Ceaseless Student

I’m writing this as a response to a great comment on my post about metric system use in the US.

Do you really think so? Speedometers have both metric and imperial units, but I don’t think that’s done much to improve “metric literacy” in the ‘States.

Listing metric measurements after the imperial units doesn’t quite say “these units are the ones we will be using.” Even then, the things that list both don’t really have “teeth.” Switching speed limit signs to metric only would, I think, have a much larger effect since people could be punished for failing to process the information.

But, yes. Hooray for New Hampshire!

True enough anonymous. That being said, speedometers are easier to ignore. It’s an analog measurement so you don’t get the effect of repeated drilling of a=b. Also, the metric numbers are way smaller and on the inside loop. It’s true that you could just look at the left side of the sign, but I think the minimum benefit would be a definition for a number of common mileages (1, 1/2 etc). I’d guess a fair number of people know that 100 k/h is close to 60 mph because those actually have lines on the speedometer and they’re pretty close. Likewise I’d bet lots of people know 0°C is the same as 32°F because that’s a temperature that people are exposed to (on both scales) on a regular basis. I’d bet 32 f/s being equal to 9.8 m/s is also not uncommon.

Here’s a long-term plan I just came up with right nowish. Whenever an all-imperial sign needs to be replaced, put up a sign with imperial units followed by metric units in parentheses. When on of these imperial-metric signs needs to be replaced, put up a metric-imperial sign that has metric units followed by imperial units in parentheses. At some pint, once everyone is pretty hip on things, stop having imperial units on the signs at all. Hooray!

I don’t think teeth are needed. I don’t think this is a switch we can, should or will make quickly. My thought is pretty much that the next generation should be heavily exposed to metric - they should become SI literate even if we have failed to do so ourselves.

Is this just me? If I think about how many meters are in 32 feet, I take quite a while to get a correct answer. First I estimate by using yards and I get just under 11 meters. On my second pass, I use 1 m = 3.3 ft and get that it’s just under 10 m. Win.
It’s odd that my mind doesn’t just think of the fact that it knows 9.8 m/s ~ 32 f/s and that it can just cancel the seconds and get to a much faster, more correct answer…

The saga of Japan 2 continues - I left you all with burnt bread and near-futile dish washing.

What I did not tell you was my sad discovery. Later that night I found out that duct-taping down the cook button was stupider than I thought. It not only burnt my bread - it had apparently killed my rice cooker. I was devastated. Rice is hugely important to my way of life during the school year. I couldn’t possibly live without this rice cooker (despite having a 5 cup, 3 cup and another 10 cup rice cooker close at hand). If I couldn’t raise it to life I’d be down thirty bucks or so and it would be sad.

So I took the natural course of action. I played Smash in the hopes that it’d fix itself by morning. Well. No luck. This is what I get from getting used to PICs and Windows. Anyhow, I figured I’d try to fix it. I got to learn how the rice cooker works (there’s a physical button [top left] that’s released either as water evaporates into steam and the whole thing gets lighter or simply as a function of time). So I figured there was probably a mechanical trip that would go off if someone were to do something stupid like, say, duct tape down the power button. I found nothing off the sort. I managed to make a hack that let me turn the rice cooker on in ‘keep warm’ mode. Not exactly what I needed…

Eventually I found a fuse that my rice cooker had deviously been hiding from me under a sleeve thing. What a jerk. Anyhow, the problem was dealt with and the rice cooker was tried. “Arise cooker arise!” Great success! Now I could try it again…

PS- boriswitchdoctor.com feel more comfortable with rice cooker. - If you don’t get it go watch some ATHF

PS 2.0- betcha you didn’t see the ‘circuits’ label coming in this bread-related storyline

I saw this sign in New Hampshire and was really impressed:

Ten points to NH for metric system use. Sadly, I only found three signs like this…

I really think this is how the US should be addressing the issue of SI ignorance. If they were simply to use both systems on new signs, we’d get huge benefits in the long-run at an extremely low price. I’d imagine that a kid seeing a sign like this every day for 5 years would have about as much trouble telling you what a mile was in kilometers as you’d have telling me how many inches are in a foot. The just go together so much that it becomes more than even just connectedness - it becomes identity.

So I pimped out my Firefox s’more and I wanted to show it off. So much screen real estate for holding my internets: teehee!

Here’s a link to my current userChrome.css if anyone cares for it.

<--And these are my add-ons if anyone cares about that.

For more details on my setup, check out my post on vertical tabs or just e-mail me. Or you could even talk to me in meatspace. Crazy.

Today, I’ll talk about Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat”

To sum it all up in one phrase: “People are becoming more empowered - with all that entails.”

Considering the press this book gets and its strong following, I’m really a bit underwhelmed. To be fair, his major points are valid and he applies them to the coming world and has examples of how they’ve worked in the past. Nonetheless, he doesn’t seem to say anything at all that surprised me. And, given all the tech research he must’ve done, he sometimes manages to sound shockingly ignorant. For example, he talked about bittorent as a music sharing network or something of the sort. This is far from right. It’s more of a process or protocol than a network; and, more importantly, people share all sorts of files via bittorent.

I dunno. I wish I had a lot to tell you about, but it’s really just him talking about how things have led to globalization and why this tendency is likely to continue. My two favorite things he talks about are people who’s jobs are safe from outsourcing for a number of reasons (eg locality-based job - convenience store owner) and the idea that the opportunity cost of war between developed nations is a huge deterrent (eg India/Pakistan nuclear standoff).

