Posts from — April 2008

The online coverage of the McCain/Clinton proposal to eliminate gas tax for the Summer months reminds me of the enjoyment I get out of reading really negative movie reviews.  It’s just a landslide of coverage about how much of a pandering gimmick the idea is and how terrible it is environmentally and economically.  I especially liked Sam Stein’s article in which he tried to find an economist who liked the idea (including libertarians, free market economists, transportation workers unions, etc). Spoiler: He doesn’t find any.

… when I saw a guy with a combination hard hat/sombrero at a construction site today.

I guess Cinco de Mayo is coming up…

Here’s a lesson I’ve forgotten and re-learned a couple of times, maybe it’ll save someone some time someday.

Javascript’s NaN (not a number) token is a bit tricky sometimes. For example:

a = 0 / 0; // a is now NaN
a == NaN;  // return false
typeof a;  // returns "number", despite the perhaps
           // misleading name "not a number"

There are good reasons for this if you think about it, but I’ll leave that as an excercise for the reader.

I’ve heard the term “reverse racism” several times in the past few months. It’s an absurd term. I looked up racism on google (search for define:racism) and got a couple of good responses from Princeton’s wordnet:
# the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races
# discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race

What would the reverse of this be? The reverse of racism is racism. Reverse racism sounds as valid as saying “I got a reverse punch in the face”.

A sad excerpt:

In February I was a 55 year old white woman trying to choose a candidate, feeling drawn to Hillary. Then I listened to Obama speak and I was inspired. I felt as I had not felt since March 16, 1968 (my 16th birthday) when Bobby Kennedy announced he was running for president. So I chose Obama and volunteered to help his campaign.

I canvassed in my local area, Dresher. As I spoke to my neighbors, my heart sank. Several people told me the country wasn’t ready for a black president. One person right out said he would never vote for a black person for president. (Stunned, I stammered that he was only half black.) One person said “the blacks get everything already.” Three of my Jewish neighbors (and friends) said that they believed Obama either was a Muslim or had Muslim ties.

(link, via andrew sullivan)

I wish I could say I was surprised.. racism is doubtlessly alive and well in the US, it just doesn’t wear white robes anymore. I don’t speak up about it as much as I should.

Pavlovian Air Conditioning

Train someone to feel cold whenever they hear a certain sound, then just make that sound periodically on hot days, saving money and energy on cooling.

Patent pending!
(though Pete has a patent pending on the phrase “Patent pending”…)

I’m surprised I hadn’t stumbled upon this before. Sleeveface involves holding a record sleeve over your face (or elsewhere) to make it fit in a picture. Example:

(sleeveface2 by Tim Caynes)

You can see the whole stream on Flickr… some of them are really funny.

(via zefrank blog)

Treppenwitz, a German word, and its French counterpart l’esprit de l’escalier.

These translate as ‘stairway wit’, but the meaning is “any witty, clever remark that comes to mind too late to be useful” (wikipedia). Example: “Oh yeah, well the jerk store called AND THEY’RE RUNNING OUT OF YOU!” (wikipedia entry on that seinfeld episode).

The “stairs” in the translation is a reference to the stairs on the side of a stage as the character leaves.

We should have our own word for this in English. I don’t think that treppenwitz is well-known enough, and I’ll probably mispronounce l’esprit de l’escalier, but this sort of thing happens to me all the time. I once came up with the perfect comeback 5 years too late (seriously).

Google App Engine is a lot of fun (note: only if you think programming is fun). I wrote a simple app last weekend that I’ll be posting about here soon. I snagged a public invite the night it was launched, without thinking about the fact that it’d prevent a real person from getting one. Thus… I need to get some karma back, so if you’re interested in giving it a try, let me know via email, IM, comment etc and I’ll get you an invite.

For some reason I find this picture quite amusing. It’s like the old guy just got shot or something, so Hillary gave him a pink hat and a hug.

Those damn snipers…