Bicycle Fixation - Common Sense

Here is an article about perception, really. Also about how what we see as normal can sound pretty outrageous when placed in a certain context. One of my favorite quotes from the article:

And I thought, if some alien intelligence were to look in on this spectacle, which for us is normal daily life, they would consider us mad.

You'd be hard put to design a system more wasteful of money, natural resources, time and human mental well-being. To add insult to injury, it often even fails to deliver its basic stated purpose: convenient transportation of goods and people from one place to another.

Yes, it is about riding bikes.

A better way to educate

Forget math and science, the world would be a much better place if this is what our kids learned in school.






Well, apparently the video above is no longer available. Try this similar, though more professional and less ridiculous version of the same Rambo move here:

You down with OSS?

From time to time I get the hair-brained idea to switch from my beloved Apple-made applications like Mail.app and Safari.app to open-source alternatives such as Thunderbird for email and Camino for web browsin'. Well, I recently did it again.

In the past Thunderbird has never worked for me. This time is different though. Leading up to switch Mail.app had really been bothering me. It unexpectedly crashes and quits probably a couple times per week. Also, there is an annoying bug (or is it a feature?) that makes quickly cruising through lots of emails a frustrating ordeal. Basically, after deleting a message the next message becomes the message being actively viewed. If I immediately scroll the newly-appeared message, then the message is automatically (and annoyingly) deselected and the viewing pane goes blank. Then I have to use the danged mouse to reselect the message I had read the first few lines of. It's an annoying bug.

Thunderbird, on the other had, doesn't do this. Also, it's not crashing as often as Mail.app. And maybe it's all in my mind, but it feels "snappier" and more stable or solid. Also, I'm using the side-by-side view and I really like it. I can't seem to find that view in Mail.app.

Mail.app wins for aesthetics though. Thunderbird's look just isn't as refined as Mail.app. I've tried a few themes, but none can match Apple's GUI finesse.

The Achilles heel of Thunderbird 2.0 is poor integration with AddressBook.app. Auto-fill for addresses just doesn't work very well without that. I'm trying to find a solution for this, but I've read that version 3.0 arriving in 2008 should fix this. This may be the only reason for me to switch back to Mail.app.


On the web browser side of things, Safari is pretty nice and I love the ability to rearrange tabs. It is fast, looks good, easily syncs bookmarks with .mac, and crashes all the time. Since Mac OS X 10.5 Safari has always felt less stable to me and I've had way too many crashes.

Camino doesn't do this. It feels rock solid and I like the subdued look. I miss the tab rearrange-ability, but I can handle that until Safari becomes more stable.

So why not Firefox, you ask? Because Camino is more under the radar and therefore if you use it you are cooler. And using a Mac is all about being cool.

Mind exercises

http://puzzles.nigelcoldwell.co.uk/index.htm

I ran across this link while googling prime numbers. Pretty fun stuff. Let me know what you think.

ALL41&14ALL

These are for Dad and Nate.

The "Chin Strap":



And the "Musketeer":