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On the way back from Houston last week, I dug into The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin.  Josh was a remarkably gifted former chess wunderkind in his youth whose exploits were chronicled in the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer". In an unusual turn of events, Josh changed his focus to tai chi competition in his early 20's and became a world champion there as well.  He now is focused on brazilian jiu jitsu.

The entire theme of the book is essentially that Josh does not feel like he is gifted specifically at chess or tai chi.  He attributes his success to a love of learning and details the specific pieces of it that he has observed throughout his career.

Let's cover a few of the interesting chapters.

Losing to win

Losing is tough.  Nobody really likes it, per se.

On the other hand, you must be willing to lose to win.  It's as simple as that.

Josh tells anecdotes of particular competitors in childhood who collapsed immediately when faced with a truly tough situation or their first big loss.  He also talks about kids who instinctually avoided tougher enemies ... partly because the prospect of disappointment from their parents was so daunting.

What Josh did was different.  He sought out unfamiliar competitors and uncomfortable styles of play.  In losing ... in exceeding the levels of his comfort and his game ... he raised himself up time and time again.

Even in adulthood, he tells the story of a large, dominating individual named Frank who slammed Josh around for months in tai chi training.  Josh willingly submitted to this in order to better himself. In the end, Frank stops practicing with him in just a few fights after Josh finally rises above his level.  Instead of viewing Josh's success as a new opportunity to better himself, he shrinks away.  Frank only likes winning.

To be blunt, I know many people like Frank.  A lot of people derive satisfaction from the act of winning.  I have always felt it is better to appreciate a hard earned victory.  In fact, many of my friends know that I will try certain things precisely because I am terrible at them.  And I have never once been disappointed by my ability to become decent at something with enough effort.

I am freqently disappointed when I see people fail to challenge themselves, even when there is no cost to them at all except a little bit of ego.  If there is nothing to lose, why not try it?  When I truly apply myself to certain problems and find myself overcoming what once seemed incomprehensible and impossible, I feel gratified.  This has ranged from coordination in drumming syncopation to being able to tease out and find a tiny mathematical bug in some MPEG-2 code that was causing red colors to bleed all over the place.  I feel like this lesson is one I've already internalized well, so it was gratifying to see it put to paper. 

Two approaches to learning

This chapter talks about two mindsets to learning.

The first, an "entity" mindset, describes the kind of person that ascribes success to an innate level of ability.  "I am smart at this."

The second, an "incremental" mindset, describes a person that believes success is a result of hard work.  "I should have tried harder" or "I got it because I worked very hard at it".

The research shows that incremental theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game.  Entity types are far more likely to have a learned helpnessless response when encountering failure, to the point where, after hitting a roadblock on a tough situation, the loss affects previously mastered problems.

It should come as no surprise that the incremental approach is the better one.  For yourself and with kids, the idea is to compliment effort and speak of everything as a process of effort and time.  Kids are not dumb and know that results matter as well, so you shouldn't dodge the issue when a setback occurs.  Simply consider losses to be part of the learning process and wins to be enjoyed, but in a transient fashion.

The soft zone

The soft approach embraces adversity.  The hard approach resists potential obstacles.  The author compares it to walking in the rain to your car ... do you tense up, scrunch over and run to your car as quickly as possible?  Or do you accept the rain and not let it affect you ... perhaps even try to enjoy it as you walk?

This analogy resonated with me significantly because, strangely enough, I had found myself recently thinking about this very issue before I even read this chapter.  Why, I wondered, did I tend to try and cover myself and run to the car when it wasn't going to help much at all?  Running does not really keep much drier, but it certainly makes me feel stressed out.  So lately I've taken to simply walking normally and letting the rain fall on me.

Back to the point.  You are concentrating on an important game.  Suddenly, a jack hammer starts going off outside.  Or perhaps some fans start heckling you.  What do you do?

The best players can take the noise and turn it to their advantage.  Spike Lee, for example, would constantly heckle Reggie Miller courtside.  Seems good, right?  Not when you realized that Reggie Miller was using him as fuel for his fire ... blowing out the Knicks time after time.

Adversity doesn't go away.  We don't live in a perfect world.  Becoming flexible, like a reed in the wind, instead of fracturing under pressure, is extremely important.  Turning such events to your psychological advantage is a key element of competitive psychology.

Other notes and conclusion

In recounting his road to the Push Hands Tai Chi world championship, I was shocked at the extreme level of cheating present at the Tai Chi world championships in Taiwan.  Pretty much everything you can think of was done to favor the local teams ... from changing the rules right at the beginning of the tournament (of course, the local teams knew well in advance), to trying to wear out the foreign teams with another mandatory tournament, to simply not counting scored points.  It was absolutely disgusting to read.

