The Iron Yuppie

Top 10 mistakes of home sellers

Yeah yeah. These are good pieces of advice, no question. But I'm a big fan of the following article:

Market Distortions when Agents are Better Informed

The number one thing you can do is leave your house on the market longer. It's one more proof that there's almost nothing that can't be made better with patience.

The beauty part of this research is that it proves that the experts who know more about the situation are optimizing for themselves rather than their clients in the most clear way possible: when THEY are the clients, they do a better job. Further, it's a particularly interesting information disparity, in that it's not like the agent is hiding potential leads; instead, the agent is likely just SAYING that the potential leads will not be as good or very difficult to find. But that is proveably not the case, since the agents are able to get those leads and do it without difficulty when they're selling their own home. Just fantastic research. Remember, when you're selling, if your agent owned and was selling your house, they'd sell it for $7k more than you're likely to get.

Microsoft security guru: Jot down your passwords | Tech News on ZDNet

This is non-intuitive, but certainly makes sense when you think about it. It's one more case where a situation becomes so one-sided, the opposite outcome is actually induced. Kind of like gun shows. Because there are so many regulations on guns purchased in stores, gun shows have now become a major area of buying and selling weapons in an illegal way. Close a door, open a window. Anyhow, I'm a big fan of "writing" down passwords... I use a text document that is PGP encrypted. The funny part is I don't think it's going to last very long anyway... at the rate computers are speeding up, we'll either have to have 60 character long passwords or figure out some new way of verifying an individual.

Wikipedia: Internet Phenomenon

I'd love to say that everything I've seen on the web was worth saving. Actually, I'd love to say that 0.001% of everything I've seen on the web is worth saving. However, here's a fairly decent site capturing lots of those 1997-1999 things I did see that I'm glad are out there. In the interest of participating in the distributed storage that is the web, here you go:

Mahir's Flash Video: "I Kiss You"
Hello my future girlfriend: Web page

Enjoy.

Boing Boing: Teenager's camera face

Stolen straight from BoingBoing...

This girl has a bunch of pictures taken of herself (Take a look) Someone meshed them all together Mahir-style into a flash demo: Link. You really have to watch it to believe it.

Heisenberg In Real Life

Chooky is in the midst of walking through his recent readings about quantum physics, and let me sum up by saying you will leave the end of this month slightly smarter and way way way more confused (as well as generally feeling in awe of the people who thought this stuff up). I'm only about half-way through and there are a couple of things that absolutely floored me when I read them.

The first was Einstein's thought experiment to work through a fact about light. Newton said that you cannot know that you are in motion without it being relative to something else. If you are flying at 500 miles an hour (relative to the Earth) and a ball is sitting in front of you also flying at 500 miles an hour, you will look at the ball and think you are both stationary unless you feel the wind on your face, see the ground, etc. Einstein then said, if I was traveling at the speed of light, and had a mirror next to me, the mirror would be black. This is because none of the light that left my face would go anywhere (it would all be stationary). THEREFORE, I would be able to tell I was traveling at the speed of light with no external reference. Therefore, you cannot travel at the speed of light OR the speed of light is not a constant OR you can tell what speed you are traveling at without an external reference point. One of these MUST be true! With one thought, Einstein unleashes a whole world of new physics. One little thought!

Second, Heisenberg declares that "(accuracy in momentum)*(accuracy in position) is less than a constant". You may know about the double slit experiment in physics, where streams of electrons are passed through a shrinking hole and then hit a wall where you can see their impact. When the hole gets small enough, the electrons behave like both a wave and a particle. The best part about this is that as you shrink the hole, the circle on the wall indicating where the electrons are hitting the wall first gets smaller (as you would expect) THEN larger THEN displays the Airy Pattern (as Chooky says, think bullseye). Getting smaller? I get it... the hole is getting smaller so it makes sense. Bullseye pattern? I get it... that's the point of the experiment, the electron(s) interfere to create the pattern. But getting larger in between? THAT'S the Heisenberg principle! Because you know the position to a greater degree, the momentum MUST increase. Because the momentum increases, they are dispersed over a larger area, creating the larger circle. Can you believe how insane this is? It's like you were staring at a baseball in flight through a pair of binoculars. As you began to focus the binoculars, the baseball began to stretch out into a blur so you couldn't tell if it was going really fast or going really slow. CRAZY!

