The Evil Eyebrow

Month: December 2006

  • Holy Wrong Hemisphere, Batman!

    German tourist destined for Sydney, Australia ends up in Sidney, Montana, USA! Hey, it’s winter out there, folks!

    Gacked from Matt Rosenberg

  • The Week in Traffic

  • Pac-Man is eating dots on Minnesotta Highways. Another story featuring the same item, with more detail but less video. Pac-man should have been painted in an elongated fashion like the striped words you see on streets, for better visibility by the driver. These dots are apparently supposed to deter tailgating and inform drivers what the proper safe following distance is. According to the various cited articles, they want to maintain a headway distance of 3 seconds between vehicles. That’s a long way and if the roadway in question grows toward its capacity, it probably won’t hold up. I will be interested to see the results of their before/after study
  • Capt. Fogg’s article of Tuesday December 26th illustrates what I consider to be an extreme opinion about directed traffic enforcement. Roadblocks for drunk-driving checks do not violate the Bill of Rights because people are not “their persons, houses, papers, and effects” on public-access roadways. Safety enforcement is not an unreasonable search or seizure.
  • There are a lot of websites devoted to talking about congestion shock waves. This one does it more entertainingly than most.
  • Lastly, this post talks about freeing up congestion and reducing delay by removing the forced regulation of roadways (i.e. Traffic Signals). The post cites an article that mentions Drachten, Holland, mentioned earlier on this blog. I think this will work, but not everywhere. You need both lightly regulated local roads for access (perhaps business districts, too) and more controlled arterials. That’s how a roadway network works.

  • Eating FrankenCows

    The FDA has released its draft assesment of the safety of cloned animals entering the human food supply. They are inviting public comment for the next 90 (89, today) days.

    I don’t intend to read this thing, but I will skim it. If only to see what people are concerned about. How can an animal that is born from a mother-animal, grow, eat, and evetually die, be unsafe when it comes to eating it? That’s not a rhetorical question. What are the risks? I’m very curious.

  • Gregorian Calendar

    Here are some history and details about the Gregorian Calendar, brought to you by Matt Rosenberg, friendly neighborhood provider of weekly emails concerning geography.

    The most interesting thing (to me) in this article is that it took 170 years to propagate the calendar change throughout all of “western” Europe. That’s a long time for neighboring nations to be on different date-making schedules. Must have made signing treaties that much more tense. (“We’ll use our Calendar.” “No, we’ll use ours!” “Prepare for war…”)

  • Armadillo Run

    I read a review of the physics-based game Armadillo Run. It sounded cool, so I downloaded the trial and gave it a whirl.

    Awesome.

    This game revolves around building structures to get the ball from its start point to the endzone. This may involve bridging gaps, rolling down ramps, climbing hills, jumping walls, etc. You are supplied with a budget and various structural elements such as cloth, rope, metal plates, metal girders, elastic bands, and compressible rubber; you must arrange them in a fashion to accomplish the task. Gravity and potential energy in stretched and compressed members are your only sources of motive energy. There are innumerable ways to solve each problem, but some may break the budget, and others may break the structure! Each structural element exhibits flex and a breaking point. Correct construction of frame members is necessary to support things. This is a great learning tool for would-be engineers, too!

    Go here for some screenshots of structures completed. But really, these screen shots do not demonstrate the serious coolness of watching real physics at work on the creations. If you were ever bothered by the bouncing balls not describing parabolic motion when you won the windows solitare game, you will love this game. Download the demo, go through the various levels, then watch the structures that they have created as a “see what you can do with this?” add-on at the end.

    If you were a fan of Lemmings, get this. If you were a fan of an of the artillery games, get this. If you like puzzles, get this. If you aren’t sure, and don’t think you have the time for another computer game, do not download the demo, because you will be hooked.

    A ping to Jamescronen.com: This should be required playing for your AP physics students.

    I love artillery games. Who could forget Worms World Party and of course, the first one that introduced me to the fun of artillery games, Scorched Earth!

  • Why You Shouldn't Recommend Books

    I have given up taking book recommendations from the masses. I am a quick reader, but I won’t read things if I don’t like them, or if they don’t entertain me. I have developed opinions about novels over the course of my reading career and I don’t like to force a novel past my eyes. I haven’t read past the first chapter of Moby Dick, and probably never will. I did not particularly like Neuromancer. Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is horribly long-winded and if I wasn’t already hooked by his other books, I never would have gotten past the third chapter. The Jungle put me to sleep, depressed. Yet there are books I love that I know would make people scratch their heads and wonder what I was smoking.

    Recently there was a call from Pharyngula to recommend Science Fiction books for young readers. The conclusion I drew from reading the responses was that it was a bell-shaped distribution ranging from crazy to excellent. Most of the responses (in my opinion, of course) were reasonable, while some steered people away from (imo) good books and others steered people toward bad ones. The final decision: Mass Book Recommendations are utterly useless. Or maybe udderly useless as you get stampeded toward the mainstream (Of course, there are some excellent books that everyone has read. “Exception to every rule,” and all that).

