CNN has a front-page article talking about the 40% increase in highway bottlenecks over the past five years. They also have an interactive map showing statistics on some of the worst traffic bottlenecks.
According to the statistics, the Ventura Freeway at I-405 Interchange in LA cost drivers 27,144,000 hours, the I-405 at I-10 interchange cost drivers 22,792,000 hours, the I-10/I-5 and I-405/I-605 interchanges each wasted 18,606,000 hours, and the I-5 at SR-22 interchange wasted 16,304,000 hours. Added up, the total time wasted anually at these, the five worst traffic bottlenecks in LA, was 103,452,000 hours. The average human lifetime spans only 24x365.24x80 = 701,261 hours. Thus, every year, five intersections on the LA freeway cost 147.5 human lifespans.
And these are not pleasant lifespans, either. I'm sure the annual time spent worldwide on masturbation spans the equivalent of several thousand lifespans, but those are relatively happy lifespans, even if filled with guilt and self-loathing . But these LA traffic jams are lifetimes spent in purgatory, waiting, listening to talk radio, inching forward, then waiting again, sipping on cold coffee, then waiting some more...
Can you defeat the 1000 Styles of Rumsfeld?
Funniest thing I've seen in a long, long time! (Link courtesy of Nikhil - kudos!)
Dishonest Dubya Action Figure (I love the flight jumpsuit).
Also be sure to check out Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry's ice cream fame) explaining the federal budget with oreos.
A friend pointed me to a very cool app: iPhotoToGallery, a plugin for iPhoto that exports to Gallery. Here is a screenshot.
My very first entry on this blog was about a "meme net" and a distributed, friend-based rating system that automatically bubbled news up or down and allowed comments and threaded discussion.
A few of the open items from the first memenet entry:
1. fundamental message format
2. auto-propagation of messages (for "neuron-like" behavior)
3. channels and zones
4. comments, replies, and threads
I've figured out a nice framework that handles all of the above!
Read full entry...Grew Ewing created Pyrex, a language with python-like syntax for writing C modules that easily port into Python:
Pyrex deals with the basic types just as easily as SWIG, but it also lets you write code to convert between arbitrary Python data structures and arbitrary C data structures, in a simple and natural way, without knowing anything about the Python/C API. That's right -- nothing at all! Nor do you have to worry about reference counting or error checking -- it's all taken care of automatically, behind the scenes, just as it is in interpreted Python code. And what's more, Pyrex lets you define new built-in Python types just as easily as you can define new classes in Python.
Most notably, you can declare types on your function variables, if you wish.
In the 1980s I was captivated by an animated series on Nickelodeon called The Mysterious Cities of Gold. I recall it "felt" different from most of the other cartoons on TV and the story, the characters, the effects were all out of this world (in my eyes). Here is one of many fan sites devoted to this wonderful series. It seems that the reason this felt so different is because it was a French series (animated in Japen) that was dubbed into English.
I'm working on acquiring the episodes and mirroring them here...
CBS will air Janet at her finest, but won't air moveon.org's political ad Child's Play because it's "too controversial". I guess in a world of lies, truth is controversial.
Update: Druge reports that the incident was planned and approved by top CBS executives.
Since more and more blog spam has been appearing on my blog, I've implemented several of the tips from Yoz Grahame's tips for a spam-free blog.
One of the biggest changes is that you can no longer post a comment directly from the main page. To add a comment, you will need to click on an entry's title to view the details, then add a comment from that page. (One of the advantages of this is that you don't have to deal with a pop-up window to add a comment.)
If an entry has comments, the number of comments is displayed at the bottom, as before. However, this is no longer an active link to the comment page - you will have to view the entry details to read the comments.