Slashdot Mirror

My first Psych professor also published this book http://www.amazon.com/Use-Misuse-Statistics-Gregor y-Kimble/dp/0134361962 "How to Use (and Misuse) Statistics" that is so good that it was a textbook for one of the statistics classes my dad (a micro-economist) had when he was in grad school.

Imagine that -- a "scientist" (psychologist, often considered not even a "hard science") literally wrote the textbook used to teach statistics to the folks you thought would be "more likely" to properly carry out the research in this study.

Stop trying to claim conclusions based on the small sample size of your personal experiences.

Amazon

The "new car smell" is simply a side effect of all the plastics involved in its construction airing out. It doesn't really come in a can.

For those who may not have heard of the this game before all the publicity and now as consenting adults want to buy it.

http://www.amazon.com/Rockstar-Games-P2T2I-7104252 78075-Bully/dp/B0009SQF0C/sr=8-1/qid=1161015985/re f=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-8746263-8476050?ie=UTF8

Skin realism is, I should think, less important for making an android comfortable to interact with than personality realism. To take examples from science fiction, think about Mr Million in Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Anson Guthrie in Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars . Both are downloaded personalities of real people, and even though they are encased in ugly battleship gray, the other characters understandably react to them as real human beings because of their personalities.

Meanwhile, even if you had the most realistic-looking android ever, its limited intelligence and tendency to misunderstand would make dealing with it an annoyance. It would be like dealing with an infant.

If robotics wants realism, it's really dependent on progress in AI, not matter how much materials science makes authentic-looking skin.

Skin realism is, I should think, less important for making an android comfortable to interact with than personality realism. To take examples from science fiction, think about Mr Million in Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Anson Guthrie in Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars . Both are downloaded personalities of real people, and even though they are encased in ugly battleship gray, the other characters understandably react to them as real human beings because of their personalities.

Meanwhile, even if you had the most realistic-looking android ever, its limited intelligence and tendency to misunderstand would make dealing with it an annoyance. It would be like dealing with an infant.

If robotics wants realism, it's really dependent on progress in AI, not matter how much materials science makes authentic-looking skin.

The ultimate ipod killer.

The Dutch intelligence service AIVD has been approached to consult on the radio emissions issue.

I assume they are referring to TEMPEST attacks. It was a Dutchman, Vim van Eck who first brought TEMPEST attacks to public attention while in the U.S. even the security standard was classified. I imagine many Slashdot readers will recognize his name from the "Van Eck phreaking" described in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon .

Xbox live 360 from Microsoft costs 40 bucks a year. Has there been any indication this is going to be free or something?

When you leave your home, you may be monitored. In the old days, it was by a plainsclothes detective popping stay-awake pills and eating doughnuts in his car parked across the street. In modern times, it is through camera surveillance and RFID.

I'm no fucking not-a-suicide-pact posner but in my opinion when the 'monitoring' goes from the guys with the donuts to the billion-dollar government contracts for systemic automated surveillance the government has already overstepped the bounds of what constitutes a reasonable search and is in violation of the 4th Amendement.

http://www.amazon.com/Quicksilver-Screen-Don-H-Deb randt/dp/0345373413

Antiwar.com touts books claiming Isreal could have stopped 9/11 and that they have infiltrated the Pentagon.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0595 296823/antiwarbookstore/

So I maintain that the bias is clear.

I just noticed this, but does anyone else think it's a little ironic for a site like Slashdot to use what appears to be a Microsoft controller as the icon for the Games section?

Gaiman's individual efforts for me have been fairly weak, but I loved his collaboration with Gene Wolfe, A Walking Tour of the Shambles . Might be a good place to start for Wolfe fans who know that Gaiman looks up to the old man, but want to get acclimated to his style slowly.

> I would also have advertisments that are about gaming on a Mac.

Here you go http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kRDPEr2hCU

And here are all the great games on Macinsoth:

Breakout http://www.amazon.com/MacSoft-04-22355-Breakout-Ma c/dp/B00005A3LS

Super Breakout (couldn't find the link)

Photoshop... http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-13102124-Photoshop-CS2 -Mac/dp/B00081I6JI/sr=8-1/qid=1160736591/ref=pd_bb s_1/104-2956179-1591916?ie=UTF8

PS: I own 2 Macs. My wife exclusively use a Mac. And I plan to buy another Mac next month. :-)

> I would also have advertisments that are about gaming on a Mac.

