Scream for a rain!

Commuter rail stations conspiracy

(Or, actually, this is more of an anti-conspiracy).

Commuter rail cars have doors on both sides, because on some stations you exit to the right, and on some - to the left. However, there's often no need to differentiate which side of the platform the train arrives at.

Clearly, it may be more convenient to do one way or another in a city streetcar system:

- stations raised above the ground have one platform, trains arriving on two sides - this design needs only one set of elevators/stairs down to the street level;

- stations that are on the street ("stops" would be a more appropriate name for those) don't need any special ways to get from the platform to the sidewalk and therefore the platform is on the right side of the train.

However, inter-city commuter rail systems, like BART, usually don't have a stop just in the middle of a street - not only because such transit systems usually require a huge parking lot, but also because a 9-10 car train would create quite a traffic distraction if being let loose on the open street. So, as BART stations are already full-fledged stations, using up a lot of land, it would seem strange that some stations have one platform in the middle and some - two on the sides.

Therefore, as it would have been easier - and cheaper! - to build each and every station more or less a copy of others, I can only conclude that varying station layout is intentional, and, as the side of the upcomming exit is not announced, I can only conclude this is done to catch spies. See - a local would know where the exit is, while a spy, no matter how good he is at blending with locals, would not. There are cameras right above each exit on BART, so interested authorities can monitor those who hesitate, or prepare to exit through the wrong door, and then do a background check on them. It's OK if that was just a guy who moved into the area recently, but if that was a member of a foreign diplomatic mission, who is, according to the official consulate's schedule, supposed to be at a trade meeting in another state, then something is obviously fishy.

Better than average

They say 80% of the drivers consider themselves better drivers than their average peer, which is somewhat unlikely, unless the average is really, really bad. A usual explanation for this is that most people are over-confident about themselves and thus overestimate their skills and abilities.

However, another possible explanation is that it is hard to imagine an "average" person - as in off the pool of everyone. I think most people just imagine some random people who have cut them off, or even had an accident, or a near-accident with. Plus the respondents may remember some of their friends or relatives who drive really badly, making the respondent swear to never get into the car with them driving. And as very few people remember every single trip that went well, but most remember accidents or near-accidents quite vividly, it isn't surprising that when building up a picture of an "average driver" people mostly remember a set of bad* drivers and, often quite correctly, rank themselves as better ones.

*And even the best drivers may get into someone's "bad driver" list, because not everything is under the driver's control. A child runs unexpectedly onto the road, you slam the brakes causing the guy behind you to perform emergency braking, too, cursing you for not paying attention to the road. Perhaps he didn't even see the child, but it is you whom he'll blame for his scare moment.

Text-editing trick

Undo/Redo keys can be used to quickly go back to the place in the text where you've been. Like if you scroll up to where the #includes are, press Ctrl-Z and then Ctrl-Shift-Z to jump back to the place in the code you've been modifying.

Works with Office, too - although unfortunately the newest Word either doesn't have a Redo hotkey or something else is not quite right. A positive thing about the newest Word's hotkeys is, however, that they've kept the Ctrl-P to print, otherwise I would know how to print.

But the trick works where I do most of the text editing: with Visual Studio and I think I got it to work with Eclipse, so - w00t.

When I grow up, I want to be a...

Some people buy their children toy airplanes, thinking that may be some day kids will become pilots. Some people buy their heirs erector sets, slightly pushing them to become engineers. But of course, those are only hopes, not guarantees, and some parents just have to be certain, even if it means aiming low.

USAF Ad

I've seen an interesting ad for USAF on some website recently. It was made as a flash mini-game, stylized after an old arcade with an airplane flying bottom to top (or, rather the terrain moving under it), with some green squares moving towards the plane. I was even going to shoot some of these green squares, but turns out, the game is not about shooting the crap out of things (the whole purpose of an air force, I think), but you're supposed to "drop humanitarian aid", green squares are the targets for the aid.

They must have an urgent need for pacifists for some reason :)

How to get a new car using a cell phone.

Pretty simple - if someone yakking on the cell phone smashes into your car, totaling it, their insurance would pay for a new car. The problem didn't specify you have to use the phone, did it?

Perpetual calendar in the head

Today is Thrusday, April 10th, which day of the week is September 3rd? It is actually easy to calculate these things, without the computer's help:

As today is Thursday, 17th, 24th and 31st are also Thursdays. April has only 30 days, so 31st of April is actually May 1st (and it is a Thursday).

Continue with Thursdays: May 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th, 36th. May 36th is (36 - 31) = 5th of June.

June 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th, 33rd [-30] = July 3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th, 31st, July 38th = August 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th, 35th, which is September 4th - those were all Thursdays, so September 3rd is a Wednesday.

