Years ago, a family friend ended up on Jeopardy, and after the experience, she commented that she had underestimated the importance of finessing the buzzer. A Google search for “jeopardy buzzer” turns up quite a few pages, including this very informative page entitled “How to Win on the Buzzer”, by Michael Dupee, a former Jeopardy contestant.

It’s not clear to me how Watson is notified that Alex Trebek has finished reading the clue, but it seems pretty clear to me that no matter how you do it, the computer clearly has an advantage. If, for instance, the computer is simply sent a signal that is wired in to the same system that the off-stage assistant uses to enable the human contestants’ buzzers, then the computer can instantly respond with almost zero latency as soon as it gets the signal. There is no way that a human can compete with that, because the humans that rely on the pin light to notify them of buzzer activation will always be late. Alternatively, those that try to “time” the assistant and guess when he feels Trebek has finished reading the clue will never have the microsecond accuracy that Watson has.

Alternatively, if a direct signal is not sent, but rather Watson is equipped with an audio sensor to process Trebek’s voice as he reads the clue, it’s very easy to write a simple optimization routine that quickly learns when the assistant activates the buzzers. Watson can expend a tiny, minuscule fraction of a single processor to this task, and still be orders of magnitude more accurate at timing than its human competitors.

The point is that if one were to replace Watson with a human being that is every bit as knowledgeable and capable as Watson, the human being would not fare nearly as well in competition, simply because his or her motor response cannot beat that of a specialized robot. So, while Watson’s ability to understand and solve open-ended Jeopardy clues is certainly impressive, the reason he is trouncing the humans seems to have more to do with robotics rather than reasoning.

“I’m writing because your review of Case Remodeling of Austin has been flagged by the community, and after evaluation, our Support team has determined that the review violates our Terms of Service (http://www.yelp.com/static?p=tos). Because personal accounts cannot be used in any promotional manner, the links to your blog that you’ve included in your review are problematic and will need to be removed.”

Naturally, I sent a response:

Hi Miranda,

I’m curious what aspects of the Terms of Service have been violated? I re-read the Terms of Service, and the Content Guidelines, and could not really find anything that pertains to my review. I linked to the detailed remodel information at the end of my review because it is too much content to post in a Yelp review; it includes day-by-day breakdowns, a lot of detailed information about the kinds of dysfunctional communication and interaction I had with Case Handyman &
Remodeling, and many photos.

The “promotional content” part of the Yelp Content Guidelines seem to specifically address people who post links that promote their own businesses and such. I am hardly doing that, but rather am instead providing more information and context for other Yelp users. Again, I simply do not see how this violates the letter or the spirit of the Terms of Service.

Of course, just because Yelp emails you, doesn’t mean that you have the privilege of emailing them back:

From: “Yelp Team”
To: XXXXX@gmail.com
Thanks for emailing Yelp.
Unfortunately, you have reached an email address that is not in use.

And now I offer a fun little challenge: try to find the email address of someone at Yelp that you can write about this. No luck? Yeah. You have to use their web form. Fuck that. If you email me, threatening to remove content that I provided for free for your site, then it’s not really right to make me jump through hoops and fill out CAPTCHAs just to respond to you. In the spirit of making a good-faith effort, I even tried tweeting @Yelp, to no avail.

So, that’s it. That’s my last Yelp review. Others who want to use Case Handyman & Remodeling or deal with Ed Dudley and get screwed, you can thank the nice folks at Yelp HQ for removing my review that could have spared you pain.

You know what the real irony is? The real irony is that the person who flagged my review is probably someone associated with the business itself. Good job, Yelp!

For reference, here is my review in full. You can decide for yourself if it is “promotional” in nature about my blog:

I’m currently using CASE for remodeling about 800 sq ft of my house, including building a brand new roof, kitchen, master bedroom and bath, and deck. Thus far, the construction quality and timeliness of the project have been OK. Our construction manager José and his crew do a pretty good job, but some of the subcontractors have left a bit to be desired. On the plus side, they at least showed up on time and got the work done (for the most part).

The financial side of the project is a completely different story. We were initially led to believe that this would be a fixed-bid contract with potentially a few change orders if they discovered things that needed to be fixed along the way. Well, as it turns out, despite the fact that we demolished half of the house and rebuilt from the ground up, there was still a tremendous amount of unexpected work. We are currently a whopping 30% over the contract amount and at change order #23. (I could have bought myself a very sweet car with the overages that we’ve had.)

