For the first time in Vacant Nebula history, I have retracted a blog post.  Upon further consideration (and a little pleading from Stephanie), I realized that the post might cause this website to show up as a result for certain search queries.  Let’s just say, Dateline might have been interested in anyone who came to the site and was disappointed that the link did not, in fact, point to the type of content that was claimed.  In addition, I do not want to attract that kind of attention to a website that has pictures of my daughter.

Fortunately, no one has yet arrived at my site by means of such queries.  For anyone interested, here are the top 20 search engine queries that brought visitors to this website in May, 2008:

That last one is a little weird though.  Yikes!

You’ve probably heard before that the mo money we come across, the mo problems we see (Wallace 1997).  While that may be the case when mo money is acquired posthumously, statisticians and economists now have evidence that your happiness is proportional to the logarithm of your wealth (see chart below).  In other words, sadness is for poor people!  The corollary is that the more money you currently have, the more you would have to acquire in order to attain an additional happiness unit.  Much like crack cocaine.

See also a more formal paper about this topic.  I didn’t read it because it looked super boring, but the charts at the end are interesting.  For instance, did you know there is a “U-shaped life satisfaction in rich English-speaking countries”? (Figure 5)

Below is a sketch of an intersection that is the main bottleneck of my commute home from work.  I’ve had a question about right-of-way and I’m curious if any of you know the answer.  In the sketch below, if cars A and B both turned into lane 2, colliding with one another, who would be at fault?

Not to scale.  Lanes 1 and 2 are actually long enough to hold about 15-20 cars each.  Cars A and B would actually be nearly parallel to one another.

This is an unusual design; typically lane 2 would be created first, and then lane 1 would be created to the left of it.  Instead, we have a lane created in the middle of two lanes.  On the one hand, car A has already turned into lane 1, and now he’d be changing lanes back.  But on the other hand, car A has gotten into the left-turn lanes, and now he wants to pick which left turn lane to use.  It should also be noted that where lane 2 is created, both lines are marked with short dashes.  If one of them were marked with regular dashes it would be clear.

Now what makes this really annoying is that from around 5:00 to 5:45, there are a lot of people that need to turn left here.  So there is a line of cars backing up well into the area that is only two lanes, so there is a long line of cars in lane 3.  What happens is that nearly all of these cars end up turning only into lane 1.  But a few people go past the traffic in lane 4, then move left at the last moment to get into lane 2.  So they only have to wait for the stoplight to complete one or maybe two cycles, as opposed to four or five.  This makes the problem worse, because the line of cars coming out of lane 2 makes it practically impossible for a person who was waiting patiently in lane 3 to merge into lane 2.  I’ve often thought about going from lane 3 into lane 1, and then continuing straight into lane 2 (making the person who skipped the line have to wait).  But I’m afraid if that guy hit me it would be my fault, or we’d both be at fault.  And my sense of politeness keeps me from passing the line and merging into lane 2.  After all, I wouldn’t want anyone to road rage me.

So what I actually do when it’s backed up like this is take lane 4 straight through the intersection, then move left and make a U-turn at the next break in the median, then make a right turn onto the road I want to go on.  This is actually quite easy since a good two-thirds of the traffic either turns left or right at this intersection.

For some reason this morning, I decided to see how well I could draw the continental United States from memory.

I started with California and worked my way generally to the east and then north.  Michigan and New England are particularly atrocious.  I forgot that Maine comes off the side of NH/VT.  Which themselves come off the side of New York.  I guess those states are just so small that I felt bad for them, and drew them bigger.  Then Minnesota totally got embiggened.  But all in all I think it’s still a perfectly cromulent map.

I went to a new Thai restaurant with some people from work yesterday, and I took a business card as I was paying:

I’m not sure what that means.  My theory is that a non-native speaker meant to write something like “premier” instead of “first.”

Any other theories?

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail with the following at the end of the message:

Please don’t print this message unless you really need to.  Our forests will thank you by providing the oxygen your children will need to survive.

What a brilliant idea!  All that paper that I’ve been using to print e-mail messages really adds up and hurts the environment.  And to think I’d never thought of it until I saw this message.

But then I got to thinking: why stop there?  Maybe I should stop printing out webpages too.  I don’t know about you, but I used to print out the entire Wikipedia on the second Tuesday of every month.  You just never know when the whole site will go down, or when some vandal will vandalize your favorite page with obscene vandalisms.  When that happens, it’s good to have a hard copy to turn to.  I used to think this was a victimless habit, since I would print it from work.  (No way I can afford five hundred reams of paper per month!)  But now I see that there is a victim.

The Earth

From this day forward, I pledge that I will no longer print out the Wikipedia or any of the other Internets.  I estimate that this will save seventy-four thousand, six hundred acres of rain forest per year.  (My office only buys paper made from endangered rain forest trees.)

But I am just one person.  What if someone else wants to print out websites?  Is there anything I can do to stop him or her?  Well, if I am the administrator of a website I can.  And so can you!

Just create a new file, named save_the_earth.css.  In that file, just put this little snippet of code:

* { display:none !important; }

Save that file somewhere on your site.  For simplicity’s sake, let’s say you put it in the root of your website.  Now, in the HTML for every page on your site, just put this somewhere in the <head> tag:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/save_the_earth.css" media="print" />

Voila!  Now whenever someone tries to print out a page on your website, they’ll get something like this:

Go ahead and do a print preview on this particular website.  You’ll see that I am not lying!

