Walt at Random

So far, April 2011 in Livermore is (as, I think, in many other places) turning out to be one of those “if there was such a thing as normal weather anymore, this wouldn’t be it” months. We’ve had hail (which is really rare hereabouts), driving rain and wind, and–not here but elsewhere in the Bay Area–even small twisters, I think.

But there are also increasing signs of spring, and I find that we can spot seasonal timemarks (like landmarks, but temporal) in more than one way.

Take yesterday, for example. One sign was that it was over 70 degrees for much of the afternoon. But that was also true in some days in February.

The other sign: We hit 16kWh (kiloWatt-hours) from our solar (photovoltaic) system, for the first time in 2011.

We’d gotten ever so close on three other wholly-sunny April days (15.94 in one case), but yesterday we made it.

Here are the milestones for 2011*–noting that we’ll get better than 9kWh on a reasonably sunny day even in December:

• January 20: 10 kWh
• February 1: 11 kWh
• February 22: 12 kWh
• March 12: 13 kWh
• March 28: 15 kWh
• April 15: 16 kWh

With luck, and assuming very little loss in efficiency from last year, we should hit 17 kWh in late April. I don’t believe we ever got to 18 kWh last year; at some point, very hot days cause a drop in efficiency.

Why no 14 kWh? It was cloudy enough during most days March 13-27 to dampen generation.

Yes, the meter’s “spinning” backwards (OK, so it’s an LCD readout with no physical manifestation)–overall, we average about 11 kWh/day electrical use, with considerably less on days we’re not drying laundry. So, typically, from mid-March on, we start generating more power than we use–and, for PG&E, that’s most useful in June-August, when we’re generating most power during the hot middle of the day, when there’s also peak demand for electricity.

Does photovoltaic and other renewable actually mean anything? In California, absolutely: The two big utilities didn’t quite hit the 20% goal for 2010, but they came close (more than 17% of PG&E’s electrical generation last year was from renewable sources, which doesn’t include big hydroelectric facilities)–and the new goal is 33% in 2020.

Now, to wait for the fruits of spring to arrive at the Farmers’ Market…as my wife said, especially for folks who don’t eat apples (she can’t eat them, I don’t care for them) but love fruit, April really is the cruelest month.

*No, I don’t obsessively write down our generation each day. Our SolarCity installation includes its own wifi and a custom web page for us, with half-hour data points each day and daily data points on weekly and monthly graphs; it took me five minutes to determine those timemarks.

So far, starting out to be a better day than yesterday–and this is just a little miscellaneous post, one that could go on FriendFeed.

• Yesterday got even stranger on multiple counts, as I was inclined to say “What the hail?” in the early evening. That’s right: Hail, and a significant amount of it, in Livermore, in the second week of April, after a sunny morning and afternoon. (Sunny enough that we got at least 15kWh photovoltaic generation–and we have yet to hit 16kWh per day this year, although Wednesday was short by only 30 watt-hours.) Apparently throughout much of the Bay Area, and enough to cause damage in other places (not here). This morning? Sunny, with just a few puffy little clouds.
• Checking Lulu (as I do once a day), I see that four books were purchased yesterday–the most in one day in a very long time. Including, for the first time in months, two of the C&I annuals (2009 & 2010). Not sure if it’s one buyer or several, but I’m grateful. (Financially, more grateful for the two C&I annuals than for the others–Open Access and Libraries is priced to return almost nothing to me, intentionally, and But Still They Blog‘s current price doesn’t yield all that much return. But financials aren’t everything.)
• So far, I haven’t caught any more flack for various things.
• Our recently-dental-worked cat is sleeping again and seems to be doing fine.

So, at least things are starting out better.

If you’re a FF person: No, I’m not boycotting FF. I’m just being, well, a little more cautious as to what conversations I choose to engage in and how honest I am in those conversations. That probably won’t last for long.

Oh, and responses so far re a possible F2F@NOLA4C&IPPL? (Wow. I wouldn’t have imagined I could do something quite that ugly.) So far, none. It’s early.

By the way: If you’re interested in some of my books (including most or all of the C&I annuals) but don’t want to set up a Lulu account–most or all of them are also available on Amazon, typically at the same price.

I lost a lot of sleep last night reconsidering scenarios and situations, to no good end.

And, eventually, found myself agreeing that–and this is the only way I can put it without getting a sudden headache:

In the Monty Hall puzzle, as discussed in this post (see below “Original Post”), in two-thirds of all possible scenarios, the contestant will gain by switching doors when the host makes the offer.

In other words, the post itself is wrong–which means I was wrong. Period.

The whole situation still gives me a headache. I’m not willing to use the wording that “the remaining door you didn’t choose has a 2/3 probability of being the right door”–that makes me want to scream. If a second contestant shows up, sees the two doors and is told which door the original contestant chose, I’d still assert that the second contestant is equally likely to win by choosing either door.

But I’m wrong as to the facts for the original contestant. Hell, I’ve been wrong before.

Note: I wrote this as the very first thing I did on my computer this morning–before reading two additional comments. Now, after pasting this same text into the original post, I’ll go read the comments and add another one, admitting that Seth (and others) were right and I was wrong.

And then maybe go take some aspirin.

New section added April 7, 2011; go to Original Post for the original post and earlier additions.

I lost a lot of sleep last night reconsidering scenarios and situations, to no good end.

And, eventually, found myself agreeing that–and this is the only way I can put it without getting a sudden headache:

In the Monty Hall puzzle, as discussed in this post (see below “Original Post”), in two-thirds of all possible scenarios, the contestant will gain by switching doors when the host makes the offer.

In other words, the post itself is wrong–which means I was wrong. Period.

The whole situation still gives me a headache. I’m not willing to use the wording that “the remaining door you didn’t choose has a 2/3 probability of being the right door”–that makes me want to scream. If a second contestant shows up, sees the two doors and is told which door the original contestant chose, I’d still assert that the second contestant is equally likely to win by choosing either door.

But I’m wrong as to the facts for the original contestant. Hell, I’ve been wrong before.

Note: I wrote this as the very first thing I did on my computer this morning–before reading two additional comments. Now, after pasting this same text into the original post, I’ll go read the comments and add another one, admitting that Seth (and others) were right and I was wrong.

And then maybe go take some aspirin.

Original Post

Reading one of the last issues of Wired before my freebie print subscription expires, I ran across another use of the so-called Monty Hall Brainteaser, which I’ve previously seen in Marilyn Vos Savant’s column (I think) and probably elsewhere.

