Iron/Ironing Board– heavy, pointed, filled with boiling water, irons feature a burning hot surface, and are perched atop a rickety stand with thin metal legs. Add electricity and a toddler-accessible cord, and you’re ready for disaster. To boot, says comedian Brian Regan, “every iron board I’ve ever opened sounds like a witch being boiled in oil.”
Internal combustion powered vehicle– just like electric vehicles, except gas cars deplete natural resources, contribute to air pollution, require constant maintenance, and rely on foreign oil (which costs are ever mounting.)
Trick or treating– teach your kids to accept food from strangers. Also, dress your daughters like working girls.
US measuring system– With no consistent relationship between increasing units, a complex conversion to the metric system, and adopted by only a handful of countries, it’s hard to see why everyone doesn’t use feet and inches.
QWERTY keyboard– here’s an idea, let’s scramble the keys to confuse typists and induce carpal tunnel!
Airplane intercom system– require a system to sound like a staticy CB radio, even though the pilot is only 30 feet in front of you? We have just what you need.
Side-view automobile mirrors (where objects appear farther than they actually are)– who wants accurate representation when traveling at 75MPH?
Shuffle skirt– who prefers walking unimpeded? Slow locomotion to a jerky gait with these starch-stiff, jean, ankle-length skirts with no kick slits. They make a great gifts for the fast women in your life.
Salt canister opening– each top sports a screeching, razor-sharp metal lid eager to slice a finger so salt can pour into your wound. (thx Brian Regan)
Early morning, several Saturdays ago, I found myself on my knees in Provo suburbia, patching a sidewalk with my friend RM. RM is the president of his homeowner’s association and is responsible for managing the upkeep of the common areas. Being an enterprising individual, RM decided to fix the sidewalk problems himself rather than engaging a contractor. The sidewalk was in disrepair. Poor concrete pouring had led to uneven settling which resulting in a dozen fractures along its length. Several of these cracks were inches high and presented a tripping hazard. In fact, weeks before, a resident had stumbled over a sidewalk crack, fallen and been injured.
One can purchase concrete repair patch kits at Home Depot or Lowes, but RM recently discovered a new product called Grancrete, a super-quick drying, fantastically-strong concrete substance which seemed ideal for the project. Grancrete is significantly more expensive (~10x) than concrete, but the manufacturer’s website claims its properties include: “high compressive strength, high flexural strength, strong bonding strength, long durability, fire resistance, water/salt/acid resistance… fastest setting time.”
So we mixed up several batches of the gray goo and troweled it into the uneven parts of the sidewalk. (Actually, I got into a heated political argument (over school vouchers) with an opinionated neighbor of RM, so he finished the job alone.) Before I left, RM mentioned someone experimenting with fiberglass and Grancrete mixtures had produced bulletproof panels. That piqued my interest.
A quick trip to the hardware store and a few minutes later, I had whipped up two pans of Grancrete, a pan of cement and a pan of concrete (concrete is cement plus sand and rocks.) Each panel was about 2 inches thick and about 10 inches square. I also made a fiberglass sheet and epoxied it to one of the Grancrete panels. I let the panels cure for a couple of days. (Each panel weighed 7lbs +-1lb)
The day after Thanksgiving, we loaded up the SUV and drove out to an isolated spot in the Utah west desert. I set the panels on the ground, backed up 75 feet and prepared to take aim. I had brought along a high caliber pistol, a shotgun and an assault rifle. I was going to fire them in turn to see what sort of protection the panels might provide. I should add that the concrete panel was particularly brittle and during the curing it split into four pieces. Still, I reassembled the pieces into a panel and placed them alongside the others.
The following are two video clips, one explaining the setup and the second showing the results of the shooting. Below that is a photo gallery of the panel construction. Enjoy!
