How do you lose weight? Easy: eat less, eat healthier, exercise more. Everybody knows those are the three steps, and everybody knows there’s no getting around it, but no one actually wants to do those three steps because it’s really unpleasant to do so. That’s why diet books fly off the shelves with promises of eating whatever you want, as much as you want, and never exercising, because their special secret sauce will make you lose weight anyway. We know it isn’t true, but the tiniest part of our brains thinks that maybe, just maybe, somebody finally found the golden ticket (spoiler: they didn’t).

The current US deficit is a spot on analogy for dieting. How do we fix the deficit? Easy: cut spending, raise taxes, and stop going to war. Everybody knows those are the three steps, and everybody knows there’s no getting around it, but no one actually wants to do those three steps because it’s really unpleasant to do so. That’s why politicians always run on the platform that we can cut spending without cutting any government services, that we can raise taxes on somebody else who is not you, and that we won’t go to war, we’ll just have “military actions.” Let’s take these one at a time.

If you don’t believe in raising taxes, check out this infographic:

The number one contributor to the US debt over the past 10 years is the Bush tax cuts. No, I’m not kidding. Not even raising taxes on the rich, but simply leaving them as they were before cutting them, would have saved us nearly $2 trillion. Damn.

And in second place we have the Iraq and Afghanistan wars which cost roughly $1.5 trillion. All we have to do is not kill people and we will save bank. Funny how that works.

Here’s another infographic of the budget itself and where we spend our money:

Bottom line? If we want to cut spending we have to reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We can cut libraries and education and police forces and PBS and NASA and whatever else we want, but that’s not going to work since that’s not where the money is going in the first place. (I could also point out that other countries with universal healthcare spend far less per person than we do.)

So what’s the problem, exactly? Why is it so hard to do these three things: cut spending, raise taxes, and stop going to war? Let’s discuss taxes first.

People react negatively to unfairness. I’ll bet that a lot of people would be happy to pay more taxes if it was fair. The problem is that it’s completely unfair. As Warren Buffett has said many times, he pays 17.4% of his income in taxes. He’s a billionaire, and the rest of his office, the non-billionaires, the non-rich, the regular people, paid an average of 36% of their income in taxes. So the middle class is paying twice as much percentage-wise as the rich; talk about unfair! As a member of the middle class, I would be happy to pay more taxes, but I’m sure as hell not going to pay more taxes so long as the rich are getting off easy. [NYT]

Moving on to cutting spending. Lots of people depend on Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid for their very survival. With the incredibly low wages that the middle class/poor are earning these days, and the demise of pensions and retirement funds, and the rise of inflation and unemployment and the recession, we can’t cut these things easily without people literally starting to starve. However, these are symptoms of the bigger problem: the rising inequality between rich and poor.

Here’s a third infographic of average income:

The top 0.01% makes 1000 times more than the bottom 90%. It used to be, in the good ol’ days, that a single working man could support his wife, his children, his entire family, and still have money left over to buy a house. Nowadays, the average working man is lucky to get by paycheck to paycheck, let alone support a family. Poor US citizens are relying increasingly more upon the government to keep them alive. Can you imagine any of them managing to save up for retirement? No. This is why it’s hard to cut things like Social Security. This is also why it’s important to fix the income distribution.

Finally, we come to war. I’ll admit, this is one thing I don’t fully understand; the need for people to shed the blood of other people. Ask for $1 trillion to go to war, no problem, but ask for even a single dollar to help someone and you’ll never get it. It flabbergasts me how much we are willing to spend killing people and how little we are willing to spend helping people. It seems we have our priorities backwards.

Although I don’t have a good explanation why, it’s pretty clear that the US loves being an empire, policing the world, sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, and starting war after war after war after war (hundreds of wars). This really needs to end if we are ever going to fix the deficit.

