An interesting tidbit about the NeXT corporate offices:
The architectural centerpiece was a “floating” staircase with no visible supports
I’d be curious to know if this had any influence on the glass staircases used in the modern-day Apple stores such as the 5th Ave store in New York. Perhaps Mr. Jobs was fond of those stairs when he was at NeXT.
I had heard the story of Kurt Gödel discovering an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution, one that would allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship. Towards the end of his life Oskar Morgenstern, who along with Albert Einstein went to the citizenship hearing for Gödel (all three were Institute for Advanced Study faculty at the time) recounted the events of that citizenship hearing. The exchange went something like this:
And then he turned to Gödel and said, Now, Mr. Gödel, where do you come from?
Gödel: Where I come from? Austria.
The examiner: What kind of government did you have in Austria?
Gödel: It was a republic, but the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship.
The examiner: Oh! This is very bad. This could not happen in this country.
Gödel: Oh, yes, I can prove it.
As far as I’m aware, his discovery was never published and was either never revealed or lost through the years. I can’t imagine how three of the greatest minds to ever gather in one location (and they went as far as working in the same institution) could have avoided debating such a topic.
The memorandum from Morgenstern recounting the event (found here) is linked below and mirrored for posterity:
Morgenstern on Gödel citizenship [PDF] | original [PDF]
Airplanes don’t recirculate air any more than most environments you spend time in. Despite this, people frequently claim various versions of this urban legend. Some say the air when they close the door stays in the cabin until they open it on landing. Others say it’s actually coming from air canisters stored on the aircraft. It is not true.
The air is really a 50/50 blend of recirculated air and new air bled through the engine air compressors (before combustion). The NY Times has a nice little writeup on cabin air:
Cabin air, he said, is refreshed about 15 times an hour, compared with less than 12 an hour in an office building. On most full-size jets, the air is also circulated through hospital-grade HEPA filters, which are supposed to remove 99.97 percent of bacteria and the minuscule particles that carry viruses. The cabin air is also divided into separate ventilation systems covering every seven rows or so, limiting the ability of germs to travel from one end of the plane to the other.
The reason most people feel the air quality is so low is because the humidity is about 10% to prevent corrosion of the aircraft, which is almost always metal. Newer aircraft are now being made using composites allowing for more natural humidity. The other factor is pressurizing to approx. 8,000 ft, which is higher than you’re used to.
Those HEPA filters employed are also more than adequate to filter air leaving it cleaner than most homes [PDF].
Presumably the confusion is aided by the emergency oxygen system on board modern airliners.
So next time someone claims that the air is literally unchanged through a 9 hour flight, you should call their bluff and ask for documentation. This has been a pet peeve of mine.
OK, combat ended years ago, but this is still pretty interesting. Germany today pays the last reparations payment for WWI. Apparently WWII and German reunification caused the payment schedule to change a little. Meanwhile there are 4 known surviving veterans left from WWI.
Bruce Schneier on the new wiretapping proposal:
Any surveillance system invites both criminal appropriation and government abuse. Function creep is the most obvious abuse: New police powers, enacted to fight terrorism, are already used in situations of conventional nonterrorist crime. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.
Official misuses are bad enough, but the unofficial uses are far more worrisome. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and the people you don’t. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured, and we’re not very good at that. Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement will mine collected internet data or eavesdrop on Skype and IM conversations?
I 100% agree here. A security vulnerability, intentional or not is a vulnerability. Even systems with no known security holes are eventually broken. Look at the recent reverse engineering of HDCP, which was theorized as vulnerable in 2001 but not broken for several years, a pretty good run. Eventually all security mechanisms will be broken. Starting with something broken just increases the window of opportunity for abuse and misuse.
