What strikes me as weird is that for the past few years, the US has spent more weeks in the calendar in DST than in Standard time, thereby making the "standard" an aberration. Standard time has become a misnomer.
312 karma · joined January 24, 2009
Medicine and the medical care system are traumatizing, all right. And the realization that they're traumatizing is additional trauma.
This is kinda fun.
> because of the things that you changed on your computer, it's a fault with Facebook's design
You're assuming my computer came out of a box all set for Facebook and your anally perfect site. It didn't. And then I had the gall to do something outrageous to it. I haven't.
You know, a person doesn't need to have major ooga-booga accessibility problems for sites to be "broken." Try fiddling with the width of your browser window. Monitor resolutions are all different, plus some people want the browser window to take up, say, half the width.
Facebook does have a design problem when its horizontal scroll bar is borked.
> We've all got buttons that get pressed. Mine are pressed when people suggest that it's not worth aiming for perfection.
Just don't lose sight of graceful "degradation." Plus it prepares the site for whatever new platforms come along, like the next iPhone.
For example, on account of my accessibility issues, Facebook looks like crap and its horizontal scroll bar is even defective. And, no, I'm not changing my configuration just to suit Facebook, or Google, or whatever.
Sorry I'm so testy, but pixel perfection really hits my buttons.
Everyone, except perhaps Grizzly Adams, needs other people. Some days you need a new client for your Rails expertise. Some days you need a plumber. You need those guys who stock the grocery store in the middle of the night. And you need real life friends. Friends who don't sap your energy or tell you what to think. Friends who will scrounge up a car for you.
Edit addendum: Hillary used to say, "It takes a village to raise a child." Yeah, whatever. What I'm trying to say is, it takes a community for thriving and emotional health. And don't let Ayn Rand tell you otherwise. There's no shame in hitting a point where you can't "produce" and you need help from others. You're not self-made. No one is. And a person who needs help is not a loser. Or a "looter."
I'll be happy without a Singularity. And I'll be happy without a complicated smorgasbord of options for how to access and filter a &@^#)!-load of Information in a virtual reality post-cyberpunk world. Geekdom don't put no food on my table. Just ask the near-slave immigrant farm laborers and slaughterhouse workers.
The Singularity might be geek rapture. But VR and Singularity stories are geek wanking. I'm going to go plant a garden. Or become a lumberjack. Or something.
Well, sarcasm aside... I do enjoy Stross's blog when I wander over to it on occasion. So, if I can find some fiction of his which is not so computer-centric, I'll be happy to try it. Recommendations, anyone?
td[bgcolor="#2b5500"] { background-color: #6c6 !important }I picked up a strange anthology from 1971 for classroom use, Science Fiction: The Future [ISBN 0155786504], from a street vendor a couple days ago. Here is an excerpt from "The Human Race Has, Maybe, Thirty-Five Years Left" by David Lyle, originally appearing in 1967 Esquire:
"Dr. Barry Commoner reported recently (in his book, Science and Survival) that the burning of fuels has caused the carbon-dioxide content of the earth's atmosphere to rise fourteen percent in the past century. This has produced a general warming effect on the atmosphere. The President's [Johnson, I suppose] Science Advisory Committee concludes that this warming may begin melting the Antarctic ice cap by the year 2000 (raising sea levels four feet a decade and, of course, finally inundating huge land areas and major cities, like New York)."
I remember thoughts of global warming floating in my head since the 1970s, perhaps, vaguely, having to do with chlorofluorocarbons and holes in the ozone layer. But I don't recollect anything about increased carbon dioxide. Hence, I was a bit amazed and surprised when I read about carbon dioxide in this old Esquire article last night.
> Ice age was the preferred senario of the Doomday crowd back then.
I had not heard of nuclear winter until the 1980s. Wikipedia (definitive source ;-) confirms "nuclear winter" buzz began in the early '80s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#History
The article addresses the question of conservation of electricity, but not other forms of energy consumption. From the article, it's not clear whether DST conserves electricity. But I've casually observed it increasing driving/transportation.
If the sun is still up when people finish work, they are more likely to do errands, paint the town, dine out, and so on. If the sun is still up after one errand, another errand is likely. If the sun is still up after a bite of pizza, a trip to the book store is likely. Etc. When you walk out of work or some other establishment in the dark, that's when you're likely to go straight home and stay there.
These away-from-home activities involve not only spending but driving/transportation.
I don't think "arms race" is a fallacy. Instead of advertising, think security for a moment. We all know browser venders are in a perpetual race against phishers and botnets and so on. So when Firefox came along, it billed itself as being "safer" than MSIE. Now think of pop-up ads. The browser vendors do indulge us in an anti-intrusive advertising race when the browsers block pop-up windows by default. My personal techniques against intrusion just happen to be a few steps ahead of Aunt Sally Sue's.
So it's an arms race! If I take self-defense classes and install security systems, I invite muggers and robbers to develop more clever ways to monetize me! Yes, I'm speaking hyperbole here. But not really. I do find myself using the word "assault" in my mind when seizure-inducing computer graphics come at me.
Likewise, by turning our heads away from our TVs during the ads, we "invite" the advertisers and stations to develop more intrusive ways of grabbing our attention. I think it was the early '90s when I started noticing ads being played at a louder volume. And in the past couple years, one of the stations here in NYC has taken to showing a bright flash between each ad, between each news preview. For the first couple minutes I happened to be facing away from the flashes, I seriously wondered whether a thunder storm was brewing. But no, it was my TV yelling, "Look at me! Look at me! Eyeballs! Eyeballs!"
I'm sure back in the Dark Ages, DARPA and the universities did not invent the interwebs with advertising and in mind. Trying to come up with a "business model" for "generating revenue" while "delivering content" has been bolted on to a system this wasn't designed for. (Aside: and the internet wasn't invented with security in mind, which is why we perpetually bolt together solutions to thwart spammers and botnets.)
"Oh, really?" I type into my heavily modded Firefox browser because some computer graphics give me brain seizures. (Too bad I cannot log into HN from my Lynx browser.)
Last time I checked, the industry term for a browser is "user agent," and page rendering is under the control of the user agent. I can use whatever user agent I want, and so can you. I can fiddle with my user agent as I see fit, and so can you. That's what your browser's Options dialog is for.
Sorry I'm getting really testy here, but I get tired of pointing out to the world that it's the user who is in control, not marketers, not page designers, not Yahoo! CSS Reset...
Liked the show? Maybe it was the pacing of the program for commercial interruption. TV ads are not injected at random intervals. They're injected between scenes. But not just any scenes. They're injected after scenes which were written to be followed by a commercial break. In other words, the TV show was designed to be enjoyed with the breaks. For example, contrast made-for-TV movies (designed for breaks) with made-for-theater movies (designed for continuous viewing). Watch an adless video of a made-for-TV movie, and you can see the story build to a little climax every few minutes, and more frequent climaxes as the story progresses. The ever-increasing climaxes get so tiresome, in my taste, that they cry out for interruption.
I got home to find my husband sitting on the carpet, leaning his face toward the TV, mere inches away, and blurting, "O.J. Simpson is getting arrested!" There on the TV was live helicopter coverage of a van surrounded by several cop cars very calmly making their way on an LA freeway devoid of traffic. The scene looked rather like a head of state with security cortège, yet this was the chasing of a suspected criminal. A very odd sight, quite the photo op, even if the van occupant were not a sports and movie celebrity.
I looked at the TV and my husband, and then it hit me: the purpose of TV news is not to inform you but to glue your eyeballs to your TV. This hit me so hard that I ran into my office and spent the next twenty minutes sobbing!