It is a testament to Josh that his extreme depth made him so far superior to his opponent that he was able to overcome truly staggering levels of dishonesty by the officials and still win.  My parents are from Taiwan, even if I'm not, so I feel some sense of cultural embarassment.

The world Josh has lived in is, in a word, intense.  The extreme levels of intensity required to perform at a competitive level are daunting.  I feel as if I should engage in some sort of competitive activity to keep my mind sharp, but my fear is that it will dominate my time to the exclusion of other activities.  Not to make excuses, but considering it further, that's a completely valid problem to have with the whole thing.  What I need is a way to compete without it sucking up too much of my time.  I'm not sure my mindset can handle that, though!

Many of the concepts in the book rang true as soon as I read them.  We learn by practicing and honing our minds to process patterns, not by memorizing rules.  Our brains are essentially big, giant, pattern recognition machines.  Internalizing those patterns is a matter of repetition, deep analysis, and then taking numerical insights to an unconscious level.

To sum up, I absolutely recommend this book.  It gives you valuable no nonsense insight into the mindset of a winner, and it demonstrates the importance of a healthy and productive mindset.  Josh is phenomenally attuned to his own psychology and is more capable of expressing those thoughts in the written word than most authors I have read.  Easily worth the money.

So, I finally managed to tear through another book.  The one is called "Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life", and it's written by Neil Strauss.

The book chronicles one author's quest to be able to survive in case the system breaks down.  Survivalists like to say ... we are all only three days away from total chaos, and that's the three days you can survive without water, not be incredibly hungry, etc.  The scary thing is ... it may not be the way most of us are used to looking at the world, but it's true.

Some helpful acronyms to know if you're speaking survivalist lingo, by the way:

• WTSHTF (When The *** Hits The Fan)
• EOTWAWKI (End Of The World As We Know It)
• BOB, BOV, BOL (Bug Out Bag, Vehicle, Location)

Warren Buffett has often been quoted as saying that your lot in life has a lot to do with timing and placement ... where and when, in other words.  He's been famously quoted as saying something to effect of "Bill Gates may be a billionaire today, but if he had been born two centuries ago, he probably would have been eaten by a bear".

Personally, this resonates with me.  Most of us would probably be eaten by a bear.  It wasn't that long ago that all people could worry about was how to keep a roof over their heads and where the next meal would come from.  Society has built up such a tremendous amount of infrastructure around us that we end up thinking and worrying about completely different problems that the ones our ancestors were designed to face.  It's amazing, but also a little unsettling.

The chapters in the book are vanishingly small and plentiful ... many running at the length of just a small anecdote of two to three pages.  It's not wrong, but perhaps a bit different.  I think the design is meant to capture some of the random stories and short thoughts that chronicle his experience.

The novel takes a while to get going.  I found myself already halfway way through the book and Neil was still recounting his experiences with trying to get an second citizenship in another country.  It's incredibly expensive to do if you don't just move there ... tiny countries basically sell citizenship in return for investment or job creation.  The US doesn't make it easy on you either ... in the aftermath of 9/11, the government has made it very difficult to keep international bank accounts and they want to keep an eye on everything you do just so they can try to gank your tax dollars even after you stop being a citizen.

While he waits for the citizenship to go through, however, the pace picks up.  The author starts taking gun lessons, wilderness survival training, knife fighting classes, and edible plant walks.  While the novelization of the details is light, the details are fun and interesting every time you do get them.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on his training at Gunsite.  The man who recommends the training program to Neil tells him "People with guns are dangerous.  Gunsite graduates are deadly."

Neil flys out there ... and btw, it's still quite easy to check a weapon on a plane.  The instructor tells them at the beginning of the class "You don't rise to the occasion.  You default to your level of training.  When the stress hits, you will only be half as good as your best day of recent training."  I'm sure this applies to many situations, not just shooting!  People learn by doing!

He picks up some interesting tidbits.  Shooting for the head with a pistol is risky because the skull is excellent protection, meaning a bullet can simply glance off.  If you have a clear shot, you go for the eye.  If you are preparing to go into a gunfight, you bring a shotgun, not a pistol.  Pistols are portable self defense, but low damage weaponry.  Colonel Cooper recommeneded a 12-gauge shotgun with an 18.5 inch barrel.

The class concludes with the following advice.  "Be safe, and be good to everyone you meet ... but always have a plan to kill them."  Funny guys.

In CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams) class, they start off with the following.

"If there's a big disaster, you cannot expect assistance for how many days?

"Three to five days."

"So who's going to get you when there's an emergency?"

"Nobody."

"Nobody is coming to your aid in a disaster.  You have to be independent."