That’s how UHP Officer John Gardner jokingly described his Tasering of Jared Massey to another police officer minutes after the incident on September 14th 2007. Officer Gardner let Jared pass him along a Vernal highway before immediately pulling him over and accusing him of speeding (how you manage to accurately gauge someone’s speed from behind you without a radar detector is just one of the questions I have…)
I’m getting ahead of myself. Have you seen the video? If not, scroll down and click to watch the dashboard cam video. Jared filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the video before posting it on YouTube. Nearly a million people have seen it, and about ten thousand have left comments on the posting. I’ve watched the video several times.
Obviously I recognize a police force is necessary to preserve order in a modern society. That said, I am incensed at this officer’s actions. In general, the problem with any police force is oversight (”who polices the police”) and I believe our police has devolved into a force highly peopled with egotistical God-complexed bullies coked to the gills with Cops episodes, ready to pull the trigger and beat down citizens whenever possible. Not all officers are like that, but my experience has shown to me that a growing percentage have this attitude.
Let’s talk Tasers. A Taser is weapon that shoots metal barbs into your skin before sending a stun-gun level of electricity though the attached wires. It collapses the targeted individual with blinding pain. Though it’s billed as “non-lethal” there have been at least three incidents in the national news in the last week alone where people have died from a police Tasering. In short, it’s not to be done lightly.
Let’s talk policy. The Utah Highway Patrol Taser Policy, that is, when it’s use is appropriate, is as follows:
1. When a person is a threat to himself, an officer or another person
2. In cases where the physical use of force would endanger the person or someone else
3. When other means of lesser or equal force by the officer have been ineffective and a threat still exists
Let’s also recap the situation: Jared is a physically un-intimidating individual who was pulled over for an alleged traffic violation. His record was checked by the officer and ostensibly came up clean. Understandably, Jared is not pleased with the officer’s conduct and doesn’t comply with the officer’s orders. The officer tells him to get out of the car, which Jared believes is to look at the speed limit sign. The officer immediately escalates the situation by un-holstering his Taser and yelling at Jared. Confused, Jared turns his back and begins to walk towards his car whereupon he is Tased. Disabled, Jared falls onto the highway into a lane of traffic. The Taser barbs are ripped out and Jared is cuffed, but lies in the road for a minute or two.
I have several problems with the conduct of Officer John Gardner, who I view as nothing more than a mentally impaired,trigger-happy tyrant. Specifically,
1. Officer Gardner needlessly escalated the situation and did nothing verbally explain his viewpoint to Jared.
2. Gardner expected Jared to obey all his instructions. Court cases have shown that you do not have to obey everything a police office tells you to do. Police do not have unlimited power to boss citizens around. A recent case of an officer arresting a reporter for not complying with his “lawful order” to get off a sidewalk highlights this. The reporter was vindicated when the court agreed that the officer had no power to order him around at will when no law was being broken. Said Gardner in the video, “You know what, you should have followed my instructions.” That is simply not true.
3. Not only was Tasering unwarranted and an excessive use of force (per the policy above), but it was done in such a manner that Jared fell into a lane of traffic, severely risking his life.
4. Did I mention that Jared was Tased over an argument concerning a TRAFFIC VIOLATION?!?
5. Jared was Tasered before being put under arrest. That’s outrageous and criminal. As well, Officer Gardner didn’t tell Jared what specifically what he had done wrong: The trooper did not state the offense he was citing, e.g. fifty miles per hour in a forty mph zone.( “You’re kinda going fast” doesn’t cut it.)
6. Fundamentally, I am irritated that the cop pulled Jared over from behind without using a radar detector. This highlights a pandemic problem with small-town cops. They ticket out-of-town travelers to bring money into their local coffers. As well, many Utah police offices have quotas (”recommended ticket issuances”) each officer is expected to fill. That is a misaligned incentive strategy which can only cause distrust and harm.
I am very annoyed. On Monday I am going to call the UHP office at (801) 965-4518 and the Governor’s office at (801) 538-1000 and yell at someone. Officers are supposed to be public servants. We pay them to protect the citizenry and to enforce the law. This officer did none of these. I am going to request that the officer be permanently released from duty and charged with assault and that all Tasers be removed from officers pending further review of the Taser policy.