If you don’t know the thing, here’s a version:

You’re on Let’s Make a Deal. The host shows you three doors. One of the three has a car behind it. The other two have goats. You choose one of the three (let’s say Door 1). The host, who knows what’s behind each door, opens one of the other two (let’s say Door 3) and shows you a goat. Now he offers you a chance to change your choice (that is, to Door 2). Should you change your choice?

The supposedly-right answer is Yes–that the odds of Door 2 being the right one have increased from 1/3 (when no doors were open) to 2/3 (because one door is clearly wrong).

That seems counter-intuitive. That’s because it’s nonsense. It’s using trick mathematics to make something appear to be the case even though it isn’t.

Let’s reframe the situation:

• There are three doors, but you really only have two choices. Either you’re going to choose the door with the car or you’re not.
• Whatever door you choose, there will be a door with a goat behind it, a door that you didn’t choose. Therefore, that door–which could be either 1 or 3–really isn’t part of the equation.
• The odds of the door you chose being the one of the remaining two doors that has the car were 50% before the host opened the third door, and they’re 50% after the host opens that door.
• Therefore, there is no advantage to changing your choice.

Essentially, from an odds perspective, one door with a goat is simply irrelevant. There are three doors: One door-with-a-goat-that’s-going-to-be-opened, one door with a car, and one door with a goat that’s NOT going to be opened. You can’t choose the first door.

Yes, I know, some statisticians/mathematicians and The Woman With The Highest IQ (And The Tiniest Weekly Column) In The World will say I’m wrong. I don’t think so. Fact is, the host’s decision to show you a door–and there is always a door with a goat behind it that you didn’t choose–cannot change the location of the car, and thus cannot give one of the two remaining doors an advantage over the other one.

Even in WiredWorld.

Update 4/6: I’ve now been pointed to a lengthy Wikipedia essay explaining in excruciating detail just why I’m wrong and the counterintuitive answer is right. To which I can only say: I guess this is one of those cases where I must be dumber than a pigeon, because I’m still not buying it. If the game’s fair, with the car behind one door and the host knowing which door is which (and always opening one non-car door), then the fact that the host opens a non-car door cannot change where the car is. The car doesn’t move because the host opens a door. In which case it can’t change the actual probability of whether you’ve chosen the right door, which remains 50% after the host has opened a door, whether you switch or don’t switch.

I rely on computers. I used to make my living from computers–as a systems analyst/designer/programmer. I still rely on computers for whatever little earned income I do have: Sure, I could write with a pen and notepad, but I wouldn’t even be able to read some of what I’d written, much less make it readily available to others.

That said…

It’s been a more interesting week than I’d really hoped for; I hope it’s settling down. These are all trivial little upsets and very much firstworldissues, but hey, this is a random blog.

Scene 1: The Toshiba comes unhinged

My wife has a Toshiba notebook that’s about 3.5 years old. She likes it just fine. Even when the case stopped closing fully, she lived with it. Until last Thursday, when the left hinge broke–that is, the screen section came out of the hinge. No way to get it back in.

The notebook still worked (and works), but that was clearly not a good sign, and from what little we could figure out, a fix would cost a little more than a new notebook.

So, after a little checking, off we went to Office Depot–not nearly as convenient as OfficeMax, but after my experience with the local OM not living up to its own promises, I’m not shopping there–so my wife could try out various notebooks, keyboard feel & touchpad characteristics being very important to her. Oh, and since the old notebook had a 14″ 4×3 screen, she probably needed a 17″ screen to get the same vertical resolution (since nearly all contemporary notebooks have 16×9 screens).

She found a unit that was to her liking–another Toshiba, as it happens, on sale at a really excellent price. That solved one outstanding issue: When she’d move from Vista to Windows 7. And, since I’d been ready to move to Office2010 soon anyway, it made sense to get Office2010 for both of us at the same time–there’s a new-machine discount, and OD offered to load her copy as a free extra.

Scene 2: I decide to upgrade to Office2010

My wife still hasn’t actually moved to the new notebook–she spends a lot of time on her primary online interest (Unclaimed Persons, a closed volunteer group currently using Facebook that assists coroners in locating next of kin for those who die without someone to claim the body: a great pursuit for a retired librarian!), and the weekend had various other issues. Maybe today; maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I upgraded to Office2010. Which brought me up short on one thing. I was using Office2007, but still using Access2003, since I didn’t lay out the big bucks for the full Professional version of Office2007. (Remember when Office Pro was bundled with computers?) And, unlike Office2007, Office2010 just won’t install when it sees what it considers a damaged version of an earlier Office.

So…

Scene 3: Undoing Access and Finishing the Upgrade

I was really only using Access for two fairly simple little databases and one slightly more complex one–one for a summary budget of household expenses by major categories, one for a list of books & authors to use when getting books at the local PL (so I didn’t get the same title twice), and one–the slightly more complex one–a summary database of wines, helpful when shopping for new vintages.

None of these could possibly justify laying out the money for Access.

I exported the primary tables (two for Books, two for Expenses, three for Wines) as Excel spreadsheets, figuring I could work with those if necessary. And I thought OpenOffice–which I won’t use instead of Word, but which I had–might provide an acceptable substitute.

Then I deleted what was left of Office2003 and installed Office2010. (Unlike earlier versions, there’s no “upgrade version”–and, at some point, I think that’s sensible. When you’re upgrading from an upgraded version of an upgraded version…well, sooner or later, you’re not going to be able to prove you ever owned the original. I think my original was either Office2000 or OfficeXP.)

The install went fine. I haven’t explored the nuances of Word2010 and Excel2010 much yet; I do like the new File/Backstage replacement for the frankly failed “hide print & file options under an Office icon” button, and I’m aware that there are some interesting typographical options in Word if I actually had any OpenType typefaces with suitable extensions. (Oh, and having the Styles list display as a simple list instead of attempting to show the formatting: What a sensible step back!)

All in all, I think I’ll like it just fine. Later this week, maybe, I’ll explore a bit more to see what typefaces besides CalifornianFB have been added, whether I want to use them, and what else is new and interesting. (I accepted a default installation. I’m never sure whether that’s the right choice…)

Step 4: Trying to use OO Base as a Replacement for Access

Actually, that’s not quite right. I did do an initial attempt–creating .ODB files that link to the MSOffice .MDB files–and verified (a) that I could open all three databases, (b) that the reports had either disappeared or turned into tables, (c) that cross-table linkages had disappeared in the process.