Here you go http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kRDPEr2hCU

And here are all the great games on Macinsoth:

Breakout http://www.amazon.com/MacSoft-04-22355-Breakout-Ma c/dp/B00005A3LS

Super Breakout (couldn't find the link)

Photoshop... http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-13102124-Photoshop-CS2 -Mac/dp/B00081I6JI/sr=8-1/qid=1160736591/ref=pd_bb s_1/104-2956179-1591916?ie=UTF8

PS: I own 2 Macs. My wife exclusively use a Mac. And I plan to buy another Mac next month. :-)

I think if parents started being charged with involuntary manslaughter or negligent homicide when their kids go on school schooting rampages, you'd see more parents suddenly taking an interest in their children's lives and activities

Parents need to raise (and control) their children.

If you do decide to setup Linux for a media center you could use MythTV to create your own personal video recorder (PVR). I haven't tried it yet, but I am a Linux user who has been thinking about trying MythTV. I plan to get a copy of the book "Hacking MythTV" and try it out. The easiest option would probably be for me to use KnoppMyth which is a Linux distribution specially designed to make installation of MythTV as easy as possible. I also ran across some info about KnoppMyth at KnoppMythWiki. I am not really sure what effect a DRM restricted future might eventually have on a Linux media center. Perhaps Hollywood, Microsoft and Congress will somehow eventually block access to most content for open non-proprietary solutions.

If someone isn't already a Linux user Ubuntu or Kubuntu might be a good choice for general use. I have not looked into how they would be for multi-media or PVR use though. With Ubunutu or Kubuntu you can use the Synaptic package manager to download free software from the list of thousands of free progams that are avaiable and have it installed with the dependancies taken care of automatically. For various legal reasons most versions of Linux don't come preconfigured to play DVD movies or MP3 files. That is somewhat of a nuisance, but instructions on how to do that are available on the Internet and in some books.

With Linux I can rebuild my computer with a new motherboard and other hardware without worring about licensing issues. With Linux, no need to scan for viruses or worms either! My understaning is that viruses and worms are pretty much a Microsoft only problem. It's not a significant issue for Linux, Mac OS X, or Unix. As much as I like Linux, a barely computer literate computer user would probably be best off hoping that the day eventually comes when local stores start selling boxes with pre-installed with Linux just like Windows. Go ahead and make Windows licensing as annoying as possible to help that day eventually come.

1. Inflection and emphasis of some words over others

This is very important. Ever have somebody tell you "It's not what you say, it's how you say it"? It's true.

2. Colloquial expressions and figures of speech.

Right now, I'm looking at this book filled with conversational Arabic expressions I picked up in the U.A.E., most of which make absolutely no sense when translated into English. Do you know what "The son of a duck is a floater" means? Neither will U.S. troops or this device.

3. Body language

Many Arabic speakers in particular gesticulate while they speak. It is just part of their cultural identity and often, the body language is just as important as what is being said. U.S. troops in the field won't understand the importance of what they see, let alone what they hear, and this device certainly won't help them with that either.

This is just what I could think of in a minute or so. I'm sure there are many more fundamental problems with using the translation device. Note that with a real live translator, most of these problems are avoided. If the U.S. military kept its Arabic translators in their ranks instead of firing them based on their sexual orientation then maybe they wouldn't have to resort to these ridiculous devices.

I keep VM versions of earlier MS operating systems and OSs at different patch levels (eg XP/XP S1/XP SP2) for testing purposes when I release software. I'm glad to see the Microsoft does not want small developers to test for compatibility on home versions of Vista.

We've been using Amazon's S3. It has a great API, pretty easy to use. I was concerned about storing sensitive data there, but we worked out a good encryption scheme (that I won't detail) and now I'm able to really restore everything from anywhere with no notice. My city could sink into the ocean and I could be in Topeka, and I could bring things back up as long as I had a credit card.

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

A singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single planet, more like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane, just beyond the Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal view, pulverized into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far underground, beneath a network of passages, in a single room filled with black. Information at the quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion years had passed since the archive was lost to the nets.