What remains is the extremely sad truth is that were it not for the press caused by the video, I’m confident that the UHP would have done nothing in this case. Like the Mafia, or any other corrupt institution of power, the UHP protects its own.
Maybe this Thanksgiving you’ve not been giving much thanks? Maybe you just need some brainstorming fodder to get you to think of the things in life that you’re grateful for. Here’s a list. You can check all that apply:
Green Jolly Ranchers
Fillet mignon
Bubble gum from a gumball machine
Good friends
Freshly baked bread
Orange juice not from concentrate
Blog comments
Fresh crab by the bushel
Slim Jims
Lemon meringue pie
Air conditioning
Temporary tattoos
Lettuce wraps from PF Changs
Gadgets
Pretty people
Funny people
The sound of a waterfall
Turkey jerky
NPR
I just got back from LA where I spent the whole of the day in a data center working on a hosting cluster. To and from the data center, we took a taxi. In the back of that taxi, on the way there, my train of thought went something like:
[the taxi driver, in a thick Latino accent, asks us our destination, whereupon he types the address into a dash-mounted Garmin GPS.]
That GPS is pretty cool. It has a sharp screen. I could use a GPS in my car. I’m always getting lost. I wonder if taxi drivers, in general, like GPSs. Sure, they help navigate, but they also reduce the barrier to entry for drivers, which can’t help but lower taxi driver pay. Unions probably slow that from happening, but it won’t be long until GPSs get so good that taxis become all robotic. Robot taxis would be cool. I wonder how much taxi drivers earn in a day. Let’s see, there is the base fee for getting into a taxi, nothing to be changed there, but then there are other variables: how much time spent idling, distance traveled and tip. Of course, if you service the airport, there is also the airport fee. What would the optimization formula look like? I suppose it would matter if you thought you might get repeat business or not. Ethics play a part, too. A long scenic route with lots of stops will rack up the fee, but will likely reduce the tip if the passengers catch on. If you go faster you can have time for more trips in a day, but that gain might be offset by cleaning out the vomit in the back seat if your travelers get car sick. I wonder if a driver’s tip increases proportional to the amount of conversation you engage in? Too much conversation could be bad. If you were funny, that would help. People like to laugh. I was watching comedian Jim Gaffigan on TV the other day. He is hilarious. I remember the bit he did on holidays and how odd they really are. He said that Christmas was particularly strange: you go outside and cut down a tree, drag it into your living room and decorate it. Then you take lights from inside your house and put them outside. Top it off by filling your socks full of candy and placing them by the fire. Jim Gaffigan said it sounded like a holiday made by a drunk man. [chuckle] That was pretty funny. I’m tired, I shouldn’t have gotten up this early. Are we there yet? California sure has nice weather.
As any of your with wives or CompUSA addictions know, “Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and is the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season in the United States. … Many retailers open very early (typically 5 A.M.) and offer doorbuster deals and loss leaders to draw people to their stores. “Black Friday” was originally so named because of the heavy traffic on that day, although most contemporary uses of the term refer instead to it as the beginning of the period in which retailers are in the black (i.e., turning a profit).” [wikipedia]
I think that instead of joining the rapid, pre-dawn fray, we might consider other entertainment options this Black Friday. Let me explain.
I’m all for commerce, and in full disclosure, I have historically possessed no sense of thrift or fiscal responsibility, but, as the saying goes, alcoholics know the signs of alcoholism better than anyone.
