mike's web log

52 things I learned this year

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:33:24 GMT

Some folks these days write up year-end pieces on 52 things they've learned in the preceding months — Tom Whitwell was the first one I encountered, and Nancy Friedman has written roundups as well. This year I managed my own! A 52-item list of things I learned is offered here for your inspection and possible amusement/enjoyment.

The Wikipedia article about the Ship of Theseus has been edited so many times that not a single original sentence remains. I've seen this claim several times, but I don't know how you'd verify it. From a Reddit thread.
The word squeegee is older than I thought. If you'd asked me, I would have guessed that it was a genericized trademark. But no; it's probably a nautical term from as early as the 1840s that might have referred to a mop or mopping. From Etymonline.
In the US, pickup trucks have gotten much bigger, and the cabin size has gotten much bigger in proportion to bed (cargo) size. This is best illustrated by a couple of charts. Here's a size comparison over time from Business Insider:

And here's the change in the proportion of cab to bed from the Diminished Value of Georgia site:

[more]

Christmas song superlatives

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:04:57 GMT

It is (was?) a tradition in high school annuals to have a selection of "senior superlatives" — "best looking", "funniest", "most likely to succeed", like that. I was thinking about Christmas songs and thought we should devise superlatives for those as well. Here are my votes.

Weirdest premise: "Little Drummer Boy"

Least Christmas-y "Christmas" song: "Hallelujah" (Leonard Cohen). Honorable mention: "River" (Joni Mitchell). Second runner-up: "My Favorite Things"

Most suggestive: "Santa Baby"

Most likely to inspire you to break up with your true love: "The Twelve Days of Christmas"

Most repetitive: "Feliz Navidad". Honorable (though at least amusing) mention: "The Twelve Days of Christmas"

Most dismaying example of social capital as a function of recognition by influencers: "Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer"

Most likely to get someone in trouble: "Baby, It's Cold Outside"

Creepiest 24/7 surveillance: "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town"

[more]

Halt, who turns there?

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 10:07:07 GMT

I saw a post on the social medias that asked something like "If I'm in a Turn Only lane already, do I need to have my blinker on?" It got me thinking about the whole question of when and why to use the blinkers (on your car, in case that's not clear).

I should start by noting that using the blinkers is a way of telling other people what your intention is. You, obviously, know where you intend to go.[1] The question of whether to use blinkers is therefore really one of whether it's useful for these other people to know your intentions.

The short answer: yes. In the most general case, your blinker tells the driver behind you[2] that you intend to do something besides continue going straight. (It also explains why you're stopped in the middle of a street.) It also tells drivers coming at you that you intend to turn, which might involve crossing their lane.

The I'm-in-the-Turn-Only-lane inquirer was probably thinking about these other people — the driver behind you and potentially drivers ahead of you. In most cases, traffic-flow markers probably make it clear to them what you intend to do, so why do you need a blinker?

Well, there are other people who aren't drivers who would also like to know your intention. One group is bicyclists, who are often squeezed into a lane to your side and whose bike lane might not in fact be a turn-only lane.

Another group is pedestrians, who might not even know that you're in a turn-only lane. The sorts of control signals that drivers have — right- or left-turn arrows on the traffic light, signs hanging above an intersection, and/or arrows on the pavement — are often invisible to someone standing on the curb. (See earlier photo.)

[more]

De-"stuff"-ing

Fri, 31 May 2024 12:04:58 GMT

The surest way to cast a critical eye on the amount of stuff that you have is to prepare for moving. The prospect of boxing up all that stuff and hauling it and finding a place to put it at the new domicile can lead a person to wonder why they even need all that. This is particularly true when you're downsizing from, say, a four-bedroom house with a double garage to, say, a two-bedroom condo with a single outdoor parking space.

We did this some years ago, which resulted in a huge yard sale and a sometimes-painful culling of all our stuff, especially books. But we did it, and in our little place we're a wee bit tight, but we manage.[1]

Chapter 2. Over this last winter, we spent about six months in San Francisco for my wife's work. During that time we lived in rentals. When we drove down, we took what we needed in one large suitcase and two small ones.[2] We bore in mind the sensible travel advice that you don't have to bring everything with you — your destination has drugstores and clothing stores (and for me, hardware stores, ha).[3] So while we were in SF, we made trips to Target and Daiso and other locales where we could fill in any missing stuff.