The curse of the mummy's tomb, a comic image from mankind's own prehistory, lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed with joy at the treasure ... and determined to be cautious just the same. They would live here a year or five, the little company from Straum, the archaeologist programmers, their families and schools. A year or five would be enough to handmake the protocols, to skim the top and identify the treasure's origin in time and space, to learn a secret or two that would make Straumli Realm rich. And when they were done, they would sell the location; perhaps build a network link (but chancier that -- this was beyond the Beyond; who knew what Power might grab what they'd found).

So now there was a tiny settlement on the surface, and they called it the High Lab. It was really just humans playing with an old library. It should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, than human). They would look and pick and choose, and be careful not to be burned.... Humans starting fires and playing with the flames.

The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built, recipes followed. A local network was built, faster than anything on Straum, but surely safe. Nodes were added, modified by other recipes. The archive was a friendly place, with hierarchies of translation keys that led them along. Straum itself would be famous for this.

[...]

"Then you know that an archive is a fundamentally vaster thing than the database on a conventional local net. For practical purposes the big ones can't even be duplicated. The major archives go back millions of years, have been maintained by hundreds of different races -- most now extinct or Transcended into Powers. Even the archive at Relay is a jumble, so huge that indexing systems are laid on top of indexing systems. Only in the Transcend could such a mass be well organized and even then only the Powers could understand it."

"So?"

"There are thousands of archives in the Beyond -- tens of thousands if you count the ones that have fallen into disrepair or dropped off the Net. Along with unending trivia, they contain important secrets and important lies. There are traps and snares." Millions of races played with the advice that filtered unsolicited across the Net. Tens of thousands had been burned thereby. Sometimes the damage was relatively minor, good inventions that weren't quite right for the target environment. Sometimes it was malicious, viruses that would jam a local net so thoroughly that a civilization must restart from scratch. Where-Are-They-Now and Threats carried stories of worse tragedies: planets kneedeep in replicant goo, races turned brainless by badly programmed immune systems.

P

>> This business of calling surface chemistry of finely divided powders "nanotechnology" is a bit much.

That's very true. I'll stick with the definitions given by the founder of the field (ie. Drexler), as it's less subject to commercial and political manipulation. Much of the defining material is freely available online, for anyone who wants their information from the horse's mouth.

First of all there's the online version of Eric Drexler's extremely seminal Engines of Creation. It's a fantastic read, even after all these years.

(The online version of EoC used to be maintained at the Foresight Institute, but it's now kept by Drexler himself above. His whole site is a great resource of course, so clear out the tail of the URL and have a look around.)

Then there's the online version of the popular Unbounding the Future, an easily readable and slightly updated introduction to nanotechnology for everyone, although somehow I find it lacks the charm of Engines of Creation.

But nothing beats his textbook Nanosystems though. This book is a 150% must-have for anyone with a strong interest in nanotechnology, because even if you cannot follow the detailed science and mathematics, the diagrams and tables alone justify the cost.

Unfortunately the online version of Nanosystems is still at a very early stage, and is not really useful except as an online table of contents. Buy the textbook, you won't regret it.

The chinese did not have science. Your belief that they did shows a misunderstanding of science and/or China. The chinese system has always been based on authority, hierarchies and loyalty, which is the opposite of how science works: Science is based on investigation of how the world works and ultimately only accepts the world as an authority.

I recommend "Uncommon Sense" by Alan Cromer for background on this.

As for relating to a timescale that "only they are comfortable with" - I'm not an american, so my culture stretch over a thousand years back locally, with known history. And I personally relate to all of history, including evolutionary time. However, I also relate to the fact that the time now is unique in history, as is the present kind of culture.

Eivind.

Save yourself $13.58 by buying the book here: RSS and Atom in Action. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

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The "average" person is quite capable of murder, given the right incentive, or the right lapse in judgement. Most "crimes of passion" would qualify.

This is exactly right. In fact, soldiers routinely murder people. OK, maybe it isn't "murder" to target a smart bomb on an enemy, but it isn't like they have a chance - you surprise them, hit them with overwhelming force, and they are dead. You don't challenge them to a duel, or even make it a fair fight - you try to kill them without having a chance to kill you. Whether it is murder or not is up to the philosophers.

