I used to bike commute, and my only wreck was with a tow truck. But it was my own stupid fault, not his, and if you're going to go over your handlebars, I highly recommend doing it onto the flatbed part of a flatbed tow truck. Saves the long fall back to the pavement.
A truncated teardrop with a flat back (like the Prius or the Insight) is actually more aerodynamic than the teardrop. It's called a Kammback, and it's named for the gentleman who noticed that if you chop off the back of the teardrop, the air keeps flowing the same way, except without the drag of sliding along the surface of the parts of the teardrop you just chopped off.
They look up the doctor's name in their list of doctors (often on a computer! amazing!), and call the number that their system lists. At this point, if the doctor's name is fake, they already know you're full of shit. If it's real, they'll have verification from the doctor or their administrative staff shortly as to whether or not that prescription was actually given out by that office. It's happened to me on prescriptions with no potential for abuse (once on an inhaler, and another time on some medicine for altitude sickness)-- I can only imagine how thorough they have to be with abuse drugs.
Lots of cable networks are at capacity. To fit more channels in, they are deploying Switched Digital Video (SDV). Essentially, their backbone carries more channels than the cable to the homes can handle, so the switches between the backbone and the homes decide which channels to send based on what is being watched.
For this to work, your box (or television) must be able to send a request to the head-end that says "I'd like to watch Discovery Channel 7: All Sharks and Motorcycles," which is then routed to you.
As it stands, people with cablecard boxes like Tivos are discovering that they suddenly lose any less-popular channels put into the "switched" pool, because CableCard is currently a one-way standard only.
No kidding. I learned this on accident as well. I had a big ol' bottle of some prescription mouthwash after some minor oral surgery. It was opaque, and held at least a liter-- but because of the prescription sticker, it was allowed on. I eventually finished the stuff and tossed the bottle, but probably should have cleaned it and kept it for bringing something to drink on the plane.
You sure about that? Don't physically delivered prescriptions have to be on the doctor's numbered/watermarked/authorized prescription pad?
The faxed prescriptions might be simpler, but have to come directly from a trusted source like a doctor's office, rather than being delivered by the patient.
And even then, if there is any question, they almost always verify with the office of the prescribing doctor.
I worked at an office "secured" with a high-tech palm scanner connected to an electronic door lock. Very futuristic. Unfortunately for actual security, you could simply turn right instead of left when you got to the top of the stairs, and walk around to the other side of the "secure" door.
Several laptops were eventually stolen by some random guy that just walked in, picked them up, and casually left.
How would you go about convincing a country rube that he's got superpowers that the rebels need? Particularly if he and everyone around him already believe that "the force" is some sort of mystic religion, you've lived as a local shaman in a cave for 30 years, and you misplaced your jedi test kit?
"Let me just get a blood sample" is probably not the best opening line.
Bad acting destroyed the story. Virgin births destroyed the story. C-3P0's inexplicable presence in Anakin's garage destroyed the story. Jar-jar destroyed the story. Midichlorians change virtually nothing, yet have become the biggest internet shitstorm ever. (The virgin birth would have been stupid whether Midichlorians did it or the Force did it.)
We already knew the force was hereditary and unevenly distributed among the population. If it wasn't, yoda and kenobi wouldn't have bothered seeking out an unreliable farm kid just because he was Vader's son.
Why does this bug people so much? Why is it so offensive that a large, organized Jedi order might know something specific and technical about the operation of the Force that was lost and replaced with mysticism after their fall? "High Science Becomes Magic After Apocalypse" is a staple of sci-fi.
The Ironman watches were hardly durable. Sure, the watch body would hold up-- but the pin that held the band on tended to fail miserably over time, almost always when you were swimming. I lost one swimming at the beach when I was a kid, and another failed during an actual triathlon swim for me. Isn't that the only thing it's supposed to do? Survive a triathlon?
The new velcro bands are more durable, but they also don't grip as well in the water. Still, the redesigned face is an improvement in my book.
If only all buyers were honest. Or at least understood the difference between "never shipped" and "waiting for you at your local post office because you weren't home for delivery."
