Time to clean house – doesn’t everyone love moving?! I just finished listing a bunch of my stuff on eBay. Perhaps you would like some?

DVD box sets – PayPal preferred.

Six Feet Under, season three

Sopranos, season five

Lost, season one

Futurama, seasons one, two, three, and four.

Other
A super-sweet UPS and power conditioner (computer battery backup, brownout protection, and surge protector). Local pickup only – that baby is far too heavy to mail!

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Wikipedia has been hot in the news lately, having recently posted its one millionth entry. The Onion has a Wikipedia article, as does The New Yorker.

I love Wikipedia, and use it as my standard reference work. Firefox users, did you know that you can type “wp [thing]” in your address bar (not the search bar), and it will pull up a Wikipedia article on your search term? Discovering this little gem was the highlight of my day.

The other day, I stumbled across Wikipedia’s List of cognitive biases page. It’s informative, entertaining, and humbling, all at the same time – what more could you ask from your web browsing experience? And look at how many of these apply directly to The Knitting Experience!

Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.

This explains why people keep buying yarn (which is crap, yet very expensive) from big box craft stores. “Everyone else obviously buys this yarn, so it must be acceptable.”

Contrast effect – the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.

I like knitting hats! No, wait, the Irish Hiking Scarf! No, wait, I want a Gothic Leaf Stole! No, wait – dishcloths!

Disconfirmation bias – the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and accept uncritically information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.

“Your favorite knitting technique is inferior to the way I’ve always done it.”

Endowment effect – the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.

Have you seen my dishcloth? It is the best dishcloth of all time!

Focusing effect – prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.

“Acid green fun fur is cool! I will use it to knit a sweater for my dad!” The focusing effect explains the problem with 95% of patterns produced by yarn companies.

Hyperbolic discounting – the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.

This is why, in the time it’s taken Feral Knitter to design, knit, and complete Sashiko, I have made about 300,000 crap hats and dishcloths.

Illusion of control – the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.

Thus my belief expressed above, that I could have knit a Sashiko jacket, but chose not to.

Impact bias – the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.

“When I finish this sweater, I will love it forever, and wear it every day!”

Loss aversion – the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains

Why I will never again drop stitches to fix a problem. Sure, I might fix the problem – but also I could ruin the entire back of the sweater like last time.

Neglect of Probability – the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.

This is responsible for every knitter that skips making a swatch before starting a project in an unfamiliar yarn.

Mere exposure effect – the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.

“I like Lion Brand yarn.”

Planning fallacy – the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.

No explanation needed.

Post-purchase rationalization – the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was good value.

Also, no explanation needed.

Pseudocertainty effect – the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.

Also why I won’t drop back stitches in the future. 100% chance that the error will stay if I don’t drop the stitches to fix it. If I do drop back the stitches, there’s a 70% chance that it will be fixed – and a 30% chance that the entire thing will be ruined. Mmm, yeah, we’ll just not drop back the stitches, eh?

Rosy retrospection – the tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.

I don’t think my first attempt at a shawl was that bad a disaster, really. I only spent a few hours working on it, and it’s good practice for the next time I try one out. But if I think carefully, I do remember that at the time, it seemed like the end of the freakin’ world.

Selective perception – the tendency for expectations to affect perception.

I think this dishcloth will be pretty, and therefore I will find it so. (The opposite is also often true.)

Status quo bias – the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.

Who’s up for knitting more dishcloths?

Von Restorff effect – the tendency for an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” to be more likely to be remembered than other items.

I browsed through an entire copy of Knitting Nature – which is not a small book – but the only thing I really remember is the picture of the model clinging to a rock face above the rising tide, while wearing six-inch heels.

Projection bias – the tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.

Wait… you don’t think my dishcloths are the coolest thing anyone has ever knitted? Sulk.

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Apropos of nothing, how much do you love the Bloglines error guy?

Bloglines is having some trouble today. From time to time, when I check my feeds, instead of all the links in the left-hand pane, I see this guy. He always makes me smile. I wish more companies had error messages like the Bloglines Error Guy.

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Saturday sky:

Bedroom weather report:

67.1 degrees at 12:14PM – I love my city!

I slept in until 7 (luxurious!) then made my way down to Apartment Candidate #1. It’s $520 for a 600 square foot, one bedroom apartment with dishwasher and garbage disposal. No laundry machines – they are an option, but it costs $50/month. That’s a lot of laundry! I don’t do that much laundry. Plus, as the rental guy pointed out, it bumps up your utility bills, too, so you pay twice. For $600 a year, I can buy myself an awful lot of DVD box sets and yarn to make up for the trauma of having to go to one of the laundry rooms at the complex.