The thing that floored me about both of these is how utterly simple it is once you understand the principles behind them. It just goes to show that even the most complicated things can be reduced to a simple example. In fact, if you cannot reduce a given problem, you're probably not thinking hard enough about it. And if the only way you can explain something is through an overly complex method, stop it. You don't fully understand it enough to teach it to someone else.

One of the cool things about Google Maps (and the upcoming MSN Virtual Earth) is the ability to get a view of just about anywhere in the world. This is a great site for tracking lots of those interesting items through Google Maps. Is it just me or does it seem like this is going to be the next kind of celebrity? People are going to be running around their backyards and on their roofs to decorate it in some way that can be seen by satellite. Boy I'm glad I live in a condo.

D

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Effects of Smoking May Be Passed Down through Generations

I was initially skeptical of this study, only in that I could not see a way that the effects of smoking could have been passed down in any way from mother to daughter let alone from mother to grandchild. But, when thinking about the immune system, that could be a very viable way for this to be passed on. My question with the study is did they control for children whose mothers smoked when they were pregnant but then STOPPED smoking when they were born. Because I have to imagine that if you're desparate enough to smoke when you're pregnant, it's pretty unlikely that you're not going to be smoking after you've had the baby. Still, it just amazes me that tobacco has still been as accepted as a product for as long as it has. You're talking about the only product which is not only proveably addictive but proveably increases your chance of dying. Yet I cannot buy alcohol on Sundays. The multiple personalities of the government always annoy me. Either regulate EVERYTHING (please don't) or let me do what I want without prejudice.

The Amazing OpenX!

Heh. When someone has an entire product designed to undo the "advances" you have made, you've probably done something wrong. Here's a perfect example of where something was designed (blister packaging) which is perfect for one audience (manufacturers) and totally worthless for another audience (consumers) yet, in order to be successful, it needs to satisfy both. Must be those space devils!

I'm going to try to use as many searchable words as possible in the following post. When I was doing my recent install of SP1 for Windows Server 2003, I had the hardest time finding out why it kept failing because it kept coming up with the same meaningless error box: "Access Denied". Are you really so short on characters that you're worried about running out of text and have to put up something that brief? It turns out that the problem was probably my fault, in that I was trying to lock down my machine and probably dropped the write permission on a specific registry key. The key in question was:

• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\KernelFaultCheck

Well, you could have printed that out, or at LEAST pointed at a log and told me where to look!

Turns out that everything DID get logged, and once someone told me where to look ("setupapi.log") it was easy to do a search on "Access Denied" and find the following:

• #-086 Deleting registry value "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\KernelFaultCheck"
• #E033 Error 5: Access is denied.

Look, MS (and all other SW makers), I know you're trying to get stuff out, but help us do some digging on our own! You could do any of the following:

• Print out the error location/library where it failed
• Print out a more specific error name/value
• Print out the log in which to look for more info
• Format the log in XML so you can read it with a tool like a normal human
• Collect all the failed logs (I know that PSS must have done this a hundred times) and point out what the failings were and if/how you solved the problem

I know that printing out stuff like stack traces are totally useless, but printing out error messages as bland as the above one is also useless. Tell us where to look! Hopefully, posts like this one will help just in that it populates the search engines with more information. Other than that, the update is running great!

D

Java chess games: database search, analysis

I was browsing through the paper this morning, and came across the chess pages in the NY Times. It's so hard to see the intricacy of the game, even with the description, but I was near the computer so I found the above site... plus this page detailing some of the positions. Particularly cool about this is the ability to just paste in any game (or search for past games) and then watch as the game unfolds. Very neat!