There are plenty of idiots and assholes on both sides, and giving one side extra power isn't exactly an optimal solution.
I'll agree that easier sorting by "total cost" would be a welcome change, but it still doesn't change the fact that unless the seller charges more than the auction states, you don't have any right to complain. Even if you believe the amount is "over-inflated," unless it's not what the auction listing states, it's what you agreed to.
How do you get tricked, exactly? Because I think we may be on the same side on this-- if you've been tricked, you have a legitimate complaint. If you just think the amount is too high, but agreed to pay it, you haven't been tricked.
There's plenty of things a buyer can do after paying to screw the seller. Just because you're an honest guy who hasn't thought of them on his own doesn't mean they don't exist.
"Not paying" is the easiest seller problem to deal with. As you say, you just don't ship. "Not as described" followed by the return shipment of an empty box, on the other hand, is a royal pain in the arse. As is negative feedback to the seller for a post office screwup.
Saying sellers should leave positive feedback the second they get payment is like saying buyers should leave positive feedback the second they get a confirmation number. Neither one of those is really and endpoint.
But maybe with this change at least we'll see the end of $1 item, $10 shipping
Why? What's wrong with that? I sold an old copper heatsink for a few bucks, and shipping was something like $15. I didn't make up the shipping costs-- that's what the post office charged me to ship a couple of pounds of copper.
You're either okay with the shipping charge when you bid, or you're not. If you're not, don't bid and then whine that the seller screwed you. If the seller charges what the auction stated, you have no legitimate complaint.
It's hard to be a "bad buyer", either you pay the amount, either you don't. No?
Well, no. I haven't sold much on ebay, but here's a few gems I ran into:
1. Item shipped, buyer not home, package is held at post office. Buyer leaves negative feedback saying he never received the item, while it sits waiting for him three blocks away, and when I eventually get ahold of the carrier that handles his route, he confirms that there are three delivery attempt notes still stuck to the guy's door.
2. USPS loses package. Buyer leaves negative without contacting me. Refuses to withdraw negative even after refund and USPS shipment proof.
3. Buyer receives package. Complains item is "not in new condition," when the auction was for a used item, described as having scratches, with clear pictures of the scratches.
In all of these cases, the buyer was lousy even though they paid.
You don't have to go rural to find affordable houses-- you could buy 2500 square feet of house on a large yard in Indianapolis (12th largest US city, I think) for something like $170k right now. Ours was pretty close to those stats when it sold last year, and it even had a pond large enough for weekend kayaking. It's hard to believe what people pay for houses elsewhere, now that I've moved to another state.
Hell, back in '01 when I was first house-shopping in indy, I could have bought an 11-bedroom/12-bath mansion that had been used as a bed-and-breakfast for a whopping $350k. At the time, I remember thinking "who would ever pay $350k for a house?"
Who says any one person is "powerless" to enact change in global politics?
Hey, look everybody! An engineer!
But seriously, you're right. I oversimplified by saying that people are "powerless." There are always more productive avenues to pursue, and it's possible that you could actually succeed with one. That said, the average engineer is MUCH more likely to find and fix that issue with the GFI outlet that keeps tripping in your basement than he is to convince even a single other person to change political viewpoints. But (in my personal experience) many of us are likely to apply the same sort of "keep working on it until it's fixed" approach to both cases.
The engineer, like Chomsky's interested parties, sees a need for grassroots change to fix something. He found a problem, thought his way to what he sees as a solution, and is taking the actions he sees as available. He's just not very good at it. Dogged, blunt persistence works well for engineering, but not for talking to non-engineers about gray-area issues.
This might tie back into the article, too. The sort of person who works hard to solve problems is probably also much more easily frustrated by a lack of results than somebody who is content to "roll with the punches." I would suggest that maybe this is why the "engineering mindset" is more represented in violent groups-- failing to nonviolently implement something they believe very strongly is correct, they just bull on ahead with the next available method?
While you're correct to point out that mobile bandwidth is indeed more expensive than fixed-wire bandwidth, I don't think your comparison is fair, either.
