about his involvement with the whole thing, and he said that it was a really good deal.
And that he’d make his money back.
For some reason I think he spent like $5k on a new jacuzzi and thought he was going to make a killing by charging students $1 or $2 to use it on their breaks.
And I just couldn’t make the numbers work, which worried me, because my little brother’s a bit bull-headed, and he was about to get cleaned out because of a wacky school-jacuzzi idea.
So I took the bus home.
But when I got home our whole roof was missing.
But I didn’t realize it at first.
At first I went into my room, which still had its roof.
But it was cold.
There was a draft.
So I went into the hallway and realized the entire rest of the house was completely missing its roof. Like someone had detached it like Lego.
And then my mom and dad came in.
And I asked them about it.
And they said they didn’t know exactly why the roof was missing. Like it only occurred to them that this was unusual when I brought it up.
So then this worker comes up.
And I guess he’s part of the roof crew, who I’m guessing were all out to lunch or something.
And he says, “sure, we could have just done it in pieces, too.”
Like, that was an option, but he opted to remove the whole roof, instead.
And the whole reason we were getting roof work done in the first place?
Because the smoke from when we cooked wasn’t being vented outside properly!
FOR THAT THEY REMOVED THE WHOLE ROOF!!
So my dad started making some calls.
The roof worker had disappeared.
And I guess my dad was worried that we’d have to pay for the new roof.
Like I guess he thought the workers had removed it because it was a code violation or something.
And that because the roof was violating code, the workers were obligated by law to remove it, and now my father would have to pay for a whole new one.
So he called a friend of ours who’s a big-time real-estate developer.
But he said he had no clue.
And my father said he’s not paying for it.
But the whole time he’s being thoughtful, and not at all stressed.
Then a van pulls up with the team of roof workers.
And the main guy who we saw before said that he thought he could have the whole thing up in a couple hours.
And I was just like, “seriously? You can a build a whole roof in a couple hours?”
I didn’t even see any wood around.

Aaaaand…scene.
That was good. Cathartic.

Turkey or TurBaconEpic? Depends on if you’re a man or not.

pardis — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 01:45:14 +0000

Courtesy of my brother, the TurBaconEpic (a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig), for those who give thanks for gluttony this weekend:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jay-Z and Warren Buffett talk philanthropy with Steve Forbes

pardis — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:12:02 +0000

Pretty great interview with Jay-Z and Warren Buffett about the keys to their success, and, more interestingly, the ways in which and reasons why they’re mobilizing their money to effect social change.

The greatest byproduct of wealth has to be the opportunity these individuals have to effect change in a sphere of their choosing on as large a scale as they deem appropriate, and to influence others to join them in doing so. Doesn’t that sound crazy fun? How bizarre it is for us to criticize success and wealth, when they have the potential for so much good. As if being wealthy in itself is somehow evil. Hey, irrational person, relax. Not all wealth is ill-gotten.

The interview, from Forbes.com:

From TED: Maz Jobrani

pardis — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:13:57 +0000

Maz Jobrani, talking about how he uses comedy to address racial stereotypes, from his presentation at the TEDGlobal 2010 Conference in Oxford, England, this past July:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Little Man Protest: War and Peace

pardis — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 07:20:45 +0000

This is such a wonderful and creative idea.

Shahriar Asdollah-Zadeh, a New Zealand-based artist, has an art project called Little Man Protest, where, according to this interview by Isaac Hindin Miller, he “creates socially conscious and interactive artworks using audience participation through social networking mediums.”

More from Isaac’s interview on Shahriar’s project:

The Little Man Protest is inspired by previous artworks of mine from the World Art Collective where I used social networking to promote interactive artworks. This year I’m using Twitter and an online blog along with Facebook. The Little Man Protest is a series of miniature public sculptures. I wanted to take part in this miniature sculpture craze so I built these little red men, which are holding up signs of protest. They’re protesting about war and peace. The quote I’ve used is “When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace.” I wanted to stick them in very public places and so people either notice them or they don’t. If they do notice, I wanted that quote to plant a momentary seed in their chaotic day, to stop time just for a few seconds.

And later on there’s this little tidbit:

When the little men do get destroyed there’s a comical aspect to it, because when a protest ends it always leaves its mark, and with this artwork it leaves a physical mark because the feet of the little men are attached to the ground still, I’ve super glued them to the ground, so there’s a commemoration round the city where you’ll find little red feet.

As noted in the interview, the artist has set up a blog for the project, which includes this note:

Little man protest is about creating miniature style art in public spaces. In this instance they are tiny protestors commenting on the quote, “When a thought of War comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of Peace.” I used a quote of personal reflection with the aim of transforming daily thoughts of negativity into positive thoughts of social action and dialogue. The scale of the artwork has a humour element to it since they are tiny little red men. People vieiwing it may or may not take it seriously. But the message the artwork conveys with the quote is very real and that message is Peace…

I will be placing these sculptures in different places around Auckland City, New Zealand, over the next several weeks. I will be messaging people in real time through the process of text messaging to Twitter.com once the artwork is live and can be viewed. These artworks are meant to be a one day sculptural performance protest. And like all protests it can end with a positive note or a negative one depending on what the viewer takes from the quote.

Here’s a sample of the protest thus far:

From TED: Bill Gates talks about reducing CO2, uses a photo of Baha’is to represent humanity and its diversity

pardis — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:44:16 +0000

Well this is delightful on two counts.

First, the talk is a pretty good one, with Bill Gates talking about the importance of reducing our CO2 emissions.

But second, and as more of an Easter egg, when presented with the need to show a photo that represented the entirety of earth’s human population, he turned to a well-known photo of Baha’i volunteers serving at the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa, Israel, presumably because the people in the photo represent a cross section of the world’s races and cultures.

Here’s the talk, and the photo of the Baha’is pops up at the 4:29 mark. Fun

TED Talks: Hans Rosling dispels myths about HIV

pardis — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:33:36 +0000

Dr. Hans Rosling, formerly a physician, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders Sweden, and professor at Karolinska Institut in Stockholm, now spends most of his time dispelling common myths about the developing world, and does so through the use of Gapminder, fantastic software he developed to better illustrate trends in data sets.

In this TED Talk, from February 2009 at Longbeach, California, Rosling:

unveils new data visuals that untangle the complex risk factors of one of the world’s deadliest (and most misunderstood) diseases: HIV. He argues that preventing transmissions — not drug treatments — is the key to ending the epidemic.

What really grabbed my attention was the ease with which he dispels the notion that there is “one” Africa and that things go on in one way in Africa, going further to say that “we have to stop that – it’s not respectful and it’s not very clever to think that way.”

Brilliant presentation.