In retrospect, what happened during Katrina wasn't surprising.  Federal and local rescue planners already know it will take forever to get to survivors.  The indignance of the rest of the country is because we're ignorant.  Apparently, in the event of a major earthquake, it could take as long as 30 days to restore water everywhere.  The average person needs a gallon of water per day to survive.  Drink from the water heater if you have a house.

On the edible plant walks in California, Neil asks what the parsley like plant is that he keeps seeing all over the place.  One student quips "California parsley surprise".  The lead explains more seirously.  "Hemlock. Dead in 30 minutes."  Guess I'm not going to eat any plants out here.  In fact, the walk ends up being peppered with interesting trivia about how eating so and so plant will kill you in such a way (usually not a pleasant way).

The knife instructor's slogan is "Cogito ergo armatum sum."  I think, therefore I am armed.  In addition to forging, sharpening, and the usual lessons on the types of swings and strikes, perhaps the most brutal part of the book is when the knife instructor teaches him how to slaughter, gut and skin a goat for food.  Although it's just words on a page, the description of the act as he cuts the goat's throat in front of the instructor made my queasy.  I'm pretty sure that if I did this in front of a friend, they would think differently of me.  Neil has the same thought as his girlfriend waits in the car.  But there wasn't a time long ago that everyone had to do this...and it was normal, because it was part of staying alive.  How can our moral standards be so different today?  It can't be possible for people to be bad because they slaughter a goat, or else everyone centuries ago would have been a bad person.

All in all, I found the book to be a rather light read, but still very informative.  Many of the instructors and other characters he meets are surprisingly quotable.   It would have been nice to get more in depth coverage of each of the topics in the book, but I suppose that wasn't really the point.

In the end, I think what you learn from this book, aside from the useful trivia, is that survivalism and training, isn't, as a practical matter, that useful of a skill to pick up right now.  On the list of things people die from, disasters are really, really low on the list.  But if the nagging sense that you wouldn't know what to do when a crisis hits is bothering you ... if knowing you're ready for anything makes you walk around with a little more confidence and a little less fear ...than these folks aren't as crazy as they sound.  After all, there's a lot of mental security built in when you're at the top of the food chain.

In non tech related matters, I got a chance last week to try a quirky little food that I've had my eye on for years.

The miracle fruit (see the Wikipedia page) was discovered (by Europeans, god bless our Euro-centric culture) in 1725 when an explorer noticed native Africans chewing the berry before meals.  In a nutshell, when the fruit is chewed, one's sense of taste is altered such that sour foods taste sweet!

Pretty crazy, huh?  In fact, it represent such a huge change in one's sense that most people start questioning whether or not it's legal when they hear what it does. (The answer is yes, of course, it is legal.)

Reading the New York Times article on flavor-tripping parties certainly did nothing to lessen my curiosity.  And, as an aside, the name "flavor tripping" certainly does nothing to lessen the questionability of the activity.  So when a friend casually mentioned hearing about miracle fruit, my ears perked up and we decideed to make a little event of it.

The berries themselves don't keep very long ... apparently, you have to eat them within a couple of days of being picked.  Sorry, but I don't schedule my activities around fruit.  So instead, we opted to try a set of packaged tablets from ThinkGeek.

The day of, we made a field trip to the local Safeway and wandered through the aisles grabbing anything that looked tasty or tart.  The cashier gave us an odd glance or two as we checked out single fruits of several different types, but nothing we couldn't handle.

The tablets appear to be manufactured here in the States but are courtesy of some "pan-biotic" Taiwanese company.  We put 911 on speed dial just in case.

The tablet itself must be taken by dissolving it all over your tongue.  Resist the temptation to wash it down like medication ... the effect is produced by binding the active compound of the berries to your taste buds, so just suck on the tablet like candy.  To me, the tablet tasted chalky, sort of like a slightly sweet vitamin, but not acidic at all.  You should be through it in a couple of minutes.

Then the fun begins.

Lemons - Sweet!

Limes - Also sweet.

Oranges - Awesome.  Kind of like an orange without the rind.

Tabasco sauce - tasty sweet at first! The heat hits you slightly afterwards.

Sriracha hot sauce - No difference.  Just spicy.

Chocolate - tastes the same.

Chocolate pudding - not much different.  But I do love me some pudding.

Tomatos - Awesomely sweet.  You know that whole debate about whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable?  Officially a fruit with miracle berries.

Strawberries - Fantastic!

Vodka - Still strong, but goes down smoother.

Guinness - Much less bitter, even slightly sweet.

Pickles - Sweet and crunchy.

Dried fruit - No difference.  Except dried apples tasted kind of bland.  Honestly, tho ... could've just been the apples.

Peppered beef jerky - very slightly sweeter.  No effect on the peppery taste.