Oh, and didn’t I start this off by talking about dieting? Eating less, eating healthier, and exercising more actually works — I have proof! Over the past few weeks I’ve lost 7 pounds on that regimen with the help of a cool little site I found called My Fitness Pal. It has great iOS and Android mobile apps that make counting your calories very easy. Take a look at these charts:

Each day I ate less than 1500 calories, walked 3 miles around my local park, and ate healthy foods like salads, wraps, and filet mignon, and voilà, I’m now a thinner, healthier version of me.

So, kids, remember Occam’s Razor: the simple and obvious solution will probably work if you just go out and find the willpower to do it.

Everyone check out my first professional blog post, written over at TorrentFreak!

6 Reasons Why Filesharing Will Go Down in History as the Greatest Thing Ever to Happen to Music

Intro

I just had a very interesting email exchange with a reader named Johan who had some excellent questions about Monty Python-esque probability puzzles. The questions he brought up were so thought-provoking that I decided to dedicate an entire blog post to answering them. Figuring out what’s wrong with Johan’s hypotheticals is an excellent exercise in improving your probabilistic vision. I hope you enjoy it!

Johan writes:

What if you have 4 cups on a table and then you ask your friends to take one coin and put it randomly under one cup while you are looking away. Then you pick one cup secretly not telling anybody (25% of picking right). Then you say to your friends “Ah my misstake! I meant only that there should be 2 cups!” and you remove two cups at random not selecting the one you have secretly selected

If it happens that the two cups you removed had the coin you simply go away and redo the experiment with some other group of friends. On the other hand if they were empty you continue (you have now 2 cups on the table and the coin is under one of them).

The one you secretly selected in the beginning will then still have 25% chance of containing the coin. If you then select the other cup and shows it to your friends you will have 75% to find the coin.

The thing that bothers me is that some other person could have secretly selected the other cup (the cup I did not secretly select or none of those I removed). Then he will say he has 75% chance of finding the coin under the cup I secretly selected in the beginning. But according to me, the cup he secretly selected, will have 75%. How can both cups have different probabilities depending on the observer?

What is wrong by removing the cups randomly and have some luck instead of having Monty to remove them? Or is it something else that is crazy?

Philip replies:

First, probability can indeed vary by observer depending on what information they possess. Suppose you pick the lottery number 575,361. Since it’s out of 1 million possible numbers, you correctly assume that you have a 1/1,000,000 chance of winning the lottery. Now, suppose I work for the lottery and I’m privy to inside information that the winning number starts with the digit 5. Well, with that extra information I know that you really have a 1/100,000 chance of winning. Two different observers, two different probabilities, both correct from their own perspective. Of course, the “absolute truth probability of the universe” remains unchanged, whatever that is. Remember that probabilities are always just guesses. For example, there could be another lottery employee out there who’s privy to the first TWO digits of the winning number and his guess would be better than either of ours. So, when dealing with probabilities, we want to get the most accurate answer for the information we have, and that’s the best we can do.

Second, in your example the two players are playing subtly DIFFERENT games. Let’s take a moment to remember why the probability doesn’t change in the Monty Hall problem when the doors are opened (or the cups are removed). When you pick 1 cup out of 4, you have a 25% chance of picking the winning cup. When 2 cups are removed, and there are only 2 left, why are the probabilities now not 50-50? It’s because you never had a chance of being eliminated. Since you knew that your cup would never be removed, nothing has changed now that other cups have been removed; your cup is still only 25%. However, suppose I am the “other secret player.” I have no such assurance that my cup will not be removed; in fact, in 50% of cases I’m eliminated from the game before it even begins (because you remove my cup). Therefore, if I survive the elimination, my cup’s probability does indeed increase to 50%. To sum it up, the secret player has a 50% chance of surviving the elimination, and then a 50% chance of having the correct cup of the remaining 2, for a 25% chance total of winning the game.

So, in reality, when you play this game you will come to the conclusion that your cup has a 25% chance of winning and the other a 75% chance, and the secret player, if he even survived this long, will believe that both cups have a 50% chance of having the coin.

