|
Taiwan_is_Protectorate
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Gregory
Gender: Male
Interests: Interested in nearly everything to do with science, math, political theory (especially power politics) and military.
Expertise: I don't really have an area of expertise right now, maybe confusing people?
Occupation: Student
Industry: Student?
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  falconpilot2011
Member Since:
5/2/2005
|
|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| In [now likely archaic] computer programing jargon, “GIGO” stands for the phrase “Garbage in, garbage out”, an often humorous way of communicating the fact that a program's output can never be more accurate, relevant, or correct than the input a program is given. Even a perfect calculator cannot tell you the area of your room if you input the wrong measurements. The same concept is true of government. We like electing men and women who, from the perspective of ability to run a country, are garbage. Sure, they might be intelligent, successful, likeable people, but even in their campaign speeches waffle about what they support. Is the budget important to you? Then why would you vote for someone who claims to want to balance the budget, but votes for giving trillions of dollars to failed banks, and refuses to allow cuts in entitlements, even though entitlements constitute well over half the Federal budget. That's like saying “Put me on a diet, but let me eat all the twinkies I want”. Garbage in! Or if you care about gay marriage (from either side), why would you vote for someone who tells gay groups she supports gay marriage, but conservative Christian groups that she doesn't. Garbage in! Or why would you vote for someone who thinks “refudiate” is a word, holds a degree in sports broadcasting, and would rather host a Fox reality program than complete her term as govenor of...? Garbage in! Or, my biggest peeve, why would you pay someone tens of thousands of dollars yearly for a job that consists entirely of writing and passing legislation, who passes legislation without even a cursory attempt to read it? Garbage in! Tell me truthfully, have you ever sat down to a final exam, taken your blue book, and started writing answers without looking at the test booklet for the questions? Have you ever submitted an expense report without reading the expense figures? Of course not. You would deserve the bad grade or the poor performance review which that sort of behavior has as a natural consequence. Why do we accept this from the people who run our country? Why do we hand them trillions of dollars to play with, when even they have no clue where that money will go? Garbage in, garbage out. If you want Congress to stop giving us this garbage, stop electing these bums to office. It's really that simple. Don't hire a janitor who refuses to mop, a farmer who refuses to plow, or a congressman who refuses to read. | | |
| I have frequently mentioned that my car is uniquely well-suited to anti-tailgating operations. Today, I will expand on the subject, with pictures, and real-life anecdotes from the field. I will, finally, make a proposal as to how tailgating can be prevented in the future, using safe, and relatively environmentally-friendly methods.
For those who don't know, I drive a lightly customized 1990 Volvo 240 DL.
Yes, to forestall all jokes, my girlfriend and my car are the same year. Go figure.
Anyway, 1990 was a good year for Volvo 240s, as anyone on or near a college campus can attest. While most cars in the parking lots seem rather younger than the students driving them, the Volvos all look suspiciously like mine.
Volvo 240s even have an old-man face. Complete with mustache.
I say my car is a "lightly-customized" Volvo 240, because it features a cleverly-designed anti-tailgating device. Thanks to the previous owners (family friends), I don't have to worry about tailgaters as long as I'm in this car. Let me show you.
Notice the solid steel protrusion in the center of the image? This device serves three roles:
- The device provides protection for the vehicle from low-speed collisions. Please recall, as the important velocity to consider in collisions is the relative closing velocities between vehicles, the 5-10 mph protection range offered by the rear-collision protection device can have significant applications in a wide range of situations.
- The shape of the device serves to increase damage to the front of other vehicles involved in a "rear ending" collision situation. Even at negligible relative velocities, the shape and position of the device combine to localize impact damage to the front of the other car.
- The device serves as a visual deterrent to would-be rear-enders. Featuring neither paint nor rubber, this design communicates to drivers who follow too closely that "collision with this device will damage your car," a fact many tailgaters seem to overlook with more conventional bumper designs
Uses:
A common belief among those who tailgate is that driving closer to the car in front of you causes said car to go faster. Unfortunately, this sometimes works.
Not with me.
