One part called ‘I Want a Glass Screen’ jumped out at me, though. It describes how Steve Jobs supposedly ordered the iPhone’s screen to be made of glass (instead of plastic), just a few weeks before the phone was to launch.

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office… Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting… “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

This part jumped out at me because I had recently watched an interview of Jobs from the ‘All Things D’ conference in 2010 (link goes to a transcript, but there are YouTube videos of the interview) where he described how he got the original idea for the iPhone. There relevant part is where Jobs said:

Interviewer: So when you built this OS, you did it in a phone. Why? Why not a tablet first.

Steve: I’ll tell you. Actually. It started on a tablet first. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on. I asked our people about it. And six months later they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He then got inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my god, we can build a phone with this’ and we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the phone.

OK, so the New York Times article claims that the iPhone originally had a plastic screen and Jobs ordered it changed to glass just a few weeks before it shipped. In 2010, Jobs said that the original idea behind the iPhone was that it would be ‘a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on’.

On the face of it, it does not seem that both of these things can be true. Perhaps Jobs originally wanted a glass display, tolerated a plastic screen for the prototype, and then insisted on the glass display after all. Or maybe he misremembered or simply mischaracterized the development history. But, either way, these two stories don’t seem to be compatible.

It shows ‘High-technology exports’ as a percentage of manufactured exports. These exports are defined as those with a high R&D intensity, such as “aerospace, computers, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments and electrical equipment” and the data comes from the World Bank.

(Click image to enlarge)

In case it is difficult to see, the red line that goes from about 33% in 1990 down to about 23% is for the United States. And the orange line that steadily goes up until it passes the US is for China.

At the Public Data Explorer’s website I also saw this graphic: 

(Click image to enlarge)

 It says:

Living longer with fewer children

This chart correlates life expectancy and number of children per woman for each country in the world. The bubbles are sized by population and colored by region. Over time, most countries have moved towards the bottom right corner of the chart, corresponding to long lives and low fertility. Note the progression of the bubble for China- in the late 60′s and 70′s life expectancy rose quickly, then the implementation of the one-child policy caused a drop in the number of children per woman.

(click to enlarge)

It shows the behavior of the ‘standard run’ of the model in the book The Limits to Growth, which was published in 1972, as solid lines. Also depicted are actual data for the past 40 years.

There’s a quote in the article by scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam, which goes:

“It is reasonable to be concerned about resource limitations in fifty years,” Bar-Yam says, “but the population is not even close to growing [the way Limits projected in 1972].”

OK, answer me this: If the population is ‘not even close’ to what the Limits to Growth study suggested, then why does it seem to look very close in the graph?

Certainly writing often might make you a better writer, but will search engines penalize you for not publishing often enough (whatever “often enough” might mean)?

I don’t really do anything to market my blog (as you will soon see from my viewership stats). I don’t tweet about it much and have never personally posted anything on Facebook about it.

People suggest that a blog should have a constant, narrow theme, but I blog on all sort of subjects. As a result, I get most of my traffic through Google searches where people type in something, find one particular post and then leave.

Some of the top volume search terms in 2011 were:

“speaking in absolutes” (leading to “The Danger of Speaking in Absolutes“, about Malcolm Gladwell’s take on the shooting of Amadou Diallo)

“asymptote” (leading to “Asymptotically Correct“, about something in one of Seth Godin’s business books)

and, of course,

“bradd libby” (Hi, Dad!)

In mid-June I published my most popular post ever, “Asian People are Good Drivers” which got blogged about a couple days later by iamkoream.com, a Korean-American blog. To date there have been 378 views of that specific post, though even more people also saw it when it was on the main page.

My second most popular post ever was “Bing Maps Bird’s Eye View: Now 4x Cooler“, which took about 10 minutes to put together. I genuinely don’t understand why so many people are doing searches for bird’s eye view of the Statue of Liberty.

The graph shows pageviews and a 7-day average, along with a small blue dot each time I posted. You can see that I don’t get much traffic. Under 40 pageviews a day is typical and single-digit values are still common.

