Consumerist has an interesting post on the games credit card companies play to try to get more money out of you. At least half of them sound blatantly deceptive and should probably be illegal.

I just pulled out my bill to verify that the due date was when I thought it was (it is), but I discovered another interesting thing, albeit minor… (A one-penny difference.)

While I get 3% cash back on certain things, I only get 1% cash back on “Everything Else” (which sounds like a Mastercard trademark—”For Everything Else, there’s Mastercard”). To date, my “Everything Else” spending has been a paltry $115.57. So what’s 1% of that? $1.11557, or $1.16, right?

No, $1.15. They round down/truncate.

I was ogling the D3 a bit more, the full-frame digital SLR that has remarkably high ISOs… (Aside: having seen sample shots, ISO3200 and ISO6400 do have some noise/grain. Very usable, but not the same as shooting at ISO200.)

It also turns out that the D3 technology has been put into a smaller digital SLR, the Nikon D700. It’s $2,000 cheaper, but apparently retains the high-ISO, full-frame sensor. It gains on-board flash. It features Live View (so you can use it like a point-and-shoot, instead of looking through the viewfinder like a real photographer), a 920k-pixel LCD (which is apparently quite superior to those on Canon cameras), and seemingly features the Adaptive Dynamic Range feature on the D300 and D3, which is pretty neat.

Nikon also has a 14-24mm zoom lens. This doesn’t sound too impressive in the age of 10mm zooms, until you realize that this is 14mm for full-frame cameras: the 10mm and 12mm lenses are designed just for cropped-sensor digital cameras. A 10mm lens on my XTi would be the equivalent of a 16mm lens on a full-frame camera, on account of the 1.6 crop factor. And if I mounted the 10mm lens on a full-frame sensor, it would look horrible, with the image being inside of a black circle. But the 14mm is the real deal. It’s also an f/2.8 lens, which is quite fast, and it’s also apparently ridiculously sharp. The word “insane” comes up a lot in describing this lens.

It’s worth noting that the D700, although $2k cheaper than the D3, is still $3,000. Canon’s 5D is around $2,000, and can hold its own at high ISOs, just not 6400+.

“Believe it or not, one single grass plant is capable of generating 375 miles of roots with as many as 14 million individual root strands, having a total surface area of 2,500 square feet. That’s just one (healthy) grass plant! Isn’t that amazing?”

I don’t believe that?

Carly Fiorina recently joined McCain in proclaiming that he “gets” technology, even after he previously admitted that he was “illiterate” when it came to computers. The past couple days have seen a barrage of news articles talking about how he’s ushered in a new wave of helpers to help get his campaign back on track. I read an article recently pointing out that Obama’s site is closing in on a million registered users, whereas an analyst suggested the the social aspects of McCain’s site appeared to have been neglected.

With that in the back of my mind, I just Googled “McCain tax cuts” to look into something, and clicked on the first link. It’s called “McCain Staging Site” on JohnMcCain.com, and with most images not loading and the site seemingly lacking font stylesheet data, I’m pretty certain we weren’t meant to see this page. But it’s the #1 ranked page on Google for “McCain tax cuts,” something you might ordinarily have to work hard at. It would technologically trivial, by the way, to do some back-end magic and make that page redirect to a production page. Having a staging site ranked #1 in Google for what’s probably a fairly common search time is a bit less than impressive.

I know we’re not electing him to Webmaster in Chief, but the little things like this can make a big difference.

As rumored last week, Obama’s holding his acceptance speech at a 70,000-person stadium instead of the comparatively small center holding the convention.

News outlets, though, are threatening to curtail their coverage of the event, saying that it “could add hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs” to something that they’ve already budgeted millions for.

Loan me a good camera for a couple days, buy me a plane ticket to Denver, and an economy hotel room for the duration, and I’ll do it. Total cost? Maybe $2,000? That includes a per diem, though. If you give me a high-end video camera, fly me to Denver, and get me a press pass, I’ll pay for my own food.