This worked well. Our rentals had laundry facilities, of course, so I was able to cycle through my limited wardrobe. And we were indeed able to get the additional things we needed — my wife needed some work clothes, for example.

But we bore in mind that these acquisitions were either temporary (to be left behind at the rentals or donated) or we'd have to haul them back with us. This mentality helped frame the question of whether to buy stuff: for everything that we acquired, what were we going to do with it when our stay in SF ended?

[more]

Making the change

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 22:34:57 GMT

Recently I was at a grocery store in our neighborhood that still does a lot of business in cash. As I was waiting, I watched the cashier ring up the customer in front of me. The cashier deftly took the customer’s bill—a $50, I think—and counted out change. When it was my turn, I said “It looks like you’ve been doing this for a while”. “Oh, yes”, she said. “35 years”.

During my college years (1970s), I had a kind of gap year during which I worked for Sears, the once-huge department store. I was hired as a cashier, and the company put us through an extensive training program for the position.

For example, that’s where I learned something that I saw the grocery-store cashier do: when you accept a big bill from a customer, you don’t just stuff it into the tray. You lay it across the tray while you make change. That way, if you make change for a fifty but the customer says, “I gave you a hundred”, you can point at the bill and show that that’s what they’d given you.

Before my time
My cashiering days were at the beginning of the era of computerized cash registers (no big old NCR ka-ching machine for us). Although our register could calculate change, they still taught us how to count out change manually. (One method is to count up from the purchase price to the amount the customer gave you, as you can see in a video.)

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No wonder Amazon is eating their lunch

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 11:32:16 GMT
No wonder Amazon is eating their lunch
Our local pool finally reopened recently, so I'm making one of my periodic attempts to get back into swimming. I have long hair, and the last time I went, I thought, you know, I should get a swim cap.

I researched and learned that there is such a thing as a cap for long hair (i.e. fits over a bun, I guess). So yesterday, Sunday, I betook myself to the local shopping center to go to the sports store. I'm always hesitant about the place because they seem to be, as we say at our house, run by children: the average age of the sparse staff seems to be in the low 20s or thereabouts. But it was local and open.

I found the section for swim caps. They had no long-hair swim caps at all, but they did have a normal silicone cap that I thought might do. In fact, they had two identical packages of them. One was priced at $12.99. The other was priced at $9.99.

I found someone who was working there and asked, "Do these seem different to you somehow?" No. So it was odd that they were priced differently, right? "Let me look that up," the employee said, and went to the register to scan the two packages. After the scan, the employee said that yeah, the price was $12.99. Did I want to buy it?

Dear reader, I now ask you to contemplate whether this could have been an opportunity for a customer-service win.

But the opportunity was not seized. Even though I was holding a package in my hand that was clearly labeled $9.99, they were going to charge me $12.99. And it wasn't even exactly what I was looking for.

I went home and ordered what I needed from Amazon. It was less than $9.99 and it was on my doorstep by 9:30 Monday morning.

[more]

Rethinking dining-out habits

Sun, 06 Jun 2021 13:23:33 GMT

Over the last year and some, we didn't dine out, obviously, since we couldn't. Now that we're easing back into more normal life, I've realized that a year away from the lure of going out to eat has changed my thinking about it a bit.

Of course, many restaurants survived by offering take-out food. We got take-out a few times. But I realized that I didn't like this very much. For one thing, the third-party delivery services have been accused of some shady practices. But even if you order directly from the restaurant, it's a suboptimal experience. My summation of the experience of take-out food is this: cook something; leave it sitting for 20 minutes; serve and (probably don't) enjoy. Now I get take-out only if I intend to eat it more or less immediately.

One of the first things that changed was that we cooked more at home. I'm a, dunno, utilitarian cook: I can make a certain number of things, but I don't aspire to fancy cooking. What the enforced time away from restaurants did, though, was to encourage me to work on cooking things I like. For example, I like going out for diner-type breakfast. Over the last year I actively worked on re-creating that food at home. This was a success for me: I've made waffles, hash browns, eggs over easy, French toast, and hash that to me was entirely satisfactory. (I emphasize that I can now cook these things the way that I like them, not that I should work in a diner.) There are also lunch and dinner foods that I feel that I've perfected for my individual taste. (Same caveat.)