During the initial discussion phase of the project, Cliff Zoch (who was the remodeling consultant we worked with) indicated that CASE really preferred to do fixed-bid contracts and pooh-poohed the “industry standard” practice of lowballing the inital contract to earn business and making back profit margins on change orders. Well, based on the progression of our project thus far, that is exactly what is happening to us.

We still have about 3 weeks left on our remodel, and I will update this once it is complete. I am also blogging my remodel at http://pwang.wordpress.com/category/remodel/ and I have a fairly comprehensive overview of our project at http://pwang.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/project-overview/. I have posted many pictures and I detail the joys and travails of our ongoing project, including interactions with various subcontractors.

So, I first installed EPD, the Enthought Python Distribution as a base. Then I created a ~/.pydistutils.cfg file with the contents as outlined in the Python docs on Installing Python Packages:

[install]
install-base=$HOME/Library/Python2.6
install-purelib=site-packages
install-platlib=plat-mac
install-scripts=scripts
install-data=data

I then tried to install Mercurial using the one-liner:


$ easy_install mercurial


And I was promptly greeted with the error:


error: install-base or install-platbase supplied, but installation scheme is incomplete


WTF?

Google turned up nothing of substance, save for a link to an old subversion commit of distutils/commands/install.py. Taking this as a sign, I opened up my local copy of the file and a brief code read revealed the source of the problem: I was missing the install-headers option. So, I added the line:

    install-headers=Include

And was greeted by a different error:

install_dir site-packages/
TEST FAILED: site-packages/ does NOT support .pth files
error: bad install directory or PYTHONPATH

You are attempting to install a package to a directory that is not
on PYTHONPATH and which Python does not read ".pth" files from.  The
installation directory you specified (via --install-dir, --prefix, or
the distutils default setting) was:

    site-packages/

and your PYTHONPATH environment variable currently contains:

    '/Users/pwang/Library/Python2.6/site-packages:/Users/pwang/Library/Python2.6/plat-mac:'

Well, this was most disheartening. I was, after all, following the Python docs, which seem to imply that install-purelib would be appended to install-base. The above error message suggests that this was not the case, so I went back to the distutils source, and more code reading and tracing seemed to confirm this. So, I added an explicit $base to all of the config lines in my pydistutils.cfg, with a final result that looked like this:

[install]
install-base=$HOME/Library/Python2.6
install-purelib=$base/site-packages
install-platlib=$base/plat-mac
install-headers=$base/Include
install-scripts=$base/scripts
install-data=$base/data

This, finally, seemed to work. easy_install mercurial worked great, and everything installed into the proper locations. One thing to note was that the $base variable in pydistutils.cfg needs to be lower case.

Hopefully this entry will turn up the next time someone searches for “install-base or install-platbase supplied, but installation scheme is incomplete” and they are spared having to dig through the distutils source.

But first, let’s start with prepping the brisket itself.

Peter’s Brisket Rub

Here is the recipe for my brisket rub.  It’s an adaptation of some that I’ve found online, as well as a few others from the Big Green Egg cookbook and everything like such as.  It has a nice spicy kick to it, and just the right amount of peppery flavor.

• 4 tbsp sugar
• 8 tbsp Kosher salt
• 2 tbsp cumin
• 2 tbsp paprika
• 2 tbsp fresh cracked black pepper
• 1 tbsp ancho chili powder
• 1 tbsp chipotle powder
• 2 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp oregano
• 1 tsp thyme
• 1/2 tsp cilantro
• 1/2 tsp McCormick seasoned pepper blend (optional)

Prepping the brisket (24 hrs. before cook)

1. Trim the brisket. See http://www.virtualweberbullet.com/virtualbrisket.html
2. Rub with a light but consistent coat of standard yellow mustard.  I use French’s.
3. Apply the dry rub above , more generously in the point than the flat.  Don’t go too wild, because it’s possible to over-rub and have brisket that is too salty.  You may also want to use plastic wrap or foodservice gloves to prevent the rub from building up and sticking to your hands.
4. Foil and place in a tub or pyrex,or wrap the foil with clingwrap.  Juices will collect in the foil, so you need to have it in something.  Don’t place the foiled meat directly into your fridge.
5. Let sit for 24 hours; at least 12 hours, or it’s not worth doing.