Okay, but that still seems like a discrepancy. How to resolve that? The key is to give the secret player more information. Let’s do the same thought experiment but assume that the secret player KNOWS what you are doing (i.e. this Monty Hall experiment). Well, as the secret player, I now know that you purposefully did not eliminate your own cup. What does this tell me? It tells me that one of the remaining cups has a 25% chance of winning and the other a 75% chance of winning, just as you know, but I still don’t know which cup is yours, so I don’t know which is which! In other words, I know that my cup has a 50% chance of being the cup with a 25% chance of winning, and a 50% chance of being the cup with a 75% chance of winning, which all calculates out perfectly to: 0.5 x 0.25 + 0.5 x 0.75 = 0.5 = 50%!!

So, even knowing that you are playing the Monty Hall game I still can’t do better than 50% unless you tell me which cup you chose and purposely didn’t eliminate. Of course, if you tell me you are playing the Monty Hall game, and you tell me which cup you chose, then we aren’t actually two different people anymore since we are both privy to the same information and come to exactly the same probability calculations.

Johan writes:

I have a deck of cards and you will try to pick the ace of spades. First you choose one card but don’t look at it (you will then have the probability 1/52). I, the dealer, know all the cards and eliminate 50 of the remaining cards that is not the ace of spades. So now you have two cards and are allowed to change your guess. Of course you should change because you will have the propability of 51/52 if you switch.

Now consider this, we do it again:

You select one card from the deck as before (1/52). Then you select a second card and at the same time look at the remaining 50 cards. Because you are lucky none of these cards is the ace of spades! That means that you have done exactly the same work as I did before when I selected the second card for you! You are now stuck with 2 cards (one of them is the ace of spades) and you should switch because of the same reasons as before.

The big problem here is of course that you just as well could have picked 2 cards from the deck at once and then have checked the remaining cards to find out that the ace happened to be in one of your selected 2 cards. You will obviously then have a 50-50% chance and it would not matter if you change. How can that be?

Philip replies:

One of the tricky things when dealing with probability is that it’s easy to talk yourself into something that isn’t true. You say, “That means that you have done exactly the same work as I did before when I selected the second card for you! You are now stuck with 2 cards (one of them is the ace of spades) and you should switch because of the same reasons as before,” but it turns out that that is NOT the case. In both of the examples you give in your email there is a 50% chance of each card being the ace of spades.

There are fundamentally two ways the game can be played: A) you can take two cards and then look at the deck to see if the ace remains, or B) you can pick the first card, look at the deck, and then pick the second card. Let’s go over each of these.

A) Picking two cards first is easy. If the ace remains in the deck, you’ve lost. If you don’t see the ace, each card has a 50% chance of being the ace.

B) Picking one card, looking at the deck, and then picking another is tricky. 1/52 times you won’t see the ace in the deck, in which case you’ve already got the ace and it doesn’t matter what the second card is. 51/52 times you will see the ace and you will be COMPELLED to pick it as the second card. Remember, those are the rules: you must discard 50 cards that AREN’T the ace of spades.

The first scenario you describe in your email simply isn’t possible (well, it’s ambiguous). You say, “Then you select a second card and at the same time look at the remaining 50 cards,” but what does that even mean? Either you pick it randomly, in which case you’re in scenario A above where both cards are randomly picked first, or you look at the deck first, in which case you are unable to pick the second card randomly as mentioned in scenario B.

Do you see the problem? It is PHYSICALLY impossible to both look at the deck and see the ace of spades and AT THE SAME TIME randomly pick the second card. Those aren’t the rules of the game. The only way you can be sure to randomly select both cards is to use scenario A, which is not how the game is played and leads to a 50-50 chance for each card.

I screwed up the beginning “lamp post” and “the most”, but the second verse onward I think was better. This is one of my favorite songs, and it’s actually pretty easy to play. The hard part is singing at a different beat than the strumming.

