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Global warming took a holiday today in Baton Rouge. We awoke to a major blizzard, and being the Northerners we are, we immediately went out and constructed a snowman and engaged in battle with snowballs. We then came in and had hot chocolate. Insanely, LSU remained open despite reports on the radio of accidents “too numerous to count.” My little boy is home from school, however, as the Kindergarten has a snow day. Not something we ever expected when we moved to the South. And I’m sure it wont last — already the consistency of the snow is becoming more like sleet. We are hoping, however, that our Cajun snowman will last a few days, even after everything else melts. |
  
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Cajun Snowman
Hands-free Cell vs. Talking to a Passenger
One often sees studies claiming that even talking on a hands-free cell phone impairs driving. The next logical question one asks is whether talking to a passenger presents the same problem.
The answer, apparently, is no, and there’s a study to back up that assertion (citation below).
It seems that actual passengers have a tendency to talk about the traffic situation, helping the driver to focus rather than distracting him/her. Perhaps also, knowing that another person is watching the road provides an incentive to drive better.
Curiously, one of the signs of “bad driving” in the study is leaving extra space between your car and the car in front of you. In my opinion, that’s a sign of better driving — but I don’t believe my difference of opinion on this point affects the conclusion of the study.
This study and its results suggest other follow-up studies:
- Would it help to equip cell-phones with cameras, allowing the caller to see the road?
- If a passengers are blind-folded, do conversations with them suddenly become distractions?
In any event, I believe that when I tell my wife or daughter that they’re doing something incorrectly, it helps them to drive more safely (even if they think it is annoying).
Article: "Passenger and Cell Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving," Frank A. Drews, PhD, Monisha Pasupathi, PhD, and David L. Strayer, PhD; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 14, No. 4. k
Categories: random ideas
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3 comments
Wyrms
I’ve started to listening to books on CD in an effort to ease the monotony of driving to and from work. My present choice is “Wyrms” by Orson Scott Card. So far I like the book quite a bit, but this one quote is priceless:
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“He won’t be awful, Lyra. The negotiators would never have come this far if he had a second head growing out of his shoulder” “Nobody gets second heads anymore,” said Lyra. “They have a vaccine for it.” Poor child, thought Patience. She was usually bright enough to understand such an obvious iron as that. |
Here’s the Google book search result.
Categories: random ideas
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Learning Haskell
If you do any programming, you may have heard of a strange language called Haskell. It’s gaining rapidly in popularity, and has many cool features.
- Implicit Strong Typing – It provides the compile time error checking that one gets with C++ or Java generics, but it deduces types on its own without explicit programmer input (of course, the programmer can over-ride this if needed).
- Functional – This is a limitation that results in a strength. Functional programming means once you assign a variable you can never change it. This restriction on the programmer frees the compiler to perform many optimizations.
- Shared Transactional Memory – Sometimes it is too inconvenient to program without mutable state, so Haskell provides you with an escape hatch from functional programming. With Shared Transactional Memory you can write sections of code that modify memory arbitrarily without fear of deadlocks or race conditions.
Check out the tutorial: Learn Haskell now!.
Categories: Programming
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Memory Conserving Regex Engine for Java
Many regular expression engines, my own package pat included, suffer from a tendency to produce stack overflows in some circumstances. This seems to be a widespread problem, common to many java regular expression engines. To overcome this limitation I recently wrote a new regular expression library, completely from scratch, designed to avoid this problem. It conforms (mostly) to the java.util.regex interface, so changing your code to use my package is as simple as changing your import statement.
Please try it out and let me know what you think. See the main site: http://stevenrbrandt.com.
Categories: Programming
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Babelcon Report
Picture from the Advocate
Me, Sir Noah, and Darth
Babelcon is Baton Rouge’s science fiction and fantasy con. It is small, but has been rapidly growing. This year was a major leap forward for the Con in many ways. Excellent care was provided for the halfings (kids) on the Con’s “Shire Track.” My son greatly enjoyed the treasure hunt, collecting more glass beads from hidden places around the con than anyone else.
Babelcon goers are above average costumers. You’ll find Darth, Klingons, blue skinned elves, blue-black skinned dark elves, pirates, storm troopers, etc. and to cap it off there is always an “Orion Slave Girl Dance” by one of the local belly dance troops. (This is always a family friendly show)
This year we had three distinguished visitors:
- John Hertzler a.k.a. General Martok. When I first saw his picture I thought, “That doesn’t look like Martok, he looks like a nice grandpa.” But after hearing him talk (he actually shed his own blood during his audition for Star Trek) and seeing some of his antics at the Con I thought, “This guy is part Klingon!”