Olives - no change.

Jamaican ginger ale - No difference.

Towards the end of our flavor trip, we ate another tomato and realized the effect was wearing off.  That was about 40 minutes in.  We also slowly came to the realization that we were surrounded by half eaten snacks and various fruits, all of which needed cleaning up.

I think it's worth trying a range of foods just to see for yourself, even if you kind of know they aren't going to work.  Also, it should be pretty obvious from the above, but drinking alcohol is a lot easier after eating a miracle berry ... so be sure to pace yourself.  Then again, maybe getting a little tipsy isn't so bad.

Overall, I would sum it up as definitely worth trying, and a lot of fun all around.  I'm curious to see what an overnight shipment of a berry or two will do, but I'm sure we'll get to that at some point.  Do it with friends ... I think a party tasting is an excellent idea and is now definitely in the cards.

I'm writing this from Squaw Valley in Tahoe, where there's a bit of a snowstorm going.

I can basically count the number of times that I've gone skiing on one hand.  The first was a week long ski trip in high school.  The second was a single day my junior year of college where I visited a friend in Vermont.  The third was last year here in Tahoe for a weekend (ski'd one day).  And the fourth was earlier this week via a company/employee funded offsite (another one day).

In general, I'm not too bad at skiing, having done sufficient amounts of rollerblading in the past to have some sense of balance on my feet.  I did a black on my last day of skiing in high school without falling (apparently a banner day for me since I remember that).  On these single day trips, since then, I've hovered between blue and black difficulties ever since.

As with any new physical activity, I find myself barely able to move after the first round of exertion. All the straining with my legs to keep my balance adds up after the first day.  For this reason, I opted not to go for a second day earlier this week.  However, yesterday I ski'd for about 2/3'rds of the day and I was tired at the end, but not completely wrecked like before.  Today I actually feel pretty good, so presumably I'm adapting quickly.  I don't have any plans to go again this season, however, so that physical improvement may be for naught.

A list of random thoughts over the past week or so.

1. What's the difference between these 50 dollar goggles and these 100 dollar goggles?
2. This thermal underwear is really comfy!
3. God, I wish I had a face mask.
4. God, I wish I had a face mask.  Wait, why didn't I buy one last week when I thought the same thing?
5. I'm going to wish I had a face mask next year, aren't I?
6. These ski house rentals are totally low tech (no internet). Thank god for 3G phone tethering.
7. Here's the fairly steep and very powdery place where I lost my ski in the snow for half an hour last week.  I deem the potential pain of that experience to be more than the potential pain of just zooming straight down the slope. GOOOOO!
8. Is that melted snow from my glasses or snot coming out of my nose?
9. My single layer of ski gloves are clearly not keeping my hands warm.
   
10. Riding up and down on this cable car is like Groundhog Day.  Everyone says the same things every time.  "OOO, look how far down it is!"  "If this cable breaks, we are so dead." General yelps as the cable car passes a support tower and swings for a bit.
11. Skiing in tons of powder presents its own set of problems.  Namely, how to get out of it if you fall.  Snowboarders are particularly screwed.
    
12. I clearly strapped my boots in too tightly in previous runs of skiing.  My shins aren't nearly as bruised these past two runs and they were much more comfortable.
13. My arms aren't tired at all.  Does this have anything to do with Rock Band? (seriously, it probably does)
    

My approach to skiing, not taking it too seriously, is to just do it as much as possible without causing myself annoying pain.  I don't see much point in killing myself just because I'm here.  My ideal approach would be to go for half a day every couple of days or so when I feel like it.  Unfortunately, the sport itself doesn't really lend itself to that model, given that I have a job and don't live in the area.  So I do what I can.

One nice thing this weekend is that I can see some improvement aside from the physical aspects.  After talking with some friends, I decided to think of skiing as more of my body carrying my momentum and my feet keeping me afloat (like shock absorbers on a car).  This was a conclusion I had reached on my own, but apparently it's just basic knowledge, and I just needed verification.  Anyway, after trying it out, this is clearly a superior approach.  Relying too much on my feet to balance myself makes me far more vulnerable to the random bumps and terrain that I encounter as I make my way down the slopes.  Keeping my feet light lets me ride over those bumps with much less impact to my overall direction and momentum.

In general, skiing seems like a tremendous amount of overhead to me ... involving expensive equipment, lodging, travel time, not to mention the cold and trudging through snow and limited windows of availability and good conditions.  It certainly isn't what I would call a poor man's sport.  Frankly, there are cheaper and more convenient ways to exert yourself.  I see nothing particularly appealing about skiing except for the unique merits of the experience, which has to compete against all of the downsides I mention above.  Still, if you like the experience of plowing down the slopes that much, there really isn't anything comparable.