On a side note, somebody tell me in the comments if I really sound this bad, or is it just the microphone? When I listen to myself play, I feel that it sounds warm and full, but in the video it just sounds so tinny.

“Does only one thing… and does it brilliantly. I won’t say that I was losing sleep over the state of my Evernote tags but I’m certainly happier now they’re organized. Nice job, thanks.” – Simon London

For many people, it’s annoying that searching for a tag in Evernote does not find notes filed under child tags. Taggy solves this problem. Essentially, Taggy iterates over all of your notes, looks at their tags, and auto-tags them with their parent tags as well.

Example tags: food -> dessert -> donuts

Clicking “Hierarchify” will change notes tagged with “donuts” to be tagged with all three: “food, dessert, donuts.” Clicking “Un-Hierarchify” will change notes tagged with “food, dessert, donuts” to be tagged with just “donuts.”

Using this tagging scheme which Taggy creates for you automatically, organizing your tags into a tree structure will make them act that way during searches.

As an avid Evernote user myself, I made this tool to help Evernote work better for me and it has allowed me to be more productive with my notetaking. I hope that it helps you as well!

FYI: This app requires that you have Evernote installed on your Intel Mac with OS X Snow Leopard 10.6+. You can find Evernote for free in the Mac App Store.

If you have any comments or questions about this app, please submit a comment below.

Buy Taggy from the Mac App Store for $1.99

“Did you see me out of the corner of your eye?” I asked.

“Yes,” my friend admitted, “but to tell you the truth, I would have known even if I was a complete stranger just passing by.”

I laughed. “Don’t be silly! A stranger wouldn’t even know who’s turn it is, let alone that there is an extra piece on the board.”

“It’s the power of logic, my friend,” he said with a smile. He then proceeded to embark upon the most fascinating journey of deduction that I have ever heard. Twists and turns abounded at every corner! And, at the end, he managed to prove with mathematical precision exactly which piece on the board should, in fact, not have been there.

Before I continue with the story, I urge you to look at the board below and see if you can figure out which piece is the extra piece. Do not assume that my friend and I played smart chess, only that we followed the rules. Also assume that there is only the one error on the board.

“Ok,” I said, “Prove it. Who’s turn is it?”

“Must you start off so easy?” said my friend. “White is in check, therefor black must have moved last.”

I took a quick glance at the board and conceded the point. “Ok, but that doesn’t mean there is an extra piece.”

“Look at the bishop on c3. How did it get there?”

I saw that the bishop was a dark-squared bishop that should have come from c1. “The pawns on d2 and b2 haven’t moved, so the bishop could not have gotten to c3. Dear heavens, did we screw up our game?”

“Not at all. The bishop on c3 must be a promoted bishop. It is the only explanation. White must have promoted one of his pawns to a bishop.”

“There is another possibility,” I said. “Maybe we just screwed up and the bishop shouldn’t be there.”

“No,” said my friend, “the bishop is needed because without it the white king is in check from two places at once.”

“Oh. Never mind. I still do not see why there must be an extra piece.”

“We know that white promoted a pawn to a bishop, but there are 8 white pawns on the board. Thus, one of the white pawns should not be there.”

I felt a smile creeping to my face. Perhaps my friend was on to something after all. “Go on…”

“The extra pawn can’t be b2 or d2 for the same reason the extra piece couldn’t be the bishop; without those two pawns the white king is in check from two places at once.”

“I see!” I exclaimed. “We have proven the existence of an extra piece, and we have narrowed down our list of suspects to six pawns. But what now? None of the other pawns are needed.”

“It’s true that we cannot deduce much more about the white pawns, so let’s focus on the other pieces. There are three white pieces not accounted for: the two original bishops and one of the knights. Can you tell me how many of these white pieces were captured by black pawns?”

I thought really hard. “Well, the black pawns are all on their original files—”

“Or the g and h pawns could have switched places!”