Wired News: Ad Execs Want to Track Every Move

Ok, I know they WANT to track every move, but how? Even if I carry a pager device around and it shows that I passed 14 billboards on the way home, will that really indicate that I saw them? I think this is one of those academic things (which happens to cost the company more than $100 M) which, on the other end, you'll get a ridiculous amount of noise and discover that people who drive red cars are %0.06 more likely to go to TGIFs than to Applebee's when they hear a White Stripes song on the radio, and whoopty do, because correlation does not prove causation.

One thing that caught my eye was this:

"One thing we found is that since the consumer has a fast forward in their hand, they will use it," Pizzurro said. However, the company also found that people are unlikely to bother fast-forwarding through one ad.

Project Apollo could offer advertisers insights into which messages resonate with viewers, and which fall victim to fast-forward.

Doesn't this optimize for some kind of ad which you will be forced to watch... OR DIE? Battling Seizure Robots anyone?

Cheap Gas - Washington

Damn, this is cool. I mean DAMN. You know what's the neatest about this is that Google did absolutely nothing here. All they did was provide the maps and the ability to highlight points on the map (through a non-published API of all things!). Yet, people are extending it like mad. The Terraserver guys should be kicking themselves over and over again.

NPR : Pedometer Fitness Fad Takes Off

I couldn't help but laugh when I heard this. I love the idea that walking is the answer to all our exercise/obesity issues. Through the magic of time travel, allow me to discuss this with my ancestor of 500,000 years ago.

Me (Present Day): Hey ancestor, what's happening?
Great-Great-(Great)^12,000-GrandDad: Ogg?

Oops, that's a bit far. Let's chat with my ancestor of 10,000 years ago.

Me (Present Day): Hey ancestor, what's happening?
Great-Great-(Great)^250-GrandDad: Yo.
M: You wouldn't believe what's taking off nowadays, old man! It's called a pedometer!
G: Uh... what?
M: Yeah, it's called a pedometer, and it measures how many steps you take each day.
G: So? What are you going to do with that?
M: Well, now we can measure how much we've walked every day to make sure that we've get enough exercise!
G: What's exercise?
M: Today we need to make sure we move around enough or else we’ll get fat and die young.
G: Why?
M: Cause we eat so much!
G: … *disbelieving look*
M: Uh, well, in the future, we eat sweets and meat and carbs and Cinnabons and FatBurgers and Slurpees and … well, I could go on but my mouth is drooling. The problem is that we eat so much, and then do not do anything that we get obese and that causes us to die early.
G: So let me get this straight, you have so much food that you DIE?
M: Yeah!
G: Um, tough life. Couldn’t you just eat a little less so you don’t die?
M: Easier said than done. Imagine that Cinnabon’s are the sweetest of the sweet and if you taste even just a little bit, you’re completely addicted.
G: I guess.
M: Yeah, so we have to do things that are hard like run for miles or lift heavy things or swim in a lake in order to not die.
G: So you can train to kill your food more easily and defend your family?
M: Um, no, we get food from a place called a store where stuff just sits around waiting for us to pick it up. We don’t really have to defend our family cause dangerous animals are usually in far off places or in restricted nearby locations called zoos.
G: Yikes. Sounds really dangerous. I pity my descendants.
M: You don’t need to be so sarcastic.
G: Fine, so what’s this pedometer thingy?
M: Well, other than running or swimming or lifting heavy things, another way of getting exercise is by walking and the pedometer tracks how much you walked.
G: Walking is exercise?
M: Yeah! It’s super easy.
G: Of course it’s easy, how the hell else are you supposed to get from place to place.
M: Well, we have these things called cars that … you know what, never mind. Just assume we can magically move from place to place without walking.
G: So, if I understand correctly, you have all the food you want, and you don’t need to walk anywhere so, in order to correct this clearly disasterous situation, you need to not eat food which is readily available everywhere and walk a bunch, even though you don't need to.
M: I guess that about sums it up.
G: …
M: What?
G: You guys have got to be the dumbest people I’ve ever heard of. I really do pity my descendants.

Tune in soon when I have a conversation with MY great^250-grand kids and discover they need to hire sleep and breathing trainers because they have machines that take care of that annoying habit in the future!

