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Bad Manners
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 1687
He comes in at 1:00 PM. We close, officially, at 2:00, the kitchen's often gone by 1:15 or 1:30.
He's waiting for his date. He doesn't want to sit in the dining room with the rest of the customers, he wants to sit instead in the closed dining room. And once there he gets on his cell phone and begins talking to his date. "She's on her way" he tells me.
He's a new regular, I don't recognize him since I left but one of the other staff members lets me know who he is.
He won't get off his cell phone, but eventually, the third or fourth time I approach the table he tells me that we have a bottle of wine for him in the cooler, the owner knows what it is.
I find it, it's a cheap Orvietto.
We charge him a small corkage, $20.00, it makes it by far the cheapest wine on our menu, or not on our menu as luck would have it.
He continues to talk to his guest on the phone, 1:30, 1:45 and she's still not here. The Owner, the kitchen is open awaiting their order. And the whole time he's on his cell phone.
At 1:55 she arrives and the kitchen gets the order. The last table has left the restaurant, from the other, the "open" side, at about 1:30.
He's out of wine now and gives the waitress $22.00 to run to the liquor store and buy him another bottle of this wine, this $11.00 bottle of Orvietto, and reminds her that the corkage is only $20.00.
They strew their papers and business documents all over the table and stay in the restaurant with his guest until 5:00 PM when we reopen, then decide it's time to leave.
Their waitress, she tells me that he's a new regular of sorts, started coming before Christmas. The owner doesn't know what to think, wants to tell him to come in earlier so he doesn't have to keep the kitchen, keep everyone here all day, I want to tell him it's futile, this customer, he's not unaware that we're closed, he's just possessed of incredibly bad manners.
Genetic Algorithm Car Evolution Using Box2D Physics (v2.2)
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2412
This is quite interesting. An algorithm that "evolves" to discover the best "car" (2D graphic representation) for the terrain that it's driving upon.
What is interesting about this is less the program than the idea that we can somehow create software that evolves with the tastes of the times and the user. Solutions that anticipate problems and "evolve" to overcome them. Programs that can evolve strategies to solve problems in mathematics and physics, like the Big Bang Theory or String Theory, or how to calculate prime numbers...
Link: http://www.boxcar2d.com/
Placebos
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1855
And a video that should raise a few questions about the mind-body connection. Don't worry, it's short.
Tom Thumb
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1763
That I was in Philadelphia at a flea market, there's an antique dealer there who has a couple of small dancing wood figures on sticks, they're well carved, with that heavy aged patina and magnets on their feet...he tells me that they're part of a "Tom Thumb" game and shows me the rest, there are some magnets they would play with, and an old metal tractor seat that's been beaten into a game board, and he's searching around for the box.
I'm intrigued. I've never seen anything quite like this, and I ask him how much..
He sucks in his breath and goes to tell me...I'm waiting, he's humming and hawing, telling me how rare it is and I'm expecting, 50, maybe a hundred bucks.
$280 dollars with many assurances of it's rarity and value.
Now I could buy it, but it's a bit too expensive and there's other things that I want and he assures me that he comes this way every week, he's from Boston but he does "The Tour" so I can think upon it and I'm wondering how in this part of the world distances are so small....
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