I’ll just take 10% of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that this would apparently save?

Carly Fiorina came out supporting McCain’s understanding of technology, even after Obama’s site built up a grassroots site with almost a million users. I knew I recognized the name, but it wasn’t until I read the news that I remembered why: she’s the HP leader that took some sort of massive (eight-figure) retirement package after she was practically fired.

So the McCain camp turned to Youtube to publish this video, calling for videos of selfless neighbors. The Wonkette called it “the most tragically awkward video in the history of YouTube,” which didn’t immediately become clear. Obama gives really powerful speeches, whereas McCain has a gentler, more subdued voice. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but they really could picked a speech where he didn’t sound like he was running out of breath. (Remember, this is for McCain, not an attack ad!) But that isn’t the “tragically awkward” part. That’s when the other guy starts obviously reading from cue cards and stumbling through the speech. It kind of grows in awkwardness as it progresses.

The 2009 BMW 7-series is even more ridiculous than before, according to this Edmunds article.

Internet in the center console, on the navigation screen? That could be very handy, but I’m envisioning myriad crashes as people checking their e-mail forget that they’re also driving a very heavy car (over 2 tons) at high speeds (up to 183 MPH, apparently). Although I have to say, the Internet access in the back seat is a neat idea. Even if I can’t drive a 2009 7-series, I guess I’ll be content for being driven around in one. 😉

We were putting our clothesline back up today (the septic tank people took it out to do repairs, and then forgot to put it back up, and left with the excavator before we could call them on it). I should note, BTW, that putting a clothesline up sounds trivial, but is actually backbreaking labor. The wooden posts are very thick lumber, and that’s probably a good 50-100 pounds of wood each. But there’s also a collosal blob of concrete on the bottom of each to stabilize them. My dad and I tried pulling together to drag one of the poles and couldn’t even budge it. He tried hooking a rope up to his SUV, and the rope snapped. (And he used some decent rope, too.)

But that’s not the point. I did a lot of digging today. That, actually, isn’t the point either, but it leads into it: somehow, I remembered all the horrible stories that get told about people being forced to dig their own graves before being brutally executed and thrown into it.

I came to wonder something: why, exactly, would you comply? Sure, they have a gun, but it’s not as if you have the choice of digging the grave or getting shot. If you get this far, you’re going to be shot. No brutal dictator with any self-respect would ask you to dig your own grave and then say, “What a nice hole you’ve done. I guess I won’t kill you.”

I suspect the answer lies in two things… The first is that people probably don’t think too rationally with a gun to their heads. The other is that people probably want to buy themselves a little more time, even if it’s a couple of minutes.

Of course, there’s a very good reason to act like you’re going along with the plan: a shovel can make a good weapon. And I suppose that, if you know you’re going to get shot, there’s no reason (other than what’s basically irrational fear) not to try to take out your captors with it. Although I’d wager that anyone who’s having you dig your own grave probably has some experience, so they’d see that one coming from a mile away. (But again, you really have no incentive not to try. The worst-case scenario is that you get shot, which, in this case, is what would happen anyway.)

But if you don’t think the shovel defense would work, such as if the executioner/guard kept his distance, the alternative is to simply refuse. If I’m going to get shot to death, I figure refusing to dig the grave is killing two birds with one stone. (Err, no pun intended…) The last minutes of my life won’t be spent doing agonizing labor knowing that I’m going to be killed, and I could die knowing that my death would now be collosally inconvenient for my killer.

If you did it really well, I think you could use this to catch the guard, err, off guard:

“Dig yourself a grave!” “But, err, with all due respect, what incentive do I have to do so?” “I’ll shoot you!” “But won’t you anyway?” “Yes.” “So I really have no incentive to dig a grave. My death would be quite an inconvenience to you.” “Err, umm…” “Perhaps you should just let me go and say I dug my own grave, and you buried me. I won’t tell.” “Umm, fine. Begone!”