D

Coyote Blog: Not the Comfy Chair! (Updated)

I thought this was an interesting take on the whole Newsweek debacle. You know what my question is? Who told them that the story was false? Isn’t the only person who could confirm that the original anonymous source was wrong … the original anonymous source? Doesn’t that mean you have to believe him/her again? What if he's lying about lying the first time!?!

*my head a splode*

Updated: Corrected spelling.

Few interesting articles recently on the environment. First, to ANWR:

Pump Dreams from the New Yorker

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on Alaska’s North Slope, is the new hope. The Prudhoe Bay oil field, one of the world’s biggest reservoirs, is just sixty miles west of the refuge. Surveys carried out by the U.S. Geological Survey suggest that ANWR may contain about ten billion barrels of recoverable oil. If this estimate turns out to be reliable, and if exploration starts next year, in 2025 anwr could be generating about a million barrels of oil a day. This is a lot of fuel, but it dwindles next to our energy requirements. By 2025, according to the Department of Energy, Americans will be consuming almost thirty million barrels a day. With luck, an ANWR oil field operating at full capacity could satisfy perhaps three or four per cent of that total, meaning that most of the oil we use would still have to be imported.

I have to say sometimes it seems like no one is doing the math on this stuff. It really seems that the only reason to go into ANWR (is that all caps or what... it's an abbreviation, right?) is to try and keep oil cheap. But if that's the only goal we had, then a lot of things would be cheaper. For example, we should just clear cut the forest right next door, rather than getting all that wood from the middle of nowhere. I do not think that's what we're optimizing for. It's a very interesting article overall, I highly recommend it. I finished reading it and wasn't exactly sure why we're not drilling the hell out of Russia rather than dealing with the Middle East at all.

But with global warming, I got into a very interesting discussion over mail recently which I'll replicate here (and ultimately led me to edit my "facts" from yesterday's post).

It started with two opinion pieces in the Telegraph:

Leading scientific journals are censoring debate on global warming

and

Global warming generates hot air


Ok, to the first, I think we can all agree that censorship in any form is much badness. Specifically with the above, I think the right thing to do would be to expose the items not selected for review, a link to the article and the reason for lack of publication. This is the Internet age, after all, and total transparency is easy! Then let the readers decide. I guess this means you get one attempt to publish and then you're done, since a cause for rejection is having your points "widely dispersed on the [I]nternet", but the author could decide that as well.

As to the follow up opinion, I disagree with a few points in there:

1) This comment is wrong:

Six such individuals have just published a paper arguing that cosmic ray intensity and variations in solar activity have been driving recent climate change. They even provide a testable hypothesis, predicting some modest cooling over the next couple of years, as cosmic ray activity increases cloud cover. Since the conventional - sorry, consensus - wisdom says we are on a rising temperature curve to disaster, a couple of cool years would deal a serious blow to the anthropogenists.

It’s not global warming that is the problem; it’s fundamental climate change exacerbated by increases in reflective IR. Cool years/warm years don’t help or hurt the long term theory; it is the variation from the norm that's the problem, even if that variation is only local (a specific region being particularly hot or cold, as an example). Unfortunately, this can be difficult to distinguish from normal extreme variations in temperature or climate, but I think a good indicator are the numbers associated with weather-related costs (such as the increase from $3.9 B in direct losses in the 50's to $63 B in direct losses in the 90's (I do not know if these numbers are inflation adjusted or not)).

2) As to this point:

[The authors of the dissenting papers] are not nutcases, nor are they in thrall to the oil companies (even if they were, does anyone seriously believe that Big Oil wants to destroy the planet?).

No, no one would think that Big Oil would want to destroy the planet. I have no doubt that they are acting in a way consistent with their thoughts on what is best for their shareholders. But, simultaneously, Big Oil is near-sighted… and required to be so! If the board of Exxon cut all funding for projects for the next 10 years in hopes of building out their 15 year strategy, they’d be laughed out of the boardroom (and likely sued). It's simply not their responsibility to think long-term without economic guidance... this is why consumers (and to a lesser extent, government) need to set the social norms about how long a company should think and penalize companies that do not think that far ahead.