[more]

Do you hear what I hear? Xmas carol lyric weirdness

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 08:07:22 GMT

Christmas carols are songs that you learn as a youngster, at an age when you don't spend too much time thinking about the lyrics. Everything else is sort of mysterious when you're a kid, and the oddball words to seasonal songs are just one more thing you don't quite get.[1]

By the time you're an adult, the songs are ingrained, and you probably don’t spend too much time thinking about the lyrics. Or at least not the lyrics that you mostly know, namely those in the first verses of all your favorites.

But I went to a Christmas carol sing-along the other evening, during which we sang verses two and beyond. I guess I was surprised at a few of the weird turns that otherwise familiar songs took when we got past that one verse that you know. Herewith a few examples.

"Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," verse 2:

Christ, by highest heav'n adored:
Christ, the everlasting Lord;
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of the favored one.
Veil'd in flesh, the Godhead see;
Hail, th'incarnate Deity

Seriously, I had to stop singing and marvel at "Offspring of the favored one."

"Away in a Manger," verse 4:

I love Thee, Lord Jesus, look down from the sky
And stay by my cradle 'til morning is nigh.

I thought that took quite a turn toward the personal. Also, … cradle?

"Jingle Bells," verse 3:

Now the ground is white
Go it while you're young
Take the girls tonight
And sing this sleighing song
Just get a bob tailed bay
two-forty as his speed
Hitch him to an open sleigh
And crack! you'll take the lead

As someone sitting behind me said, "Uh-huh, now we know what that's about."
[more]

Save the headphones!

Sun, 14 Oct 2018 19:00:48 GMT

I commute to work on crowded mass transit, and when I get there, I work in an open office. So I consider good headphones an essential part of my gear. My employer apparently agrees; they subsidize headphones for us. I’ve appreciated the pair I got: over-ear, noise-reducing, Bluetooth headphones. I use them for hours a day every workday.

But the daily use has taken a toll. A few months ago I noticed that the headphones seemed loose on my head. Close examination revealed that the plastic arch between the earpieces had cracked. Thus began an ever more involved effort to save these lovely headphones.

Bridging the crack

My first thought was to patch over the crack. I found a washer that was about the size of a quarter, and used epoxy to glue the washer across the crack, then taped it over to salvage some semblance of aesthetics. (Ha.) was a little dubious about this, but it actually worked ok.

However, a few weeks later the headphones were loose again. I thought my patch had failed, but no—a second crack had appeared at a different point. It seemed clear that there are stress points in the headphones:

I tried a second patch like the first one, but a third crack developed.

Repair or replace?

After this discouraging development, I spent some hours online looking for a replacement for my headphones. I looked and looked, but two things ultimately stopped me from buying a new pair. One was that omg, headphones that have all the features I want (NR, Bluetooth, over-ear, decent audio) are expensive [more]

Only mostly true/lies to children

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 23:33:19 GMT

The other day I was taking an introductory training class for some technology at work. There was a slide that outlined the technology, and one of the bullet points had an asterisk next to it. At the bottom of the page was this footnote:

Most strong statements like this are only mostly true. Don’t worry about it.

I had to stop for a while to ponder the pedagogical implications of this footnote.

There's an inherent problem in trying to describe something complicated to a newbie: how do you start? If someone knows absolutely nothing about, say, playing bridge, or verbs in Spanish, or physics, or grammar, you have to give them a large-picture, broad-stroke overview of this thing they're about to dive into.

This is hard. One reason is that people who are familiar with some domain frequently have difficulty coming up with sufficiently high-level overviews that make sense to a beginner. I've had a couple of people attempt to explain the game of bridge to me, but they could not come up with a simple, comprehensible explanation of the bidding process.[1]

A closely related reason is that experts often cannot let go of details. For example, in your first week of Spanish class, the teacher tells you that the verb hablar means "to speak," and that to say "I speak" you cut off -ar and add -o: hablo. And that this is the pattern for any verb that ends in -ar. So to say "I take," you use the verb tomar and turn it into tomo.