With all the overhead involved with skiing, I find myself wondering how the sport evolved.  Lifts certainly haven't been around forever, so the sport seems like it must have been completely inaccessible until the latter half of the 20th century.  I know this must be easily discovered information via the Internet, but I haven't bothered looking yet.

As it is, I find this to be a sport that I either do a lot or a little, and a little bit seems to be the right amount.  A "Variety is the spice of life" approach, if you will.  I certainly wouldn't mind seeing myself graduate to consistent black runs in a few more visits or so, if my skill level can survive the long gap between visits.

I recently surveyed several friends to see whether they were maxing out their 401K's.  To my surprise, many of them weren't.  In fact, from general experience a lot of people ignore this seemingly no brainer piece of money management.

In short, the 401K is an investment vehicle designed to encourage savings by the government.  You can contribute a maximum set amount it each year ... in 2009, you can contribute up to $16,500.

The way the government "encourages" your participation involves taxation.  You only pay taxes once on the money going into and coming out of your 401K.  Normally, you would have to pay taxes on money when you earn it and on any gains thereafter.  Essentially, if you use a 401K to invest, the government takes a lot less in taxes from you than it would otherwise.  However, because the goal is to get you to save, you must wait until 59 1/2 years of age to begin tapping the savings account without penalties.

OK, not having to pay taxes is great on its own.  But, on top of that, your employer often has match programs.  For example, if you look at the benefits page for Google, Google matches up to 100% up to $2500 or 50% up to the contribution limit, whichever is greater.  Let me sum that one up for you.  If you contribute $16,500 this year at Google, you get $8,250 in free money from the company on top of that initial contribution. Granted, Google has great benefits, but other companies have quite generous match plans as well.  If you had $8,250 sitting in front of you right now, would you just throw it away?  Because if you aren't contributing to your 401K, you're doing something pretty close.

Now, due to the penalties, some people are worried about not having that money around to make a big purchase because there are penalties on taking that money out ahead of retirement.  Generally, you can borrow against the 401K to do things like pay for college tuition or buy a home, so if you're worried about liquidity, you probably shouldn't be.  Also, there are hardship clauses where you can take money out without penalty to deal with unexpected medical expenses, etc.  In general, your 401K is liquid for you if you really need it to be, but it's not there to be abused.

The standard 401K is not taxed when income goes in.  Taxation only happens when you pull money out at retirement.  There is a second form of the 401K known as the Roth 401K.  This plan allows you to contribute your after tax earnings now, and not get taxed when you start pulling the money out near retirement.

Why pick one over the other?  Well, if you believe your tax rates will be higher near retirement, then taking the tax hit now is a pretty smart thing to do.  In short, having climbed the corporate ladder (or whatever ladder you're climbing) and observing the spending patterns of the country in general, quite a few people are betting on their taxes being higher in retirement.  In this case, the Roth 401K is a good idea.

If you're having trouble maxing out your contribution to leverage your company match, then you probably want to just do the standard 401K so that you get the maximum benefit from matching.

If you're already maxing out your contribution, then the Roth 401K can be pretty smart.  In particular, independent of the whole taxation issue, using the Roth 401K lets you leverage significantly more money into the 401K.  For example, if you think now is a good time to invest in general, then getting money into your 401K right now via the Roth is a great way to dump more money with the 401K tax advantage into investments than you could otherwise do with a regular 401K.

The bottom line is this.  If you aren't maxing your 401K plan out, you're giving up a lot of free money.  If you aren't sure whether you should be or not, then odds are you should be.  Feel free to do your own research, but hopefully this gives some people a kick in the pants to check their contributions and start saving some money.

I'm back from vacation as of earlier this week, but the blogging continues with a weekly Sunday schedule. =)

Do you know the answer to the title of this blog post?  Do you want to know?  If so, then keep reading, dear friends.

I was driving back from the airport, coming back from vacation, and I had a little over 1/8th of the tank in the rental car.  Time was a little short and I didn't particularly feel like taking a big detour to hit a different gas station from the one next to the airport.  The gas light came on about 20 miles away from the airport.  Was I going to make it?

Turns out that tankonempty.com is a great resource to figure out exactly that without having to run down the tank yourself.  The average distance is listed for all car models so you can figure out the answer yourself ... but, in general, you have about 30-40 miles to go from that point.  The Toyota Corolla I was driving averages 46 miles before running out of steam.  One less thing to stress about on the way back to the Bay. :)

Note that running down to the gas light is not really a good idea, because the fuel pumps in many cars are designed to run submerged.  So regularly burning thru that reserve actually can cause damage to the fuel pump in your car over time.  Try to refill at around 1/8th to 1/4th of the meter.

