Scrupuli
blunt essays with sharp points
The Weather Is Running Late Today
by ScrvpvlvsMar 17, 2008 5:10 PM–From a statement issued by the National Weather Service, Fort Worth, Texas:
ELSEWHERE...THUNDERSTORMS HAVE BEEN SLOW TO FORM ALONG THE DRY LINE ACROSS WEST TEXAS...BUT ADDITIONAL DEVELOPMENT IS EXPECTED BY EARLY EVENING.
Apparently enough faith in your weather forecast can lead you to characterize the weather itself as running late!
Labels: faith, national weather service, weather
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Snapfish Tricks Confidential Information Out Of Visitors
by ScrvpvlvsMar 13, 2008 5:09 PM–An invitation to view a friend’s private photo album reads: “(Friend’s name) has created an account on Snapfish for you. Please enter your name, email address and password to access your account.” Snapfish then prompts for full name, e-mail address, password, and retype password.
It’s a classic confidence game. Snapfish creates a pretext for the need for your real name. You are being led to believe that what you enter is being compared with information your friend gave them already. There seems to be no harm in logging in to an account that has already been created. Bull Shit, as we say in my state. Snapfish is setting up the account now. It’s you, not your friend, who is giving up your real name.
Earlier, they created a pretext for your friend to give up your e-mail address. You know that worked, because the e-mail came from Snapfish. Your friend was led to believe that the appropriate way to protect the confidentiality of the photo album is to give away confidential information about you. And that is false. I’ll look at how Flickr, the Yahoo property, handles this in a moment.
First, I want to avoid a possible misunderstanding about my amazement with Snapfish. While I don’t like being required to sign up before I can see my friend’s photo album, I do accept it. That’s not the con. E-mail addresses are valuable. Any site has every right to ask for an e-mail address in payment for locked content. It’s up to me to decide whether the release of personal information is worth it to unlock the content. My complaint is not about requesting personal information but about the pretexts.
So about Flickr. It does not play this confidence game. When I share a private photo album with a friend, I supply zero information about my friend to Flickr. Instead, Flickr supplies me with a guest pass in the form of a web address. The guest pass is valid until I choose to expire it, and I can deliver it any way I like to anyone I like. My friends remain anonymous.
Labels: anonymity, confidence game, flickr, personal information, pretext, privacy, snapfish
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Intelligent Transportation Systems
by ScrvpvlvsMar 12, 2008 6:34 PM–The Freakonomics blog was talking here about what causes traffic jams, and this reminded me of something I wanted to write about.
The traveling exhibit Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination came to our science museum not too long ago.
In one video, a senior civil engineer (who I believe was Joseph Sussman at MIT) pointed out that we have designed in to our current transportation system a certain rate of crashes. As long as we use roadways, drivers, and vehicles the way we do, there will be these crashes. Traffic will back up, and worse, people will be injured or killed.
This transportation design is why the current safety model wraps large amounts of metal and safety gear around the motorists.
Significantly for our petroleum consumption, most of the fuel burned by personal vehicles turns out to be moving the vehicle, not the passengers. And, of course, a substantial amount of the cost of the vehicle is the safety system.
He also pointed out that many modern cities were designed in the automobile age. Destinations in such cities are very far apart. It becomes difficult to make public transportation of any kind effective in these cities on existing roads.
He was arguing for intelligent transportation systems. The benefits, he said, are huge in accident prevention, fuel consumption, and trip times. The difficulty is that the project is the size of what we did with rail and with the interstate highways, and probably requires a sea change in attitudes about piloting one's vehicle.
Labels: intelligent transportation systems, joseph sussman, petroleum, science, star wars, traffic, transportation
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A Foolish Consistency [link]
by ScrvpvlvsMar 11, 2008 11:18 AM–This article from the Science-Based Medicine blog is an unsettling reminder that people, even people in the scientific community, believe themselves much less gullible than they are, believe themselves immune to human weaknesses they can easily see in others, and effortlessly ignore facts that contradict what they believe.
This fact of human nature is why Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, wrote that the first principle of scientific integrity, the main reason science has advanced our knowledge so greatly, is, “you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Labels: feynman, gullibility, medicine, science
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Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes they fool you by walking upright.
What part of “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” don’t you understand?
Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life. —Terry Pratchett
Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig. —Robert Heinlein
Do not ask why the past was better than the present, for this is not a question prompted by wisdom. —Ecclesiastes 7:10
Power lines abruptly stopped causing cancer in 1997 after the U.S. National Cancer Institute conducted a better study. —Robert Parks
Встретимся под столом! (Vstretimsja pod stolom: To meeting you under the table!)
The more you cry, the less you’ll pee.
Relish the love of a good woman.
It’ll never get better if you keep picking at it. —advice from Judge “Maximum” Bob Gibbs