There have been studies done on how soldiers react to killing other people, (killology, and I'm not kidding), and they found that the ability to kill is related to the physical distance from the target. If you are in a plane dropping a smart bomb, or firing artillery, it is "just a game" and few of the soldiers even give it a second thought, let alone feel guilty about it. However, the closer the range, the harder it becomes. Some people won't fire a rifle because they can see the other person and realize they are killing someone. Even worse is when you are close enough to see their face - even fewer will be able to do kill and, if they do kill the other person, most are qracked with guilt. At the closest range, (think knife combat), only 2% of the soldiers that had to do it were not wracked with guilt. Of those, they estimate that 2/3 were psychotic in some way.

I direct you to the book: "On Killing" by Dave Grossman (Amazon link), where he covers a lot of topics on refusal to kill, guilt, remorse, psychological factors, etc. It is a pretty good read and has some interesting insights into the role killing has in our society. (Note: I didn't agree with all of his conclusions, but even the ones I didn't agree with I found interesting.)

And Bookpool.com (my preferred retailer of technical books) has it cheaper still. And look, it's yet another "it's cheaper on Amazon.com" post.

Seriously, anyone who reads Slashdot knows that they link to B&N, period. As I recall, I think that Rob actually posted about that specific topic a couple a years ago. I don't remember why they do, unless it has to do with earning commission off of it for the referral (which they do, but Amazon.com offers a similar Associates program

Meanwhile, don't worry, really. The Slashdot crowd is (in general) pretty smart, and we all know how to shop around for the best price.

The review links to B & N, but I notice that Amazon has it cheaper. One wonders why Slashdot keeps linking to a site that costs their readers more.

Several people responded to you saying that it was not racism, etc.

I grew up in the south. I was taught in elementary school that the South should have won the civil war. My boyscout troop leaders discussed the "proud history" of the KKK. There were half a dozen private schools in my city that did not allow blacks. (They later changed this so that blacks athletes could attend.)

I agree that the south still has a LOT of racism. It varies though. The worse the education system and job market the more racism that is present.

One of your responders even said that democrats must feel "they will get the criminal vote". Well 1 in 10 black males are in jail. 30 percent of black men will spend part of their life in prison. (stats from http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/RACIAL/Reports/MUM handoutsMarch19-2002.ppt) I would say it safe to say that current law means that blacks have only 70% of a vote. Also anyone who has studied the war on drugs will note that the higher minimum sentences are often conveyed for drug offenses of types most common among minorities. Back in college I ran a study and read many books (including http://www.amazon.com/Smoke-Mirrors-Drugs-Politics -Failure/dp/0316084468) on how the drug war was often directed to maximize political benefit for the party in power. The whole marijuana == illegal drug thing was started as a convenient way to criminal hippies protesting the war. Why yes democrats may get more of the vote, but part of why the criminals are not given the vote is their high inclination to vote against the lawmakers.

I think these facts are much more relevant to your post than the responses from your responders. My parents complained the other day of "literacy tests" at the polling place. They (white) were asked to read a simple passage from a book, the black guy behind them has to read a parable from the bible and explain it to the satisfaction of the poll worker. *sigh* Racism is in fact live and well despite what people would like to think.

But it is not just the US and not just the south. It is visible in the south because there are so many blacks and poor people that acts of racism are more common. Racism is probably as common anywhere, but in Norway there are no blacks for people to call names. (I recall no dark skin in my travels around Norway) Just something to think about. It may be just as present but not surface as much because there are less targets forcing the bigotry out into the open.

Well, there's a "hot deep biosphere" theory that perhaps oil is continually replenished by subterranean bacteria. It sounds crazy, and I'm inclined to suspect it is, but it's the brainchild of respected scientist Thomas Gold and apparently there is some evidence for it.

Humor is a human coping mechanism.

The best example I know of this is a book called Laughter in Hell: Humor During the Holocaust.

It was an interesting read and a perfect example of this sort of thing.

The sad fact is that this time around we've burned up many of the resources that a resurging civilization would need. Rome at its peak wasn't obliterating non-renewable resources the way we are.

Fred Hoyle pointed this out over 40 years ago in his book "Of Men and Galaxies". For our world this is intelligent life's only chance to become advanced technologically. I found it very depressing when I first read, primarily because it was so logical ... even though I am an optimist. If we collapse we wont have the resources to rise again.