 

I recently rearranged my living room to be a bit more spacious...and the 24" monitor I was using for a TV wasn't cutting it any more.  I thought for a long time I could get away without a TV, but the monitor was looking awfully tiny in the corner ... and with friends coming over for Rock Band and other reasons, it was time to take the plunge.

I realize this is a stereotypically male topic, but hey, as I learned recently, the male brain is more interested in visual engagement.  So you'll have to excuse me, but I can't help it ... I'm genetically predisposed. =)

The short of what I did was I bought a Sharp LC46D64U 46" LCD TV.  Didn't like it so much, so sold it to a Googler for a fair price and ended up picking up a Panasonic TH-42PZ85U 42" plasma TV.  Very happy with this one.

Read the following and learn what I learned.

Looking at TV's in a store

You should do it, but you need to be aware that stores set the TV's to blow out the color and brightness...basically settings that look OK in a harsh store lighting environment but will look like crap in your home.  Whatever you see on the TV's in a store isn't what it's going to look like in your house or apartment and should be taken with a heavy grain of salt.  If you can, go look at TV's in a darkened or specialized home theater dealer ... you'll be better able to judge what you like there.

Black levels

This refers to how "black" your TV really is when displaying a black image.  For an example of ideal blackness, if you were in a completely isolated and unlit room, you would not be able to see a TV displaying a black image.

Of course, in reality, this isn't the case.  You can definitely see TV's in a dark room displaying black.

The reason is that LCD's don't perfectly block the backlight, so light gets through.  Plasma TV's have residual/constant charge in the cells, so they still emit a small amount of light even when displaying a black image (or something close to it).  In general, however, the plasma approach results in better black levels, and the LCD approach is rather fundamentally flawed here.

Contrast

How much of a range of brightness can this TV show?  AKA, what is the difference between the darkest level of brightness the TV can display vs the brightest level?  The more, the better.

Manufacturers like to fudge these numbers, as they do with lots of numbers, by quoting contrast levels obtained by dynamically adjusting the image and backlight based on the content of the image or the ambient lighting.  Usually this is the "dynamic contrast ratio".  This is basically bullshit, but seems to be standard operating procedure these days.

LCD's are beginning to approach plasma constrast ratios, but plasma still takes the win on this one too.

Read this article from Gizmodo for a nice primer, and note the pictures.

Power consumption

Plasma TV's generally consume more power, but not as much as you might think.   Here's why.  The transmissive nature of LCD's mean that the backlight is on all the time.  Plasma TV's, on the other hand, only use power when charging a cell.  The maximum power consumption of a plasma TV, therefore, occurs when the screen is completely white.

Obviously this almost never happens.  So while plasma TV's are rated to consume more peak power, on average, they consume nearly the same amount as an equivalent size LCD.  In reality, the variation between individual manufacturers in power consumption is far more important.  In general, expect around 50-150 dollars in energy cost per year to run your TV. 

Here's a good CNet article about HDTV power consumption that goes into more detail. I did not consider this to be a factor when making my purchase.

http://reviews.cnet.com/tv-power-consumption/?tag=rb_content;rb_mtx  

Weight/Size

LCD TV's are generally slightly slimmer and lighter than their plasma counterparts.  We're talking about a 10-15% difference.  For example, my 46" LCD was around 70 pounds...and my 42" plasma was about the same weight. Interesting, but essentially a non-issue.

Motion Blur

This one is interesting.

On a TV, good motion resolution characteristics are important for tracking small objects and continuing to see fine detail as an image quickly pans or changes.  So while a static image may look great on any particular TV, how moving video looks on a TV is an entirely different story.  Typically, the type of consumers looking for good performance in this area are game players and sports aficionados.

Put another way, under motion, the effective perceived resolution of a display may drop.  Your 1080p display may only look like a 900p display when things are moving.

So let's talk about what causes this.

Poor response times 

LCD's have a reputation for poor motion blur characteristics.  This is largely due to the face that early LCD technology did not have good response time characteristics...that is, the pixels couldn't change to the next color as quickly as the images on the screen were changing. As a result, you would see trailing images or blur.

However, this is largely in the past for LCD's.  At a standard framerate of 60 frames per second,  a new frame is displayed every 16 ms.  LCD's have response times around 5-8ms...some going low as 2ms.

Plasma cells have always switched very quickly, so this has generally not been an issue for plasma TV's.

Sample and hold

I found this one really fascinating.