For example-- my cell phone plan includes unlimited data transfer, although the max rate is quite a bit lower than the 12Mbps my cable modem will manage. But SMS messages are specifically excluded, even though they are almost exactly the same thing as the rest of the data I send without paying extra. This results in the hilarious result that I can use instant messaging clients for free, but pay extra to do the same thing (with a length limit) via SMS. And more amusing than that is that watching streaming video is included, while a tenth of a kilobyte of text costs $0.20.
I can pull gigabytes and gigabytes through the cell phone network. But this one weird standard has an artificially inflated cost associated with it for no reason beyond "it makes us a lot of money to do this."
(Although truth be told, voice traffic is the same deal. Why do I have a montly cap on voice, when I can watch youtube 24/7 for free?)
I agree with you completely. The "problem-solver" mindset has two serious real-world limitations: nobody is an expert on everything (even after careful thought), and not every problem is within your capability to solve no matter how much effort you put into it.
Clearly any rational person would see that annoying everyone is not the way to convince anything or anybody.
Yes and no. They address "normal" people just like they would other engineers. "Here's my idea, here's my reasoning, here's my conclusion." They expect that everyone else will realize that this is intended as a prompt for you to present your ideas. Also especially annoying is the "Here's my (devil's advocate) idea, here's my (hypothetical) reasoning, here's my conclusion (that i WANT you to disprove)." Most people look at you like you have three heads when you start a discussion like that.
But it works with other engineers, who are used to pushing through ideas like this. Still, this may make up the majority of their daily interactions. Is it irrational for them to attempt to use what works for them most often? A bit, if it always fails in the same places.
Just remember-- we're not TRYING to be dicks, most of the time. Nobody's good at everything, and we might even be trying to help, awkwardly. When non-engineers realize this, it often is more help than the engineer realizing it. They may know what they're doing isn't working, but that doesn't mean they'll ever develop the knack for not being so absolutely blunt. But a more socially adept person may be able to just factor this in to how they deal with the engineer.
I think that's good advice for everybody, though. Remember that most people aren't trying to be dicks even when they seem like it, and react accordingly rather than exploding back at them. Save the explosion for after you've confirmed they meant to be a shithead. There are many more types of people than just the engineer and the non-engineer, and everybody communicates differently.
I'm not sure it's a superiority complex, but the end result is awfully similar. Engineers are one of the few subsets of people that are in active control of changing the world around them. It's what they do for a living. They think about a problem, come up with a way to implement a solution, and then build it.
I don't think they believe they're superior-- but when an engineer decides one way or the other about an issue, he sets out to do something about it. A lot of people are content to hold a viewpoint but go on about their business, but it has always seemed to me that an engineer with a viewpoint on an issue that he won't back down from is simply doing what engineers do. He's thought about a problem, looked at his limited options, and is pursuing the solution his believes is correct.
This mindset, however, is not common. Most people, when confronted with an issue (even one they strongly feel needs to change) that is outside their ability to control, will simply go about their lives. The engineer, although similarly powerless to enact change in, say, global politics, will do the only things he can, like annoy everybody around him trying to convince them to see his viewpoint. They try to think rationally, and they believe when they've reached a conclusion that other people could be convinced rationally to see their viewpoint. Again, this is what they do day-in and day-out at work, convincing co-workers to choose a particular design path on purely rational merits. It just doesn't map to the messy grey-area that makes up normal life with irrational people.
(none of this is peer-reviewed, and was made up on the spot, and may or may not match your experiences.)
Are you actually suggesting that there is no difference between homebrewed meth chock-full of delicious impurities taken in massive abuse doses and standardized, tested drug doses prescribed after research proves efficacy? Meth users *do* get wonderful lesions and lose their teeth. Kids taking ADHD drugs don't, unless they're inhaling their pills at many times the prescribed dosage and not sleeping for days at a time.
It's no different than painkillers-- the right dose helps people in pain. Too much taken chronically is addictive drug abuse. It's not difficult to see the difference.