Before attempting to resolve those issues, it was suggested that I switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. After discussing the reasoning, I concluded that just having less to do with Larry Ellison was reason enough, so I downloaded LibreOffice 3.3, deleted OpenOffice, and tried again.

Yesterday, despite some frustrations, I managed to build a report for the Expenses database that provides the same summary by category and grand total that’s the whole reason for having the database. It’s not as pretty and it was clunky to build, but it works. What I cannot get to work, so far at least: having the “category” column within the Expenses table limited to, and prompted by, values within the Expense Category table, a linkage that was in the Access database. Maybe it’s because this particular Base database is really acting as a connector to the .MDB database, but there seems to be no way to do this, at least within existing tables.

I can live with that, at least for this table.

Before lunch today, I made a typical every-three-weeks library run to take back three books and get three more–as usual, one non-genre fiction, one genre fiction (mystery this time, since it was SF/fantasy last), one nonfiction. For nonfiction, I’m cheating: the library had a book on OpenOffice 3. Aha! Maybe that will help.

Then came home and, after lunch, sat down to work on this. When I’d gone to put the computer in Sleep mode before running the errands and having lunch, I got a Windows Update, which meant shutting it down entirely. That’s OK.

Step 5: Something goes very wrong–fortunately, temporarily

Turned the computer back on. The background came up, as did all five items in the tray (W7 is much better than Vista in this regard), all six icons on the toolbar (some standard, some I’ve added), all 29 shortcuts and icons on the desktop (which I really should trim some day, but I guess 29 isn’t terrible).

Clicked on FireFox. The little circle spun for a couple of seconds. Then nothing. Did same for Windows2010. Same non-result. Well, let’s open TaskManager…whoops, same result.

Restarted the system. No luck.

Powered down. If it had come up one more time with the same results, I would have hit F10 during startup and gone to the previous restore point. Fortunately, the third time was the charm. Slowly, at first, programs came to life. Everything seems back to normal now. (Well, I haven’t tried *everything*–but if non-MS programs, MS contemporary programs, and 15-year old programs all work, chances are it’s good.)

So, then, taking the book in hand and trying to modify tables to use links…

No luck. Maybe I’m dense, maybe I’ll try again later, but so far, it looks as though compatibility with MSAccess databases is limited. That’s no great surprise.

In one case–the most complex database, probably not for very good reasons–it turned out to be most sensible to combine the exported Excel tables into a new and simpler Excel database, which–among other things–allows me to use typefaces I like while entering and updating data (I can’t see how to change LO Base’s table typography; again, maybe I’m missing something). In the case of the expense database, losing the category prompt list is a nuisance but not fatal. In the case of the books database–well, it never really amounted to anything anyway.

So there’s an afternoon pretty much shot, with no real progress…but hey, I could afford to waste an afternoon.

Step 6: Profit!

I know, that’s supposed to be Step 3 or Step 4, and in this case it’s nonsense–almost. If one proposed project is approved, I’ll need OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and I’m pleased to see that its import of Word files is a whole lot better than it used to be (last time I tried this, OO threw away major portions of style-based formatting).

Otherwise? Back to writing, browsing, being grumpy on FriendFeed, virtual slot poker, all that good stuff. And maybe reading the OO book in more detail and seeing what I’m missing. Which is probably that I can only *add* a new field that’s based on a set of values from another table, not *restore* a table linkage lost in the so-so “compatibility.”

Hmm. My Gateway notebook–my only computer, used as a two-screen setup with my old-but-beautiful Sony 19″ 4×3 LCD display–is probably 2.5 or 3 years old. Hope it holds up a little longer…

For those of you who don’t already know (which, among my readership, may amount to almost nobody):

• After a mere three years, Judge Chin reached a decision on the Google Books settlement. He rejected it.
• Some commentaries are already appearing–here are three for starters. (There are lots more, but those three should all shed more light than heat.

As of now, I have 204 items flagged “gbs” in Diigo–going back two years or more.

And here’s my take on the matter:

If it took Chin three years to reach a decision, I can take three months or more to decide whether I have anything useful to say–whether a historical summary makes sense, whether I can synthesize usefully, or whether I should just delete those 204 items.

I am entirely confident that I have nothing useful to add at this point. Meanwhile, there will surely be steady streams of informed commentary and, well, other sorts of punditry from nearly all the usual suspects.

Gee, and here I was counting on the proceeds from the settlement (for the three or four books of mine that have been scanned) for our retirement. In much the same way I was counting on flying pigs to drop off bags of gold.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a long essay about a certain leisure activity that’s proving to be a great way to deal with interstitial time at the computer–the times when something’s taking a while to load or when I need a brief break within a long or boring task, and have already walked around.

That essay included the note that, in my geeky desire to track how long it actually takes to go through 200 coins ($50 of quarters) playing optimally but not playing maximum coins, I found that the third run–actually the fourth–was taking a while.

I finally finished it, in what would have been the equivalent of maybe three years of normal gaming back in the old days, maybe five years now: 29,001 hands, or a payback percentage of 99.31%. Which is less than the theoretical payback if playing maximum coins, but considerably better than the theoretical payback playing one coin (98.4%).

Added a bit later: I forgot one thing–checking up on my belief that I’d been ahead of the game for at least two years of light gaming here and there. Easy: In this run, I was continually ahead for at least 19,000 hands in the middle of the game–which at current gaming rates is probably three years of playing. In the long run, of course, the odds caught up with me. Then again, when a tiny variation can shift things that far, you run into the answer to “In the long run…” — “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

Considerably better?

Yes. Numbers get very strange when you deal with percentages at the edge. So, for example:

• In the third run, I played 11,310 hands for a payback of 98.23%.
• In the fourth run, I played 29,001 hands for a payback of 99.31%.
• The difference in percentage: “trivial”–1.08%. The difference in actual playing: Nearly three times the number of hands.

I also tracked the effects of my “system” of varying bets, which should yield favorable results if I’m getting streaky hot hands (3 of a kind or better) and terrible results if I’m going hot & cold. In this case, the “system” was favorable to the tune of 54 coins–but, looking at actual hands, that really means I would have played about 250 fewer hands without varying bets, or about 28,751 hands (99.30%).

That item also shows the problem with playing max coins if you’re gaming, not gambling: it doesn’t take much of a cool streak to run through $50 at $1.25/hand. Try 92 hands (maybe 40 minutes play in a casino) today, and I’ve seen even faster descent.