Easy! Powerful! Also, of course, only mostly true: there are irregular verbs and reflexive verbs and other fun. But throwing those additional details at you in the first week of Spanish 101 is counterproductive. There will be time to sort out the exceptions later, [more]

Mind the gap

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 21:30:05 GMT

I find it harder and harder these days to ride as a passenger when other people drive. Some of that is just part of getting old. But it's not just that; as I've noted before, learning to ride a motorcycle has helped make me a better driver.

One tactic I've worked on is how much space I leave between me and the driver in front of me. To my mind, most people follow too close. You really don't want to do that. Here's why.

Note: If you want the tl;dr, skip to So what do I do?

Speed and distance

Let's start by examining what sort of distance you're covering when you drive, because it might be more than you think. At 10 mph, in 1 second you cover about 15 feet. At 70 mph, in that same 1 second you cover 103 feet. Here's a graphic that illustrates this ratio.

An accepted measure of a car length is 10 feet. This means that if you're going 60 mph, in 1 second you will travel 9 car lengths. Even small differences in speed result in significant differences in how far you travel—the difference between driving at 60 and at 70 is that in 1 second at 70 you will travel an additional 15 feet (88 vs 103). More than one car length.

Braking distance

Let's imagine that for some reason you have to slam on the brakes. Alas, physics tells us that you cannot stop on the proverbial dime. The faster you're going, the longer it takes to get to zero mph.

[more]

Selling books

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:26:26 GMT
Sarah and I have been engaged in a gradual process of downsizing, and one of the ways we’ve been doing that is by shrinking our extensive collection of books. Not long ago we did another round of culling and pulled five boxes of books off the shelves. Then, in keeping with what we’ve done many times before, we lugged our boxes around to bookstores in order to sell them.

Prior experience suggested that we’d have the best luck with specific bookstores. Several times I’ve sold books to Henderson’s and Michael’s in Bellingham; the former in particular has always paid top dollar for books, which is reflected in their excellent on-shelf inventory. We have reason anyway to occasionally visit Bellingham, so not long ago we hauled our boxes northward.

But it proved disappointing. We used their handcart to wheel our five boxes in; the stony-faced buyer picked out about 25 books, and we wheeled five boxes back to the car. Michael’s, which is across the street from Henderson’s, was not buying at all, only offering store credit.

With diminished enthusiasm, we headed back south. Our next stop was Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. Like Henderson’s, they carefully picked out a small stack of books and gave us back the rest. Although I was tempted to visit Magus Books in the U District—in my experience, they’ve always been interested in more academically oriented books—the day had already gotten long for little gain. Therefore, our last stop was Weasel Half-Price Books, which gave us a handful of change for the remaining four boxes. Presumably we could have demanded back the books they were not interested in, but by then we we'd lost pretty much all of our energy for dealing with the boxes, even to donate them to the library.

[more]

I (heart) DST

Sun, 09 Mar 2014 12:37:26 GMT
In the U.S. today, it's time for the semi-annual grump-fest about the changeover to Daylight Saving Time, aka DST. As we say around here, we "spring forward" an hour on the clocks, such that the first thing you do on Sunday morning is run around the house and slice an hour off your clock. You woke up at 9:00? Guess what, it's actually 10:00!

Some people don't understand why we do this, and lots of people don't like it, citing reasons from sleep deprivation to communism. It's true that DST doesn't make sense everywhere, and indeed, DST is not imposed everywhere. In the US, it's not uniform in Arizona, and Hawaii doesn't play at all.

Basically speaking, DST makes more sense the further north you go (or south, in the southern hemisphere), because it's an effort to even out, so to speak, the differences between the shortest and longest days. The closer you get to the equator, of course, the less of a difference there is, and at the equator, there is no difference (ok, only a very small difference) between the length of days on the solstices.

Ever since the beginning, offsetting the clock was proposed as a way to save energy (by Ben Franklin, who else, who calculated energy costs in terms of candles burned). The idea is to shift the bulk of daylight to the hours when people are most active.

