The Iron Yuppie

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.