This was an extraordinary run, with more than one royal flush (which I’d never had in the past–never) albeit no straight flushes (there should have been about three in 30,000 hands. As for everything else, though, while any given playing session can be incredibly streaky–e.g., seven four-of-a-kinds in 1,500 hands or three in 892 hands–over a long period, you do tend toward the mean (and this long run was maybe my long-term lousy play or lousy luck regressing toward the mean). As in, over 17,800 of the hands (the last 2/3 of the play, mostly):

• 0.19% of hands were four of a kind, compared to expected 0.24%
• 1.14% were full houses, compared to expected 1.15%
• 1.12% were flushes, compared to expected 1.10%.
• 1.18% were straights, compared to expected 1.12%
• 7.34% were three of a kind, compared to expected 7.44%
• 13.22% were two pair, compared to expected 12.92%
• 21.08% were jacks or better, compared to expected 21.46%
• 54.73% were losers, compared to expected 54.56%

If you’d asked me, I’d have said I get more 3 of a kind than I expect, more full houses and fewer straights–which says a lot about expectations! (Those odds also show why the payoff for full houses is so important: It pays much better than straights or flushes but hits just about as often–also why drawing to a non-flush inside straight is always stupid, since the odds are terrible and the payoff’s lousy.)

I’ve made the one “expert play” adjustment based on not playing max coins: Namely, when dealt four to a flush, of which three are royal, I keep the four (where “expert play” would have me drop them). The really agonizing one–where you get a full flush dealt, four of which are to a royal flush–it still, just barely, makes sense to drop the non-royal card, but that sure is painful.

Well, a little less painful since no money is involved.

I think that’s the end of these gaming posts, at least for a while. If I never get a run like this again, which seems likely, this one was still fun, even if it was a minute there, two minutes there, at most five minutes elsewhere…

Another post with no grand meaning–just a few miscellaneous items.

Cheapo movies in color and broken plastic

I gave the five-disc pack of 20 Spaghetti Westerns (really 19 Spaghetti Westerns and Possibly The Worst Western Ever Filmed, but not an SW) to a friend who loves this stuff…and saw Mill Creek’s bigger package, “Spaghetti Westerns”–not quite a 50-pack, but a 44-pack on 11 discs–for about $15 on Amazon. Since I know I want to watch some of them again and enjoyed most of them, I put the pack in a new Amazon wishlist.

And also remembered how much I’d enjoyed, just as pure dumb entertainment, the Hercules-and-friends “hero” movies in one of the Mill Creek megapacks. There’s a whole 50-pack of them, “Warriors,” a 13-disc set (really 12.5 discs). Also put that in the wishlist.

Checked last week. Both were at $11.99. My wife needed a supplement we get through Amazon. So, hey, why not?

They arrived today. I’m sure I’ll enjoy both sets when I get around to them some time in the next few years. But there was one difference, consistent with the smaller sets I’d received free from MCE: Instead of the old cardboard boxes, these came in plastic boxes.

Snazzier, but with one little problem (also true of a couple of the smaller sets): The plastic is brittle. In both boxes, which I opened to make sure the discs were all there, there were broken pieces of the box. Oh, I could send them back to Amazon, but why bother? The boxes are still workable, and that’s a lot of hassle for such cheap items. In a way, it’s an odd sort of progress: the new boxes are much snazzier for retail sale and appear much sturdier, but in fact the old cardboard boxes hold up much better.

Generations and personal issues

Jenica’s right, of course, on both counts.

Will library bloggers stop tossing out generational arguments that hold no water?

About as soon as library gurus stop trying to convince public librarians that print books are DOOMED (based on various oversimplistic theories, certainly not based on significant drops in either library print circulation or sales of print books) and that they should run away from the things their patrons actually use, toward some wonderful new future in which, well, you pay for each use or convince your city government that a community center needs professional librarians to run it. Good luck with that.

What? HarperCollins actually surprised you? You thought that you owned that ebook?

Hmm. I’ve combined three or four different things there, haven’t I?

“Hell, Walt, you’re old. You should retire.”

I did, whether willingly or not. But, of course, the job itself went away–and it was never a professional librarian post.

Not asking questions when you don’t want the answers

I’m moving forward with stuff for the April C&I (out sometime between 3/15 and 3/31) and, as it happens, the May issue.

I’m also still dealing with a recent incident in which I was told, in effect, that there were only a handful of people who gave a damn about one area I was active in. Which removed a bunch of already-written material I’d expected to use in C&I.

I find that I don’t want to ask about other aspects of C&I. That answer was hard on me. I concluded two things:

• I shouldn’t ask a question when I might not want the answer.
• I should work with real publishers on all but the smallest projects.

I’m doing the latter. One result is out this month from ALA Editions. I’m hoping for one more each year…

Or, what the hell, there’s an unlimited supply of books out there to be read, at least unlimited in terms of my reading capabilities…but, you know, maybe later.

I read magazines–print magazines, that is. I love good print magazines. Always have. The set of magazines I take changes over the years depending on my current interests (our current interests, that is) and depending on what’s being published, since magazines have been dying and being born for as long as there have been magazines.

Unfortunately, I’m one of those idiots who will read everything in a magazine, or at least start every article. That was particularly noticeable back when I was taking something like seven different personal computing magazines, one of which–PC Magazine when it still was the bible of the industry–appeared 22 times a year and had a book’s worth of content in each issue. I’m now down to one personal computing magazine (and should maybe look for others), partly because some have disappeared, partly because I don’t write much about PCs any more or really care about them as much. I don’t read Hammer Monthly either; the PC for me is now mostly a tool.

How many magazines?

There are, I believe, a couple hundred thousand magazines and journals published in the U.S….with at least two or three for almost any interest, no matter how obscure.

Right now, as of a key occurrence that’s part of what this blather is really about, I believe I get 24 magazines on an ongoing basis–one PC-related, five travel-related, three library-related, three science fiction, three audio/video related, and a whole bunch of others. Excluding one sort-of weekly that really barely qualifies as a magazine, I get 225 issues a year. I’m usually about a month to six weeks behind on “regular” magazines–and four months behind on science fiction & fantasy magazines, which I used to catch up on while traveling. Since I don’t travel much anymore, I’m reading them when I go out to lunch and sometimes at home, but the rate at which I’m reading them (roughly one issue every two weeks) is the rate at which they’re arriving, so the current ten-issue backlog isn’t changing much.

