I’ve taken to following a number of news sources on Twitter, many of them being things other than traditional news outlets. It’s a very fast way to get news, and often presents more of a first-hand look than traditional news can provide.
But it’s also important to remember that the news, whether it’s some guy on Twitter or primetime nationwide TV networks, get things wrong from time to time. The Internet makes it really easy for these errors to spread.
Twitter had an outage the other night, mostly affecting mobile users. I saw it reported that there was evidence / experts were saying it was a “hack attack” by North Korea. Nope! Turns out that was groundless speculation, and it was just a Twitter bug.
When AirAsia flight QZ8501 went missing, some of the early reports on Twitter were that it had requested “an unusual flight pattern” change right before it went missing. That’s really suspicious and reminiscent of MH370. Could it have been sabotage? Nope! “[T]he pilot requested permission to turn and climb to a higher altitude because of bad weather,” CNN reports. Many seem to have corroborated that there was a fairly strong storm in the area at the time.
So take your news with a grain of salt. Otherwise you’re one step away from believing stuff like this.
I think the “hearty New Englander” gene may have skipped a generation with me. Winter is an utterly horrible time to drive. Ice makes driving dangerous. Snow requires you to shovel your car out before you can drive. Salt and sand ensures your car is absolutely filthy all year. And the cold results in gigantic freaking potholes in the road.
My first recommendation is to move somewhere warm. For those of us too foolish to do so, here are a handful of things I’ve found that make driving in the winter slightly less awful. (All links go to Amazon because that’s where I shop, but I have no financial interest in any of these things.)
This is a pair of plastic polypropylene “boards”, 3′ long and 8″ wide, with spikey nubs on either side. When you get stuck in the snow, you can put these down under your drive wheels for some quick traction. I haven’t needed them on my own car yet, but very shortly after I got them, a coworker couldn’t get out of his spot after a snowstorm. We tried these and he backed right out.
The link is to the product I purchased. There are versions that fold (these take up a good bit of room in your trunk, though you can stand them to the side), and versions that are a bit cheaper, but I haven’t tried either.
For windows only! Brass is a lot more durable than a plastic ice scraper, but still softer than glass so it won’t scratch glass. That makes this brass ice scraper fairly handy for chipping away at a thing layer of ice. (It’s a small handheld scraper, so it’s not well-suited for working on thick ice. For that, see my recommendation on moving much further south.)
Be warned: I’m told that some retail stores have stopped selling these because people use them on plastic side mirrors and they destroy them. Only use these on actual glass windows.
I actually have a $20 knock-off version of this, with which I’m perfectly happy. It’s got a soft foam head, so you can don’t have to worry about scratching your car. You can use this to just shovel snow right off your car. Completely clearing my car of snow is perhaps a 2-minute process, tops. Last winter, I rushed out to clean my car because the snow plow was waiting for us to clear out of the lot. I got out after my neighbor had started cleaning their car—much smaller than mine—and finished with time to help do more than half of their car.
Water blade
This doesn’t have a good photo, but it’s basically a 9-12″ “blade” made out of soft silicone.
What they advertise it for is drying off your car when you’re cleaning it. The soft finish makes it safe to use to wipe water off your car, and it’s pretty effective. But I keep this in the front seat of my car and use it many mornings to wipe off the misty dew covering my windows. Not winter-specific, and not useful in the real dead of winter, but great when it’s a little above freezing and your windows are covered in a hard-to-see-through mist in the morning.
The jury’s out: Runflat tires
My new car came with runflat tires. Last week, I hit an enormous pothole and ruptured my tire.
The good: I just kept driving. TPMS told me that the tire pressure was “low” (there was, in fact, a literal hole in my tire) and to proceed cautiously. I drove home, just taking it a little more gently than usual, avoiding the need to stop on the side of a busy road in very windy, 20-degree weather. The tire is designed with heavily reinforced sidewalls that can support the weight of the car, and some sort of bead that’s designed to stay intact even with no pressure.