    I am personally of the opinion, as evidenced in the Harriet Klausner post, that you should take a book recommendation with a large grain of salt until you and the reviewer develop a relationship. I have friends whose book taste I know and vice versa. I don’t feel like I’m leading them astray when I tell them “read this, don’t read that.” Likewise, there are a few professional reviewers that I trust to accurately predict my enjoyment of a book (there are those reviewers whom I can trust to hate anything I’d like, too, which is an accurate prediction.)

    Of course, you shouldn’t depend on anyone’s judgement for reading. Not mine, not your brother’s, not the NY Times, not anybody! You should merely pick something up and read it. If you don’t like it, move on. That’s a great way to review books!

  • Harriet Klausner

    You learn new things every day. Not necessarily useful things, but things. Possibly, these various items may pop up in a bar quiz someday. I can only hope.

    Today’s thing is Harriet Klausner. This was clued to me by one of SFSignal’s various tidbit posts. This post lists a comment train that has been continuing for over 3 years now and is quite educational.

    Harriet Klausner is Amazon.com’s #1 reviewer. “She” has reviewed more books than anyone else. As of today, she has written 12,939 reviews in almost the exact same format (three paragraph summation with a 4 or 5 star rating). This woman is either a front for a large set of people or someone who might possibly be lying to us.

    I base this on the following data, drawn from Amazon’s list of her reviewed books.

    • She reviewed 19 books on December 10 2006
    • 59 books on December 9 2006
    • 3 on December 8
    • 1 on December 7
    • 1 on December 6
    • 15 on Decmber 3
    • 10 on December 2

    I gave up at this point. I went to page 99 intending to find the date of the last review on that page. Then I decided to make sure I counted all the reviews done that day. I ended up on page 106! The date was August 2, 2006. Checking all of the August 2 pages, it ends up that 102(!) reviews were published that day.

    So, if I do my math right, between August 2 and December 26 we have 146 days. Over the course of that time “Harriet Klausner” has posted 7.27 reviews per day. But, let us not discount what she said in her Wired interview.

    Klausner, for one, has a day job to supplement her income. She works as a paid columnist in two national magazines, Porthole Cruise Magazine and Affaire de Coeur.

    Also

    She never deliberately criticizes an author and she doesn’t accept gifts or money when writing about a book.

    So, here’s a woman with a day job, who never deliberately criticizes authors, yet (from not-so-random-sampling by yours truly and through affirmations by others) never gives less than 4 stars on Amazon, and reviews 7.27 books per day. The first ten books in her reviewed list as of today, the 26th of December, averaged 423 pages. So she reads and reviews 3075 pages every single day, including weekends, while holding down a paying job, and presumably reading the first 50 pages of at least the occasional novel she does not like. Let’s be generous and reverse Sturgeon’s Law and call 90% of the novels she reads good and the last 10% crap. That leaves us with a grand total of 3113 pages per day every day all year long.

    She must be keeping bandage companies in business with all of her paper cuts.

    This is a bunch of crap. No one can honestly, ethically, review this many books every day and have more to say that banal generalities that we can get from the book jacket. If she is telling the truth and does read this much, I have no need to read her stuff; it will be trite and useless to me. If she is not telling the truth and has a team behind the name, then why don’t they publish better reviews? Read some if you don’t believe me…

    I have nothing deep to say about this, other than it reinforces my belief that you cannot trust book reviews or reviewers unless you actually know the person who did the reviewing.

    While paging through her listing of reviewed books, I noticed that one of them was a book of photography. I might be able to believe she can speed read her way through 3113 pages, but a book of photography is not a novel. It would require a different mindset to “speedread.” Yes, I realize it’s only one book, but it’s proof of principle. My principle.

  • War on Christmas

    There is a new perpetrator in the media-hyped “War on Christmas.”

    This “new aggressor” (as mentioned by The Moderate Voice) is shamefully ignoring its own conservative base, the very ones who initiated and continue to perpetuate this mythical “War.”

    I need to “use” more “quotations” in this entry to make it seem more “visual”

  • Transformers Trailer

    There’s a new trailer out for the Transformers movie coming next summer.

  • Polar Ice Albedo and Ponderings

    I’ve been reading (not exhaustively) Realclimate.org since it popped up on the 2006 Best Science Weblogs nominations.

    I like science blogs that stretch what I know about topics, yet are not so far past me that I can’t make heads or tails. This entry I find cogent and fascinating. It reminds me that topics such as global warming (just for one example) are always more complicated that than appear and require dedicated study to truly understand.

    It also reminds me why I usually dislike discussing “science” topics with people. I am science-knowledgeable enough to know what is fact, what is fiction, what is still under debate, and most importantly, what I don’t know enough about to have a legitimate opinion. However I’m not a professional scientist and I don’t have practice convincing lay persons that what they hear or read in the media is not everything to it. I especially find it difficult explaining that having a useful discussion about a slippery and detailed scientific field of study requires both persons involved having some expertise. “‘Cause I heard it on the TV,” is difficult to slap down when it’s considered gospel.

    Nevertheless, I try and explain without being insulting that the person may want to seek multiple sources of input before chiseling their opinion in stone. Practice makes perfect.