Building the Fire

The idea here is very simple: ensure good and consistent airflow across the charcoal stack, throughout the entire duration of the cook.  This means that the area below the fire pit should be relatively free of ash, and the holes in the fire pit should be mostly unobstructed.

It also means that you should sort your charcoal by size, at least so you can separate out the extra-large pieces from the medium-sized pieces.  You don’t need to have them in separate bins, but you should at least use a wide enough bin that you can easily pick through it.  You will not get good results if you just dump a bag of lump charcoal into the fire pit! In fact, if you do this, I can almost guarantee that you will have trouble and you will need to babysit the smoker for the entire duration of the cooking process.

So, given that you have a reasonably clean fire pit and ash pit, and given that you can easily pick out different sized pieces of charcoal, here is how you build a good fire:

1. Find two-three extra large pieces of charcoal.  In a standard 20 lb. bag of charcoal you will probably have half a dozen of these.  They will be 2″ in diameter and 5″ or 6″ in length.  They are gigantic compared to the average-sized ones in the bag.
2. Place the extra large pieces in the center of the fire pit, making sure to leave some room for air to flow up through the holes.  So, if a piece has a flat side, don’t cover up holes with it.  Instead, turn it onto a curved or jagged size, or even prop it up a bit on the others.
3. Find 8-12 large pieces of charcoal, and fill in around these XL pieces, and a few on top.  Again, make sure that no charcoal with flat parts is block the bottom fire pit holes or the side holes in the fire ring.
4. Use medium sized pieces to build up another layer and a half of charcoal.
5. Grab your chimney starter, and place another 3-4 large pieces in the bottom, and fill it up 2/3 of the way with medium sized pieces.  If you’re not using the chimney starter, then put this amount of charcoal directly into the smoker.

Lighting the Fire

1. Light the chimney starter, or, alternatively, light the coals directly using some other method.
2. If you are using the chimney starter, don’t let it get too hot.  This can make the initial smoker temperature too high and you’ll have to wait a while for its temperature to come back down.  I usually wait to see the top layer of charcoal just starting to ash around the edges, and then dump them into the smoker and spread the hot coals around.
3. Place the grill grate (but not the indirect piece or drip pan) in the smoker.  As the fire builds up, the heat will sanitize and clean off the grate.
4. Open up the bottom vent all the way, and open up the daisy wheel (i.e. swivel it out of the way).  Close the dome, and monitor the temperature.
5. As it nears 200 degrees, close the bottom vent to 1″, and swivel the daisy wheel back in place, although leave it dialed open so all of its holes are undamped.  The reason to start clamping things down at 200 is because later, it will take you some time to get the meat placed on the grill, various probes set up, etc., and during this time fresh oxygen will be gushing into the smoker.  If you wait for the smoker to be at 225 before trying to slow down the fire, then you may end up at 300 by the time you get your meat in there.
6. Once the smoker seems to be reasonably stable in the 220-230 range, you are ready to put the meat in.  The next few steps need to be done as quickly as possible, so as to minimize the amount of oxygen that is introduced into the stabilized smoker.  This means that you should have everything you need easily within reach before you open the dome.  Mise en place absolutely applies to barbecue.  For instance, your brisket should be de-foiled and ready to be placed on the grill.  You should have a place to put the hot grill grate while you’re messing around with the indirect piece.  Etc.
7. Open up the dome.  Scrape off the grate if necessary, then remove it and set it aside.  Remember: it is hotter than boiling water, so keep that in mind as you look for a place to put it.
8. Throw in your smoking wood chips.  For a brisket, I use a little mesquite but mostly hickory.
9. Put in your indirect piece.  Some people use the plate setter, flipped upside down.  I use a Woo3 extender ring with a a large 18″ drip pan on the bottom level as my indirection piece.
10. Replace the grate.
11. Place the brisket on the grate.  Insert the temperature probe into the thick part of the point, but try to avoid leaving the tip in the fat vein that runs between the point and the flat.  Install the grate-level temperature probe, if you have one.  If you are using the upside-down plate setter as your indirect piece, then try to place the grate probe away from direct exposure to the coals.
12. Close the dome, grab a beer, and chill for 5-10 minutes.  There is nothing you can do during this time because none of your temperature probes will read the right temperatures.
13. After a while, the dome thermometer will start registering the true temperature again.  This will consistenly be about 25 degrees hotter than the temperature at the grate.