“—right. Or those two pawns switched places. Since there are only three white pieces missing, the black pawns must have captured either 0 or 2 pieces. An odd number of captured pieces would have left two black pawns on the same file.”

“You are almost there,” said my friend. “Which is it? 0 or 2?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted.

“No worries. Let’s take this one piece at a time. Did a pawn take the original white bishop on c1?”

“No! The white bishop on c1 never moved from that square because it’s locked in by the pawns on b2 and d2.”

“Good! Now, what about the bishop from f1? Did a pawn take it?”

“No!” I exclaimed. “That bishop is also locked in by pawns.”

“Be careful,” said my friend. “The pawns on b2 and d2 are necessary to keep the king from being in check from two places at once. However, the pawns that are locking in the white bishop from f1 are not necessary. Either one of e2 or g2 could be the extra piece that shouldn’t be on the board. If that is the case, the white bishop could have moved to another part of the board where it was taken by a black pawn.”

“Oh,” I said, very sadly. “So, what gives?”

“Let’s go back to the very beginning of our deduction. Black just moved his rook to put white into check. Where did his rook move from?”

“The situation seems almost impossible. The only possibility is that black’s rook took a white piece on f1 after moving from either g1 or h1.” Suddenly, it came to me (or so I thought). “Black’s rook must have taken the white bishop on f1!”

“Again, be careful,” my friend warned. “If white’s bishop was on f1, how did the black rook get to g1 or h1 in the first place? And, for that matter, how did the white rook get out?”

“Well, I suppose that means the g2 or h2 pawn must be the extra piece, because there had to have been a hole for the rooks to get through.”

“I’ll say it once more, be careful. Try out this scenario: The e2 pawn is the extra piece. At some point in the game, the f1 bishop left its home square. At another point in the game, the black rook moved to g1 or h1. Finally, at a third point in the game, the black rook was blocked by a white knight. In this scenario, the last move was the black rook taking the white knight.”

“Ok, ok,” I moaned, “but it doesn’t matter. In any case, the black rook took something. Maybe it took the white knight, and maybe it took the white bishop. But it took something.”

“Not necessarily. There is one more possibility. What if the f2 pawn is the extra piece? In that case, the rook could have simply moved to f1 from anywhere along the f file. No capturing is necessary.”

“^*$&!” I exclaimed.

“Don’t worry, Phil. It all works out nicely in the end. In this final scenario, with the f2 pawn being the extra piece, what do we know about the f1 white bishop?”

I quickly came to my senses. “We know it never left its home square. If the f2 pawn should not be there, then the e2 and g2 pawns should be, thus locking in the white bishop.”

“Exactly! In that scenario, nobody knows what happened to the white bishop from f1. All we know is that it never left its home square and thus could not have been captured by a pawn.”

“Whew,” I breathed. “Can you sum that up for me?”

“Sure. When you boil it all down, here is what we have:

1. Three white pieces are missing.
2. The black pawns captured either 0 or 2 of them, because an odd number of captures would leave two black pawns on the same file.
3. The c1 bishop was not taken by a black pawn, because it never left its home square.
4. Some other white piece was captured on f1. It could have been a piece captured by the rook moving to check the king. Or, the other white bishop was trapped there by e2 and g2, in which case it never left its home square and must have been captured there.
5. Thus, two of the three captured white pieces were not captured by a black pawn. That leaves only one piece that could have possibly been captured by a black pawn.
6. Conclusion: Since the black pawns captured either 0 or 2 pieces, and they also captured at most 1 piece, they must have captured 0 pieces.”

My friend finished speaking and I could feel my head spinning. “Wow,” I said. “All that trouble only to prove that no black pawn did any capturing. What good does that do us?”

“What good does it do?” said my friend. “Why, it’s only the key to the entire mystery!”

“Then please share it.”

“If none of the black pawns moved off their home file, how did a white pawn get through to promote to the c3 bishop?”