The bad: Runflats aren’t something you’ll find in every garage, so I had to take it to the dealer, a 25-mile drive. In the rain, when it was mid-30s, so the whole thing was liable to shift over to ice at some point. On a tire that isn’t supposed to exceed 50mph. It was completely fine, but it was pretty scary not knowing. After I got there, they informed me they were out of tires, and I’d have to take a loaner car until they got a spare in the next day. The repair ended up being over $500, and it took two days.
At the time the tire failed, I was absolutely enamored with the runflats. In the end, I have to think it was far more of an ordeal than it should have been. (Note that cars with runflats rarely have a spare time, since it’s “unnecessary.”)
The battery in my old car started to lose some of its oomph, and, after seeing one of these used elsewhere, I thought I should buy one to play it safe. I didn’t, but the idea floated around in the back of my head for a long time.
In that old car, I easily went 5+ years without anyone ever asking me for a jump. I’d had my new car for substantially less than 24 hours before I ended up next to someone with a dead battery, who asked for my help.
I probably looked like an idiot looking around my engine compartment, before I had to tell them, “I, umm, can’t find my battery.” BMW keeps them in the trunk, where a spare tire would normally be, apparently.
Less than a week went by before I was at a gas station with a guy whose car wouldn’t start. Eventually he found someone inside who was able to help him. And then, within a month, it happened two more times. People next to me in gas stations couldn’t start their car. I took it as a sign and bought a jump kit.
I’m yet to get a chance to try it. But if I do, it’ll be a lot easier than trying to maneuver my car into place and hooked up some tangled jumper cables.
The one thing so far that I don’t like is that the clamps are always live. Put a multimeter across it, and there’s about 13V there. I worry I’m going to eventually accidentally put a wet snow brush across the top of this thing in my trunk one day, and very quickly discharge its claimed 1,700 “peak” Amps in a fiery surprise. I wish there were a switch on it, or at least that the metal pads on the clips weren’t exposed.
(There are a lot of cheaper, smaller, less-powerful alternatives. This is hardly the ultra-deluxe version, but I decided against getting a tiny $50 one. If I’m going to spend any money at all on this, I want to be confident it will work. If I skimped and bought one that turned out to be too weak, the whole purchase would be a waste of money.)
strace is pretty handy on Linux for profiling processes, including attaching to a running one and WTF-ing it.
It turns out that there’s a Mac equivalent, dtrace1. If you skip past the instructions on how to use the terminal and using top, there are some good examples of using dtrace, including a lot more than just profiling system calls.
1 Calling it a Mac app is slightly misleading; it comes from Sun. But to someone used to strace on Linux who is using a Mac, dtrace is the equivalent.
Aquagenic pruritus is a skin condition characterized by the development of severe, intense, prickling-like epidermal itching without observable skin lesions and evoked by contact with water.
It turns out you can be allergic to water. It appears to “only” cause itching, versus causing one to break out in hives, but it’s certainly not something I’d wish to have.
Human beings, myself included, have this fascinating flaw where we hear information, assume it’s true, and go around repeating it. The end result is that a lot of garbage is floating around as facts.
You know that crazy lady who sued McDonald’s and successfully won because her coffee was too hot? It’s surely either urban legend, or was a ridiculous, frivolous lawsuit, right? Nope! It was a real court case, Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, and the facts suggest it’s actually a very legitimate lawsuit. More here.
Poinsettias aren’t particularly dangerous to pets. They are mildly toxic, but [the ASPCA says] they are “generally over-rated in toxicity.” Don’t feed them to your pets, but they’re not the enormous danger the news, for some reason, makes them out to be.
Diet soda (specifically, aspartame) doesn’t cause cancer. The American Cancer Society calls talk of this “rumors” which “continue to circulate the Internet.” They also address talk about how aspartame, when digested, includes methanol (toxic!) as a by-product, pointing out that, for example, fruit juice produces ten times as much. They go on to debunk, in detail, the myth that diet soda / aspartame causes cancer.
