| Year | Assessed Value | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | $146,900 | ||||
| 2008 | $160,000 | ||||
| 2007 | $151,900 | ||||
| 2006 | $123,800 | ||||
| 2005 | $109,300 | ||||
| 2004 | $103,400 | ||||
| 2003 | $84,500 | ||||
| 2002 | $81,000 | ||||
| 2001 | $78,600 | ||||
| 2000 | $70,300 |
Monday, February 01, 2010
Housing Bubble Made Real
We're considering buying the house we live in from our landed lords, so I swung over to the assessor's web site to see what it was appraised at. See if you can spot the where the housing bubble began in this table of valuations:
Saturday, November 28, 2009
True story
"Nomi?"
"Yeah?"
"How much do you love me?"
"....Why?"
"Cause I left my book in the car and I don't want to have to put on clothes to go get it."
"You want to know if I love you enough to go out into the cold and rain and get your book, which you left there, so you don't have to put on pants?"
"Yes."
......
"What have you done for me lately?"
"Yeah?"
"How much do you love me?"
"....Why?"
"Cause I left my book in the car and I don't want to have to put on clothes to go get it."
"You want to know if I love you enough to go out into the cold and rain and get your book, which you left there, so you don't have to put on pants?"
"Yes."
......
"What have you done for me lately?"
The Best Video Game Ever!
Had some friends over this evening, and while we were talking I fired up Super Mario World on my Wii's Virtual Console. While I played, one friend asked a question to the effect of, "Do we still play games like this one because it's truly a great game, or is it not actually that great and we just play it for nostalgia? I mean, when your [my] kids [who are 2 and 4] hit that magic video game demographic of 8 or 10 years old, will they look at this and recognize a great game, or will they see a crappy old videogame?"
This lead to an interesting discussion of greatness in videogames, and how if it's even possible, could a game objectively be described as "great" or "the best?" We came up some interesting things:
"The Best" anything is a highly subjective matter; Halo is widely considered to among the best FPSs out there, but one of our impromptu round-table members who is a big fan of the FPS genre cannot stand it, as he hates any FPS played on a console. We decided that "best of" contests would work the best within a given genre. I asked would it possible to come up with a list of criteria for each of the "canonical" video game genres in order to remove as much subjectivity as possible from a "best of" contest, and we decided that it probably would, but it was not a task we were interested in at the moment.
Someone brought up something that they had seen on XPlay, I think, about how one of the hosts was introducing some of the games from his childhood to his kids, and sometimes he could not remember why he liked a particular game so much, but other times he found games that he and his kids both had a lot of fun with. We decided that that was probably the fairest possible method, and the best video games could hope for was a certain level of "timelessness," something that can only be determined until a few more generations of people are exposed to the same game; if it was fun for kids then, and still fun for kids 25 years later, then it's probably a really good game. I suggested that, based on that criteria, SMW is probably more timeless than the original NES Super Mario Brothers and everyone seemed to agree with me.
One thing I've thought of since they all left: Since we probably can't fairly list out the criteria for "the best videogame ever," would it be possible list the criteria of a "great" videogame, either by genre or overall? I mean, not everyone has the same list of "best books of all time" but we could probably agree on certain things that make a book great; the same should be possible for videogames. It might be easier with games to list the things that a "great" game shouldn't have: sluggish controls, slowdown, things like that.
This lead to an interesting discussion of greatness in videogames, and how if it's even possible, could a game objectively be described as "great" or "the best?" We came up some interesting things:
"The Best" anything is a highly subjective matter; Halo is widely considered to among the best FPSs out there, but one of our impromptu round-table members who is a big fan of the FPS genre cannot stand it, as he hates any FPS played on a console. We decided that "best of" contests would work the best within a given genre. I asked would it possible to come up with a list of criteria for each of the "canonical" video game genres in order to remove as much subjectivity as possible from a "best of" contest, and we decided that it probably would, but it was not a task we were interested in at the moment.
Someone brought up something that they had seen on XPlay, I think, about how one of the hosts was introducing some of the games from his childhood to his kids, and sometimes he could not remember why he liked a particular game so much, but other times he found games that he and his kids both had a lot of fun with. We decided that that was probably the fairest possible method, and the best video games could hope for was a certain level of "timelessness," something that can only be determined until a few more generations of people are exposed to the same game; if it was fun for kids then, and still fun for kids 25 years later, then it's probably a really good game. I suggested that, based on that criteria, SMW is probably more timeless than the original NES Super Mario Brothers and everyone seemed to agree with me.
One thing I've thought of since they all left: Since we probably can't fairly list out the criteria for "the best videogame ever," would it be possible list the criteria of a "great" videogame, either by genre or overall? I mean, not everyone has the same list of "best books of all time" but we could probably agree on certain things that make a book great; the same should be possible for videogames. It might be easier with games to list the things that a "great" game shouldn't have: sluggish controls, slowdown, things like that.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Google Books Snafu
The method that Google uses to scan books for their Google Books project is pretty interesting. Basically, they take a photo of each pair of pages as the book lays open on a table. Then they use software to digitally "unbend" the image so that it looks like a flat scan. Anyway, it looks like sometimes the person doing the scanning doesn't move quite quick enough for the camera. Check out page 492 and 493 of Charles Babbage's autobiography.
Looking around I found a few other examples from Tech Crunch and Mysterious Ways
Looking around I found a few other examples from Tech Crunch and Mysterious Ways
Monday, July 27, 2009
Scientists Report Pretty Women Get Laid More Often
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