Ten issues? Yep. Fantasy & Science Fiction now publishes six double issues a year, each of those issues as thick as a paperback and with at least as much content as a typical book. Analog and Asimov’s each publish ten items a year, two of them double issues. So a typical four-month period will have eight to issues in all.

I’m trying to read roughly a book a week in book form. I’d guess I read at least two books a week worth of magazine articles–including roughly a book every three weeks worth of shorter fiction (although these double issues now frequently feature novellas, which at up to 50,000 words aren’t that much shorter than typical books).

Update 3/1/11: Sigh. My count was off–even apart from things like Schwab’s On Investing. Turns out that Money won’t stop arriving until November 2011, and I forgot that I’d tried another subscriptions-for-miles deal, Wine Spectator with its peculiar 15/year frequency. So it’s currently 26 subscriptions and, aside from one “weekly,” 240 issues.

So?

All of that’s prefatory to some changes, which may say something about my intellectual level or just my patience with imposed guilt.

I’ve tried a few magazines over the past two or three years using airline miles from airlines I don’t expect to travel on very often: Frequently, when your miles are near their expiration date, you’ll get an offer of subscriptions at roughly the two-cents-a-mile rate. Since magazine subscriptions are usually pretty cheap anyway (with some noteworthy exceptions, these days including all three SF magazines and, of course, Consumer Reports), it’s a bargain–if I was so inclined, I could even get the Wall Street Journal or The Economist for free.

Anyway, a year ago one of the magazines on offer was Harper’s–and I thought I’d give it a try, since I really haven’t been subscribing to those hifalutin’ magazines like Atlantic or The Nation or The New Yorker or…

That subscription just expired. I will not be renewing it. I don’t need to be told in every issue and damn near every article that I’m guilty, guilty, guilty, the world is going to hell in a handbasket (made by workers under inhumane conditions), and the glass is not only half empty, it probably has dangerous levels of lead. It just became too much of a muchness, particularly since the emphasis seems to be on what’s wrong and why we’re all to blame, not on any possible ways to improve situations. If you just love Harper’s and think I’m a philistine for dropping it, that’s your privilege.

Then there’s Fortune. I essentially got that for free along with an absurdly cheap offer for Money three years ago: $10/year for one magazine with the other tossed in as an extra. Well, OK…

Money either has expired or will shortly (I’m not counting it as part of that 24 magazines and 225 issues). I won’t renew it. I think it could just as easily be named Stocks and come out as a broadsheet: “Buy stocks. Buy more stocks. If your stocks lost half their value, trim expenses…so you can buy more stocks.” Yes, that’s oversimplified; so, in my opinion, is Money. Hell, Schwab’s On Investing (oops: that’s 25–but I don’t know that I count it) is more conservative than Money on the need for everybody to buy lots and lots and lots of stock. (We don’t own a lot of stock. We plan to keep it that way. We may be poorer in the long run, but we sleep a lot better.)

Fortune, on the other hand, surprised me–pleasantly, given that I’m not exactly one of the high-income moguls that might be its target audience. The writing tends to be excellent; the far-right columnists (not all of them) are fairly obvious in their biases; the investigative work is first-rate; articles seem to be “as long as they need to be” rather than diced & sliced to preset lengths. Their investigative report on the BP disaster is, well, let’s say BP executives probably were not pleased–and it’s hard to write off Fortune as some commie liberal radical zine.

So when I got a renewal offer for $20 for three years (that’s 20 issues per year–it’s a sort-of fortnightly), I took it. With pleasure. They must be getting a fair amount of advertising, since the thirtyfour cents an issue I’m paying can’t even cover the postage…

I’m not necessarily fascinated by business and making a fortune–it’s a bit late for the latter in any case. I do love really good writing and research. I used to read the sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle–hell, I used to read Sports Illustrated–even though sports don’t interest me, because the writing was/is so good.

I think the 24 will become 23 before too long: The airline-miles Wired subscription, which was (unfortunately) extended because the first-rate Portfolio from the same publisher folded right after I subscribed to it, has got to expire one of these months. It will not be renewed.

If someone wants to tell me that I really, truly should subscribe to some other Serious Magazine, now that I’ve dropped Harper’s, I’ll definitely listen. Whether I’ll do anything about it…well, we’ll see. There are only so many hours in a day, and I do plan to keep writing, reading books, watching TV, going for hikes and walks, etc., etc…

Major philosophical impact of this post: Zero. Sorry about that.

Just for fun, I’m creating this content-free post as a placeholder for anyone who wishes to comment on my previous post…noting that you need to avoid certain words within a comment, otherwise Spam Karma 2 will block your comment or, at best, moderate it as spam.

Prefatory warnings: You will learn nothing of any use about indexing from this post. You will learn nothing that applies to libraries from this post. On the other hand, you will not be urged to buy books in this post. It is a long and rambling post about a topic that some may find offensive. If I allow comments at all, you will find it difficult to comment without triggering a “discard, don’t even mark as spam” rule because of certain words. This is the “long and boring post” I referred to recently, and if you find it too long or boring, I can only offer you a Lehrerism of sorts–you’ve yourself to blame if it’s too long, you should never have let it begin: You can go right on to some other post. I won’t be unhappy. Of course, I won’t even know…

I enjoy doing Cites & Insights, sometimes more than others. I enjoy doing other library writing–again, sometimes more than others.

But there are aspects of C&I and of other writing projects that are at best dull, at worst so annoying that I’ll waste hours just trying to avoid doing them. A prime example is preparing index entries for each issue of C&I (by adding to a dummy Word document that consists entirely of index entries and page/section breaks). It’s necessary–I’m sure a few readers appreciate the end-of-volume indices, and I certainly refer to them in later years–but it’s a dull, repetitious drag, one that reminds me I’ll never be much of an indexer.

There are others. Preparing leadsheets for source material is one. The last time I did a major essay without preparing leadsheets, I wasn’t that happy with the results–the organization was too chronological and failed to pull together things that might have related nicely. The two-part essay in C&I 11:2 and 11:3, on the other hand, benefited considerably from leadsheets: The segments of the essay suggested themselves to me as I was arranging piles of leadsheets on our big coffee table. The sorting process is interesting, but requires frequent breaks. Printing the leadsheets is just plain drudgery, particularly since I absolutely have to do Print Preview for each source before printing “page 1″–since some blogs don’t show the post text until page 2 or 3 (or 7, in one case), and some blogs won’t really show me the post text at all.