I posted 49 times in 2011 (plus one more time, so far, in 2012), which is about once per week, on average – or about what a small business, solo artist, or so forth might do.

(click image to enlarge)

I had a dry spell in May and then another starting in August and lasting through September, October, November and part of December.

What’s interesting to me is that, during that longest period without posting (highlighted in gray), my traffic didn’t drop off overall. In fact, it increased.

Some of that traffic was really bad quality. Thanks to some of my posts like “There’s No Place Like China“ about the sex ratio in Asia (the number of young boys relative to the number of young girls), my posts are appearing in searches for things like “sex with young asian boy”.

So, I don’t have an answer to the question of how often one should post. But, if you have a dry period for a few weeks or months, you probably don’t need to feel anxious about not posting.

Dear Olivia,
I am from a mixed-breed flock. Half of us are brown (like me) and half are white. A couple of weeks ago we were attacked in an open field by a hawk, who killed one of our white companions.

I think it is irresponsible of whites to hang around together, where they attract the attention of predators. This poses a risk not only to themselves, but to everyone in the field.

Look, I am not a member of the Ku Kluck Klan or anything, but I just feel that the world would be a better place if only every chicken was brown. Maybe, at least, we could require all light-colored chickens to wear dark wide-brim pimp hats as camouflage when they are outdoors. What do you say?