I have proposed a corollary to this rule: Driving closer only increases the speed of the front car if the driver of the front car cares more about the back of his car than the driver in the rear car cares about the front of his car. See diagram:
When traveling in the direction of the arrow, Car A wishes to cause Car B to travel faster. Tailgating will only achieve Car A's goal if Car B's back bumper is more important than Car A's grillwork.
My anti-tailgating device reduces to importance of my rear bumper to far below the level of anyone's grillwork, rendering my car impervious to tailgaters.
I have personally educated a fellow KSU student on this concept. A rather foolish individual, she tried driving much too close on a two-lane road with a 35 mph speed limit.
I say foolish, because she seemed to think that her late-model Mustang would somehow intimidate my customized 1990 Volvo. After miming ramming my car a few times (drop back, rev engine, speed to right behind the other car), she settled into driving so close I could not see her headlights in my rearview mirror.
Naturally, I had to slow down.
Please understand this was not me just being a jerk. (V''')
When someone is following too closely, they have no time to react in an emergency situation. As a result, I was having to follow far enough back for the two of us. If something happened in front of me, I would need time to allow both of us to react, or I'd get slammed from behind.
Watching cautiously in the mirror, I lightly touched the brakes to begin a gradual deceleration.
I have never seen anyone's eyes get so big so fast.
Apparently she realized her headlights were worth more than my car.
I guess it's lucky nobody was tailgating her.
Of course, this can go wrong.
On Wednesday, I beat off a similar tailgating situation, but the car later caught up with me at a stoplight (the road having widened to two lanes each way). Rather than realize the logic of the situation (even if I'd been going faster, we would still have found ourselves stuck at the same intersection at the same time), they rolled down their windows and began to scream obscenities and misplaced racial epithets at me (silly kids, they've got a different word for people who look like me, ask your parents).
Now, this could have been somewhat scary.
Fortunately, they were rather on the small side. I'm guessing the driver was 11th grade, and the passengers were 10th or 11th. The driver was also female, and smiling and blinking at me...
So, I just flashed them my best "Why so serious?" smile
And drove away (the light having changed).
Okay, so now the proposal.
Please, please, please, as you value your car, do not tailgate me.
I hate it.
It awakens the homicidal clown in me.
Instead, let's all show a little courtesy on the road.
We'll all be happier if we do.
| | |
| Good morning (or afternoon, evening, whenever you happen to read this)
Okay, let's take a time out for a second.
When you give someone a greeting, is the greeting traditionally rendered as time-appropriate for the sender or the receiver?
If I'm in the UK at 0800, and greeting a friend in the States (for whom it is afternoon) do I say "good morning" or "good afternoon"? After all, it's morning for me, but afternoon for him.
Or suppose I'm on one side of the IDL... say, in Guam, on Christmas day, and I want to greet my friend in Taiwan. "Merry Christmas" or just christmas eve?
Keeping your answers to these questions in mind, consider the problem of the blogger. I have no idea what time you'll be reading this, and no idea from what time zone (Although, I can guess it's probably Eastern Time, US and Canada). As a result, I don't really have any idea what your local time might be upon receipt of my greeting. I think I will just use entirely arbitrary time of day greetings in my blog to reflect my inability to account for your local time. Yes, I know you're thinking I could just use my local time, but that's just too boring for me.
Of course, I'm lucky compared to the hypothetical interstellar blogger. If I were writing from a location several light years away, the probable time difference would be far greater than it is in my case. Not only would I be unsure when exactly my posts would be read, but I would also know that it would not be within the next couple of years.
Or shall we consider the case of the relativistic blogger. If I were writing from a different inertial frame of reference from my readers, the time my blog is read would seem entirely different depending on the observer. Of course, if I know my speed, lorentz transformations would allow me to figure it out, but that's a lot of trouble, yes? This reminds me of a physics test with a variation of the "who shot first" problem common in westerns. The only problem being the sheriff who saw the gunfight was sitting on a train moving at 0.1c. If I recall correctly, the gunshots were said to appear simultaneous, and the distance to the various shooters was left unitless.
I guess I'm lucky most of my readers seem to be terrestrial.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other news:
My plans for today:
- Two funerals
- Computer games
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh yes, the originally planned subject of this post.