There are others, of course. When I’m doing some big research project (if I ever do one of those again!), I can only work on it for an hour or two at a time without going a little more nuts than usual. And, for that matter, when I’m into an essay I’m really happy about, it rarely makes sense to write more than two hours at a stretch, both for physical reasons and for mental reasons. And there are Wednesday afternoons: After a long hike in the morning, I’m rarely up to doing much of anything “mental” in the afternoon.

Gaming and gambling

I found a solution of sorts, to this and to another problem, and that brings up the first word in the title above: Gaming. Yes, I know, most cynics figure Las Vegas and others just call gambling “gaming” to make it more innocent, but for some of us there’s a real distinction, one I’ve discussed before. To wit:

• Gaming: Cheap entertainment, with known limits on what will be spent, with no expectation of “winning back” anything–or, in general, winning at all. The gaming itself is the pleasure.
• Gambling: Wagering in the real hopes of winning, with The Win being a big factor in whatever pleasure is there.

You’d never game with more than a tiny fraction of your leisure income. Gambling is another question entirely.

I tried gambling once, in Las Vegas, more than 33 years ago. I’m not cut out for it: I’m too acutely aware of the real mathematics to be willing to risk significant sums, I don’t have the nerves for the action at craps (for example), I apparently don’t have an addictive personality (cross fingers, but so far…), and I didn’t really get turned on by the excitement of the blackjack table.

Gaming, however, is something else. My wife & I both used to enjoy going up to Reno two or three, sometimes four, times a year–usually visiting interesting places (of which there are a lot in Northern Nevada) during half of the day and playing during the other half. Both of us gravitated toward video poker, usually at the $0.25 level for me and that or slightly lower for her: It combined some modest intellectual effort with simple fun. We set a limit of $50 per person per day, probably 30 years ago, and never increased that limit–but we also never spent that limit. Back in the day, particularly when we’d go up in the winter via Amtrak, we could get such cheap high-quality hotel rooms and food in Reno that adding $100 per day total (which we never spent all of) to our total costs still made them cheap vacations.

We gave up on Reno as my wife’s asthma and sensitivity to smoke grew worse, as my desire for clean air also grew, and as the bargains diminished–although the other issues were the deciding ones. We went to the Indian casino where my wife’s niece works a few times–it has a good true nonsmoking area, although the video poker odds are mediocre at best–but the available lodging didn’t excite us and the local restaurants we’d use seemed to have gone downhill. In other words, after 20-25 years of gaming perhaps 4-6 days per year, we haven’t gone in two years or so.

Oh, I’d also game on cruises–not a lot, perhaps 6-8 hours a week, mostly during sea days for an hour or two. If any of the shipboard casinos had been smokefree, I might have played more (and my wife would definitely have played more), but…

How cheap is gaming as entertainment? Well, there were some holiday vacations in which the Reno hotel/casino gave us our room for three nights (or charged $50 for two or three nights), meals were good and inexpensive, and we probably each averaged $25/day on video poker (and occasionally other slots). At least once, the gaming money came from hotel points that I’d accumulated over the years, making the total gaming outlay $0 (less, actually). And I fondly remember the casino on Crystal Symphony, one of our favorite cruise ships (when we could still afford it), which at the time was operated by Caesar’s and had full-odds poker…but with drinks supplied by Crystal. At least two evenings, I sat at the bar (with inlaid poker games), played poker for an hour or so…and drank a free glass of DeLoach Chardonnay, spending less for the poker than the DeLoach would cost in a bar.

Were we really lucky in order to be able to get by for less than $50/day? Not really, as it turns out–indeed, the fact that I never once got a royal flush in 25+ years of playing video poker, and only got one straight flush during that time, suggests that my luck wasn’t really very good. (You should, on average, get about one royal flush for every 40,000 hands, and one straight flush for every 9,000… I’d guess I probably used to play about 10,000 hands a year.)

In fact, full-odds video poker, even if you’re not playing five coins at a time, has better than a 98% payback rate–better than 96% even without royal flushes. (If you’re playing five coins at a time and playing perfectly, the odds are something like 99.5%. I don’t play five coins at a time–and I think the constant advice that you MUST do so is bad advice for gamers, although not for gamblers.)

About that “always play max coins” advice. Yes, you will theoretically get a higher percentage payback that way–if and when you hit a Royal Flush. Which, if your luck is perfectly even, happens once every 40,390 hands. How much higher? Payback for full-odds Jacks-or-Better poker with max coins played is supposed to be 99.5%. Payback with one coin played (or any number less than five) is supposedly about 98.4%–but when I add up the numbers, I come up with about 98.1%. During all the time that you’re not getting Royal Flushes, there’s no difference–payback is about 97.5%.

But if you’re playing because you enjoy playing, or if you have a somewhat limited bankroll, the huge difference is that you’ll play five times as long at one coin as you will at five coins–and the streakiness of true randomness without memories virtually guarantees that you’ll run out of limited stakes much more often at five coins, before you have a chance to get a Royal Flush. How streaky? A run of mildly bad cards can make you go “down 40″–40 coins at one coin per play, 200 at 5 coins–in 80 hands, and it’s not at all unusual to go down 40 in 150 hands or fewer.

Oh, and if you do play 40,356 hands, play them all perfectly (the casino’s big edge with video poker is that very few people will play perfectly) and have perfect luck–well, at that point (having played 40,356 coins at one coin per hand or 201,780 coins at five per hand), assuming your coins are quarters, you will be down $252 if you’re playing five coins at a time…and $161 or $190 at one coin (depending on whether you believe 98.4% or 98.1% as payback). Try as I might, I can’t make a loss of $252 to be winning compared to a loss of $190. Ask me if I’d rather spend 1.6% or 1.9% of $1,000 or 0.5% of $5,000: I’ll have the same answer, and it’s not one that favors five coins at a time.

If you’re playing half decently, you should average at least 90%-95% payback…and that means it takes 2,000 to 4,000 hands to go through $50 at $0.25 per hand. In a casino, I doubt that I ever play more than 150 hands an hour or about 1,000 a day. Thus, it’s not at all surprising that we didn’t spend $50/day. I did have a three-year period in which I was ahead throughout the three years…which, it turns out, also isn’t all that odd, especially as I was probably only averaging 3,000-4,000 hands a year.

Long digression, I know…but not really a digression. (“Poker” as a search term here will find previous posts on gaming and Nevada, along with some entirely unrelated posts.)