Consider our latitude here in Seattle. Here's a graphical illustration of the times for sunrise and sunset at the solstices and with DST (not entirely to scale[1]):

Winter solstice[2]

[more]

Together in a small, crowded, moving box

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:52:18 GMT
These days I work in a tall office building, which means that I spend a lot of time in elevators going up and down between office and lobby, not to mention up and down for meetings. Sometimes I run to co-workers in the elevator, but often it’s a bunch of strangers.

I don’t know how international it is, but the protocol for Americans—or let’s say Seattleites, anyway—is essentially to ignore strangers, and to stand facing the doors. Phones help ease the awkwardness of this situation (strangers are so near, yet so ... non-existent), because people can look down and fiddle busily with their phones instead of desperately trying not to make eye contact with other passengers.

But our elevators (and, I assume, those in many other buildings) have a feature that changes the dynamic in interesting ways. Above the bank of floor buttons is a 12-inch screen that displays a rotating selection of news bites, weather, traffic, reviews, deals, and so on. (According to the provider, this “reaches smart, busy, upscale professionals on the move and struggling to ‘do it all.’” Sure, whatever.)

People now have something to look at in the elevator besides the closed doors, or their phones, or the back of the person in front of them. This subtly changes the feel of the constantly changing group going up and down together. They’re watching TV together!

The headlines that are displayed will occasionally move someone to make a remark, or at least to grunt in acknowledgment. This can be an ice-breaker for others … it’s a conversation starter!

Sherry ~~Turkel~~Turkle, who teaches "the Social Studies of Science and Technology" at M.I.T., has [more]

Office space

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 12:34:30 GMT
I spent over 17 years at Microsoft, and for most of that time, the company went to extraordinary and expensive lengths to try to give every full-time employee his or her own private office space.[1] The company kept building new buildings, and every office move — and there were many — involved a substantial effort to sort out seating arrangements so that people could both have their own offices and had some reasonable proximity to their colleagues.

The company's focus on office space presumably was based on an implicit acceptance of the idea that people engaged in concerted intellectual work need to be able to work in peace. In the widely read Peopleware, a book from the mid-1980s about managing software projects, authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister addressed the need for this type of space:
Before drawing the plans for its new Santa Teresa facility, IBM violated all industry standards by carefully studying the work habits of those who would occupy the space. [...] Researchers observed the work processes in action in current workspaces and in mock-ups of proposed workspaces. They watched programmers, engineers, quality control workers, and managers go about their normal activities. From their studies, they concluded that a minimum accommodation for the mix of people slated to occupy the new space would be the following:
100 square feet of dedicated space per worker
30 square feet of work surface per person
Noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or six-foot high partitions (they ended up with about half of all professional personnel in enclosed one- and two-person offices)
[more]

Sleight of hand

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:55:18 GMT
Two stories, both lifted from articles in the New Yorker, about magicians who are, well, magic. The first is about the sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay, from a profile in 1993 titled Secrets of the Magus:
Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on, Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”

Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, ‘Mort—you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”

Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.” After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.

“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”

“The three of hearts.”

“Look inside the bottle.”

Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately.
Then this appeared in the current issue in an article about Apollo Robbins, a different kind of magician, titled A Pickpocket’s Tale:
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A specious take on fuel efficiency

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 08:33:56 GMT
I’ve put a little over 18,000 miles on my motorcycle. The fact that it gets a whopping 53 mpg gives me an entirely unjustified sense of virtue as I pass other vehicles. Still, now and again I’ll consider the nominal fuel savings that I’ve achieved by riding the bike instead of driving my car. And how much might that be?

To keep things simple, I’ll round numbers grossly. I’ll assume 18,000 miles, 50 mpg for the motorcycle, and 25 for my car (which I actually know, because the car’s computer tracks this). So:

18,000 miles at 50 mpg = 360 gallons

Since the bike gets essentially twice the mileage of the car, it’s all very easy. If I'd used the car for the same miles, I would have used 720 gallons. At (assumed) $4/gallon, I’ve "saved" $1440 by riding my motorcvcle (360 x $4 = $1440).