My apartment cost threshold is $600 in-city, $550 outside. I only work 14 days a month with my new schedule, so these two cost the same, factoring in gas prices.

Unfortunately for me, the rental market has gone insane in the last year. Occupancy rates are up 6% in the first six months of the year, and the number of apartments has dropped sharply, because they’re all being converted to condos. (As many apartment buildings went condo by June this year, as did in the entire year 2005.)

What this means from a practical standpoint is that there are a few $600/month apartments left in Seattle, in non-scary neighborhoods, but nobody’s moving out of them. For every 20 places I call, only two will have occupancies coming up – one of those will not be available until September, and the other will be available this month, but cost $775.

Just to give you a benchmark, several years ago I lived in a 500sf studio, cement breezeblock walls, no window screens, no dishwasher or garbage disposal, half-size kitchen, the fridge was in the living room, and it had catastrophic mildew “issues,” but it was on Alki. At the time, it cost me $520 – now, five years (and no renovation) later, it rents for $675. Also, it’s occupied.

Part of the problem is that I’m picky. I require a minimum of 600 square feet, a dishwasher, and assigned parking. I am too old to wash my dishes by hand, or to drive up and down the street to find a spot, and then walk around in circles the next morning, trying to remember where I parked. Also, the place must be available by August 20th at the latest.

As you might expect, this doesn’t leave me with very many choices. Contender #1 is in Federal Way, about halfway between Seatac Mall (icky) and Redondo Beach (wonderful). The complex itself is 30 years old, maybe looking a little rough around the edges, but the appliances and windows are new. (This is important: old crappy metal-frame windows without screens are typical for apartments around here, and they will make you miserable.)

I drove through and examined it carefully before stopping in at the rental office. (It’s amazing how much you can tell about a place just by looking carefully, if you know what to look for.) I would say the typical renter is a hispanic or asian family with young kids, both parents working hard at just-above-minimum-wage jobs, and Grandma helps out with the kids.

Peering in at the patios and decks, it was obvious that the owners took pride in what they had, even if it was just a pair of white plastic deck chairs and a small Hibachi grill from WalMart. I saw a lot of young children playing in the common areas, wearing clean but well-worn hand-me-down. Young mothers stood together nearby, chatting in small groups while keeping a sharp eye on the kids. As I passed one play area, a small boy picked up a clump of dirt in his chubby little fist and raised it to his mouth – his mother broke off her conversation and rushed towards him, hollering in Spanish. He dropped the dirt before she had crossed half the distance between them; she scooped him up and carried him back with her, shaking her head.

It’s not a fancy apartment complex by any means, but it looked wholesome, if not in the upper middle-class way that wholesome is usually used to describe. More important is what I didn’t see: I didn’t see any trash, or broken things lying in random heaps, or young men standing around seemingly with nothing to do, or scruffy children without parental supervision (these, I can tell you from first-hand experience, are all red flags). I didn’t see any cars that were suspiciously expensive, or that looked as if their owners might be tempted to try “drift racing” in the parking lot at 3AM while playing their custom-built car stereo at 160dB.

All of which makes it a little easier to swallow the idea that I’m contemplating moving 27 miles from work. But really, $520 a month? That’s crazy cheap!

This is a lot more than I meant to write about an apartment I’m not even renting yet. How about some dishcloths?

I call this one Egg Salad. Really for no particular reason – the name just occurred to me, and it kind of stuck.

I like the backs as much as the fronts.

This is Bluey. I didn’t really like Bluey at first, but the colors grew on me.

Bluey is eight reps tall, which is just the right size to hang over the faucet without having to fold it up. (Because you know if you have to fold it up, it won’t dry quickly, and it’ll get all gross and smelly. At least in the Pacific Northwest, it will.) Egg Salad is ten reps tall, which is a good size for drying dishes. I knit both of them on 3.75mm needles, which seem to be about the right size.

I think two smaller ones (Bluey’s size) and one larger one (twenty reps, twice Egg Salad’s size) would make a good gift package. Then you have two for washing dishes, and one proper towel for hanging over the oven handle or laying out on the counter to dry larger dishes. I used Bluey to actually wash dishes last night (not those ones, obviously) and it worked quite well. Definitely better than a sponge – it has so much more texture for scrubbing.

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I’m a little late to the 2006 ABC-along party (which started in January) but I figure if I post one every Friday, I can make a good go of it.

A is for Adjusting to a new schedule. This is what the world looks like from under the covers at 6AM – it’s too bright, and the cat wants his breakfast.

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