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I used to bike commute, and my only wreck was with a tow truck. But it was my own stupid fault, not his, and if you're going to go over your handlebars, I highly recommend doing it onto the flatbed part of a flatbed tow truck. Saves the long fall back to the pavement.
A truncated teardrop with a flat back (like the Prius or the Insight) is actually more aerodynamic than the teardrop. It's called a Kammback, and it's named for the gentleman who noticed that if you chop off the back of the teardrop, the air keeps flowing the same way, except without the drag of sliding along the surface of the parts of the teardrop you just chopped off.
They look up the doctor's name in their list of doctors (often on a computer! amazing!), and call the number that their system lists. At this point, if the doctor's name is fake, they already know you're full of shit. If it's real, they'll have verification from the doctor or their administrative staff shortly as to whether or not that prescription was actually given out by that office. It's happened to me on prescriptions with no potential for abuse (once on an inhaler, and another time on some medicine for altitude sickness)-- I can only imagine how thorough they have to be with abuse drugs.
Lots of cable networks are at capacity. To fit more channels in, they are deploying Switched Digital Video (SDV). Essentially, their backbone carries more channels than the cable to the homes can handle, so the switches between the backbone and the homes decide which channels to send based on what is being watched.
For this to work, your box (or television) must be able to send a request to the head-end that says "I'd like to watch Discovery Channel 7: All Sharks and Motorcycles," which is then routed to you.
As it stands, people with cablecard boxes like Tivos are discovering that they suddenly lose any less-popular channels put into the "switched" pool, because CableCard is currently a one-way standard only.
No kidding. I learned this on accident as well. I had a big ol' bottle of some prescription mouthwash after some minor oral surgery. It was opaque, and held at least a liter-- but because of the prescription sticker, it was allowed on. I eventually finished the stuff and tossed the bottle, but probably should have cleaned it and kept it for bringing something to drink on the plane.
You sure about that? Don't physically delivered prescriptions have to be on the doctor's numbered/watermarked/authorized prescription pad?
The faxed prescriptions might be simpler, but have to come directly from a trusted source like a doctor's office, rather than being delivered by the patient.
And even then, if there is any question, they almost always verify with the office of the prescribing doctor.
I worked at an office "secured" with a high-tech palm scanner connected to an electronic door lock. Very futuristic. Unfortunately for actual security, you could simply turn right instead of left when you got to the top of the stairs, and walk around to the other side of the "secure" door.
Several laptops were eventually stolen by some random guy that just walked in, picked them up, and casually left.
3. Profit!
I am still using all of the compact fluorescent bulbs I bought in college. In 1997.
How would you go about convincing a country rube that he's got superpowers that the rebels need? Particularly if he and everyone around him already believe that "the force" is some sort of mystic religion, you've lived as a local shaman in a cave for 30 years, and you misplaced your jedi test kit?
"Let me just get a blood sample" is probably not the best opening line.
Bad acting destroyed the story. Virgin births destroyed the story. C-3P0's inexplicable presence in Anakin's garage destroyed the story. Jar-jar destroyed the story. Midichlorians change virtually nothing, yet have become the biggest internet shitstorm ever. (The virgin birth would have been stupid whether Midichlorians did it or the Force did it.)
We already knew the force was hereditary and unevenly distributed among the population. If it wasn't, yoda and kenobi wouldn't have bothered seeking out an unreliable farm kid just because he was Vader's son.
Why does this bug people so much? Why is it so offensive that a large, organized Jedi order might know something specific and technical about the operation of the Force that was lost and replaced with mysticism after their fall? "High Science Becomes Magic After Apocalypse" is a staple of sci-fi.
The Ironman watches were hardly durable. Sure, the watch body would hold up-- but the pin that held the band on tended to fail miserably over time, almost always when you were swimming. I lost one swimming at the beach when I was a kid, and another failed during an actual triathlon swim for me. Isn't that the only thing it's supposed to do? Survive a triathlon?
The new velcro bands are more durable, but they also don't grip as well in the water. Still, the redesigned face is an improvement in my book.
If only all buyers were honest. Or at least understood the difference between "never shipped" and "waiting for you at your local post office because you weren't home for delivery."