He also likes to concentrate on a few key things for just about everything. Titles like “the 10 _” or “The 3 most _” or “the 7 _ that _” were easy to come by and he seemed to fixate on certain things more than made sense (eg: 11/9 [Berlin wall taken down] v. 9/11). I did like it when he acknowledged that any and all of the awesome power that an individual can wield use to the world’s flatness can be used for progress or destruction.

Oh well. Not all books can rock hard. I should finish Atlas Shrugged (I’m finding it a bit tedious).

RSS might be right to call itself “really simple syndication.” It’s certainly simple enough that I have accidentally gotten to the point where it eats more than 3 hours of each day. This is not acceptable.
Here’s a before screenshot. My subscriptions on the left have quite a scroll bar. You’ll notice the tabs on the right - those are things I opened for further inspection as I parsed my rss feeds (largely digg). All right. Before: 47 subscriptions…
Exhales… It’s a good thing I like radical change. I tore my list down to 27 in about a minute and then added one that I should’ve had on it before. Sweet. No scroll bar at all. Yay time reclamation!
I will miss you feeds…

Update: I find it kind of hilarious that one of the tabs I had opened while doing this was Steve Pavlina’s post about the 50-30-20 rule. The general idea is to do less of urgent things that aren’t really that important (*cough*rss*cough*). (In defense of rss, it does help me know things that are interesting to myself and others - goes well with ping-type e-mails).

Someone recently asked me how to visualize what files are taking up the most space on their hard drive. I decided this was a neat enough thing to do that I’d like to let y’all in on it too. My short answer: Use SequoiaView and/or TreeSize Free.

Sequoia:

Sequoia gives you a nice visual representation of what’s going on in your hard drive. The best part is easily the coloring you can set up. Below I have my .jpg files in green, my .mp3 files in red, my .avi files in yellow and my .sys files in blue. Each file is represented by a block and you’ll notice that blocks are grouped. For example, there’s currently a yellow outline around the My Documents folder. If you hover over a block, you’ll get its full path location - great for finding that massive uncompressed .avi you forgot about… Nice.
TreeSize:

If Sequoia is the way to look at the kinds of files eating up your hard drive, then TreeSize is the way to get stats about how much the locations on your hard drive are eating. The killer feature here is the explorer type interface that lets you delve deeper into the file tree. It gets you stats for every sublevel you need - sweet. The blue bars are also pretty neat. They represent the proportion of the hard drive that each folder takes up. Most folders have no apparent bar, but you can see that My Documents has abut 48% of my stuff. Nice.
So what’s the verdict? They’re both free. Get them both and try not to get lost playing with them (they are dangerously fun).

Well. I’ve been told to get on with it, so I’ll continue the epic saga that started with anime, a recipe and a dream. OK. There was no dream, but I did think it’d be neat…

I started baking it and took my evening nap. Then I woke up to see that the rice cooker was all steamed up and the bread was smelling breadish. “Good,” I thought. I was wrong. You see, I had gotten worried that the rice cooker would switch to keep warm and not cook the bread enough. Dumb. Rice cookers always do that - this was a recipe for rice cooker bread. So. Maybe duct-taping down the cook button was not the smartest idea…

Anyhow, the results were tragic. After its first of three baking cycles the bread was more than a little bit burned on one side:

Washing the pot was incredibly difficult. It came out fairly well, but it will have marks of this day all the way to the grave:

I then did my best to salvage the situation. The offending portion of the bread was removed:
Then I went down to the kitchen and baked it for 20ish minutes:

The side that I’d removed a layer from dried up a bit, but it could’ve been far worse. While it wasn’t the fluffy goodness promised by the anime, it was more than tolerable. I wish I could say as much for the smell of burning that permeated my entire hallway. Tolerable is not the way I’d describe it.

But this does not end the saga fair readers - I promise a minimum of two more stories before this epic is complete. The next one will be about my discovery later that night and my quest on the following day.

By now, it’s common knowledge that Dell is offering a computer preloaded with Ubuntu (an easier-to-use-than -most Linux distro). This was huge for Linux users everywhere - it means that people who aren’t huge nerds are starting to use it.

The Linux community’s growth among non-geeks now has something else to look forward to. It appears that Walmart’s super-economy (sub $300) line of desktops may offer a Linux version as soon as this year.

And it looks like we might soon see other big PC makers preloading Ubuntu. At Ubuntu Live, Shuttleworth told his audience that they would indeed be seeing “more top-tier PC manufacturers offering Ubuntu pre-installed.” Looks like Ubuntu is really pushing for the mainstream.

Insane. I can actually imagine seeing Ubuntu be a serious player in the field. ie We could have Ubuntu pop out of the ‘Linux’ category that we now have when talking about operating systems: Windows, MacOS, Linux, other. That’d be neat.

What I’d really like to see for the masses (and maybe even us geeks) is a cheap Linux box that’s ready to run headless and interface with Macs and Windows PCs. I think a cheap Linux box, some clever software and a huge hard drive would be an extremely marketable product. It could actually make backing up computers happen in normal households. I wonder if I’m seeing too much potential in this - the status quo is quite a force to be reckoned with…

I was just talking to my brother and he told me a story that I really liked. So I’ll share it with you all as best as I can remember it:

So there’s this hedge fund manager who is really successful. He makes somewhat over a billion dollars a year. Literally. Over a billion a year.

Anyhow, he’s talking to John Grisham - for those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he’s an extremely successful, well-known and respected writer.

So they’re talking and at some point the hedge fund manager says “Y’know John, last year I made more money than you’ve made on all the books you’ve ever published in your entire life. In one year John.”

Since this was factually true, John Grisham agreed. “Yeah. That’s true. You did make that much, but there’s something I have that you will never have.”

Manager-“Oh yeah? What’s that John?”

JG-“Enough.”