“One of the white pawns must have moved diagonally by making a capture.”

“And how many black pieces are missing?”

I saw where my friend was going. “Only one black piece is missing! Therefor, one of white’s pawns moved exactly one diagonal in order to move around a black pawn and make it to the 8th rank.”

“So, Philip, how does that narrow our list of suspects?”

“We already know that it wasn’t pawns b2 or d2. Now we know it must have been a pawn that could only make one diagonal move. That rules out a2, because it would have to make two captures to get around a5. It rules out c6, because it would have to make two captures to get to either the a file or the e file. It rules out e2 because it would need two captures to get around e5.”

“What is left?”

“There are now only three possibilities: the f2 pawn promoted on e8 or g8, or the g2 pawn promoted on h8, or the h2 pawn promoted on g8. We are getting really close!”

“Very close indeed, Philip. There are three possible squares that the pawn could have promoted on: e8, g8, and h8. What do you notice about the color of those squares and the color of the promoted bishop?”

I literally gasped as the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. “The promoted bishop is a dark-squared bishop. If the pawn had promoted on e8 or g8, it would have been a light-squared bishop. The only pawn that could have reached h8 with only one diagonal move, and thus could have promoted to a dark-squared bishop, is the g2 pawn!!!! The mystery is solved! The g2 pawn should not be on the board because it was promoted to the bishop on c3!”

My friend got up to shake my hand. “Well done, Philip. I knew you had it in you. Now, remove that nasty pawn and let me get back to whipping your butt. It’s your turn. Mate in…”

The bad part about this is that it’s Apple’s way or the highway. Apple can and does reject apps from its store for any and all reasons, and sometimes even apparently for no reason. Sometimes previously approved apps get yanked without warning. This offends a lot of people, including myself, because it goes against one of the principles of computing: namely, that I can use my computer to do whatever I wish. Why should Apple get to tell me what I can and can’t do with my own property?

Now, anyone who reads my blog knows I’m a big proponent of freedom, but I’m actually going to come down on Apple’s side, here. This is similar to the debate about Tivoization, which is essentially a question of whether TiVo can take a free, open-source, user-modifiable operating system (Linux) and then modify it to run on a non-free, non-open-source piece of hardware that is locked down and not editable by the user. I agree with Linus Torvalds: true freedom means the freedom to be a jerk and make things not free. In other words, if you don’t have the freedom to take this free piece of software and modify it in such a way, then it’s not really freedom in the first place.

Anyway, back to Apple: it all comes down to choice. Nobody is forced to buy Apple products. Nobody is forced to buy apps through the Mac App Store. People are free to use Windows or Linux instead. People are free to buy applications on CD-ROMs or from other websites instead. If Apple was forced to make the App Store open, or if it was illegal to run a “walled garden” app store such as it is, that wouldn’t actually help consumers because it would limit their choices. Before the App Store existed, consumers had no choice: they were forced to take risks downloading possibly unsafe applications from the internet, or they had to buy physical media from chain stores like Best Buy. Thanks to the Mac App Store, consumers now have a third alternative.

Let me make an analogy: how would you like it if I forced you to use Linux? After all, it is the most free and open operating system out there. Still, I bet you wouldn’t like it. I bet you would rather have the freedom to use whatever operating system you wanted, even if that meant using a non-free, closed and controlled operating system like Mac OS X.

True freedom means having the freedom to live in a walled garden if you so choose. If you don’t like Apple, don’t buy their stuff.

Footnote: I’d also like to point out that Apple is just following the rules of capitalism and competition. Consumers apparently want simple things that just work. Consumers apparently don’t care about openness. Consumers have voted with their wallet on these issues again and again, and the vote has overwhelmingly been in Apple’s favor. Apple competed against Microsoft and Google, and has done very well. If you don’t like it, don’t blame Apple, blame Microsoft and Google for not making products that can compete with the quality and ease-of-use of Apple’s craftsmanship.