So, with that disclaimer, let’s talk savings. It has been widely reported that Americans are saving less and less money. In fact, we recently crossed the black line. The number crunchers call this a negative savings rate. It might be good for retailers, but it’s a risky proposition for consumers. This news broke two years ago, when the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis first announced a national negative savings rate of 0.5 percent for the year. That’s the first time that’s happened since the Great Depression. Of course, if your savings rate is in the red, that doesn’t necessarily mean *you* are; it just means you’re spending more than you earn, so you’re dipping into your savings or you’re borrowing to pay for purchases. This is a relative new trend, back in 1985 the average savings rate was 11.1 percent (of our disposable income.) [bankrate.com] One reason for the low savings rate is the lure of credit cards. “Credit is more readily available, and younger people are targeted,” says Stacey Lannoye, a financial educator in Tacoma, Wash. “They don’t get how credit works, and there’s so much to buy.” I personally get several credit card offers in the mail each week. “But the biggest reason for our poor savings rate is that people have been borrowing against assets — mainly their homes — to get their hands on spending money. The median price of a home rose 24.5% from 2001 through 2004. The real boom period was 2005: The median home price — half cost more, half cost less — soared to $206,600 from $184,100 in 2004. Homeowners have been using home equity — the difference between the value of their home and their mortgage — at an astonishing rate. Fully 80% of mortgage refinancings last year were “cash out.” That means borrowers refinanced to a larger loan balance to get their hands on some cash to spend. ” [USA Today] “Our sense is that people don’t have enough put away for a rainy day,” says Jack Gillis of the Consumer Federation of America. A CFA study last year showed that young women were particularly poor savers: 55% of women ages 25 to 34 had less than $500 in an emergency fund. And 42% of all women said they had no emergency fund at all. ” [USA Today]”There is, of course, one way out: to live more simply. “You can live off your income if you lived the way people did in the 1950s,” Wyss says. That means one car in a family, a small home and fewer gadgets.” [USA Today]
“Go back to basics. Save 10 percent of gross income every single year. For some reason we’ve gotten away from feeling that saving is our responsibility. We have to save for ourselves,” says Tony Proctor, certified financial planner.
Ben Franklin even had some advice for us when he wrote, “If you would be wealthy, think of saving as well as getting.”
So, I’ve begun saving. Rather than use a standard 1-2% savings account, I opened an ING Direct account. ING Direct is the largest online bank in the United States. They are very conservative/old-fashioned with how they lend money. As an illustration, in this era of massive write-offs from sub-prime lending, ING has had only 11 foreclosures total. That’s impressive. As a bonus, ING Direct will even pay you to open an savings account. Send me an email and I’ll reply with a ING direct invitation. If you click the link and deposit $250.00, ING will give you $25 and me $10 (assuming you keep the money in the account for 30 days). That’s 10% ROI immediately. Did I mention that ING savings accounts earn 4.8% interest?!?
Actually, the tip reader GK IM’d in said “create your own Simpsons Avatar,” but I thought some of the less tech savvy might be confused, so I changed it. An avatar, BTW, is “an Internet user’s representation of himself or herself, whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games, a two-dimensional icon (picture) used on Internet forums and other communities, or a text construct found on early systems such as MUDs. The term “avatar” can also refer to the personality connected with the screen name, or handle, of an Internet user.” “abbreviations include AV, ava, avie, avy, avi, avvie, avis, avies, avii, and avvy” So, now you know and can go make yourself one!
If we’re still on the subject of the Simpsons television show (and I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t be), I think it should be said that the show has largely ceased to be funny. In fact, it has not been funny for some time. I don’t know if Matt Groening began to outsource the script writing, if they simply exhausted the available humorous topics, or if the FOX Broadcasting Company finally put the kibosh on the clever, often left-wing political commentary, but what remains is some seriously unfunny stuff.
Anyway, the Simpsonesque avatar you create can be used as your identifier for your IM persona, can adorn your blog, or can be used as your screen wallpaper.
A couple of days ago, we talked about nerd fitness. At work, we recorded information on those who joined us for our nerd fitness test, and as promised, I’m releasing that data plus some results of data mining. In order to run the decision tree and neural net analysis yourself, you’ll need to download Weka, a free collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks, made possible by our friends at the University of Waikato, a forward thinking New Zealand University.
You should probably start with datamining.ppt, which is an except from Burdette Pixton’s presentation today and includes his data mining results plus a some brief data mining review. You might also be interested in fitnessdata.xls, a pared-down version of the original spreadsheet. Once you’ve downloaded and installed Weka, these files will come in handy:
Let’s talk keyboards — computer keyboards, that is. The QWERTY layout (named for the first six keys, obviously), was introduced in the 1860s on the first typewriter (built by Christopher Sholes.) Sholes’ typewriter keys relied on gravity to fall back down after striking, so typing keys beside each other could lead to jams. The QWERTY layout split up commonly occurring letter sequences (digraphs) and was designed so that successive keystrokes would alternate between sides of the keyboard. This jumbling of letters also had the effect of slowing down typing speed to further reduce jamming.