Unfortunately, the header and footer will still be printed on each page due to a browser “feature.”  Since this can harm so many trees, I consider it a major bug, but none of the browser manufacturers agree with me.  Yet.  But until this bug is fixed, at least there will be minimal ink wasted.  And no matter how much data is on the webpage being printed, it will all fit onto one page.  That’s pretty neat!

And the best part about all this is that it is 100% standards-compliant.  In addition, it has been tested on all major browsers, without any workarounds.  Now that is something web developers can really get excited about!

But here’s the part where I need your help!

I need the help of you, the reader.  I’m only one guy, but there are a lot of trees out there to save.  Sure, I’ve saved the trees required to print this website, but we need more websites to do this.  It’s so easy, anyone can do it!  So spread the word to any and all you know.  Tell them, “By allowing users to print, you are allowing them to destroy the earth!”  Write your Congressmen and/or Congresswomen.  Tell them, “We need to do something about earth-hating eco-terrorists like Google and Wikipedia!  Please pass a law requiring them to prevent users from printing their webpages!”  If we all work together, we just might be able to save this planet before we run out of trees!

Okay people, I knew Tuesday’s post would be offensive to some, but I thought it would come across somewhere between Rush Hour and Rush Hour 2 on the Kramer scale (which I just made up to measure racial offensiveness).  I didn’t think I was saying something on a Mind Of Mencia level.  Or maybe you guys did get my humor and were being sarcastic in the comments and I didn’t pick up your sarcasm?  It’s really hard to tell on the internet, without things like inflection.

Everyone understands that correlation does not imply causation, and that observation does not imply judgment, right?  In my experience, there is a correlation: black and hispanic families generally cheer more loudly at graduation ceremonies than white and asian families.  We don’t have to pretend that our cultures are identical; it’s okay that we’re different.  I find it interesting to speculate on the socioeconomic factors that might be causing said correlation, but maybe that is because I’ve found the Freakonomics blog to be an excellent place to waste time lately.

Also, I don’t really care if someone I don’t remember ever meeting doesn’t like that my hand-drawn graphs, with arbitrary axes and data points, don’t convey clear, scientific information.  I think they’re funny, and there will be more on this site in the future.  I’ll just stick to less sensitive topics.  Like religion and politics.

I wanna roll with the gangstas, but so far they all think I’m too white and nerdy

Over my life I have been to several high school and college graduation ceremonies, and I have observed an apparent correlation between two factors.  The following chart will explain:

Update: See my follow-up post if you are deeply offended.

You may have heard that Apple is bringing the Safari web browser to the Windows platform.  In fact, you can download the beta now.  I wanted to see how compatible my own website is, since Safari is not a browser I’ve ever tested.  Unfortunately, proxy support seems to be broken right now.  Whenever I try to go to a website, I get prompted for my name and password to get through the proxy (this is on my PC at work).  After entering this information, Safari immediately crashes.  This is beta code, so I won’t fault them for having bugs.  I do, however, question the validity of this chart:

From my own experience, this is completely backwards.  Opera is much faster than IE, which is faster than Firefox (when I say IE, I mean IE 6, whereas the chart says IE 7; maybe IE 7 is slower).  I’m not sure what kind of HTML they used to conduct this test, but it must have been much more complex than your typical webpage, in some way that made Safari look good.  Of course, I still use Firefox, the browser that feels slowest to me, because 1) I need my precious extensions, 2) IE is teh suck, 3) Opera cheats with overzealous caching, 4) the speed difference is not really significant, and 5) Opera doesn’t support ctrl+enter, which I rely on to type URLs.

The other thing I noticed in my brief time with Safari is the font smoothing technique, which must have required a lot of work to port over.  I’m not going to get into a discussion of whether it is better than the Windows technique or not; if you’re interested, Joel Spolsky has already done a pretty decent job of covering that topic on his excellent blog.  The problem I had is that my monitor at work is a little unusual in that its sub-pixels are aligned backwards (BGR instead of RGB).  You can fix font rendering in Windows to account for this, but I couldn’t find any such option in Safari.  For an illustration of the problem look at this image:

If you are on a CRT monitor, both probably look OK to you.  If you are on an LCD monitor, one of them probably looks significantly easier to read.  For most people it is the text on the left; for me, it is the text on the right.  This means that the text in Safari will be really difficult for me to read.  Again, they are in beta right now; they might fix this issue by the time the final version ships.

My screen at home is normal, and I don’t go through a proxy there, so maybe I will actually get to try it out tonight.

At work, several people have left in the last year or so, and no one has been hired (at least, no one in not-India) to replace them.  This has resulted in several empty cubicles with equipment sitting in them going unused.  So a few weeks ago, just before Christmas, I took an extra monitor that was just lying around and set up my computer for a two-screen display.  You may recall from a previous post that I have four computers under my desk.  Well I came up with a way to use two switch boxes to give myself access to three of the four machines (the other I’ll still use remote administration for), while still keeping my main machine outputting on two screens.  Check out my schematic (blue lines are video, black are keyboard/mouse):

If that seems a little complicated, that’s because it is. :)  Here is a table of which switch box needs to be switched to what in order to use different arrangements:

The only problem I’m running into is from daisy-chaining the keyboard from one switchbox to another.  The mouse seems to work okay though.  Maybe it’s because the mouse is natively USB, but the keyboard runs through a PS/2->USB adapter (these are USB-only switch boxes).  I suppose a four-way switch box would be a much better option, then I could just have one screen run straight to my main computer and run the switchbox on the other.  But I wanted to do this without having to ask IT for any stuff that isn’t lying around in empty cubes.

I’m currently using the top half of this image as my two-screen display (as seen below).