Let the Meat Cook

Now just wait for the meat to cook.  Keep the temperature at 225 degrees.  The brisket will take about 1.5 hours per pound.  You are looking for a target internal temperature of 190 degrees.  If there is a thick point, and you have guests that like the lean cuts of brisket a little on the dry side (e.g. they like to drown it in BBQ sauce), then you can go to 195.

If you are doing an overnight cook, tune the dampers so that the temperature is stable/trending downward.  That’s a better failure mode than stable/trending upward, because you still end up with edible meat (albeit a little bit later than you might have wanted).

If you have a temperature probe with an alarm feature, LEARN TO USE IT.  Set the low temperature warning to 205, and the high temperature warning to 240.  This is a little asymmetric because I’ve had OK outcomes when the smoker has rested at 210 for a brief while, but if hits 205, there is a chance that your fire has gone out entirely.

Finishing the Cook

Once the meat reaches 195, take it out and wrap it up using a large piece of foil.  You should wear oven mitts or heat-proof grilling gloves to do this, because the meat is very hot.  Once it is successfully foiled, wrap it up with a beach towel that you don’t mind potentially getting a little greasy, and then place the toweled meat into a cooler.  The meat needs to rest 3-4 hours.  Really try to avoid ever serving it up immediately after taking it out of the smoker.  When you are planning the cook a few days ahead of time, the rest time really should be factored into part of the cooking time.

Bon Appetit!

The “eye drops” are an antibacterial agent that prevents gonorrhea or chlamydia in the mother from causing and infection and possible blindness in the baby. Hospitals used to use silver nitrate, and now they use Erythromycin.

In my searches, I have found some people questioning the efficacy of Erythromycin in preventing such infections. Whatever the truth is about that, it’s entirely irrelevant in our case because from what I can tell, there is simply no reason to do this procedure on an infant whose mother does not have these STDs.

I found some web pages making the argument that since the vast majority of mothers actually get reasonable pre-natal care that tests for these STDs, and they get treated before they give birth, the entire practice is relatively pointless. Regardless of the financial and legal reasoning behind hospitals’ decisions to maintain this practice, it’s clear to me that it’s just another unnecessary routine that we will explicitly avoid in our birth plan.

Here are some of the resources and links I found:

Newborn Baby Eye Drops Explained

Newborn Procedures (including a section on eye ointments)

Wikipedia entry on Erythromycin

Google Answers thread about Erythromycin

This morning Primo was at the house around 9am (about the same time our pest control guy showed up) and he started painting the hallway bookshelves. Jose showed up a little while later and was walking him through the punch list as I left for work.

When I got home this evening, I saw that Primo had not only painted the hallway bookshelves, but he had also repaired the final bit of floor tile in the center bathroom and painted all the of the kitchen base trim.

The bookshelf paint had dried, so Crystal and I got to work moving the bulk of our paperbacks onto them. As soon as we were done with that, we took advantage of the new empty shelf space in the office bookshelves and put up many of the books that had previously been in overflow stacks.

(For the curious ones with sharp eyes, yes – the Discworld novels are in publication/chronological order.)

Also, I’ve uploaded photos of last night’s work on installing our HTD HD-R80 in-ceiling speakers. I haven’t placed the grills back on them because they have small adjustment switches on the front that can independently add or subtract 3 dB to the woofer and tweeter, and I want to hear how they sound with a variety of music before finalizing my switch settings. (Once the grills are installed, they are quite a pain to remove.) Also pictured is my old Aiwa receiver from college that I ordered off of Onsale.com or Ubid.com back in 1998. It gets pretty warm but it works quite well. We’re in the market for something more energy efficient.

More photos at http://pictures.electrictao.net/finish2.

I have not only uploaded ALL the daily progress photos from the end of September through today, but I have also written detailed blog entries starting from the middle of September until up to Rob & Margaret’s wedding in mid-October. (I still need to do a couple more.) For those keeping count, that’s 13 albums and 19 blog entries, replete with inline photos. On a perfectly beautiful Saturday. Just for you.