There are plenty of idiots and assholes on both sides, and giving one side extra power isn't exactly an optimal solution.
I'll agree that easier sorting by "total cost" would be a welcome change, but it still doesn't change the fact that unless the seller charges more than the auction states, you don't have any right to complain. Even if you believe the amount is "over-inflated," unless it's not what the auction listing states, it's what you agreed to.
How do you get tricked, exactly? Because I think we may be on the same side on this-- if you've been tricked, you have a legitimate complaint. If you just think the amount is too high, but agreed to pay it, you haven't been tricked.
There's plenty of things a buyer can do after paying to screw the seller. Just because you're an honest guy who hasn't thought of them on his own doesn't mean they don't exist.
"Not paying" is the easiest seller problem to deal with. As you say, you just don't ship. "Not as described" followed by the return shipment of an empty box, on the other hand, is a royal pain in the arse. As is negative feedback to the seller for a post office screwup.
Saying sellers should leave positive feedback the second they get payment is like saying buyers should leave positive feedback the second they get a confirmation number. Neither one of those is really and endpoint.
But maybe with this change at least we'll see the end of $1 item, $10 shipping
Why? What's wrong with that? I sold an old copper heatsink for a few bucks, and shipping was something like $15. I didn't make up the shipping costs-- that's what the post office charged me to ship a couple of pounds of copper.
You're either okay with the shipping charge when you bid, or you're not. If you're not, don't bid and then whine that the seller screwed you. If the seller charges what the auction stated, you have no legitimate complaint.
It's hard to be a "bad buyer", either you pay the amount, either you don't. No?
Well, no. I haven't sold much on ebay, but here's a few gems I ran into:
1. Item shipped, buyer not home, package is held at post office. Buyer leaves negative feedback saying he never received the item, while it sits waiting for him three blocks away, and when I eventually get ahold of the carrier that handles his route, he confirms that there are three delivery attempt notes still stuck to the guy's door.
2. USPS loses package. Buyer leaves negative without contacting me. Refuses to withdraw negative even after refund and USPS shipment proof.
3. Buyer receives package. Complains item is "not in new condition," when the auction was for a used item, described as having scratches, with clear pictures of the scratches.
In all of these cases, the buyer was lousy even though they paid.
You don't have to go rural to find affordable houses-- you could buy 2500 square feet of house on a large yard in Indianapolis (12th largest US city, I think) for something like $170k right now. Ours was pretty close to those stats when it sold last year, and it even had a pond large enough for weekend kayaking. It's hard to believe what people pay for houses elsewhere, now that I've moved to another state.
Hell, back in '01 when I was first house-shopping in indy, I could have bought an 11-bedroom/12-bath mansion that had been used as a bed-and-breakfast for a whopping $350k. At the time, I remember thinking "who would ever pay $350k for a house?"
Who says any one person is "powerless" to enact change in global politics?
Hey, look everybody! An engineer!
But seriously, you're right. I oversimplified by saying that people are "powerless." There are always more productive avenues to pursue, and it's possible that you could actually succeed with one. That said, the average engineer is MUCH more likely to find and fix that issue with the GFI outlet that keeps tripping in your basement than he is to convince even a single other person to change political viewpoints. But (in my personal experience) many of us are likely to apply the same sort of "keep working on it until it's fixed" approach to both cases.
The engineer, like Chomsky's interested parties, sees a need for grassroots change to fix something. He found a problem, thought his way to what he sees as a solution, and is taking the actions he sees as available. He's just not very good at it. Dogged, blunt persistence works well for engineering, but not for talking to non-engineers about gray-area issues.
This might tie back into the article, too. The sort of person who works hard to solve problems is probably also much more easily frustrated by a lack of results than somebody who is content to "roll with the punches." I would suggest that maybe this is why the "engineering mindset" is more represented in violent groups-- failing to nonviolently implement something they believe very strongly is correct, they just bull on ahead with the next available method?
While you're correct to point out that mobile bandwidth is indeed more expensive than fixed-wire bandwidth, I don't think your comparison is fair, either.