In theory this proposal could (I’m no lawyer, I don’t even play one on TV) even impact things like Firefox Sync (Formerly Weave) which employs the best security mechanism I’ve seen in a service. To summarize, it works by encrypting your data before transmission to the server. However the key is never sent. That means even if the Gestapo took the servers with your data, they would still need to get the key from you, or do battle with the encryption which isn’t easy. Even Mozilla can’t read your data, unless a flaw were found in the encryption algorithm. The question is if sync were considered to fall under “services that enable communications”. That seems broad enough to leave room to argue that sync facilitates communication since the browser is the ultimate communication client. The browser is also valuable since it potentially has passwords, bookmarks, and history giving a good motivator to make that argument. Argue that to a 75-year-old judge who never used a computer and it might work.
Meanwhile just weeks ago UAE ironically gets criticized by the US for proposing a Blackberry ban for the same reasons.
There’s outrage today over a story that NYC needs to spend $27.5 million to replace street signs because they are uppercase and federal regulations require title case. They will also now be using the font ClearviewHwy rather than what I believe is Highway Gothic (I’m no font geek).
However the headline is misleading if you read the actual article. A little common sense and a trivial knowledge of accounting (you most likely learned this in High School) will make you scratch your head.
The article even says typical sign lasts about a 10 years. They have until 2018 to make the change, which is 8 years. Assuming an even distribution that would mean 80% of the signs would have been replaced by 2018 anyway due to their age. The remaining 20% would be nearing their replacement time anyway. 20% of $27.5 million is $5.5 million. That’s the cost of the signs that will be replaced prematurely.
Even that however is not correct since the city would almost definitely use straight-line depreciation on the cost of the signage. The reasoning for this is as follows: If you have the sign for 8 of the 10 year lifespan, you got 80% of the value. Each year is worth 10% of the value.
The formula goes something like this:
annual depreciation expense = (cost of fixed asset - residual value) / useful life in years of asset
Again we’ll assume an even distribution of the remaining 20% (that’s 10% replacement per year or about $2.75 million). We’ll also assume no residual value though they are likely sold for scrap metal and have some token value.
($2.75M-0)/10 = $275,000
Now 10% of the signs are being replaced 2 years early, another 10% are being replaced 1 year early. That’s 3 years of value lost. That means:
$275,000 x 3 = $825,000
The actual cost to the city is $825,000 in lost value due to prematurely replacing signage. Not $27.5 million. I guess you can throw in a little more for labor, though I doubt you’ll get $26M and change out of that.
I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss HTML5 Boilerplate, a template that’s rapidly going around the web development community. I’ve had a few email threads and chats about this recently and thought I’d just put all my thoughts together in one place now.
I’ll start by saying it’s not a bad template. It’s actually quite good and encompasses many best practices as well as incorporates fixes for many common problems (clearfix, pngfix). What I’d like to make note of is that it’s not really bringing you HTML5 and lots of what it does has nothing to do with HTML5.
For starters you’re not really getting HTML5. HTML5 Boilerplate uses JavaScript library called Modernizr. As their website explains:
Modernizr does not add missing functionality to browsers; instead, it detects native availability of features and offers you a way to maintain a fine level of control over your site regardless of a browser’s capabilities.
It also lets you apply styles to the new semantic HTML5 elements like <header/>, <footer/> <section/>.
What don’t you get? Well for starters you’re missing <canvas/> and <video/>. Other than tag elements you’re also missing things like Gelocation, Drag&Drop, web storage, MathML, async attribute on <script/> to name a few. SVG?
Pretty much all the headliners in the HTML5 spec aren’t included. Some like <canvas/> could be helped by way of explorercanvas, but that’s not in there by default.
HTML5 Boilerplate also makes reference to things like Access-Control which still doesn’t work in older browsers. They also suggest setting mimetypes for HTML5 video. This isn’t by any means bad, but hardly makes <video/> useful to everyone. Browsers are still pretty fragmented between webm, ogg, and h.264 (mp4). Then you have older versions that support none of these.
Using gzip on ttf,otf,eot files seems to be a good idea. WOFF however are compressed and correctly excluded.