Sincerely,
“Eva Brown”
Pulaski, TN

~~~~~~~~~~

OK, first of all, Eva, I’m going to tell you pull your beak out of your cloaca so I can get something through your little chicken head. No, it’s not OK to hate others because of the color of their feathers, nor to recommend that they all be forced to wear hats if they don’t do what you say.

You’ve ruffled my feathers already and discussions like this one can be very emotional, so maybe some mathematics can help us. In his book Micromotives and Macrobehavior, Thomas Schelling used ‘checkerboards’ of 64 squares to study mixing and segregation and I think that tool might be helpful here.

Imagine that there are two colors of chicken: Gold and Blue. There are 32 of each kind scattered on a checkerboard that has 64 squares, one chicken per square.

Gold chickens are Tolerant, in that they enjoy the company of all other chickens, both Gold and Blue. But Blue chickens are Intolerant. They like other Blues but dislike Golds. Each chicken looks to the 8 nearest squares surrounding it and gets 1 point for each neighboring chicken it likes and loses 1 point for each chicken it dislikes.

We can examine many possible configurations of chickens in that space. Each try, we pick two squares at random and have the chickens on them swap spaces. If the move increases the overall happiness, then the move is kept. If it decreases happiness, the chickens go back to their original spaces.

(To avoid boundary effects, the edges of the space wrap around to the opposite side, so that the land we’re examining is really more like a small parcel amid a much larger field.)

What happens after random chickens have tried to swap spaces, say, 10 million times?

Since the Blues want to be away from the Golds (and the Golds don’t care who they are near), the two colors of chicken will separate completely. That is, they are completley immiscible.

If all of the Blue chickens were Tolerant, like Golds, and considered each neighbor to worth +1 point instead of -1 point, then the two colors would mix completely. That is, they are perfectly miscible.

But interesting things happen when the 32 Blue chickens are a mixture of Tolerant and Intolerant kind.

Let’s say that we have 32 Gold chickens and 32 Blue chickens and all of the Blues are Intolerant. Then, we replace one of the Intolerant Blues with a Tolerant Blue. Then, we replace another, and then another.

When we had 0 Tolerant Blues, the Gold and Blue chickens separated completely. When we have 32 Tolerant Blues, the Golds and Blues mixed completely. So, between 0 Tolerant Blues and 32 Tolerant Blues, there must be some sort of transition from a society where chickens separate to one where they intermingle.

We can measure how well-mixed the checkerboard is by how many chickens neighbor someone whose color is unlike theirs. When the chickens are completely separated, as is shown in the figure above, half of the chickens have 3 neighbors who are a different color and half have no neighbors who are unlike themselves. So, on average, the number of Unalike neighbors is 1.5.

In a perfectly mixed society, each chicken on average would have 4 neighbors who are Unlike himself (and 4 who are like himself).

The graph below shows how the ‘mixedness’ of our chicken society changes as the number of Tolerant Blues changes.

In a society with 0 Tolerant Blues, we tried 10 million swaps and found that the Blue separated themselves from the Golds, resulting in an average number of Unlikes of 1.5.

We then took that configuration of chickens and randomly turned one of those Intolerant Blues into Tolerant Blue and tried another 10 million swaps.

We turned a second Intolerant Blue chicken into a Tolerant Blue and tried 10 million more random swaps, and so forth until all of the Intolerant Blues had been replaced with Tolerant Blues.

As the first few Blues become tolerant, the checkerboard becomes slightly more mixed. But after 8 of the 32 Blues become Tolerant, I find it interesting that adding Tolerant Blue chickens makes society become more separated. When there are 16 Tolerant Blues and 16 Intolerant Blues, the Tolerant Blues act as a buffer, separating the Intolerant Blues from the Golds. In this state, every single chicken is perfectly happy with his 8 neighbors, yet there is a clear separation of Golds from Blues.

It is only after more than about half of the Blues are Tolerant that the separation of colors on the checkerboard begins to approach the fully mixed state that occurs when all of the Blues are Tolerant. When the number of Tolerant Blues goes from 21 to 22, the separated bands break up into small bubbles called miscelles, with a core of Intolerant Blues separated from the Golds by a layer of Tolerant Blues.

On the graph I have also shown a gray line for when we start with 32 Tolerant Blues and then switch them one-by-one to Intolerant Blues, moving in the opposite direction down the graph. In that case, from 24 down to 12 Tolerant Blues, the checkerboard of chickens exhibits hystersis, showing patterns not seen in the other direction. But that’s a story for another day…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Olivia DeLane has a Master’s certificate in normative ethology from Gallus College, a non-accredited online institution. Her writings are for entertainment purposes only and should not be misconstrued as being for any other use. Olivia’s smash-hit YouTube dance video ‘Shake Your Tailfeathers’ has had over 430,000 unique viewers since its debut.

I’ve been spending some time recently scrutinizing the various door-operation buttons on Norwegian trains. Bear with me.

The photo below shows the buttons from an older style of train car. The red button on top opens the door and the black one underneath closes it. Both buttons are labeled, in both English and Norwegian.

Why red to open the door? And why black to close it? It seems a strange choice of colors for ‘Open’ and ‘Close’, unless you know a little about electrical engineering: the convention is that electric wires are colored red for positive wire and black for negative. (Note: This is the exact opposite of accounting, where red numbers are negative and black numbers are positive.)

Why not use red and green instead? Well, part of the reason is that about 1 in 8 adult males are colorblind. So, if you color the wires red and green, about 1 in 8 electrical engineers will eventually electrocute themselves.