For example-- my cell phone plan includes unlimited data transfer, although the max rate is quite a bit lower than the 12Mbps my cable modem will manage. But SMS messages are specifically excluded, even though they are almost exactly the same thing as the rest of the data I send without paying extra. This results in the hilarious result that I can use instant messaging clients for free, but pay extra to do the same thing (with a length limit) via SMS. And more amusing than that is that watching streaming video is included, while a tenth of a kilobyte of text costs $0.20.
I can pull gigabytes and gigabytes through the cell phone network. But this one weird standard has an artificially inflated cost associated with it for no reason beyond "it makes us a lot of money to do this."
(Although truth be told, voice traffic is the same deal. Why do I have a montly cap on voice, when I can watch youtube 24/7 for free?)
I agree with you completely. The "problem-solver" mindset has two serious real-world limitations: nobody is an expert on everything (even after careful thought), and not every problem is within your capability to solve no matter how much effort you put into it.
Clearly any rational person would see that annoying everyone is not the way to convince anything or anybody.
Yes and no. They address "normal" people just like they would other engineers. "Here's my idea, here's my reasoning, here's my conclusion." They expect that everyone else will realize that this is intended as a prompt for you to present your ideas. Also especially annoying is the "Here's my (devil's advocate) idea, here's my (hypothetical) reasoning, here's my conclusion (that i WANT you to disprove)." Most people look at you like you have three heads when you start a discussion like that.
But it works with other engineers, who are used to pushing through ideas like this. Still, this may make up the majority of their daily interactions. Is it irrational for them to attempt to use what works for them most often? A bit, if it always fails in the same places.
Just remember-- we're not TRYING to be dicks, most of the time. Nobody's good at everything, and we might even be trying to help, awkwardly. When non-engineers realize this, it often is more help than the engineer realizing it. They may know what they're doing isn't working, but that doesn't mean they'll ever develop the knack for not being so absolutely blunt. But a more socially adept person may be able to just factor this in to how they deal with the engineer.
I think that's good advice for everybody, though. Remember that most people aren't trying to be dicks even when they seem like it, and react accordingly rather than exploding back at them. Save the explosion for after you've confirmed they meant to be a shithead. There are many more types of people than just the engineer and the non-engineer, and everybody communicates differently.
I'm not sure it's a superiority complex, but the end result is awfully similar. Engineers are one of the few subsets of people that are in active control of changing the world around them. It's what they do for a living. They think about a problem, come up with a way to implement a solution, and then build it.
I don't think they believe they're superior-- but when an engineer decides one way or the other about an issue, he sets out to do something about it. A lot of people are content to hold a viewpoint but go on about their business, but it has always seemed to me that an engineer with a viewpoint on an issue that he won't back down from is simply doing what engineers do. He's thought about a problem, looked at his limited options, and is pursuing the solution his believes is correct.
This mindset, however, is not common. Most people, when confronted with an issue (even one they strongly feel needs to change) that is outside their ability to control, will simply go about their lives. The engineer, although similarly powerless to enact change in, say, global politics, will do the only things he can, like annoy everybody around him trying to convince them to see his viewpoint. They try to think rationally, and they believe when they've reached a conclusion that other people could be convinced rationally to see their viewpoint. Again, this is what they do day-in and day-out at work, convincing co-workers to choose a particular design path on purely rational merits. It just doesn't map to the messy grey-area that makes up normal life with irrational people.
(none of this is peer-reviewed, and was made up on the spot, and may or may not match your experiences.)
Disney movies in grad school? Did American cartoons out-hip Anime in the college set while I wasn't looking?
Are you actually suggesting that there is no difference between homebrewed meth chock-full of delicious impurities taken in massive abuse doses and standardized, tested drug doses prescribed after research proves efficacy? Meth users *do* get wonderful lesions and lose their teeth. Kids taking ADHD drugs don't, unless they're inhaling their pills at many times the prescribed dosage and not sleeping for days at a time.
It's no different than painkillers-- the right dose helps people in pain. Too much taken chronically is addictive drug abuse. It's not difficult to see the difference.