Alex Bain's Blog

Life Expectancy Calculator

If you have some time to kill and want to see how long you have left on this earth, here's a good quick way to find out.

You answer about 20 questions based on your demographics, lifestyle, and family medical history, and it spits out your virtual age and expected of death. It's well designed, and neat to see how the answers impact your health.

It's also flattering to find out I'm a virtual teenager, health-wise (and probably in terms of maturity, too). Even if this news is coming from a website I've never seen before, good news is good news.

It looks like I'm not going anywhere for the next 19,800 days.

This makes me think I should really start saving more for retirement :-)

How to kill time and drive yourself crazy

When I worked in consulting, there were occasionally stretches of time at the office where I had to wait, either for someone else to finish work that I needed to do my own, or for a critical phone call to be returned.

This was common, and we would kill this time by challenging each other to silly games we found on the internet. We played a bunch of Oregon Trail, but the most popular game was always QB Challenge.

Nobody was better at this game than my buddy, Randall. The all-time highest score was 50K points, and Randall came within 50 points of the record over Thanksgiving in 2002.

I recently rediscovered this game, inadvertently, and noticed a new wrinkle that's been added. You don't play forever anymore, which is great news for Randall, who used to be able to play individual games that last over an hour. Now you get just 60 seconds to pile up points.

My record is 960. See if you can beat me.

Here's the link.

TriviaFix.com

One of the best things about having a blog is when people you don't know tell you that they enjoy your writing. In the last few months, I've received a handful of unsolicited invitations to try a product or check out a site based on someone reading AlexBain.com. Even if they just did search of people with Red Sox text on their pages, I'm excited to know that it's that easy to find me.

I got an email the other day from Dani Waxman at TriviaFix.com, and he mentioned that I might like his site based on what I've written about sports in the past.

I took a gander at his site, and it's excellent. I wish I'd thought of this. If you like sports trivia, give it a whirl.

3 fun brain teasers

I learned these recently from friends that had investment banking interviews. I'll put the answers at the bottom. The answers are clever, but don't recuire any "shoot the hostage" kind of out-of-the-box thinking. enjoy:

1. There's a man who owns a stable with 25 horses. He also has a track on which he can race 5 horses at a time. How many races must he hold to determine the 5 fastest horses?
2. There are 100 prisoners who are given the following instructions by a warden, "Tomorrow I will line you up facing in the same direction and make you wear hats. The hats will be either black or white, assigned at random, and you will not know how many there are of each color. You will be able to see the hats of the prisoners in front of you, but you will be unable to turn around. I will ask you what color your hat is. You must answer the question then shut up. If you're right, you live. If you're wrong you die." The prisoners have the night to devise a plan. How many of the 100 can safely survive?
3. There's a round table with a hole in the middle. You're playing a game with a friend where you take turns placing coins on the table. The loser is the first person who must place a coin on top of another coin. If you are going to play this game, would you rather go first or second? [amazingly, it doesn't matter how big the table, hole, or coins are]

OK, here are the answers:

1. The stable owner must hold seven races. Five "heats" with have different horses in each heat. Then he holds a race for the winner of each heat. The winner of this race is the fastest, but who are #2 and #3? Well, let's hold a race with the horse that finished #2 and #3 in the champions race, as well as the two horses that were just behind #2 in his original heat, and the 1 horse that was just behind #3. These are the only horse that could possibly still be in the top 3. Make sense?
2. The first prisoner who the warden asks is screwed. He's got a 50/50 shot, but he can pass along information about the others with his response. I heard someone suggest that the prisoners alter the tone of their voice to indicate the color of the person in front of them. Great idea, for partial credit. Here's the real answer: if there are 99 hats in front of the last man, there must either be an even number of black hats or white hats. The first prisoner counts the hats he sees in front of him, and his answer to the warden is not what he thinks his own hat is, but what color has an even number. Assuming he says "white", the next prisoner counts the white hats, and if he sees an even number too, he knows his own hat must be black. This same logic applies all the way up the line. Using this system, we can save all but the last prisoner, who might still stand a chance if he's lucky.
3. You want to go second in this game. You play your coin each turn on the exact 180º opposite place on the table from your opponent. As long as he has a place to put his coin, you will too, regardless of the dimensions of the table, hole, or coin. Cool, right?

My Superhero quiz results

Here are the results from the quiz I took that tells me which Superhero I am. It's a little like when girls try to determine which character from Sex & the City they most resemble:

You are Iron Man

Iron Man 80% The Flash 75% Spider-Man 65% Hulk 55% Superman 50% Green Lantern 50% Robin 40% Wonder Woman 25% Supergirl 25% Batman 20% Catwoman 20%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test


[By the way, I really like this guy's idea to put together a simple, compelling quiz with a simple compelling URL and throw Google ads all around it. I have no way of knowing this, but I'd guess he's made some decent money from this simple idea, especially because clicks on comic book related adwords must be pricey.]