3) Even if I take the author’s position to be correct, that there are individuals who could be publishing papers which contradict the majority of positions out there, this comment seems odd:

But that hardly justifies Draconian measures that will make us poorer, unless the scientific evidence is overwhelming.

By the author’s own admission, there have been HUNDREDS (928 to be exact) of papers in 10 years which all agreed. Even if 10% of them were outright lying, or 1/3 of them were positive and the rest neutral (as the first paper suggests), that’d still be fairly overwhelming consensus for action, right?

I don’t know how grim things are/will be, and forecasts are never going to be that good. But here are the (updated) facts as I see them:

• Fact 0: H20 & CO2 reflect infrared better than N2 and O2 (and other trace gases in the atmosphere).
• Fact 1: As the % CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the amount of IR reflected back to the Earth's surface increases.
• Fact 2: We have more CO2 in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times and are putting out CO2 faster than ever before in man's history.

Likely hypothesis? Our CO2 output is affecting the reflected IR and thereby affecting the climate. Follow up hypothesis? Affecting the climate is a bad thing.

I’m not saying Draconian measures are necessary, but certainly taking us down a path to get us closer to the way the atmosphere was before substantial human effect is probably a good thing (tm).

D

PS3 Three Times Faster Than Xbox 360? : Kotaku

Speaking of marketing, here's a little hint on how to detect that something is a lie. #1, base one part of a two part statement on something that has no possible way of being true or false because you have yet to produce or even see a real implementation of the thing you are talking about. #2, base the second part of a two part statement on something that has no possible way of being true or false because you have yet to produce or even see a real implementation of the thing you are talking about.

I guess that's pretty much it.

Old Foes Soften to New Reactors - New York Times

I am a BIG fan of nuclear power. Well, first and foremost, I'm a big fan of conservation, but if I have to go with a power source, I'd like to go with one that has a known and highly regulated system and produces less radiation over the course of its life than coal, and the only thing that goes into to the atmosphere is water vapor (and heat). I feel that too many people are using perfection as the enemy of the next best thing. Sometimes the next best thing is what you have to go with.

Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank

Ok, first a disclaimer, I own XOM. Second, I'm about to own AIG. Third, I'm a big fan of the theory that things that humans are doing are causing climate change.

Now, onto the witty commentary. Look people, this is what the free market is all about. I would wager that the majority of these articles are based on theories which can be reasonably deduced from the facts. You may not agree with the deductions, but that's what science is all about. You get a hypothesis. You look for a bunch of facts. You prove (or disprove) your hypothesis. What I do not understand is why more companies are not doing this. I would LOVE insurance companies to start funding think tanks proving that climate change is going to increase the cost of insuring real estate and global instability due to scarce third-world resources will increase the cost of doing business with societies that are strongly dependent on their own food source generation. This has already started... "Property damage [due to climate change] is rising very rapidly, at something like 10 % a year." - Dr. Dlugolecki of CGNU. The fact is that I agree with neither the interpretation nor the tone of the majority of pieces that think tanks that Exxon funded put out. Example:

Global warming, for instance, which remains speculative and based on incomplete computer models rather than on demonstrated science, might cost man and nature a great deal if we rush to impose dramatic limits on fossil-fuel use in a misguided attempt to solve a problem that may not even exist. Just twenty-five years ago, some of the current proponents of global warming were warning us about global cooling.33

The single footnote there is to a second book which was an analysis of the scientific community's reaction to interpretations of the facts as global cooling. But there were no facts there either! It's just pure marketing! I love facts. Fact 0: H20 & CO2 reflect infrared better than N2 and O2 (and other trace gases in the atmosphere). Fact 1: As the % CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the amount of heat reflected back to the Earth's surface increases. Fact 2: We have far more CO2 in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times and are putting out more CO2 than ever before in man's history. Likely hypothesis? Our CO2 output is affecting the average temperature of the Earth. Discuss.

My major problem with many environmental movements is the complete lack of attempting to use market forces and MARKETING to their advantage. If this stuff is so wrong, shouldn't there be a hundred other think tank pieces for every one we see here? And further, if this is going to affect us so terribly, tell corporations in language that makes sense to them... ROI and cost of doing business. Please people, this is like block and tackle.