Along with speedreading, that’s a course I think should be taught in schools. Doing my periodic “follow Amazon’s recommendations down increasingly obscure tangents” dance, I came across a book about how people are surprisingly bad at understanding the practical implications of anything that’s not incredibly simple in math, such as probabilities.

Over on MAKE, they pose an interesting question leading into their article… Say you have two cars, one that gets 18 MPG and one that gets 34 MPG, and you have the money to replace one of the two. All other things being equal (e.g., cost, quality…), would you rather replace the 34MPG with a 50MPG car, or the 18MPG with a 28MPG car?

The answer is counter-intuitive: going from 18 to 28 (+10MPG) saves more gasoline than going from 34 to 50 MPG (+16). This perhaps explains some of what was previously a major pet peeve of mine: hybrid SUVs that moved from, say, 15MPG to 25MPG.

In totally unrelated news, MAKE also has details on a neat project that looks like a goalpost, but has a bunch of misting nozzles on it.

For a couple months, I was a hard-core Wikipedia editor. Academic life was moving at a fairly slow clip for a bit, so I had plenty of guiltless free time. I was putting in major hours cleaning up awkwardly-phrased articles, reverting vandalism in near-real time, and so forth. My usual ability to spot typos and grammatical mistakes was in overdrive, and I was perpetually on guard against bias creeping into things. I’d have an assigned reading in a textbook and find an oddly-phrased sentence, or go to take a test and find the classic, “Explain…?” mistake, where the ‘question’ is actually a directive, but nonetheless carries a question mark. I’d often find myself correcting it on the test before realizing what I’d done, and that the professor most likely wouldn’t appreciate it. Over time, work picked up, and what was once an unhealthy obsession faded.

But errors still jump out at me. What I’ve noticed is that errors are practically universal. They exist not just in my late-night blog posts where I don’t proofread and when people post rants on forums, but they turn up in the middle of articles written by the Associated Press, and in headlines on the nightly news.

I often see Wikipedia bashed because the site lets anyone edit it, as if they were unaware that this is the site’s raise d’etre and that it’s a double-edged sword. The idiots of the world can come screw Wikipedia up, but obsessive-compulsive editors (like me) can just as easily clean things up. It’s almost a battle between good and evil, except a lot less dramatic. In my experience, good wins 95% of the time, but that 5% causes people to proclaim Wikipedia unreliable.

One of the major problems is disruptive editing. A lengthy article, potentially getting thousands of hits a day, might be edited by a sixth-grader, who replaces the whole page with the word “poop.” He is most likely unaware that Cluebot, one of the many user-run bots on the site, watches the Recent Changes feed for “bad words” and for major changes in page length, and that “poop” is, strangely, among the most common “bad words,” meaning that his change will be undone by a bot before any of us human editors can even click “Undo.”

The reason Cluebot exists is also the reason I don’t think we’ll see many “major” publications adopting a wiki model any time soon*. But one thing I’ve thought would be neat for a while was a sort of “moderated” wiki, where anyone could make changes, but they wouldn’t show up unless a moderator approved them. Thus, in theory, people like me, who spot errors in the AP, could have them corrected, while people who erase everything and type “poop” wouldn’t be able to bring anything down.

I still don’t see the AP, in particular, adopting this any time soon*. Print media like that doesn’t really have a, “Written in part by 75 different people” dynamic, and it’s probably not one that they’d be eager to implement right away. But I think the technology—a way to allow users to ‘suggest’ changes and have a moderator decide whether or not to apply them—could be useful all over the Internet, I think.

• Enormous tangent: I hesitated for a minute, wondering whether it was “any time soon” or “anytime soon,” but both terms have considerable usage from well-regarded, edited sources. I tend to think of “anytime” as meaning, “whenever,” or at an unpredictable time, and thus sticking the “soon” modifier on it seems strange: it could happen whenever, soon? “Any time soon” seems more pure. That said, I doubt that the difference one way or the other is significant.