Like clubbing a baby penguin

My Uncle Michael sent this to me. It's a snowman hitting a penguin with a bat for distance. Surprisingly captivating. I think part of what makes it so addictive is that the game's really quick to reload and try again if you're not happy with your score.
My personal record is 310.

I would do anything for love, but I won't do THAT...

Had a great conversation with my Milton buddies, Jared and Hutch, last night over dinner. It was an extension of a talk I've had with Lisa in the past, where we both said: "If there's one state I never want to move to it's ______." This is right up there with my 5 houses game, or the Tom or Tom game.

I told the guys what my answer was, what Lisa's answer was, and then I asked them to play.

Now, before I get into the answers, there's two ways to play, as Jared pointed out.

1. Think of a state you never want to live in, and name that state.
2. Think of a state your significant other might conceivably make you move to, and use this game to strategically and preemptively avoid that possibility. If you talk to a person playing this way, you end up learning neat info about their personality and/or relationship.

Here were the responses I've received so far

• Me: Connecticut. For two reasons. One, I hate that they arbitrarily post signs along the highway that they're doing construction (whether or not they actually are), so all fines on issued tickets will be doubled. Two, I never want to work in NYC, and I think knocking CT out of the equation would help me turn down a job there.
• Lisa: Texas. She says that my buddy Jeb and his friends are the exception that proves the rule that she usually doesn't like Texans. I actually really like the state and it's people, and think she would too, but I have to respect the way she plays the game.
• Jared: Iowa. Jared doesn't want to be so far away from the action, but conceded that his kids would get into whatever schools they applied to, because everyone loves applicants from Iowa.
• Hutch: Southern California, but not including San Diego. Hutch got kinda specific. I think there's a lot of merit to what he has to say, even though I really enjoy visiting the area and seeing the friends I have down there.

I make a good sofa cushion

I have a lot of relatives from the south, because my father grew up in Tennessee. His birthday was at the end of July, and my extended family all came up to celebrate. My Cousin Katie has recently had two children, and they're adorable (objectively speaking).

Well, hanging out on the Cape with them, a few days after the party, it occurred to me that my favorite activity when I was their age was to play around with the huge sofa cushions and "build a fort". I tried to explain the game to them, and the idea was a big hit, but the execution was not what I intended.

This picture has been buried on digital camera the last couple weeks, but I just discovered it, and thought it was worth sharing. This is how forts turn out when I'm the lead contractor.

Great bar games: Liar's Dice and 1-4-24

I'm a big fan of happy hour on Fridays, and, in San Francisco, I'd almost always spend them at a bar called Greens. We would usually just sit around, enjoy a few Bud Lights, and catch up on our respective weeks, but sometimes we'd play bar games. Golden Tee was a popular choice, but there were two dice games that I also really enjoyed:

1. Liar's Dice - The rules are best explained here, but what's noteworthy about this game is that we (and by "we" I mean mostly Randall and McGill) built a model that determines the likelihood a player is lying given a particular situation.
2. 1-4-24 - I don't see any good website for this game, so I'll explain the rules. Only one player rolls at a time. He rolls 6 dice, and keeps at least one. The ones he doesn't keep, he rerolls. By the time he's done rolling he must have kept a 1 and a 4, or he's disqualified. If he has a 1 and 4, the other dice are totaled, for a max of 24. The player with the highest 4 dice total wins the pot (usually we'd all put in a buck before each game). If two players tie for the highest total, the pot stays in the middle and a new game is played, with a new pot. The next outright winner takes both that game's pot and the previous.

The great thing about both of these games is that they require just enough skill that you must keep your head in the game, but not so much that they're difficult or intimidating to beginners.

Frusion: the biggest thing since sliced cheese

You all know how excited I got about sliced cheese, well here's another big food innovation...

It's a product I wish I'd known about when I was commuting to Apple:

I always wanted something light and healthy that I could consumer easily in the car, so I'd end up eating bananas, but these things taste awesome and they're so easy to grab as you're running out the door. This will become a staple of my business school diet.

As if the product wasn't cool enough on it's own, it's website has an old Mike Tyson's Punchout simulator.

UPDATE:
My friend, Hutch, who turned me onto drinkable yogurt pointed out that I have inadvertently endorsed the wrong brand. I hear that Frusion actually doesn't taste that good, and that the brand which is by far the best is Stonyfield Farm. Try their Organic Strawberry flavor.