My various tracking devices record dozens of visits since I last posted. Sadly, only one of you decided to comment. Please comment, it allows me to know who's reading. While I don't mind yelling into the silence, hearing someone besides my own echo is nice.
| | |
| Good evening, morning, afternoon, night, etc. to all who maybe sometimes read my ramblings in this medium. Thanks for sticking with me through my long blogging absence. I have decided to resume writing, and hopefully this time my resolution would stick....
ANNOUNCING!
NEW ADHESIVE RESOLUTIONS!
New 3M technology allows patented Duck (tm) brand tape adhesive to attach to your resolutions, making them 100% more likely stick!
Gone are the days of nonstick resolutions, yo-yo dieting, and nicotine patches.
Make your resolutions, and make them stick!
Available everywhere in December 2009!
Look for them on the Resolution Aisle
Ehem, sorry. The idea of "resolutions sticking" just brought that to mind. Oh, by the way, you should excuse the stream-of-consciousness feel, or just stop reading. I'm neutral on that to be honest. I'm writing to fulfill a resolution, not for readers. My apologies, but this is a blog, not network tv. I do give thought to my audience, but only in passing :P
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many of my readers (yes, I realize the irony of this with the preceding statement) would probably like to know what I'm doing this summer. Well, your blogger is currently unemployed, and not taking classes. My unemployment is involuntary, and relates more to the state of the job market than to anything else (although my general lack of qualifications probably has some impact--most of the interesting jobs are for college grads). As a result, aside from filling out job applications and doing yard work, my summer so far has consisted mostly of the following:
- Hanging out with my girlfriend. Yes, I know, most of my long-term readers will be rather surprised to learn that I have a girlfriend, but it's the truth. Despite declaring Valentine's day "for the birds" and being a general nerd and misanthrope, I am dating a very amazing girl. Chalk one up to being incredibly attractive and not remotely humble.
- Working random Calculus and ODE problems. I know, not the general ideal of summer fun, but since I'm currently a math major, I figure I should keep myself sharp this summer. Besides, differential equations really are just that fun, especially the systems that require eigenvalues (a word nearly as scarily awesome as the concept) to solve.
- Listening to the song I've had stuck in my head for weeks. I'm not sure this counts as an activity, but "Dashboard" by Modest Mouse has been stuck in my head for a while. Catchy, but weird. "...even needs have needs, tiny giants made of tinier giants..."
- Reading the Adventures of Dr. McNinja. Ninja by birth, doctor by choice, Dr. McNinja is pretty much the picture of comic book action-comedy awesomeness. If you start reading, I recommend you go to the archives and start with the first real story. The actual first story is lower-quality and a bit confusing.
- Blasting the heads off of zombies. From the people who brought you Half Life, Half Life 2, and Portal, Left 4 Dead is probably the best zombie shooter of all time. An intense tribute to zombie movies, the four-player cooperative game puts you in the shoes of immune survivors 2 weeks after "the Infection" has turned most of the world into zombies. Hole up in farmhouse or try to reach the military safe zone, but be ready to fight hundreds and hundreds of the should-be-dead.
- Watching NCIS reruns. I don't think this requires explanation.
- Capturing Dustbowl. From the same folks as Half Life 2 (the best shooter ever) Team Fortress 2 is a multiplayer team versus game. Different character classes have different weapons, equipment, and attitude...
- Reading C. S. Forrester. Horatio Hornblower is a socially awkward genius (remind you of anyone?) in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. Great read.
Anyway, I'm sure there's more, but that list is a good start.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've decided I rather like majoring in math. Mathematicians tell the Truth. Not the "best guess" a doctor might give you, or the imaginative answer of a sociologist. Not the "model best fitting the data" of a physical scientist or the "sincere belief" of a pastor. Not the carefully-formatted lies of lawyers or "enhanced truth" of politicians. No, math is truth and certainty. Abstract maybe, but still a piece of absolute reality. That appeals to me.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've been thinking a lot about the "social issues" that frequently come up in elections. Since reader involvement always increases readership, I'm going to let you decide what my next "serious" post should be about. Abortion or same-sex marriage?
---------------------------------------------------------
I think I've blogged enough for one evening. Expect more soon!
| | |
|