Our daily vacation and the urge to game

We never owned a vacation home–with California real estate prices and our library-field salaries, that was never a plausible option. We also didn’t much care for the idea: Why pay for a property you’re going to use two or three weeks a year, and be more-or-less stuck going to the same place every year? We did, of course, go back to the same places year after year–although the most interesting vacations were those where we tried new places (as in “Seeing the world by cruise ship”).

A funny thing happened when we moved to Livermore, however. We found ourselves in the lightest, airiest house we’d ever owned, we were suddenly living in wine country (with two wineries in easy walking distance, two dozen in easy biking distance)…and, well, we suddenly owned a vacation home. A full-time vacation home, since we’re both essentially retired. Heck, there’s even a very good public library (which, although Will Manley apparently doesn’t see them when he’s there, always seems to have at least half a dozen people in the bookstacks finding books when I’m there, and usually even more–along with, to be sure, those in the children’s section, those working on computers, those reading in easy chairs and maybe one or two sleepers), and lots of reasonably-priced ethnic restaurants, albeit not as many as in Mountain View.

We haven’t actually been on an away vacation since we moved here in late May 2009. That will change–I’m not sure when, but it will change. There are several reasons (my wife has food sensitivities, we need to find the right catsitters, we think about long-term financial issues…), but one cluster has to do with our daily vacation. As my wife says, unless we’re really doing something special, why go somewhere else with inferior rooms/beds, more expensive and probably inferior food, and quite possibly inferior views?

I was grumbling about wanting to game once in a while, but couldn’t really argue with the other points and with the infelicities of most casinos these days. And then I thought about a very old CD-ROM I had–from 1995, although the software seems to have been written in 1991-1992, based on the copyright statement: Masque Video Poker. Back in the day, I tried it out and played for a while, certainly taking advantage of its training tools (it will show you the preferred cards to hold and warn you if you’re not holding them, and you can print out a long list of which things you should hold, in descending order), but it wasn’t the same…and I found the music and sound effects annoying.

Just for fun, I got out the CD and installed it on my current notebook (not knowing whether this antique would even run under Windows 7, much less run politely and well). It ran, surprisingly in a proper Windows window (resizable and all), and looking through the settings I found that I could turn off all those annoying sounds (which also speeds up the game).

And I found that I liked it just about as well as actual casino play. It doesn’t look quite as good, but it looks fine. I can keep the training function on (which I mostly ignore), which should make me a better player when I do go to a casino again (on a cruise ship, for example…or, for an hour or two, at Harrah’s in New Orleans during ALA, possibly), as I’ll have the proper holds ingrained into me. While it may be missing some of the excitement of a casino itself and nobody brings me free drinks, I never have to change machines because a chainsmoking yahoo has sat down next to me, I never have to think about earplugs from overloud music, the chair’s a whole lot more ergonomic, second-hand smoke is simply not an issue… [Since I drink white wine, the free drinks in casinos aren't much of an incentive anyway...]

…and I can play 10 minutes at a time, 20 minutes at a time, five minutes at a time, just when I need a break from something else. It turns out to be perfect for C&I indexing: Do four pages; play for five minutes; do four more pages; play for five minutes…and so on until done. I can just leave the game minimized most of the time, or put it on the secondary screen (great for printing leadsheets, which is mostly delay).

It also turns out that this game appeals to the numbers geek in me (I did have an informal math minor at UC…and it was the national math contest that kept me from going to the state National Forensics League tournament in my senior year of high school, which was the wrong choice but felt right at the time). To wit, one of the training functions is that you can call up a table that shows how many hands you’ve played and how many of each kind of hand you’ve had. If the game just keeps running all day (or over several days), which it can since its memory and CPU usage are so small I can’t even locate them, I can pull up a chart after a few hundred or few thousand hands (I play much faster on the computer–maybe 500 hands an hour if I’m playing full-time) and see whether my luck is improving.

To be sure, I won’t see a cash reward if I hit it big. I also won’t see any cash losses if I have a bad run…and I was never playing video poker in the hopes of hitting it big in any case.

For me, for now, this is a nice little solution. I’m not grumbling about the need for any old vacation anymore: we’ll wait until we both really want to see something. I’m finding a way to break up annoying tasks. And I’m finding out more about how real-world video poker works out. Yes, of course, I have a spreadsheet–one showing how long it takes for me to go through 200 coins ($50 in quarters) using my single-coin-but-with-variations-based-on-possible-streaks betting. (Yes, it’s a system; it probably costs more often than it benefits, but it adds a little extra interest. There’s a reason casinos love systems: Most of them are losers. Overall, I’d guess this one is too.)

Results so far? The first run where I tracked results until I was down 200, it took 2,425 hands: That’s a payback of 91.75%. I didn’t have the training line on at the time, and was probably misplaying some hands. The second run, where I did have it on, I suspect I was having fairly average luck: 4,382 hands or 95.44% payback. Thing is, either of those results tells me why I don’t go through $50 in one day: There is no way I’d play even 2,425 hands of video poker in one day in an actual casino.

And then there’s the third run. (No, I don’t keep the game running indefinitely–I like to turn my computer off overnight, not just put it in hibernate mode. I jot down the mark at the end of the day on a 3×5 card, or rather keep a running total until I hit -200 total.) I can’t say where this one’s going to wind up, but I can certainly see how I went three years being ahead. So far, I’m at 17,266 hands. I’m ahead 460, which means I have 660 coins left to play in this run. I’ve been steadily ahead since somewhere around 4,700 hands. That’s more than 12,500 hands so far: Easily a year’s worth of play. Sure, I could go through the remaining 660 coins in 660 hands, but more likely it will take at least 6,600-13,200…

What’s happening, apparently, is that luck is catching up with me: My overall results are tending back toward the norm. Beginning with, well, this:

I remember one time when some stranger passed by as I was playing one-coin video poker and felt compelled to admonish me for not playing maximum coins. “How will you feel if you hit a royal flush and didn’t have five coins in?” the stranger said. My response: “I’ll feel great: I’ll have finally gotten a royal flush.” And that turns out to be the right answer. It’s taken more than 20 years, but it still feels great–even if the actual cash return is $0.

I grabbed that partial screen using Windows Snipping Tool. If you’re not aware of it, you might check it out–”Snipping” in the Start menu search box should find it in W7 and Vista, and you can make a shortcut. It lets you choose any rectangular portion of the screen, make annotations, highlight portions, and email, copy, or save as PNG (default) or JPEG or another format. And, y’know, it’s already part of the OS, albeit as a separate program.