Of course, this is all laughable. Many of the miles I’ve put on the motorcycle are miles I would never have put on the car—i.e., miles driven just for fun. Not to mention that this supposed savings in fuel expenditures doesn't come anywhere near what it cost to buy the bike in the first place, and what it costs to insure and maintain it.

Even so, every time I pass a Prius, I think "neener-neener, I get better mileage than you." And maybe by the time I’ve put 600,000 miles on the bike, it will actually represent a real savings.

'Tis the season ... for bad ads

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:30:21 GMT
One way for me to retain sanity in the face of the commercial onslaught of Christmas is to keep an ear and/or eye out for the utterly lamest, most obvious attempt to co-opt Christmas for commercial gain. This is a periodic, if not annual, tradition: previous 1, previous 2.

The bar is low, obviously, but my favorites are always the ads in which the merchant tries to establish a connection between their blatantly off-season or aseasonal offering and the holidays. My favorite so far this year is a company that offers zipline tours up on one of the San Juan islands. The premise of their ad — and this is a typical strategy — is that so-and-so is just so hard to get a gift for, so the answer is a gift certificate for a zipline tour! The ad writer in this case felt obliged to provide some backstory on the putative recipient and why swinging through the trees was just the thing for him. Presumably the simple offer of the tour was by itself insufficiently, um, compelling.

My radio listening is way down in latter years, so I'm not really sampling broadly. This is a good thing in general, of course, since it spares me exposure to foolishness like this. On the other hand, it reduces my enjoyment of this little exercise.

Got any candidates?

PS Apologies to John McIntyre for the title.

Labor-saving

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:11:38 GMT
I had to cut a piece of plywood today. It had to be a clean cut, so I couldn't just rip through it by hand. Fortunately, I have a table saw to save me labor, so it only took about 14 minutes. Like this:
Clear path to table saw: 3 minutes
Wheel table saw out to driveway, unfold: 1 minute
Find extension cord, plug in: 45 seconds
Set blade height: 10 seconds
Measure width, set fence, square fence: 1 minute
Cut wood: 11 seconds
Unplug saw, wind and stow cord: 30 seconds
Fold table saw, wheel back into garage: 1 minute
Find broom, sweep up sawdust: 2 minutes
Put crap back in garage in front of table saw: 2 minutes

Yeah, I'm fluent in that

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:12:30 GMT
Among the many privacy-invading questions (haha) that Facebook asks you is what languages you speak. This is a slightly odd question to me, because I can't imagine why this is interesting information to post on a Facebook page. (On a LinkedIn profile, sure, where there might be professional advantages.) In cynical moments, I suspect that people sometimes fill this in to a) show off that they speak more than one language and b) neener-neener.

On the other hand, it turns out you probably know more languages than immediately come to mind. In fact, you're probably fluent in quite a few of them. Like which? Well, Colleague David discovered some of these recently when he was updating his profile:

How Feynman learned to crack a safe

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:51:37 GMT
The physicist Richard Feynman worked on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos in the 1940s. This was the biggest, most secretive project in the country, and security measures were — at least theoretically — very tight.[1] Scientists were issued safes in which to keep their confidential papers. However, Feynman's restless drive to tinker and to work on interesting problems led him to ponder the puzzle of how to crack these safes.

Turns out that cracking a safe has some things in common with hacking someone's bank account in our present day: while the problem is theoretically hard, it helps tremendously to have some insight into human nature. Safes have some additional weaknesses by virtue of being mechanical devices. OTOH, they don't offer the problem we have today of trying to remember dozens of passwords.

In any event, the passage below (sorry about the length) is from James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Times of Richard Feynman and says something about the nature of security when you've got those darn humans involved. (This is edited slightly for length.)
[more]

Tempest in (on) a coffee cup

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 01:42:11 GMT
As about just everyone on the planet knows, the logo for Starbucks is a mermaid. The coffee lady has gone through a number of transformations, from this:

To the latest design:

As an aside, just for fun I want to note that this latter design is very cleverly used to decorate Starbucks HQ in Seattle (the erstwhile Sears store-cum-warehouse), with the sea-lady peeking out from the top of the building's "tower":

Ok, so, the question du jour is where this logo came from. Corporate mythology has it that the design was "originally derived from a twin-tailed siren in an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut." Sounds plausible, right?

