I seem to always have trouble on my return flights from Austin.

I seem to always have trouble on my return flights from Austin.  I've been stuck in Denver and Phoenix, and I was reasonably sure that I was going to end up stuck in San Francisco as well.

I arrived at AUS with plenty of time to spare, and went through the "Premiere Line" for security, which means I get to skip over all the waiting and go directly to the driver's license check.  Yay, frequent flier benefits!

I then got pizza:

which put me behind the worst fast food orderer I've seen in a long time.  First he didn't know what pizza he wanted. Then, after choosing and moving on to pay, he decided he wanted a second slice, and asked if it could just be put into the same box.  Since a box holds one slice, that couldn't happen, so he accepted the second box.

Anyway, by the time I got to the gate, I noticed an important fact: there was no plane connected to the jetbridge.  This continued for almost an hour, until the flight came in late, leading to the second problem: there was no crew to fly the now-available plane to SFO.  I've never been able to understand how airlines can manage their logistics so poorly.  You know you have a flight at airport X at time T.  That flight requires a set of N crew members, who need to be replaced after some number of hours.  Therefore, you need some number of crew sets k = ceil(dT / H).  Not having a crew I think has been the problem in both my Denver and Phoenix flight issues.

Upon arriving at SFO, I discovered the actual reason for the delay for the flight: the airport only had one open runway, and all traffic had to use that.  I didn't know anything about this, suggesting that United didn't do a very good job of notifying travelers.  The one benefit of this was that all flights were delayed, so leaving Austin an hour late didn't decrease my layover very much.  I went to the gate, and saw what I thought was my name noting that I'd been given an upgrade to first class, as seat 3-A was listed for someone with my same first initial and first three characters of my last name.

So, using this set of data for last name frequencies, and this data for first names (assuming first initial fractions are reasonably constant over time, so I don't need to convolve an age cohort function against time variable first names), suggests that my first name is more likely than random (0.068126 compared to 1/26 = 0.038462), but that my truncated last name isn't that common (0.0024997 compared to SMI = 0.010087).  Therefore, randomly selecting from the US population gives me a upgrade name that has a probability of 1.7030e-04.  Now, confining this to a plane makes it a birthday problem, and this seat map suggests a United 757-200 has 188 seats.  This leads to a probability that someone else on the plane has the same upgrade name as me of 0.031512 (Edit: For comparison, Roger Smith has a probability of 0.10684, significantly worse than me.) This is higher than I would have thought, but since it's a birthday problem, that's pretty much always the case.  Still, this would give me a ~97% confidence that I had the upgrade to first class, meaning I would be able to count on a meal on the flight.

I had some emergency chocolate that I'd packed before leaving home, and I discovered it while sitting there.  It had a raspberry filling.

Tl;dr: I didn't get the upgrade, this flight fell into the 3.15%.

In any case, I made it home without much trouble (despite all that), and was able to get to see a really nice sunset over the Pacific Ocean:

I'm sure the clouds have a specific name too. Altocumulus?  Is that right?

Seriously, it's things like this that make it hard for me to sleep

Did you mean: goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle

Isn't there a way to super-share pictures in Google+ so that other Google Googles can Google them with their Googles?

Ok, so that last sentence made me think of the word Google. That led me to thinking about power laws. That led to:

Yes. Yes it is. A lot of the higher number searches fall into two categories: the worst typo-squatters ever and youtube video comments/forum posts where someone is being a dick about suggesting someone search the internet to answer a question.  My original plan was to stop searching at 100-o's, since that seemed to be the appropriate number. However, since I was still getting O(log10(R)) ~ 2, I figured I would keep going until it reached zero results.  That happened, but it turns out to be a special case. When you have a search that includes a 125-character word, Google assumes you're just messing with it and refuses to do the search.

Everything is a powerlaw. Everything.

Alternate title: How to use Google and Twelve Years of Higher Education to Prove Useless Things.

So this, pointed me to this, which reminded me of a similar experiment that I'd done a year ago.  Khan's fine, but I like LOLcats, so instead of the number of "a"s, I counted "ol"s after the first "l".

Here are the interesting things I noticed from this data.

1. The current distributions of lols is very similar to the distribution 18 months ago when I first considered the problem.  Other than a few wobbles, this is well described by a N_{ol}^{-3.5} power law.
2. This distribution suggests that adding two more characters gets boring at a constant factor.
3. There is a sharp jump in the current distribution at eleven "ol"s.  Beyond this point, the power law has an identical index. This suggests that during the last 18 months, eleven "ol"s became the new cool, but the boredom factor is still the same.
4. The fall off in the 2008 data occurs at 50 "ol"s, which corresponds to a jump from 99 to 101 characters. I suspect this shows that something somewhere had a limit of 100 characters.  This isn't visible in the new data, because the tail of the eleven-ol cool boost is sufficient to wash out any such drop.

The khan data linked above has a powerlaw index of N_{a}^{-2.5} for the middle section, between the fall off at low N_{a} (probably just typos, and not meme-related), and the drop above 50 (no theories on this one).  Therefore, while adding "a"s, you're less likely to get bored as you are with "ol"s. I don't have a good test meme for larger letter sets, so I can't test that a three letter suffix/infix would drop off as N^{-4.5} or so.

Another interesting test was to look at the quoted phrase "N martini lunch", where the number was written out.

After a quick upswing (I assume while our luncheoneers gain courage from martini's one and two) to the peak at four (a skew point suggesting the proper number of martinis for your lunching), there's a rapid drop with a power law index of -8.  This probably represents the combination of two effects:

1. The difficulty of drinking that much liquid during a standard lunch.
2. The unwillingness of people to call something "lunch" when it's clearly devolved into "mid-day binge."