The Dvorak layout, patented in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak, was designed to remedy the problems of inefficiency and fatigue which characterize the QWERTY keyboard. As well, obviously the problem of gravity based keys has not been a problem for a long time, and certainly doesn’t affect computer keyboards.
So why have we kept the same outdated keyboard layout?!?
So, how did Dvorak decide on his key placement? If we have any cryptographers around, they’ll tell us that a useful tool in solving cryptograms is letter frequencies.* In English, a list of letters from most to least used looks like: etaoinshrdlcumwfgypbvkjxqz. That being the case, AOEUIDHTNS (the Dvorak choice) makes more sense than ASDFGHJKL (on the QWERTY) for a homerow. (I think Dvorak messed up with the letter R, but anyway…) Additionally, the Dvorak layout is designed so that typing words should generally move from the edges of the keyboard to the middle. Why is that? Speed — when tapping fingers on a table, it’s easier to go from your pinky to your index than vice versa. That motion on a keyboard is called inboard stroke flow.
So where do we find Mr. Dvorak’s keyboards? Well, as it turns out, your PC already has the layout pre-programmed in. It’s simply a matter of telling your computer which key encoding to use. In Windows XP, you’d do this: Start -> Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages -> “Details” button -> add (under Installed services) “English (United States) - United States Dvorak”. Of course, you’ll need to train yourself, and the keys wont have the correct letter or number on them, but hey! you’re not supposed to look at the keys while you type anyway, right?
Anybody switching to Dvorak with me?
* Speaking of letter frequencies, International Morse code encodes the most frequent letters with the shortest symbols; arranging the Morse alphabet into groups of letters that require equal amounts of time to transmit, and then sorting these groups in increasing order yields: e it san hurdm wgvlfbk opjxcz yq.
Iron/Ironing Board– heavy, pointed, filled with boiling water, irons feature a burning hot surface, and are perched atop a rickety stand with thin metal legs. Add electricity and a toddler-accessible cord, and you’re ready for disaster. To boot, says comedian Brian Regan, “every iron board I’ve ever opened sounds like a witch being boiled in oil.”
Maybe this Thanksgiving you’ve not been giving much thanks? Maybe you just need some brainstorming fodder to get you to think of the things in life that you’re grateful for. Here’s a list. You can check all that apply:
One reason for the low savings rate is the lure of credit cards. “Credit is more readily available, and younger people are targeted,” says Stacey Lannoye, a financial educator in Tacoma, Wash. “They don’t get how credit works, and there’s so much to buy.” I personally get several credit card offers in the mail each week. “But the biggest reason for our poor savings rate is that people have been borrowing against assets — mainly their homes — to get their hands on spending money. The median price of a home rose 24.5% from 2001 through 2004. The real boom period was 2005: The median home price — half cost more, half cost less — soared to $206,600 from $184,100 in 2004. Homeowners have been using home equity — the difference between the value of their home and their mortgage — at an astonishing rate. Fully 80% of mortgage refinancings last year were “cash out.” That means borrowers refinanced to a larger loan balance to get their hands on some cash to spend. ” [USA Today] “Our sense is that people don’t have enough put away for a rainy day,” says Jack Gillis of the Consumer Federation of America. A CFA study last year showed that young women were particularly poor savers: 55% of women ages 25 to 34 had less than $500 in an emergency fund. And 42% of all women said they had no emergency fund at all. ” [USA Today]”There is, of course, one way out: to live more simply. “You can live off your income if you lived the way people did in the 1950s,” Wyss says. That means one car in a family, a small home and fewer gadgets.” [USA Today]
Actually, the tip reader GK IM’d in said “
A couple of days ago, we talked about 
