From an IM conversation with a friend whose son is about 3 years old now:
Friend: My plan is to get him playing Dungeons and Dragons when he turns 10. That way we can guarantee that we won’t have any girl problems until after he’s 18.
Me: That plan worked out for you, didn’t it?
Slate writer Jack Shafer notes that “As recently as 1980, the New York Times reserved an honored—if small—place in its pages for “bus plunge” news. Whenever buses nose-dived down mountainsides…the news wires moved accounts of the deadly tragedies, and the Times would reliably edit them down to one paragraph and publish.” In more recent times, however, the Times has been virtually free of bus plunge news.
The reason: the move from manual to digital typesettings. In the manual days, such short news items were used to fill in remaining space in columns. Nowadays, that’s not necessary. Most interesting is that many such items were written in such a way that they could be shortened even further due to space needs:
This Times plunge story, for example, filled the loose space at the end of a news column on July 21, 1964:
Bus Plunge Kills 8
LAS PALMAS, Canary Islands, July 20 (UPI)—Eight persons perished today when a small bus plunged over a 300-foot cliff into the sea near the town of Mogan. One man jumped from the vehicle before it reached the edge and was saved. All the victims were Spaniards.As typeset, this article takes up 10 lines. I assume that the copy editor who cut this piece from the AP wire included the sentences about the jumper and the victims’ nationality to maximize the makeup editors’ options. By physically snipping one sentence, the makeup editors could reduce it to a nine-line story on the fly. By snipping two, they could cork an even smaller layout hole with a six-line story.
On a related note, I can’t get the Bobs’ song Bus Plunge out of my head now.
(via Rafe Colburn)
UPDATE: This made it onto MeFi after I blogged about it. Mildly interesting thread.
When the issue of evolution comes up, I always say that I think a God who can set evolution in motion is much more impressive than one who can just zap everything into existence as is.
Well, once again, Gordon Atkinson expresses my beliefs but in a much more elegant way than I ever could. Go read his new essay Your Uncle’s Third Nipple.
Well, I took the new toll roads to work today. And my drive to work took me 20 minutes, versus my previous 40 minutes or so. Once the tolls are collected, it’ll should cost me about $52/month. I guess it’s worth that to cut my commute in half.
This is my first Youtube post, but it’s well worth it:
I’ve owned my iPod Nano for almost a year, but I’ve just recently started listening to podcasts. I’ve found one annoying behavior. I have my iPod settings for podcasts set to ‘Sync unread podcasts.’ But as soon as I start to listen to a podcast, it gets marked as listened to. So, the next time I sync, this podcast gets removed from my iPod. Apple mentions this issue and suggests a workaround:
Once an episode is finished downloading, a blue dot appears to the left of the podcast, indicating that it has not yet been played. As soon as you begin to play the podcast, the blue dot disappears. When the blue dot disappears, it’s a reminder that the episode will be automatically removed from your iPod the next time you sync it with your computer. If you want to make sure the episode stays on your iPod, right-click it and choose mark as unread.
OK, that gets the job done, but every time I sync, I have to remember which podcasts are partially listened to and make sure that they don’t get deleted from my iPod. I wish there were some way to indicate “Only sync podcasts that I’ve listened to to the end”
Update January 11, 2007: Please see the solution to this problem.
I’ve heard repeatedly that there is an order of magnitude difference between the most and least productive programmers. I have no doubt that’s the case, but recently I’ve experienced that difference first hand, and I’ve also come to appreciate the effect of experience on that difference.
We hired a new QA engineer a couple of months ago, and I’ve been working with her closely the past few weeks. She’s very smart and seems to have high technical aptitude, but she doesn’t have much experience with the type of tasks we’ve been working on–dealing with various DBMSes. I’ve worked repeatedly with three of the four DBMSes and know quite a bit about the subtle differences between them. Furthermore, I’ve worked with DBMSes enough to know how to figure out how to do different tasks in each one. This experienced also helped me to get up and running with the one (DB2) that I’m not experienced with.
In this situation, I was an order of magnitude more productive due to my experience.
A great comment on MeFi:
I love MILF’s for their tragically unavailable, deer in the headlights “What’d I do?” selves, which is suddenly-gorgeous-and-completely-spontaneous in a way that makes the angle boned, air-brushed cover girls shot from low angles seem like pitifully dry and frail waifs. Show me a girl who can sling a 40 lb two year old, a big ass purse, and a diaper bag on one arm, and reach for groceries with the other, and I’ll show you a girl who will know what the hell to do with a baby sitter, a warm bath, a bottle of wine, some good takeout and 4 hours in a quiet room of a respectable hotel.
She’ll know, but 99.995% of the time, God love her, she won’t go, and on her typically wistful common sense lies the hope of civilization. But the hope that springs eternal in every man’s heart, that feeds love and lust and occasional wonder, is ministered to by the other .005%, who make grocery store day dreams on short odds a worthwhile endeavor.
There’s an interesting article at New Scientist that imagines what would happen to the earth if all humans disappeared today. The most basic conclusion is that pretty much all traces of human existence would be gone in 100,000 years.
Equally interesting is the discussion of this topic on MetaFilter. As usual, the MeFi discussion goes in many different directions, but I sense in some of the posts an unease that traces of the human race could be erased so quickly.
November 1 marks the opening of the toll freeways in red on the map below. Although I’m fundamentally against the idea of toll roads, now that they’re a fact, I’m sure we’ll take advantage of them. If I choose to pay for it, my commute should go from 35+ minutes to around 15 minutes. I’ll get on Hwy 45 about 1/2 mile from my house and exit Mopac (Loop 1) in front of my office.
Officials are saying that tolls will average $.10-.12 per mile, and I estimate that I’ll have 10 miles of toll roads eacy way, so I’m calculating a cost of $40/month for saving that 30-40 minutes per day. Time is indeed money, so this seems like a good buy to me.