Vaccines don’t cause autism. This myth came about in 1998, when British “former surgeon” Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet arguing that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism. Trust in the vaccine plummeted. As Wakefield’s study came under fire for undisclosed conflicts of interest, The Lancet called his study—which it had published—”entirely flawed.” They went on to entirely retract the article, and ultimately deemed it a fraud, showing that Wakefield had forged data. His article spurred others to investigate his claims; subsequent, credible studies have not reached the same conclusion. Autism Speaks, Inc., an advocacy group for those affected by autism, says of subsequent studies: “These studies have not found a link between vaccines and autism,” and that they “strongly encourage” that parents vaccinate their children.
MSG, which everyone knows as that thing that used to be in Chinese food until it was banned for being carcinogenic or something, is actually recognized by the FDA as being safe. Knee-jerk reactions caused it to practically disappear from use, but scientists have never found any actual correlation. (Interestingly, though, it seems like there is a strong placebo effect among those who think they are allergic to MSG.) You can even buy MSG on Amazon, where it seems to have pretty good reviews.
High-fructose corn syrup is in a similar position. It’s pretty much vilified, and studies have found all sorts of health issues associated with it. But, here’s the thing that’s key: those health issues are the same as with normal sugar. Excessive intake of either is bad. There’s currently little in the way of evidence that substituting HFCS for sugar causes health issues.
MDMA (ecstasy, the illegal drug) doesn’t cause holes in your brain, and has generally had its neurotoxicity massively overstated. Using ecstasy is still a bad idea, and there are plenty of legitimate health issues with using it. However, many of the “facts” that we hear about it are egregiously wrong. For one, the holes in the brain thing is thought to have come about through a false-color CAT scan, which was actually showing very minor, temporary reduction in blood flow to regions in the brain; the regions with reduced blood flow were colored differently, and someone interpreted them as “holes”. A number of other studies about MDMA’s neurotoxicity have been similarly flawed. One was retracted when it was found out that the study administered meth to lab rats instead of ecstasy. A number of other studies have compared lifelong users of many drugs (“polydrug users”), including ecstasy, to people who have never used drugs. It is unsurprising that the former group has more neurological problems; the studies entirely fail to show that ecstasy plays a role, though.
I’m not actually advocating many of these things. All things equal, I prefer sugar over HFCS, even though there’s not strong scientific support for this. I have never tried ecstasy, and have no desire to do so; there are many legitimate health issues. I don’t drink a lot of diet soda because I don’t care for the taste. I’m not sure that anything includes MSG anymore, but I’m not buying it as a supplement and pouring it on my food. And don’t feed your dogs poinsettias. But it drives me insane when people go parroting these things as “facts,” when they range from mostly untrue to patently false.
I had a hard time finding this information for some reason.
If you hold a UPS package for pickup in their Chelmsford, MA location, the address to pick it up is at 90 Brick Kiln Road. (There’s also a UPS HR building there.)
Do not go to the truck depot across the street at 87 Brick Kiln Road. That is not where you pick up packages. (Unless you’re a UPS driver, I suppose.)
If you’re anything like me, this may save you 15 minutes of confusion.
I was reading a bit about AT&T’s former Long Lines division, which for a period was a series of microwave towers placed around the country to allow long-distance calling. For example, here’s an article from 1948 about the link between NYC and Boston. They had a series of distinctive towers, with the odd stuff on top being highly-directional microwave horns.
Eventually, demand exceeded the capacity of the microwave links, and they began to run fiber. (Interestingly, many of the old towers still stand, and have found other uses, for cell towers or regional radio traffic.)
What’s interesting to me about fiber is that the capacity is seemingly infinite. While 100Gbps Ethernet is just emerging (and presently only available, AFAICT, for links between switches), that’s grossly insufficient for, say, major Internet backbones. So places just multiplex many signals onto a single strand, known as Wavelength-division multiplexing, or WDM. Present capacity is now in the range of terabits per second on a single strand.
Makes me wonder what things will be like in another 30 years.
I will admit, with only a little embarrassment, to being an Alanis Morissette fan. And for whatever reason, I really like .
I would like to propose that, while the song is fairly good, it is possibly the worst love song ever. Here are some lines from the song that I hope are not the nicest things someone could find to say about me:
I had no choice but to hear you.
You ask how my day was.
Your love is thick.
You’re so much braver than I gave you credit for.
You are the bearer of unconditional things.