A similar, more recent, effort at this kind of depressing analysis is an essay titled "The Road to Olduvai Gorge".

Your name isn't Michael Weston by any chance?

I am a little late in posting, but I checked Amazon. The Little Mermaid DVD (2 DVDs) costs $14.87 (full price $29.99) and the The Little Mermaid audio CD (1 CD) costs $14.99 (full price $18.98). So I can get the DVDs for less money than the audio CD. That does not seem right, yet from my experience it seems to be not that unusual. (To be fair I listed the full prices too which seems more in line with my expectations.) Is the demand that much higher for the audio CD than for the DVD? It is my guess that the wholesale prices of the audio CDs are inflated.

I am a little late in posting, but I checked Amazon. The Little Mermaid DVD (2 DVDs) costs $14.87 (full price $29.99) and the The Little Mermaid audio CD (1 CD) costs $14.99 (full price $18.98). So I can get the DVDs for less money than the audio CD. That does not seem right, yet from my experience it seems to be not that unusual. (To be fair I listed the full prices too which seems more in line with my expectations.) Is the demand that much higher for the audio CD than for the DVD? It is my guess that the wholesale prices of the audio CDs are inflated.

As Sowell would say, there is not a shortage of oil - there is only a shortage of oil at today's prices.

Most game developers already know how to code, and probably have ideas as to how their plots will go. Here is a great book that addresses what most game developers don't know:

Game Development Business and Legal Guide by Ashley Salisbury

Highly recommended

Having worked in said industry long enough to know better, I can unequivocally say the one book I WISH I had read prior to taking said job is "Death March -- The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects" by Edward Yourdon.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-March-Developers-Impos sible-Computing/dp/0130146595

About Palestine: http://youtube.com/watch?v=eCL6WdnuNp4 http://youtube.com/watch?v=mo2HW4T7wK4&mode=relate d&search= About Jews against Zionism: http://www.amazon.com/Zionist-connection-What-pric e-peace/dp/0396075649 http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/ People can be against Israel and extremo-zionism without being antisemetic, unless of course you somehow think jews against zionism are antisemetic? Your Godwin dogma doesn't work so well on jews, does it?

About Zionist agendas in WWII and other weird stuff: http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/righitpix.html http://christianparty.net/hitlerfounderisrael.htm http://christianparty.net/nazi.htm

Except for mathematicians and programmers, most think of "random" in a *very* different way from its technical definition. To most humans, saying that a particular sequence is "random" means *guaranteeing* certain things about it. Among them: the same element does not occur back-to-back, EVER, even if there are only a few elements total to choose from.

With this sort of definition, you will probably find that "random" means something different to just about everybody. It sounds like what you want in music sequencing is something that is a little more equally distributed-- that is, all the artists are equally distributed over the total playing time of the entire shuffle sequence. Or maybe what you really want is to have all the "moods" equally distributed. Or tempo, or genre, or... To achieve that sort of thing you probably want some kind of permutation and not a complete dice-roll, with just a dice-roll to get you to the first choice in the permutation so sequential runs won't get you the exact same sequence... Still, people will then complain because every time they hear Dylan song A it's always followed by Britney Spears' song B, as that's something that they'll notice before long. That suggests a more complex form of permutation combined with a dice-roll is in order.

Randomness or apparent-randomness is not as simple as many people think. I've been programming computers for over 20 years now, and I've seen a lot of code written by programmers who clearly didn't understand randomness very well-- in the "early days" you'd be amazed at the really bad random number generators that were built into many languages. It wasn't uncommon to just walk a pointer through all of memory and pick up whatever bytes were found as a random number source, which produces really abysmal results. Also, it can make a surprising difference in the quality of the results of programs dependent on them. There's a lot of non-intuitive things that come into play almost immediately when you delve into the subject. (see This Book for some juicy ones). And while I don't consider myself an expert on the subject I have gained a respect for the complexity of seemingly simple problems in randomness-- and avoid inventing ad-hoc randomizing solutions.

One example of subtlety is the easy-to-implement "swap" method of mentioned in related threads above doesn't really give you very good shuffling if you only pass over the deck once, and gets worse the shorter the card deck is. I've always preferred sorting an array of random data along with the indices and utilizing the indicies as the shuffled deck, though that too could have some non-obvious quirks-- certainly it's very dependent on the quality of the random number generator being used.