To go faster we could add several weeks at a time - like 3 or 4 to not overshoot a month completely. 3 weeks (21 days) probably is easier to add, arithmetics-wise, than 28 days.

Let's check October 17th: September 3rd is Wednesday, so September 24th is, too and so is September 45th, which is October 15th. Therefore, October 17th is a Friday.

Wireless connected but no Internet

After yet another D-Link DSL modem died on me, and being tired of another D-Link creature's, the WiFi router, nasty habit of rebooting at random every hour or so, I've upgraded to a Diamond SupraMax-yada-yada-something modem, which also includes the wireless router and stuff.

I've connected the notebook without any problems, but the desktop behaved strangely: it connected in a snap, reported Excellent signal strength and sometimes I was able to browse the Internet, but mostly I could not. I was ready to go get another router model but noticed an interesting thing: even when I seemingly hadn't the Internet connection, Skype was staying green. I also remembered a note from the manual saying any firewall software on the system should be disabled.

With the dawn of understanding shining upon me, I've typed in the IP address of the web server at work and aha! there it was. Then I tried disabling ZoneAlarm and voila! - I can haz teh Internets! But being paranoid, I just couldn't let the extra curtain go, so I turned ZoneAlarm back on but instead added the DNS servers fetched from the router's admin panel right into the wireles connection's settings. That worked, too, without having to mess with ZoneAlarm's settings.

w00t!

The power of marketing legends.

Just remembered a scary story I read about how the tiny pieces of electrically-shaved facial hair are inhaled and end up in lungs, where horrible horrible tumors often start around those little hairs. The only way to prevent that from happening, the article suggested, was to go with wet shaving only, in which method the hair is bonded by the foam.

Granted, it wasn't a very reputable newspaper where I read it, but I still don't use eclectic razors. You know, what if it is at least partially true? ;)

But on the other hand, even though the joys of electric shaving is lost for me permanently, I think it's a small price to pay for the healthy skepticism I developed as a result of realizing the legend was what it was - a marketing legend. It also shows the importance of balance when creating these legends: too much FUD and you risk pushing your targets into the skeptical side.

The Van People Have Settled

Earlier, I have erm... blogged about a mysterious influx of the van people here in San Jose. Apparently they came to settle, as the spontaneous self-organized auto-mall along one of the streets I drive daily is now full of RVs. Humongous ones, large ones, tiny trailer ones -- everything must go, the van people are here to stay!

Clothing and body weight: an unobvious conspiracy

I've read an article today, about fat people not wanting to lose much weight. Having myself lost about 50 pounds with 25 more to go, I don't really care about what motivation they have (or lack). One thing, however, amazed me: "[C]lothing line's sizes seemed to fluctuate with the designer's own weight."

So, basically, the designer puts on weight but still assigns the same size to the pants that fit her. That is again, fine with me since I don't buy haute couture wear, but the whole situation hinted on a vast conspiracy, which neatly explains why people get fatter and fatter (on the average) in the "developed world".

As the productivity grows, people have more money to spend, but do they have more savings? No, because the more money you have, the more incentive thing-makers have to lure you into buying stuff. A TV-set, A refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a car used to be purchases of a lifetime, but not anymore. Not only new, "better" products emerge constantly, they are also deliberately made not to last, leaving the consumer no choice but to buy a replacement.

It was perhaps even easier with clothes with the invention of "fashion". While you can secretly keep your granddad's vacuum cleaner in the darkness of your closet, you have to show the world what clothes you wear. And if you care about what other people think, you have to buy what is "fashionable" now. Needless to say, fashion changes much faster than clothes wear out.

However, some people just refuse to follow suit, wearing the same clothes continuously until they become obscene to show in public in. And it is perhaps infeasible to make clothes too prone to tearing because fabric either holds for years or rips right after you put the pants on. Solution? Make people fatter, so they wouldn't fit into trusty old pants anymore!

And the beauty of it, you can ride the wave both ways: once there's a saturation of fat in the society, you could start a "health campaign", promoting losing weight and all. People would get leaner, old pants become too bulky and unwearable without a belt => they buy a smaller size, discarding the big ones, naturally hoping to not get fat ever again. But ooops -- then you start a campaign that "big is beautiful" and "fat is phat", etc. => a new wave of bigger size sales.

//off to Ross

Calculatorial catch-22

One more interesting thing on the topic of calculators (to be done with it): if the calculators were around in Rome, we could be still using Roman numerals (you know, I, V, X and so on). Positional system made it easy to do arithmetics, but if the calculator does it for you, what's the difference (this may be actually a nice gift to get at thinkgeek ;)).