There are lots of things that I would consider best-practices, but would hardly consider to be HTML5. For example pngfix for IE6, .clearfix, apple-touch-icon, console.log wrapper being the most obvious.
Setting far-future cache times are good, and disabling Etag is a good idea, assuming you rename the file every time it updates. But what does this have to do with HTML5? Is this even practical for everyone?
Then there is some interesting CSS work like inline print block. There are also a couple of nice usability fixes that I like. Regardless, they are just good design and UX. Not HTML5.
As for the graceful degradation and mobile optimization… that’s design and CSS. There is no reason why any HTML4 or XHTML site couldn’t do that today. Most choose not to do so in favor of serving different content (including ads) to different devices.
Options -MultiViews… grumble. I’m not particularly fond of it, but again if it works for you, I wouldn’t push you away from it.
Removing www… I hate this one. In my experience the only people who insist upon this have never dealt with websites with high volume and had the requirement of using a CDN by way of a CNAME in front of your site (your domain must be an A record). What is the real benefit here other than some sort of URL ascetics? I’ll let you in on a little secret: The IP address for this blog is hardly maximizing feng shui.
Many of these things are best practices. Some of these depend on your application. Most of these aren’t HTML5.
Lets just clarify that HTML5 is not about disabling MultiViews getting rid of the Etag header and being able to style <section/> elements. HTML5 is more than that.
Your ability to use HTML5 still depends on widespread adoption of modern browsers like the latest and upcoming versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and even IE 9.
Again, HTML5 Boilerplate is not a bad starting point. My point is you’re not really getting as much as it initially sounds like. It’s a bunch of fixes you likely already have in your toolkit already assembled. If that’s helpful: great. But don’t think your missing out on a new era of the Internet by not adopting it. Most good web developers have done these things for a long time now.
The Arduino folks have announced a new board, the Arduino Uno. I’ve worked with the Arduino Duemilanove, the board it’s replacing in the past and found it to be a great starting point for a project. In fact I still have another Duemilanove sitting around ready to go for the next crazy idea I have. The upcoming Arduino Ethernet also looks very interesting, if not more interesting.
No announcements on pricing just yet. Very cool stuff for hardware hackers.
Update [9/26/2010 @ 10:50 PM EDT]: Looks like the going price is $29.95 – $30, about $5 more than the Duemilanove.
Ever wonder what would happen if you put your hand or other body part in the Large Hadron Collider and the scientists turned it on? Well nobody actually knows, and it seems none of the scientists really want to find out. Their analysis of the question however is quite interesting.
Serious Eats is a very cool site, particularly for The Food Lab. What makes it so great is they don’t just demonstrate how to do something, but the science behind it. A few months ago they did a post on making ice cream without an ice cream maker. This is relevant to my interests.
One of the greatest things about this particular blog post is that they explain overrun, something that few actually bother to understand but most people have noticed. I remember learning this in either 6th or 7th grade science class:
Churning also does another thing: it introduces air to the mix. The amount of air incorporated to the mix is referred to in the industry as overrun, and is given as a percentage representing the total volume after churning over the volume of the unchurned base.
So, for example, say I started out with 2 cups of ice cream base and introduced enough air to the mix while churning to make 3 cups of frozen ice cream. That’s 50% more volume added during churning, so the ice cream has an overrun of 50%.
In small amounts, overrun is a good thing. It keeps the texture looser and creamier. Most premium ice creams, like Häagen-Dazs, have an overrun of about 25% while cheaper brands, like Breyers, can have an overrun of as much as 94%. At this level, the ice cream melts much faster, and loses a lot of its richness.
For anyone who has tried one of the brands with high overrun: you know it. It’s really obvious. Also note the ratio of product to air you’re actually getting.
By law ice cream can’t contain more than 100% overrun (50% of the product being air). I presume that is related to 21 C.F.R. PART 135 but I’m not a dairy lawyer.
While I’m on the topic of ice cream, I’ll note that soft serve is 33-45% air.
Science: it even makes ice cream better.