Joel on Software - Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

Every time I come across Joel's essays, I'm always astounded both with how simple yet resonant they are. This piece is about the essence of good coding practices to make it super clear where things are wrong without trusting the compiler to do the work. Not that the compiler cannot help, but beyond the most basic checking (types, overflows, etc), the compiler will not know what you are trying to do. The beauty of this particular note is how it can apply to so many things. A screwdriver can be made to have a torque sensor so that you do not strip it, but it becomes so much more useful when the screw is color coded with the place it needs to go. I’d love it if more companies provided the help and feedback built right into the action that you are currently performing. Not just technology! It is extremely rare to come across anything that could not benefit from a feedback loop or "built in" help so that you know if what you’re doing is what and how the manufacturer intended you to do it.

Xbox 360 compatibility not yet decided

I have to completely agree with the author here... how is it possible that a product which is about to see the light of day does not have a fundamental design decision made? This really feels like a decision that actually DID get made and people are not willing to take the (brutal) press over it.

I keep meaning to pass on responses to posts in the text, but I never seem to get around to it... well that stops right now!

Whether you like private accounts or not, you've got to admit that there's something fundamentally wrong with investing long term in a zero beta investment. Isn't THE fundamental rule of savings to move from risky to non-risky investments as the individual approaches retirement? Combined with the fact that the SS Administration is theoretically managing a retirement portfolio for a hugely diversified population, wouldn't this allow us to take on even greater risks?

I'll rub your face in a nice concept you posted here once: "What would it take for you to change your mind on this issue?"

ACK, hoisted on my own petard! Actually, no, I'm a huge fan of personal private accounts; I have an IRA, a 401(k) as well as my own private (fully taxed) account. Further, managed risk is exactly the idea behind savings; again, I must totally agree with you.

My only problem with the whole solution being proposed was that it would solve (in some way) the SS shortfall, which it cannot. Further, there does seem to be something impossible to it. If it was that easy to get higher returns, wouldn't everyone do it? Anyhow, my net is that I think we already have a number of methods to offer private accounts; I have no (non-cynical idea) why the Bush Administration is pushing yet another one.

For Bush's plan to eliminate the SS deficit overall, I love it! Yes, it's kind of a socialist redistribution of weath thing over time, but I honestly think it's the right thing to do. If you make enough money to be saving extra anyway, SS payments do not factor in as much to your retirement income as it does for the average worker. Since I can say that I'll be in that top category, I can say (as a clearly representative member of the top category since it appears that I'm so in synch with the rest of my top category folks (</sarcasm>)) take the extra money and give it to someone who needs it. I'm pretty comfortable with that.

D

Powerseed: An Electronic Eating Coach via Medgadget via FutureFeeder

How cool is this!

Basically it beeps or changes color or something when you're supposed to take a bite. I so need one of these... I used to eat so slowly, now I eat like someone is going to steal it. I remember when I broke my leg about four years ago, it was a huge pain even leaning forward on the couch to get my food. The nice part was that it was about 5 minutes in between bites, and the food always tasted so good. I've tried eating slowly since, but I'll tell you, it's harder than it looks. I love the tast of food so much, it just kind of sneaks up on you and boom, your plate is clean. Which is why I'm never going to tell my kids to clean their plate. If they stop eating, fine I'll put it in the fridge and if they get hungry later they can eat that. But cleaning your plate is just so absolutely arbitrary. With a device like this, I'd like to think I can get myself a little better tuned to when I'm actually full.

Oh, and FutureFeeder is a great read! (Subscribed!)

Reading Chooky's Blog and a recent visit with my girlfriend and her family to an excellent exhibit of Lewis and Clark maps have certainly dulled my opinion of myself. Chooky talks about three fellas - Erastosthenes, Aristarchus, and Anaxagoras - who happened to come up with the size, shape and relative distances before they knew the Earth and Sun were anything else than big flat platters being carried around on the chariots of Gods. Fine, they knew about pi but they certainly did not have any kind of confirmation about the shape of the Earth. Talk about novel thinking!