Below is a helpful table of the new entries, complete with summary photo.

	9/22 – Plumbing trim-out day 2 9/23 – Plumbing trim-out day 3
	9/24 – Electrical trim-out, start of kitchen backsplash, and solar tubes!
	9/25 – Electrical trim out day 2, backsplash day 2, and more attic demolition
	9/26 – Kitchen backsplash day 3, cleanup and prep for flooring
	9/28 – Kitchen backsplash day 4 (grout & seal), oven installation
	9/30 – Main power turn on (electrical trim out, day 3) and start of hardwood flooring
	10/1 – Flooring day 1: master bedroom, kitchen floor hardibacker
(No picture)	10/3 – More work on the upstairs bathroom; dealing with the deck change order
(No picture)	10/4 – Main sink turn on! First dinner in the new kitchen!
	10/5 – Flooring day 2 (kitchen floor float), bay window underpinning
	10/6 – Flooring day 3 (Guest bedroom floor board finger join), deck skirting
	10/7 – Flooring day 4: floating the floor, finger join work in the guest bedroom
	10/8 – Flooring day 5: sanding guest bedroom floors, installing kitchen floors
	10/9 – End of an Era: removing the plywood barrier between the old house and new construction
	10/9 – Flooring day 6 (laundry tile), Trex decking delivery, center bathroom work
	10/12 – Flooring complete! (hallway, laundry tile), center bathroom work
	10/13 – Installing kitchen and laundry appliances
	10/14 – Moving back into the kitchen

In the morning, I had the pleasure of doing my first load of dishes and my first load of laundry.

Later in the day, we started unpacking boxes of kitchen items from the dining room and unpacking them into various cabinets and the pantry. Our friends who were staying with us for the wedding were very helpful in unpacking everything and getting everything moved in.

Photos: http://electrictao.net/gallery/kitchenmovein

I worked from home part of the time this morning, but I took time off work to help Jose’s crew move all the appliances into place and finish out the laundry area.

The first thing we did in the morning was to cut a notch in the metal backsplash for our cooktop. Why did we have to do this? Because the dumb plumbers installed the gas line the wrong way. Rather than installing it upwards from the base cabinet, they ran it through the back wall. There’s a reason why the BlueStar’s gas receptacle points downwards…

Next, they worked on installing the dishwasher. Because our previous dishwasher was wired directly into the supply wire, it didn’t have a plug that we could take and reuse on the new one. So, I cut apart a spare computer power cord and Jose wired that to the dishwasher. I also had to get a universal dishwasher supply hose from Home Depot so that it could connect to the hot water line from the supply valve under the sink.

While at Home Depot, I also got a dryer vent duct, and while Jose and his crew worked on installing that, I got to play with the now-functional BlueStar range. Here is range in its final installed configuration, and here is first light, on the center 15k BTU burner:

While all this was happening, Trinity kept a patient watch from behind her gate in the dining room:

Before installing the washer, I recalled our very important lesson about that we’ve learned about the plumbers, i.e. that they can’t distinguish hot water supply lines from cold water supply lines, and I asked Jose to make sure that the water coming out of the laundry hot water valve was indeed hot. They opened one of the casements in the bay window, pointed the hose outside, turned on the valve, and after a brief wait, confirmed that it was indeed the hot water.

After installing the laundry appliances, they installed all of the cabinet hardware that Crystal and I bought at Home Depot the other day. The hardware works really well with the style and color of everything.

Also, the whole time that this activity was going on in the kitchen, Danny’s sister Dorothy was cleaning up the splotches of wood adhesive that Danny had let behind in various spots on the floor. She showed up in the morning and went to work on the master bedroom. She basically finished that today, and plans to finish the kitchen area tomorrow.

Earlier in the day, Jose and his guys moved the fridge back in and hooked it all up. Later in the evening, Brad, Shaown, and Adrian helped me give it a thorough cleaning, inside and out. Every single shelf was disassembled and handwashed or wiped down with 409 or Windex. You can see the array of shelves drying on the island counter in this photo:

More photos: http://electrictao.net/gallery/kitchenfinish