You held your breath, and the door, for me.
Thanks for your patience.
You’re the best listener that I’ve ever met.
I’ve never felt this healthy before.
I am aware now.
Okay, so I’m pretty sure takes the cake for worst lyrics for a love song. But Head over Feet is a close second, if you ask me.
But I learned the correct answer today: it is neither.
The precise instant that is “noon” is the “M” in AM and PM (ante- and post-meridiem). So noon is properly “12M,” though the spoilsports at Wikipedia term this usage “antiquated.” (They do go on to call the modern US GPO style manual incorrect, though.) More modern usage appears to be to just say “12 noon.” But if you’re referring specifically to noon, “12am” or “12pm” are both incorrect. (In the same way that the year 2000 was neither pre-2000 nor post-2000.)
This does clear something up for me, though! My confusion has typically been about the whole hour of 12:xx. Is 12:30 (30 minutes past noon) a.m. or p.m.?
It turns out that I have been wrong. I assumed it was a.m., and that the switch happened when the 12 rolled over to 1. But the pedantic clarification of what a.m. and p.m. means makes this suddenly intuitive:
11:59:59 a.m.
12:00:00 M
12:00:01 p.m.
The equivalent for midnight is less clear, but it seems as though “12 p.m.” is generally accepted, with 12:00:01 being a.m.
A while back, I somehow became interested in gold. I’d seen a few references to people investing in gold—physically buying gold coins. The idea is that gold holds its value well, and has been used as currency for millennia. So it sees use as a hedge against the dollar—when people worry about the dollar losing value, they buy gold. Seems pretty reasonable!
But as I started to look into it, my doubts grew. I’m now of the opinion that gold is a terrible investment, especially for the claimed purposes. Here’s why.
First, I’ve seen it said that gold holds its value very well, and is very stable. Here is a graph, from Kitco.com, showing the price of gold from 1995 to today:
If you’d have invested around the turn of the century (I love that “turn of the century” now means 1999-2000), you’d have done very well for yourself. But would you want to invest now? It’s true that past performance doesn’t indicate future performance, but this isn’t exactly the type of graph that makes me see a huge opportunity. But my point isn’t to argue that gold has “peaked,” or anything of the sort. My point is just that if someone tells you that gold is a very stable investment, they are lying through their teeth. In a 10-year period, gold went from below $400/ounce to over $1800/ounce. And since 2011, it’s lost about $500/ounce in value. Here is how to invest 401k in gold with the help of experts and get the right returns.
Gold also seems to attract some nutty conspiracy theories and strange beliefs. A lot of place sell pre-1933 gold. I spent a while trying to figure out why. And, well, here’s why: back in 1933, the government started seizing gold coins for a brief period of history. Some worry that the government will do this again, but believe that gold coins from before 1933 are exempt. This belief is, of course, wildly inaccurate. The linked article does a good job factually debunking it. (For those less inclined to care about facts, but fond of conspiracy theories, I might argue this—if the government were to overstep its authority and confiscate privately-owned gold in the modern era, what makes you think that they would honor a misinterpreted rule from the 60s and leave your pre-1933 gold untouched?)
I should disclaim that I’m not an investment expert, and that I’m not really trying to argue that savvy investors could never see gold as a good investment. If you’re a financial wizard and want to put some money in gold, by all means give it a try. What I am saying is that, if you’re a senior citizen who saw the commercial I saw on TV about how the dollar is going to lose its value and your safest bet is to buy gold, you are being had.
But when you see ads on TV trying to sell you gold, you might consider their motives. If I believed gold was going to keep climbing in value, I’d be buying up all the gold I could get. But suppose you were sitting on a lot of gold and saw the graph I linked to above. Wouldn’t it seem really tempting to try to convince people that the dollar was going to fall and that they’d better buy all the gold you were selling right away? You’d be rid of your rapidly-depreciating gold, and left with plenty of cash in a time when the stock market is hitting record highs.
In conclusion, please do not buy gold without doing a lot of due diligence. Maybe gold is a good investment in certain situations, and maybe gold was a good investment a decade ago. But that doesn’t mean that gold is a good investment for you, today.