And Lewis and Clark, while not working from the same dearth of scientific knowledge, basically walked out into the world with absolutely no idea what was out there. I loved looking at those maps because I cannot think of another area where you would be the only person to put pen to paper and actually record the very first instance of something. (For those who would like to say the Native Americans were there first, I do not deny this, but they certainly did not cover as wide a scope as Lewis and Clark and did not affect all of the rest of the population of the US in the same way. Now if you want to bring up the Polynesian folks who sailed from Indonesia to Hawaii in basically a canoe, that's another story!).

Any how, I'm not quite so pessimistic as John Horgan declaring the end of all discovery, but it certainly feels like I am a lot further away from discovering anything that would affect our fundamental understanding of the universe. One may, semi-convincingly, argue that it is that process of discovery that truly identifies the geniuses. Yet what's left to discover without having multi-doctorates in high energy physics? It's not like I can just reach out any more and just discover gravity. It's there all the time! They don't even bother to turn it off on weekends...

D

Oh why traffic... why must you steal my precious precious video game time?

I genuinely think that the only way out of this is through technology. More roads are of limited use. It's stuff like adaptive cruise control that's the way out of this one.

I was particularly surprised at this one:

Smaller steps -- such as ramp metering and coordinating traffic signals -- also make a difference, cumulatively reducing delays by about 8 percent in the 85 urban areas tracked by the study.

Really? Those traffic metering things actually help? Will wonders never cease.

Updated: Fixed some layout

D

World's Hottest Hot Sauces

There is nothing about this site that is not spectacularly cool. Especially this:



This little gem is called Blair's 6.a.m. It is 16 million on the Scoville Scale. (I love the fact that there's a scale for this stuff.) Ok, that sounds big, but let's put some meat behind that. 16 million is, well, 16 million times hotter than a bell pepper for high values of a bell pepper. It is also one thousand six-hundred times hotter than a smoked jalapeno and three hundred and twenty times hotter than tabasco sauce.

Apparently, the hot stuff in hot stuff is a compound called capsaicin. I've always wondered... what would happen if you ate too much hot sauce? The interesting thing about this is that it's ultimately guided by the strength of the chemical bond. Acids are only acidic because the strength of the negative ion that releases the hydrogen ion is wicked high (this is the technical term). But you can't really add more acid to acid to get it any stronger. In this case, if you have pure capsaicin, is it just pure heat? What is pure capsaicin on the Scoville scale?

According to the BBC, trying a granule of this is like smashing your tongue on a table with a hammer. Wow, now that is pain.

D

Employees Can't Be Fired for Surfing Porn on the Job via LockerGnome

In Norway, you cannot be fired for viewing porn at work. Let me repeat that... You CANNOT be FIRED for viewing PORN at WORK.

Man, I'm working in Norway. Then it's hot-hot-dwarf-on-donkey action from dawn til dusk! Oh yeah!

Javascript password generator

This is a great little tool. If I could, I'd include this in all browsers. Basically, it allows you to take some password (your base password) and pair it with a site name to generate a random password. It does absolutely nothing to strengthen your password, but it does prevent an exploit from one site exposing your base password and allowing access to all kinds of other sites. Great stuff.

reality blurred + Big Fat Obnoxious Boss revealed.

This is pretty old, but I thought it funny that the Big Fat Obnoxious Boss turned out to be a monkey. This is a twist? You know that eventually we'll have a reality show where the only twist is how absurd it is that you actually watched it the entire time. One may argue that that has already happened.

Oh, and great blog! Subscribed!

Google Web Accelerator Download

I spent a few minutes downloading this little app. I love the concept... I've been complaining about it FOREVER. Why can't an app pre-load based on data that's already there? Do you know how long I sit there reading? Great idea!