Not to everyone. As recounted in the Wall Street Journal blog, of all places, a graduate student at Yale who writes a blog named Got Medieval thought this sounded fishy (haha), because, for one, "there’s no such thing as a 16th-century Norse woodcut."

Long story short (i.e., edited), ...
The twin-tailed siren isn’t from a “marine book” at all. She’s from an early German printed book, Das Buch von einer Frawen genant Melusina, a translation of Jean d’Arras’s Roman de Melusine. Melusine [more]

New weasel-osity with customer-initiated rebates (CIR)

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:46:07 GMT
Anyone with a modicum of retail savvy knows that retailers are constantly trying to set price points that balance their margins against what customers seem to want to pay. One traditional way to do this was to put things on sale (i.e., discount them) to drive sales.

As we've all experienced, retailers these days like to offer discounts -- sale prices -- in the form of rebates. There are two kinds: instant rebates (IRs), which are taken off the price when the cashier rings it up, and "customer-initiated rebates" (CIRs), which is the kind where you have to fill in a form and send it in.

From the seller's perspective, CIRs are a great approach. First, the retailer can post a discounted price, which looks like a sale. Second, rebates are often offered through the manufacturer, so the retailer doesn't have to eat the discount at all. Third, the rebates have very specific steps and requirements (the more cynical will maintain that these are crafted to maximize consumer error in rebate-request submission), and many folks either won't bother at all or will not complete all steps correctly. Estimates for rebate redemption vary. Some think around 50%; others say "The industry average is less than ten percent. And it can be as low as one percent."

[more]

Sounds phishy

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:04:27 GMT
It must be my week to attract folks with malicious intentions. I have some ads in on craigslist, so I was happy to get an email this morning about one of them. Until I read the email, I mean:
Dear Seller

I 'm interested in purchasing your advertised item and i will like to know the final price if is okay by me.And if I can pay with a cashiers check, If this is okay with you do get back to me immediately for me to arrange the payment. Concerning the shippment, my shipper will come and pick it up from your location as soon as we seal this transaction. Do get back to me immediately with your Full Name, Contact Address and Phone Number for me to issue out the payment check to u asap cos am right now out of town but i can instruct my client overthere to issue out the payment check to u as soon as u get back to me here also im paying you an extra $50 to get this advert off the internet cuz am really interested in buying it. Hope to hear from you soon.so u can get back to me via my email at kellyqueen06@yahoo.co.uk

Best regards,
Ann
NB:- i will be looking forward to hear from you soon. Do attach the picture if available. Thanks
The prose is wretched, but that's par for the course on craigslist. The real tipoff was the offer of a cashier's check, which is a well-known scam. And the fact that the responder is offering to buy my item and ship it. To the UK. Which is slightly suspicious, given what the item actually is:

Get the jive on Route I-405

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:24:55 GMT
Aside from congestion, cost, and urban blight, there are many things to like about the US interstate freeway system. For example, the naming scheme. Many people apparently don't realize this (to my surprise), but freeways are named according to conventions that can tell you, the driver, something about the road you're driving on.

Here are some general rules. (They don't apply in every case. There are other subtleties as well.)

Two-digit (primary) routes
Numbers are intended to be unique.
Even numbers run east-west.
Odd numbers run north-south.
Freeways divisible by 10 (I-10, I-90, etc.) represent major E/W freeways. The lower the number, the further south the road. I-10 runs from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, FL. I-90 runs from Seattle to Boston.
Freeways divisible by 5 (I-5, I-95, etc.) are major N/S freeways. The lower the number, the further west. I-5 runs from Canada to Mexico through Seattle and Los Angeles. I-95 runs from Maine to Miami.

Other two-digit routes
Two-digit freeways not divisible by 5 or 10 (I-84, I-88, I-76) are often spurs that link other interstates, often older roads renamed. Different numbers exist in order to avoid duplicated numbers when possible.

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Three-digit (auxiliary) routes
These are routes that take off from and sometimes return to a primary route.
Numbers are intended to be unique within a state. For example, there is theoretically one (each) I-405 in CA, OR, and WA.
An even starting number (I-405, I-225) means that the route meets an interstate at both ends.
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