With regards to music shuffling-- I don't think it's a very good idea in the first place, as you'll always be likely to set tunes with completely different moods against each other which will be likely to grate even if you like both tunes. It's better to take the time and manually make some good playlists, IMHO-- they don't pay radio station program directors the big bucks for nothing...

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Save yourself a couple bucks.

You may be wondering why Steven Johnson is writing about Spore. The answer is that he wrote one of the best books ever written about swarm intelligence, Emergence.

For a para-scientific book, it is very deep. It goes over the entire history of swarm intelligence and really explains how local actions can have global consequences. It is also incredibly fluid and easy to read.

In short, you are not a true computer-geek until you have read it, so check it out.

Save yourself $4.89 by buying the book here: Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $4.89 by buying the book here: Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Speaking of "willing to buy the book", Slashdot links to B & N here, but Amazon has it cheaper (look at the "Used and new..." 3rd party sellers), and I'm sure there are other sites that are also cheaper. Why does Slashdot keep linking to B & N all the time? Even if their reviews make a book seem great, the relatively high prices they link to aren't very attractive.

The Future of Content
What I learned about content from the Sims.
...and why it's driven me to procedural methods.
...And what I now plan to do with them.
Will Wright
Game Developers Conference
3/11/2005

Joel Jones and her family Will Wright and Cassidy Wright just published this beautiful new book, which I highly recommend:

Mirror Lake is the natural environment where Joell Jones, Will Wright and Cassidy Wright retreat for vacation to draw inspiration. Proceeds from this new book go to the Turtle Nest Protection Program.

Through the paintings and photographs of authors Joell Jones, Will Wright, and Cassidy Wright, this gift book looks at the nature and environment of Fripp Island, off the coast of North Carolina near Beaufort. The images and musings span more than two decades of visits to a coastal vacation spot that mirrors the process of leisure development in natural settings all over the world. In it we see and read about many aspects of nature, including the loggerhead turtles that once hatched freely on Fripp's beaches.

About the Authors

Joell Jones is an exhibiting artist with her studio in Oakland, California. She received her BA from Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, and her MA from JFK University in Orinda, California. She studied painting with Michelle Cassou. Joell is married to co-author Will Wright and mother of co-author Cassidy Wright.

Will Wright is co-founder of Maxis Software Company in Emeryville, California, and designer of the computer games SimCity, The Sims, and Spore. Wright was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001. He has been informally photographing at Fripp Island since 1999.

Cassidy Wright has been involved in art exhibits, and in the inventor sport of Robot Wars, since she was eight years old. In 2004 she entered the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California, to investigate her interests in a variety of media. She has been photographing at Fripp Island since 2000.

• Millenium Math Problems
• International Campaign to Ban Land Mines
• World Peace
• Where are my socks?
• Where's Waldo?

How much for just the planet?

Years ago, I read the book Divorce Your Car!

It tells the reader about how even if cars ran on pollution and planted flowers everywhere they went, they're still a big pain in the ass and really, not worth the trouble. They're hard to maintain, expensive, deadly, hard to find parking for (and when we build more roads and parking, traffic and parking problems just get worse), and expensive to society as a whole.

The book also tells of two possible solutions to the problem, that you can implement right away. There's the car-lite life, and the no-car life. Because I was young and living in a big city with good public transit (where I still currently live, but not for much longer), I chose the no-car life. Instead of buying a car, I found an apartment closer to rapid transit, which gives me a direct route to work. I get my groceries delivered to my door - I can do this over the internet or any one of the many local grocery stores. If the trip is short, I just walk or bike. And if I *need* a car, I call for a cab.

The car-lite life means using your car as little as possible. 90% of all trips are less than a mile anyway, so why not walk or bike them? And yes, you'd be amazed how many shops will deliver, but I'd bet you hadn't had the need to ask before, have you? If your city has rapid transit in one form or another, it more than likely lets you park at the nearest train station, so that you can keep the trip distance down. Or perhaps you can lock up your bike there. There's not always a need to bike the *whole* way to get where you're going.

Either option is also good for your health, by the way. Not only are you contributing less to smog, but you're getting more exercise. And no doubt, your doctor knows how that's a good thing.