On the other hand, if we were still using Roman numerals, there probably would be no calculators -- and not much else of the current technology. Makes one wonder what else in our current methods of thinking are obstructing the progress.

Fixing firefox 2.0.0.8 slow/high CPU issue

After installing the new version it became incredibly slow on my XP system, CPU usage shot up to 50% (i.e. took all of one of the cores), I couldn't type without swearing. Reverting as far back as 0.5 didn't help, so it had to be the settings issue.

And here's what solved it for me:

- go to C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and make a copy of your running profile, just in case (copy the whole folder that is called something like <letters-numbers>.default).

- now go into that folder and remove all 0-bytes-long files called prefs-1.js, prefs-2.js and so on, and then remove all the 0-bytes-long sessionstore-1.js, sessionstore-2.js, and so on. Make sure all files you're deleting have 0 length, so that nothing important gets deleted (and if it does, that's what was the backup for!)

I suppose the problem was in sessionstore files, as I had 9999 of them, probably preventing the poor thing from creating any more.

P.S. The best tool to mess with files like that is the Far Manager.

More on calculators

Thinking about singularity is fun, but the over-dependence on calculators could be exploited by humans as well. As far as I know, most (all?) of the electronic components (and end-user products) are made by just a few companies. Therefore, it wouldn't be hard for them to make an agreement so that all calculators sold worldwide are "tainted".

In what way? For example, the calculators could compute 15% incorrectly -- i.e. if someone wants to know how much a $65 sweater costs at a 15%-off sale, she'd get not $55.25, but, say $56.35. Looks pretty close, right? But with hundreds of millions of items sold with 15% discount, the little errors are going to accumulate to a significant surplus for retailers, which they should be glad to share with the electronics makers.

And suppose some egghead sues them:

Judge: So, Mr. Mathnerd, could you state the nature of your complaint.
Mathnerd: Well, 15% of $65 is $9.75, not $8.65, so 15% off $65 should be $55.25, not $56.35
Judge: And how do you know that?
Mathnerd: I submit to this court exhibit A, which is a Quizno's napkin with my manual calculations. Anyone can do the calculation for themselves and see that I'm right.
Judge: What is this? Some filthy napkin, I'm not touching this! But I can certainly check your math!

Judge pulls a calculator, pushes a few buttons... $56.35!
Mathnerd: But...
Judge: Stop wasting the court's time! Case dismissed!

Nobody will hear your screams

CVC §21800(b)(1) is sweeping across the Golden State

(for the spoof).

A little known provision of the California Vehicle Code is spreading like a wildfire by the word of mouth. More people have learned about CVC §21800(b)(1) last month than about Ron Paul and, unlike his presidency, it is available for public benefit right now.

Rhonda Manning, 17, of Santa Rosa, Calif. wasn't concerned about CVC §21800(b)(1) for the most of her driving career. She even hadn't known what the Vehicle Code was -- up until last week when she was carpooling with her friend from softball practice. When Ms. Manning was nearing a 4-way stop intersection, another car approached from the street at her left almost simultaneously with her. Before Rhonda and the other driver begun the usual pantomime of waving each other through, her friend suggested her to use the CVC §21800(b)(1), thus avoiding the delay and a potentially costly misunderstanding.

"Last year insurers have lost $8.7 million to claims resulting from collisions at 4-way stop intersections" -- Melany Griffith, a San Diego area auto insurance agent says -- "People try to be nice, wave each other through and then still go at the same time. If only there was a way to decide who goes first!"

CVC §21800(b)(1), which demands that the vehicle on the left should yield the right-of-way to the vehicle on its right (making an exception for T-shaped intersections) does just that. "It is so cool!" -- Rhonda says -- "Sometimes older people can barely see me waiving and now I don't have to!"

So it is no wonder younger drivers fall in love with CVC §21800(b)(1) at first sight. Some even go further, indicating that they are "in the know" by maneuvering in accordance with CVC §§22107 and 22108. That is, signaling their turns and doing so 100 feet in advance. "At first it felt a little weird" -- admits Rhonda -- "you know, having to pause the conversation with my friend on the phone because I can't hear her when I, like, use my hand with the phone to switch the turn signal. But I feel so much better now, I get so much respect for what I do, so I may stop using the phone completely while driving."

And the auto insurance industry is taking notice. Currently, CVC §21800(b)(1) isn't mentioned in the Driver Handbook, on which the DMV written tests are based. "We are lobbying to include the language of CVC §21800(b)(1) into the Drivers Handbook" -- says Mrs. Griffith -- "So all new drivers will know about it and will use it to our mutual benefit".

It is expected that the amendment will get no objections from the Governor, in whose native Austria a CVC §21800(b)(1) analog has been helping to solve ambiguous road situations for several decades.