1. Nf3 Nf6 2. d4 d5 3. c4 c6 4. Nc3 Bf5 5. cxd5 cxd5 6. Qb3 b6 7. Bf4 e6 8.e3 Be7 9. Bxb8 Qxb8 10. Bb5+ Kf8 11. Ne5 h6 12. Bc6 g5 13. O-O Bd6 14. Rac1 Bxe5 15. dxe5 Ng4 16. Bxa8 Qxe5 17. g3 h5 18. Ne2 Kg7 19. Bc6 Nf6 20. Qc3 Qd6 21. f4 gxf4 22. Rxf4 Rh6 23. Nd4 Be4 24. Rcf1 Rg6 25. Rxf6 Rxg3+ 26. Kf2 Rg2+ 27. Ke1 Qxh2 28. Rxf7+ Kh6 29. Nf5+ Bxf5 30. Qh8+ Kg5 31. R1xf5+ exf5 32. Qf6+ Kg4 33. Qxf5+ Kh4 34. Qf6+ Rg5 35. Qf4+ Qxf4 36. Rxf4+ Kg3 37. Rd4 Re5 38. Ke2 h4 39. Rxd5 Re7 40. Rg5+ {Black resigns} 1-0

Here’s also a brief live video from the beginning of the exhibition. I’m his 8th opponent in the dark blue shirt. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=834842#!/video/video.php?v=111007125632116

Actually, the story has a happy ending. I had just finished a chess tournament at the Marshall Chess Club and was turning the corner of 10th Street onto Fifth Avenue when a guy approached me. It was 7 PM so it was still broad daylight (sunset is at 8 PM) and there were plenty of people milling about. He looked like one of those guys asking for spare change for the subway, so I got ready to ignore him: I had my headphones on and was fiddling with my iPhone so I figured I could walk right past shrugging my shoulders.

He straight up punches me instead! Talk about the element of surprise. It was very sudden, but I basically knew what was happening at that point. Still, I was thinking, “I’m in a nice part of Manhattan, there are people everywhere, it’s not even dusk, surely I’m not getting mugged.” As I was kind of staggering trying to deflect the punches he grabbed my iPhone and took off running. So, I took off after him!

I was screaming things like, “Somebody call the cops!” and, “Give me back my phone!” and, “Help!” Still, seeing as it’s New York City, I wasn’t really expecting anybody to help. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when a young woman with red hair joined the chase with me (I learned later that her name is Cristina).

I don’t think the mugger expected to rob a cross-country runner and I managed to run him down pretty easily within about a block. Cristina yelled, “Get him!” which was encouraging, and, let’s face it, pretty darn cool. How often do you get to yell, “Get him!” outside of the movies?

The mugger looked over his shoulder and saw that I was right at his heels and I guess he began to worry because he started saying, “Stay back, I’ve got a knife,” over and over again. But his hands were empty and it seemed pretty obvious that he was bluffing so I just grabbed him and pulled him to a halt. Cristina caught up and now it was two against one.

He tried to play dumb for a few seconds (“I don’t have your phone!”) but he acquiesced and gave the phone back and then took off. I didn’t go after him because I had my phone back and I really wasn’t looking for a fight. So, it’s a happy ending, and it turns out there really are some heroic pedestrians out there! Plus, I’ve discovered a new and unconventional method for making new friends in the City.

Well, that’s the end of the story, but it’s led me to think about a few things. First, Apple actually has a Find My iPhone feature which can locate a lost iPhone to within a few yards, as well as remotely lock it and delete all the data on it for protection. If the thief had gotten away and didn’t think to turn the phone off, perhaps the GPS could have been used to lead the police right to him? Second, owning the newest Apple gadget is apparently very dangerous, ha ha. He didn’t go for my wallet or anything, he went for my iPhone. I might have to be more careful from now on and consider not wearing Apple’s signature “please mug me” white earbuds. Oh well, live and learn, that’s New York City for ya.