Of course, I wasn't able to get it working, because every time I opened up my blogger window to blog about it, the plug-in crashed. I'd say that's a pretty good summary of the state of Google right now. Great great ideas. Not quite there on the reliability yet... save search, which they knock out of the park. Of course it's only pre-beta right now, and this is absolutely going to keep people on their toes long term, but it does knock their image down a little bit. They'll get it right eventually... their quality gates just are not there yet. And when they do, it's party time (though I think their rate of innovation will suffer greatly). It's not like I think MS or Yahoo are going out of business, but they've got a whole new world to react to.

Goodness, the kind of stuff we spend processing power doing. Check out this article about how ridiculously accurately tires are modeled in Forza motor sport: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/forza/greenawalt-20050422.htm

Here's a Popular Science article comparing the REAL cars v. the simulation (Spoiler: the simulation does a damn fine job): Race Against Reality

Goodness... so much modeling power on basically a triviality. That doesn't mean I'm not going to be buying the wheel and playing this until three in the morning (to all those living with me, I'd like to apologize in advance). It's just a shame that they've made it so damn fine that I'm going to throw my life away playing it. I'm kind of worried actually.. it sounds so accurate that I'm probably not going to be any good at it (let alone online against others). Especially if you measure the skill in driving to number of dings in my car.

Updated: Edited the PopSci URL

D

Looking back at my post of yesterday, I do not think I correctly stressed how useless the stuff we are going to be convinced into buying is going to be. I implied that the garment that we will be buying may have some utility of some kind. I strongly believe that when the forces of marketing figure it out, we will be encouraged to buy goods and services which have no utility whatsoever.

In fact, much like we have in the food industry today, we will be convinced to buy the goods which will make us happy (chocolate ice cream) and then the stuff which cures the stuff that we originally bought to make us happy but makes us unhappy in other ways (diet pills). I’m not entirely sure that this will be done in a conspiratorial way where one firm controls all the strings, but that would be the smart way (until the congressional hearings anyway).

I think it’s much more likely to be done through market forces:

• “Our ice cream tastes better than anything you’ve ever experienced in your life”
• “These diet pills will get you back to how you looked before you had the ice cream”
• “Haven’t you been dieting enough… experience true pleasure through our ice cream”
• “We know you’re human, our diet pills will get you back to feeling the way you want”
• … and so on.

Except the examples here have a modicum of usefulness. In the future it will be, “Please buy our red cube of joy, it will make you happier than you’ve ever been.”… “Red cube of joy not doing it for you any more? Try the blue pyramid of sympathy”, etc. We're such tools.

D

Analyst: Next-gen growth starts with PS3, no sooner - News at GameSpot

I'm kind of fascinated when I read these game industry analysts. They tend to be so wrong, so frequently. Not that this is necessarily the case with Mr. Morgan, but his analysis does seem a little bit odd. Either MS has a total flop with Xenon, and PS3 walks, or Xenon sells a significant amount and the next generation of console growth begin then. Xenon is fascinating to me... according to the public rumors, it'll have power to spare, but whether or not they have more than the four launch titles that game consoles always seem to have (some family play type game, some single player adventure, a sports game and a driving game) is yet to be determined. And because Halo 2 just launched, there's not going to be a Halo to peg their early sales to next time.

NPR : Jonesing for Fries? Blame the Cave Men

Great story on why we crave the foods we do on NPR today. I was wandering through the mall the other day and discovered the majority of mannequins with nipples. Nipples! As though I should be attracted to them. I think we’re entering into (or have already been in) a time where marketing has our collective numbers. There is a great old study where a mouse has a sensor implanted in the pleasure sensor of its brain and the mouse does nothing else than hit a bar which triggers the sensor until it dies of starvation. Marketing isn’t far off from this… it takes our completely normal evolutionary responses to things (for example, salt was a leading indicator of valuable nutrients in natural foods) and optimizes just for that sense. Soon we’ll be walking down the mall with huge floating abstract shapes which we all think looks kind of good but somehow touches the exact neurons in our brain which are designed to do nothing else but indicate a critical need to spend our last cent on a totally useless garment which at one time may have provided a brief respite from the elements but is now so designed that it makes it totally impractical for wearing any longer than 5 minutes. Yet we’ll feel fantastic about doing it! Scary.