Let's assume your TV is showing you 60 frames of video per second.   Would it be better for the TV to show you

A. Each image for a full 1/60th of a second

B. Each image strobed instantaneously and precisely 1/60th of a second.

As it turns out, according to the way the human eye works, the answer is B.  Think about it this way.  Any particular image being shown to you is only valid for that instant in time. The longer that image is shown to you for the rest of that 1/60th of a second until the next frame is shown, the more "wrong" it is.  This "wrongness" is perceived as motion blur by the human eye.

This effect is called the sample and hold effect.  The "sample", or image, is displayed and then "held" for the entire 1/60th frame time.  The longer it is held, the more blur your eyes perceive. 

So the answer, obviously, is to strobe the image instantaneously every 1/60th of a second.  Of course, nothing is truly instantaneous, so now we've got issues.  The percentage of time spent displaying the image within the frame time is called the "duty cycle".

Regular LCD's have a duty cycle of around 100%...that is, they show the image for pretty much the entire duration of the frame.  CRT's have a duty cycle of 10%...that's really good!  And plasma TV's have a duty cycle of around 25%...which is quite good, but not perfect.

New LCD TV's compensate for this by performing either black frame insertion or frame interpolation.  These features get all kinds of weird trademarked names from each manufacturer, so you'll have to dig and interpret the sales literature to determine what features different TV's are actually offering.

I'm not going to get too deep into this, but black frame insertion basically takes the 1/60th of a second and shows the real image for 1/120th of a second and a black frame for the other 1/120th of a second.  This "clears" the image to the human eye and reduces the duty cycle to 50%.  I like this feature in LCD TV's and the effect is clearly visible to a trained eye.

Frame interpolation essentially makes up intermediate frames for the source material.  Since the TV is actually displaying different images 120 times a second, this also reduces perceived motion blur.  The problem of course, is that those intermediate images aren't real.  As a result, weird artifacts, double images, or haze can be displayed accidentally.  Anyway, some people like this feature, some people don't.  Personally, I am not interested in the potential artifacting that can result from this feature, but it's the hot new thing for 2008.

Poor source characteristics

A lot of content you watch already has motion blur built into the image.  You can verify this by freeze framing or pausing something you're watching.  So detecting motion blur in these cases can be really tricky.

Off angle viewing

LCD's used to be absolutely terrible about this...even going so far as to see the colors invert past a certain viewing angle.  Nowadays, things are much better, but not perfect.  You're likely to seeing dropoffs in brightness and contrast as you move more than 20-30 degrees off angle.

Plasma TV's emit light in an unfocused fashion from the cells in the screen, so there's no off angle viewing issues to speak of.

Depending on where you are planning to put your new TV, viewing angles may or may not be important.  In a big living room or common area, you'll notice the viewing angle issues more.

Latency

This refers to the time between when the TV receives an image vs when it displays it.  This is often referred to as input lag.  Today's TV's perform a lot of image processing to enhance or otherwise tweak the incoming image.   Unfortunately, the processing results in a delay before the image gets to the screen.  Typically, this range anywhere from 0 to 100 ms, although on average you'll probably see latency in the 30-60 ms range.

Letancy is important for competitive/serious gaming because every millisecond between when an event is displayed vs when you react to it counts.  Latency is a non-issue for everyone else since as long as the audio and video are in sync it doesn't really matter when the audio and video get to you when you watch TV or DVD's.

For gamers, the problem is, it's really hard to find reviews that measure this specification scientifically.  As a result, you generally have a lot of well-intentioned but misguided people claiming their sets have no latency, when in fact they are simply completely unqualified to make such a claim.

Fortunately, many new TV's are starting to pay attention to this and are including game modes which significantly cut latency.  Having such a mode is no guarantee that your TV can reduce or eliminate latency, however.  If you a serious gamer, you will need to do a lot of research or do hands on testing.

Burn-in

TV's that display the same image for long periods of time are prone to suffering "burn-in".  Basically, the overuse of the same pixels for a long period of time wears down those pixels unevenly and causes them to look visibly different...usually darker.  This leaves a perceptible afterimage on the screen.

LCD TV's suffer very little from this due to the nature of LCD technology.  Since the backlight is generating all the light and the screen is essentially deciding what to let through, burn-in isn't really an issues on LCD's.

Plasma TV's, on the other hand, excite phosphors to generate light and these phosphors do wear down over time.

Even if an image is displayed on a plasma TV for 48 hours straight, it can generally be cleared by displaying a moving white bar over the screen. (this feature is built into most plasma TV's).

Watching 4:3 content on a 16:9 screen can cause noticable burn-in if done often.  There are features to move the image slowly around the screen to prevent burn-in from occurring.

In summary, burn-in is a possibility with plasma TV's, but a multitude of features exist to compensate for this.

Characteristics under different lighting conditions

LCD TV's tend to have better viewing characteristics than plasma TV's under very bright lighting conditions, such as very well lit or sunlit rooms.

