DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Want to become a millionaire? Just solve one of the Millenium Problems, and the Clay Mathematics Institute will set you up: $1M US, plus a free propeller beanie. Here are the seven million-dollar-prize problems:

1. Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, the official problem definition for which states, in part,
   L(C, s) = c(s-1)^r + higher order terms
   which incidentally that is the name of the next movie by Arntz, Chasse, and Vicente
2. Hodge Conjecture
3. Navier-Stokes Equations
4. P vs NP Problem
5. Poincaré Conjecture, which has to do with the “multidimensional topology of space in three dimensions,” for example donuts.
6. Riemann Hypothesis, which has to do with the distribution, and ultimately, perhaps, predictability of prime numbers.
7. Yang-Mills and Mass Gap

If you want to compete in #s Q or T, where Q=5 and T=6, you’d better hurry because it looks like Louis de Branges and Grigori Perelman might have beat you to them. Oh, and by the way, de Branges’ work might “bring the whole of e-commerce to its knees, overnight.”

“Hey Joey, do you sell digital cameras too?”

Over the past 24 hours, I endured:

• a derogatory joke about John Kerry, implying that he married Teresa Heinz for her money
• a defense of Rush Limbaugh’s drug addiction
• an accusation that Michael Moore fabricated most of Fahrenheit 9/11
• a recap of the comedic highlights of Schwarzenegger’s speech at the Republican Convention
• an inquiry whether I can get Fox News on my cable feed
• the suggestion that bloggers were to blame for Trent Lott’s late-2002 resignation as Senate majority leader

Sigh. The air is so thick with distortions I may not survive until the election.

At 10 mph my commute should take me 8 hours, at which point I could just turn around and drive back home. But I’m not going even that fast: at my current velocity, my commute time approaches infinity. And even though I left home just an hour ago, the time it would take me to get back is infinite too.

I guess I could do like all the professional commuters around me and use my time sitting on the highway to check my voice mail. This would enable me to hear messages from people who couldn’t reach me on the phone because I was stuck in traffic.

Or I could use a dashboard-mounted notepad to jot down time-saving ideas, which could allow me to recover, over a week’s time, five or 10 of the 360 minutes I would be spending in the car today.

My rental car checklist got one item longer today. Used to be, so long as the car had a tank of gas, I thought I would be OK. Then I realized I actually had to request upholstered seats and interiors that didn’t reek of wet dogs or body odor.

This week’s car had a film on the inside of the windshield. I don’t mean “optical film,” like a UV filter or sun shade. I mean film in the more organic, pudding sense of the word. Driving into the sunrise caused the windshield to light up like the cap of the Luxor — yes, at that moment, my car’s windshield could have been seen from space.

Enterprise does a good job, generally speaking, of cleaning out the interiors of their fleet of cars. This meant I had no spare scrap of paper or tissue with which to wipe down the inside of the windshield. I ended up pulling over and using my sock.

This is the man responsible for the smiley face on your dinner check.

William Michael Lynn is an authority on tipping behavior. He has published a free PDF pamphlet describing 15 ways servers can manipulate a restaurant diner’s generousity (Scientifically Tested Techniques to Increase Your Tips, 588K PDF) — everything from addressing the diner by name to providing candy with the bill.

He advocates touching customers. The next time a waiter or waitress touches you, enjoy the warm and fuzzy feeling, because it will cost you between 22% and 42% more than whatever you’d have tipped otherwise.

Lynn advocates squatting: by increasing “postural congruence” and eye contact between server and diner, servers achieve greater rapport and likeability, and therefore maximize the tip amount. In one study, “the servers received approximately $1.00 more from each table that they squatted next to.” In another study, servers who put their heads all the way under the table received $500 more from some diners.

Drawing happy icons on the check brought big rewards too.

Drawing a “smiley face” increased the waitress’ tips by 5% of the pre-tax bill size! However, no comparable effect was observed for the waiter. He recieved [sic] an average tip of 21% when nothing was drawn on the check and received an average tip of only 18% when he drew a smiley face on the back of the check.

Peering deeply into the human psyche, Lynn speculates that “seeing smiley faces drawn on checks may simply make customers smile themselves and, thereby, improve their moods.”

Lynn has not yet published pending research on the effect of dotting lowercase i’s with tiny hearts.

Applying all 15 of the tricks in this Mega Tips guide should yield a massive 520% increase in tips. So, for example, on a dinner bill of $100, a typical tip would come to $15. After applying Lynn’s methodology for maximizing tipping behavior, the server could instead expect $93. Now that’s good money!