ih rock

This has been bothering me for some time... How do you pronounce Iraq? Listening to NPR today two speakers used the word, one pronounced it IH-RACK, and the other, IH-ROCK. Various other pronounciations I have heard are

EYE-RACK
UH-ROCK
UH-RACK

From Wikipedia's Iraq entry you can hear what appears to be an authentic pronounciation. Although the sounds needed to say Iraq don't seem to be found in English, I would say it is somewhere between IH-ROCK and UH-ROCK, and nowhere near UH-RACK (or EYE-RACK for that matter).

Blizzard Entertainment captures a soul

The screenshot below comes from the xfire.com gaming profile of someone I know well. Note the drop off after the two Blizzard games. Valve's Counter Strike also gets an (dis)honorable mention. This covers roughly a one year time period, therefore this individual spent roughly 20% of his/her waking hours playing the top three games.


For reference, I've racked up 120 hours on Counter Strike and 20 hours on Civ IV. 80% of these hours were recorded before I started working 6 months ago.

Will you change the world for the better?

I created this quiz, The How Will You Change The World Test, in order to test one ability to change the world for the better. No empirical evidence was used in the creation of this test. Instead, I used my world view such that the test-taker results bin him/her into one of my eight categories of world citizens. I won't tell you what the bins are just yet; take the test!

Keeping in mind that I created the test, I scored as an "Average Citizen." Take that for what it is worth.

Milton Friedman passes away

I heard it on the radio today on my way home from work. He was a champion for liberty. My hero has died, but his memory lives on.

Donate organ or gain

A tragedy:

In the United States, less than one half of potential organs donors became actual organ donors.

We are talking about dead people here of course. Less than half of living people are willing to sign-up to donate their organs when they no longer need them. Alex Tabbarok asks, well then why not pay?! With over 80,000 people on the waiting list and about 10% of these dying per year, it'd be nice if we could convince people to check the organ donor box when they go to the DMV. One obstacle is the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984 which states

"It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation."

Ostensibly, this is to reduce the traffic in live human organs. To a lesser degree it aims to keep the rich from cornering the organ market. However, there are ways to avoid these undesirable outcomes. First, only allow payment for organs from dead people, with the funds going to the family, the estate, or some charity of the donor's choosing. Second, don't sell organs on the free market. Instead, use the current national registry system but allow the donors to be paid for their contribution!

In the absence of legal payment options, a group called the LifeSharers has banded together, promising to donate their organs upon death to other members of the group before opening up to the national registry. At first I didn't know what to think about LifeSharers. But then I read their FAQs and found this quote on their website...








...Dr. Friedman has spoken. Think about it, if you could join a club that gave you first dibs on organs, wouldn't you join. You never incur a cost to join because you fulfill you obligation upon death. No, I haven't joined yet, but I'm seriously considering it.