My wife and John Hertzler - Richard Hatch a. k. a. Zarek was also present. I asked him if he thought he might be a Cylon — naturally he refused to comment. I don’t know, i think if I were him I would have just raised my eyebrows suggestively and said, “By your command.” Anyway, he also got into the spirit. He participated in a knighting ceremony (the Queen of Babelcon was performing them regularly throughout the Con). He even taped the queen’s mouth shut!
My wife and Richard Hatch - Suzie Plackson, a. k. a. K’Ehleyr (Alexander’s mom, Worf’s girlfriend). She’s a beautiful woman and has recently been branching out into other endeavors (art, music, etc.).
Suzie Plakson
Looking forward to seeing how things progress in 2009!
Categories: events
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Klingon Campfire Songs
Translated from the original Klingon, of course.
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Categories: Humor
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Thursday 13: Things I learned from reading Sci-Fi
- McNugget’s will some day be all-natural health food, relatively speaking (Caves of Steel, Asimov). Apparently our diet will consist largely of yeast grown in vats.
- My cockroach problems really aren’t so bad (Starship Troopers, Heinlein). Mr. Rico has to face giant bugs carrying death rays. Don’t watch the movie, by the way, it does not do the story justice.
- Don’t trust your computer (2001, Clarke). One of the early stories about a computer that goes nuts and kills everyone. If you use Windows, you know what I’m talking about.
- Don’t drink while sitting on an 8th floor window ledge (Inferno, Niven & Pournelle). The protagonist did this and woke up in Dante’s version of Hell.
- You can’t get away from bugs by moving to the desert (Dune, Herbert). Giant sandworms are everywhere. Fortunately, you can ride them.
- Asteroids and burritos are a bad combination (The Dragon’s Nine Sons, Roberson). This really cool alternate future history has the Mexic Dominion (a cult nation that worships Mexico’s ancient bloodthirsty gods) on a secret asteroid base.
- It’s a bad idea to make Libertarians angry (Freehold, Williamson). This piece of Libertarian science fiction is sort of a Klingon’s version of utopia — justice served by dueling, armed citizens, and a highly efficient military.
- It’s a bad idea to set your alarm clock for too early a time (Coyote, Steele). One character wakes up early from cryosleep and has to spend the rest of his life alone on a starship.
- Never take your wedding ring off (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Donaldson). In this story about a modern day leper, we find that a white gold wedding ring has enough power to stop all the forces of evil.
- Cats are telepathic (On Basilisk Station, Weber). Specifically, the book is referring to a race of six limbed tree cats. But you know the regular ones are telepathic also.
- Puns are magic (A Spell for Chameleon, Anthony). I probably read 10 books from this pun-based fantasy series.
- Those secret Vatican organizations? They’re here to help (Carpe Demon, Kenner). These books are about what Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be like if she grew up, had kids, and lived in the burbs. The heroine works with a secret demon-fighting organization in the Vatican called Forza Scura.
- Make sure you have good health insurance (War of the Worlds, Wells). The big powerful aliens with their war machines all died from the common cold. Apparently, they didn’t even have an HMO.
Categories: Humor, thursday thirteen
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Wedding Dress Pun-ishment
Katrina Chalifoux of Rockford, Ill. won a contest sponsored by Ripley’s for the best wedding dress made of folded toilet paper. See the ladies below, posing, smiling, flush with pride!
Katrina’s dress was just charmin’. I hope she keeps up this work, clearly she’s on a roll.
Thank you, thank you. Tip your waitresses, I’ll be here all week.
Toilet paper wedding dress picture
Categories: Humor
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Tags: Toilet paper wedding dresses
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Unicorns Do Exist
 (source http://www.physorg.com/news132406601.html) |
A unicorn deer named ‘Unicorn’ was born June 11, 2008 in Italy. This appears to be a genetic defect, but it was a natural occurrence. It remains to be seen whether it has magical healing properties in its horn, etc. Perhaps this genetic defect has occurred previously, and perhaps it is the source of medieval tales of these beasts.
Since this creature was born in captivity, hopefully it can be bred. |
(source http://www.physorg.com/news132406601.html) |
Categories: random ideas
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