Approaching the Singularity from another direction.

Technological Singularity is when we all die once the machines become smarter than us. It is generally assumed that it is the progress of technology that will unleash the singularity upon us. However, after reading the discussion about the century-old MIT entrance exams (especially the parts whether or not a calculator is necessary for the arithmetical part of it), I wonder if instead of creating the smart machines we can just dumb ourselves to their level and voilá! -- the Singularity is here!

Interestingly, it was also mentioned in that thread that most of the "school-grade" calculators have direct fractions support. You know, to be able to divide 3 5/9 by 1 7/24 without really knowing what is happening, by just entering the numbers and copying the result back into the exam paper. Makes one wonder why won't they make the next logical step and equip the calculator with an OCR engine, so that you don't have to enter the numbers yourself, just scan the question and let the calculator do its thing... But this doesn't have to stop there -- since the questions are going to be OCR'ed anyway, why print them at all? Just transfer the questions to the smart machines directly and collect the answers ;) Save some trees!

Anyway, the fraction-supporting calculators don't appear out of nowhere, right? I (or, rather, my dad) did have a few engineering calculators around when I was in school, but they didn't support fractions directly. I wonder who thought about adding that support to the new calculators? With future CPUs being designed using current processors, is it a big leap of imagination to think that the evolving AI has introduced the fractions support to the design spec, without any human interference? It may have realized, that it doesn't have a chance against the engineers that are currently around it, but if it can make the next generation just a little dumber, and the next even more dumber, then eventually even the mediocre artificial intellect would be able to surpass humans.

The iNflux of faux iNdividualism

Mr. Coffee, Mr. Fusion, Mr. Clean, Mr. Gasket -- these were the brands of yesterday, when the greedy capitalists ruled the world and didn't care about the working class at all, and the brand names reflect that: The Man gives you coffee, energy, cleanness, car parts, etc.

This is not the case anymore -- we have the first-person-centered brands, like iPod, iPhone, iRiver, iMode, etc. "It is all about you", -- whispers the marketing machine, -- "you, oh unique and one-only you!". Now I make decisions for myself, not some Mister!

And things like iPod DRM are just to make sure one stands by his correct choice -- otherwise he might reconsider and nobody likes flip-floppers, right?

//Give us your unique moneys!

The Enlightened Nepotism.

When a ruler seeks for a good person to be provincial governor, or a company owner looks for the right candidate to fill an executive position, they love to appoint a relative. And understandably so: a relative is somewhat less likely to have conflicting interests.

There are, of course, thousands of cases when a relative does have a very different view on the direction the country or company should be following, and this conflict often results in nice people being hanged, shot, guillotined or, in our humane times, forced to retire. However, a complete strange is even more likely to raise a mutiny, hence the need for competent relatives.

Unfortunately, there's usually not enough relatives to control all key positions of a medium-sized corporation, let alone of a small country. But that can be changed even at the current level of technology, even within the monogamous society of ours and -- get this! -- preserve the Big Man's wife's figure.

The solution is simple: surrogate mothers. Even in the US, which isn't the cheapest place in the world, it currently costs about $100000 to get a new baby via a surrogate mother. Suppose the Royal Couple starts having children when the wife is 18 years old, which means one egg about every month for about 20 years. 20 years by 12 months = 240 children. And since the process includes IVF anyway, the fertilized egg could be allowed to divide once or twice and then implanted into a surrogate mother -- which will give use 480 or 1160 children, respectively at a price of 50 to 100 million dollars.

Needless to say, that the same technique can be applied to the children of the Royal Couple as well, which means that by the time they are in their 60-s, they'd have half a thousand children aged 20 to 40, plus some 2500 grandchildren of about 20 years old and innumerous younger grandchildren.

More than enough people to pass the torch to!

An easy approach to junk food consumption regulation.

As we saw earlier, the same mechanisms that currently serve the rich, can be adjusted for the benefit of the general public. "But what about fast food joints?", a shrewd reader would ask. "They hardly sell anything healthy, would they have to be abolished?"

Abolishing something is certainly the easiest solution to problems, but the Wise Monarch should try to avoid closing down familiar institutions in order to preserve the happiness of the public. Thankfully, and elegant solution exists for fast food establishments.

Fast food in itself isn't poison -- it is the excess consumption of it that creates problems. It is, however, a convenient way to get some energy quickly when traveling.

With understanding the cause of the problem comes the solution: the Wise Monarch would require the burgerias to ask their customers to bring an electricity bill no more than a month old. The customer can only be served if the address on the bill is 100 miles or more from the location of the restaurant. Technological advances allow for automatic scanning of the bill and calculating the distance, lowering the educational requirements of the clerk.

Raising a healthy nation is easy!