Interfering with other stuff?

So am I becoming a video poker junkie? Well, you know, for two years I didn’t play any video poker–not in casinos, not on my PC. I missed it, but only a little.

Now? Great for breaks. Great for parts of Wednesday afternoons when I’m too tired for writing. The biggest “waste of time” connected with video poker so far is writing this post. It’s not interfering with writing or FriendFeed. It might help keep me from doing huge research projects when nobody much cares about the results, but it won’t keep me from doing booklength projects. I’m actually reading more books now than before (yes, I’m tracking them this year), and we’re watching neither more nor less TV than before…although, if I’m tempted to channel-surf, video poker is a whole lot better use of that idle time than, say, Surreal Housewives of Sioux City or Minute to Spin It or whatever.

It may be interfering with my two-a-week old movies: I’m finding that I’d rather watch one old movie and spend a little more time reading, playing video poker, and out walking in wine country. I can live with that.

Oh, by the way: If there was any question remaining about my disputed claim that I live within two hours of snow: For this weekend, at least, 30 minutes is more like it. There’s snow on the hilltops in both directions. That’s as close as I want it.

I’m disabling comments for this post because it will predictably draw lots of spam related to poker and gaming…and because legitimate comments will disappear because of words in my discard list. Turns out I can’t even comment on my own post. Such is life.

I’ve never done the “day in the life” thing both because I’m not a librarian and, back when I had a full-time job, was either working on stuff that was partly confidential or, toward the end, working on stuff that was stultifyingly boring to anybody else.

Now I’m essentially retired, partly by choice (as in “unwilling to relocate in order to acquire gainful employment”), and “a day in the life” would mostly be boring.

But I note that there really haven’t been many worthwhile posts here lately (depending on your definition of “worthwhile,” “lately” can mean anywhere from five days–the time since my last post–to five weeks or five months. Or five years, but then why are you reading this?)…and thought a quick summary could be useful.

The “not many worthwhile posts”–and specifically the lack of any posts offering segments of “disContent” columns to encourage purchase of the limited-edition collection–has a lot to do with this post. The numbers continue to be the same. Namely, not only does it appear to be the case that nobody (except four people) gives a good goddamn about the liblog stuff, it also appears that nobody (except three people–I wonder what the overlap is there?) has enough interest in the “disContent” columns and keeping my writing going to do anything about it.

I could find this discouraging. OK, I do find this discouraging. Lots of readership as long as it’s free. Zero interest in anything that carries any price tag, even a “pay what you think it’s worth” price tag. Just at a guess: If I restored the kind of ads where I only get paid of people click on links, I’d get the same results as a couple of years ago–that is, something like $3 to $4 average. Per month, not per day.

More encouraging: there’s still hope on sponsorship front…and three publishers have shown some interest in working with me. I’m revising one proposal and considering two other proposals. Clearly, the self-published books aren’t hacking it; if I can manage one traditionally-published book every year or two, I at least keep my hand in the field at a very low level. (I’m attending ALA Annual in New Orleans after missing Midwinter in San Diego. Next year? We’ll see…)

Meanwhile, I’ll get over the discouragement; I’m a Pollyanna by nature. (Not quite a Candide, maybe.)

Update: Given the interesting stream at FF based on these paragraphs, I’ve struck them out as being secondary to the quick, hopefully fun, summary…

So here’s a quick summary of this week as it’s gone:

A week in the life…in no particular order

• Reviewed the proofs (editable PDF) for the forthcoming Open Access: What You Need to Know Now from ALA Editions. Twice. Made three very minor proposed changes; sent back revised proofs. (Book now just awaiting CIP before going to press…)
• Prepared a “pseudobook”/pamphlet on templates, typeface choices, type size and leading, and copyfitting in Word, and an accompanying Word 6×9 book template using 11pt. Garamond, partly in preparation for the last 10 minutes of a talk my wife is doing, partly as a draft form of a small portion of a book I’m proposing to do. (The pamphlet’s available free as a PDF, $10 as a 38-page paperback. If you download the PDF or the template, I’d love to hear comments–I don’t believe I’ll know when people download a zero-cost PDF from Lulu, and, not surprisingly, nobody’s purchased the paperback.)
• Prepared the PowerPoint slides and accompanying notes for the brief talk, most of them screen snippets of steps in the uploading process. (Windows 7 Snipping Tool for the win!). Discovered this weekend that I’m also supposed to mention templates, so I’ll add a couple more slides this week. (The talk’s on February 8.)
• Got back a preliminary negative response on the proposed book, with room open to submit a revised proposal. Thought about revising the proposal, but didn’t actually do anything about it.
• Drafted a “Crawford at Large” column for Online Magazine; it’s finished, and I’ll review it once more tomorrow before submitting it.
• Took three books back to the library (after only 2.5 weeks, not the usual 3), took three new books out. Read one of them–Plastic Fantastic by Eugenie Samuel Reich, a surprisingly engrossing story about fraud in physics.
• Watched one old movie, the usual current and past TV shows (one per day plus the Saturday night movie), went for a Wednesday hike, and did the usual weekly stuff…
• Didn’t do a lick of work on the next Cites & Insights…but probably will next week. Although, since I already have most of an issue (the second half of the big essay in the current issue…)

Exciting, no? OK, no…

Aha. Here’s part 3 of the test–and note the URL. In fact, WordPress did detect an identical URL and auto-generated a “-2″ to the previous title.

I’m happy with that.

What does this have to do with milestones? Not much.

So here’s the second post, and I think I see the answer: To wit, WordPress will allow a very long URL. And, in this case, where I copied the title, then discarded the draft (because I thought the URL had been truncated), it appears that it automatically adds a “-2″ (because the discarded draft is probably still around.

So I guess the answer is:

• Duplicate URLs shouldn’t happen–probably not even if you deliberately use precisely the same actual title (I’ll test that shortly)
• But WP URLs can get pretty long…

All things considered, I think this is preferable behavior.

This is just a test. Apparently SixApart’s “use title in the URL” option (assuming it’s an option, as it is in WP) will cheerfully generate identical URLs for more than one post, if the only difference in the title comes at the end of a fairly long string. (John DuPuis accidentally discovered this.)

Is the same true for WordPress? This is Part 1 of a two-part test to find out; I’ll post Part 2 in a few minutes.