However, you can't really expect any sort of good image under harsh lighting conditions.  If this is your goal, buy some cheap LCD TV's and be done with it.

In controlled lighting conditions, plasma TV's have a distinct advantage due to all the characteristics I've mentioned already.

Resolution

Ah yes...what would an HDTV be without the HD?

Most TV's today come in a 720p or 1080p variety.  The number 720p means that there are 720 rows of pixels on the TV.  The "p" means "progressive", which is just a fancy way of saying that each image is displayed all at once as opposed to displaying every other line, which was the default back in the day.

Putting it another way, the resolution of most HDTV's today is either 1280x720, or 1920x1080.

This excellent article from Carlton Bale has charts showing you at what viewing distance you need to be to benefit from different resolutions.

My opinion? Buying a 720p can get you a big discount on the price, and honestly, most people aren't sitting close enough to their TV's to justify 1080p.  Nevertheless, I feel like 1080p is still the way to go ... it's such a fundamental characteristic of the television that I think it's worth going for now, and in the future.

Value

Finally, price.  As it turns out, plasma TV's are very competitive with LCD's strictly in terms of size to cost ratio.  However, plasma TV's are generally not manufactured in smaller sizes because no one has managed to squeeze that many cells into a small display yet.  So you generally won't see plasma TV's at sizes less than 42".

Conclusion

OK ... believe it or not, I could go on, but I won't.

As you can see, the chips stack up pretty favorably for plasma TV's.  The image is significantly better in nearly all viewing conditions and pricing is competitive.  Having done some homework, my personal suggestion would be the budget plasma lines from Panasonic, like PZ80U or PZ85U series.  You can pick these up from 1100-1500 bucks in the 42-50 inch range.  They seem to win on multiple fronts at competitive prices, especially if you get a discount deal.  LCD TV's are catching up, but as far as I'm concerned, are clearly not there yet.  Don't get caught up in store or marketing hype ... avsforum.com has a thread on practically every TV in existence and is an excellent resource.

I hope this helps someone out there looking to buy a TV.  I really don't consider myself that picky, but you still have to do your background when buying the centerpiece of your living room. ;)

Like a lot of other people, I really enjoy the series House.  At its core, it's a medical drama.  But the chararacterization is what really makes the show tick.  House is a brilliant *** of a doctor.  Everyone else on the show is a foil for his antics.

By its fourth season, however, House is incredibly formulaic in the structure of its episodes.  To their credit, they did manage to shake things up a bit this season with the Apprentice-esque setup in the first half of the season.

Each episode typically opens with the person in question getting sick in some rather dramatic fashion.  If you're lucky and blessed with a special episode, there may be some misdirection involved where one person acts woozy, but then someone else gets REALLY sick.

The next 5 minutes of the episode involve someone trying to convince House why this case is interesting enough for him to spend time on.  The next ten minutes are spent testing various theories and cures, at which point something dramatic happens ... either vital signs crash or some really weird symptom manifests itself.  Cut to commercial!

We come back and they've managed to do something to buy some more time.  At this point we come in for a mish mash of the following.

1. House insults patients.
2. House insults his proteges.
3. House makes inappropriate comments about Cuddy's cleavage.
4. House suggests a dangerous treatment.
5. Someone has to talk the patients into a potentially dangerous treatment.
6. Someone mentions lupus or couple of other goto diseases that are never actually the disease in question.
7. Proteges break into patient's home to get more info.
8. House catches the silly patient lying about something.
9. Small bits of character development that rotate between anyone that isn't House.
10. House notices something small about a regular and correctly deduces a major piece of new and hopefully saucy information.

I'm sure there's a drinking game for this show somewhere.

At around the 50 minute mark, it's time for the episode to wrap itself up.  Nobody has any idea what's going on and things are looking grim for our Jane Doe.  Luckily, House will be having an innocuous conversation with a colleague, (usually Wilson) during which something will be said that will trigger something in House's stream of consciousness.  It typically goes something like this.

Wilson: You're a bitter and small person, House.
House: Yes...yes...small...just like the parasitic amoebas of the Lower Nigerian Basin! (runs off to cure the patient)

There's about a 50/50 chance that the diagnosis will come in just before the patient is about to go in for some major life changing surgery that is based on a previous incorrect guess.  Thus, our patient is saved in an appropriately dramatic fashion.

Despite the above, I forgive the writers because House definitely isn't a show pretending to be something else.  They do a pretty good job of giving the audience what they want...which is an irascible guy who says what everyone is thinking in the most creatively mean way possible and still gets away with it.  It's sort of like watching Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in the form of a genius doctor.

Um, I think I just came up with a brilliant Conan skit. =)  Too bad the strike is over!