It seems odd to me that in order to make the doors open so that I can leave the train, I would need to push a red button. From traffic lights, I’d be inclined to look for a green button to make the doors open and a red one to make them close.

So, I am guessing that the guy who picked the button colors was the electrical engineer who designed the system. That is, he chose the colors to make it easiest for himself and other electrical engineers to build and maintain, not easiest for travellers to use (even though travellers probably push those buttons thousands of times more often than maintenance personnel).

Really the only way to tell which button does what here is to simply read the label. If the labels fell off, there would be no way to know which button did what except by pushing them and watching what happened. I’ll bet that someone somewhere along the way received enough complaints about how confusing for passengers it is to have the buttons be red and black that they decided to revise the panel.

Below are the buttons from a newer style of train where they’ve ‘fixed’ the color scheme. Now it is green for open and red for close. Except, they seem to have made a new mistake. Colorblind people cannot see the difference between a red traffic light and a green one, so they differentiate them from their position. In many places in the world (Norway included), traffic lights are positioned with the red light on top and the green light at bottom. (Some places orient the lights in a row from left to right, with red on the far left and green on the far right, but in Norway it’s red on top and green on bottom.)

For these buttons, though, the positions are reversed. The green button is on top and the red one on the bottom. So, if you are colorblind and don’t speak either Norwegian or English, you might push the red button over and over again at your stop, thinking you were pushing the green one.

A transparent ring surrounding each button helps avoid this by lighting up when the train is stopped, but in good lighting it can be tough to see which button, if either, is lit up.

They still have the labels, though, so now you have three ways to tell which button is which: read the label, look at the color of the button, or see which button is illuminated.

Perhaps the designers realized the downside of having the green button on top and red on bottom because the Type 76B train cars have revised the layout once again.

In this kind of car, the buttons are placed side-by-side, with red on the left and green on the right (just as it is with some kinds of traffic lights). The buttons are labeled, like elevator doors with ‘><’ for Close and ‘<>’ for Open. And, to top it all off, the buttons light up from within (although I did not manage to get a photo with the buttons lit up. Even in very-polite Norway, people can have exceedingly little tolerance during peak travel hours for amateur photography of their public transit systems).

So on this kind of panel, the designers have actually built in 5 separate ways to determine which button does what: (1) the plain language labels under the buttons, (2) the text characters on the buttons themselves, (3) the relative position of the buttons, (4) the color of the buttons, and (5) the presence or absence of internal illumination.

The only things I can think of that they could realistically have done, but have not, are make the buttons different sizes or shapes.

Here’s the thing, though, that the designers of these systems never quite seemed to figure out: Nobody ever uses the ‘Close’ button. When you get off a train, you open the door and depart, leaving the door open behind you. When you get on a train, the last person on does not close the door, since he isn’t certain that he’s the last person on. He doesn’t need to close the door anyway: The train personnel have a switch that closes all of the doors immediately before the train takes off. They even announce over the intercom system right before closing all of the doors, so that no one gets caught in a doorway.

So, the latest style of control panel, from the Type 69C trains, only has one button, the only button anyone ever needs: Open. It is labelled with text in both Norwegian and English, it’s colored green and also the lights blink when the button is active, but all of this is really superfluous, since there’s only button and it only does one thing. There’s no need at all for the label, the green color, or the blinking lights.

In fact, for the oldest trains that are still in use, the doors do not open electrically. You must swing them open by hand (though again, the train personnel close them all mechanically before the train takes off). For those trains, the door does not have any buttons to push – it simply has a handle you turn. It might be difficult to believe, but the handle does not light up, it does not blink, and it is not even labelled. It is just a single metal handle on a swinging door, and the passengers are expected to figure out how this mysterious device works entirely on their own.

Starting one day, whenever I turned the ignition, the car’s electronic display would say something like “LOW WIPER FLUID LEVEL”.

It was like this for a few days, but I didn’t worry about it. I’d just pick up some wiper fluid the next chance I got. You could make the message go away by pushing the ‘Clear’ button, but the message would come back each time the car was restarted. So, I just didn’t worry about it.

Then, one day I was driving along and noticed the engine temperature was very high. Steam started pouring out from under the hood and I quickly pulled over to the side of the road.

Sitting there beside the road, wondering what was going on, I noticed the warning message that said: “LOW WIPER FLUID LEVEL”. I pushed the ‘Clear’ button to see what would happen.

A new message appeared that said: “NO ENGINE COOLANT”.

Call me crazy, but it seems that a catastrophic loss of engine coolant would have been worthy of overriding the low wiper fluid message.

So, you can be upset about the bankruptcy of Saab all you want, but personally, I prefer my cars to be of the non-quirky kind from now on.

I read this amazing fact which I still find difficult to comprehend: In the United Kingdom, the food rationing program that was implemented during World War II did not fully end until 1954 – Nine years after the fighting ended. And they won the war!

Flash forward 50 years and what was one of the biggest concerns of people in the UK about their food? Its carbon footprint.

Brief recap: In 1944 Brits were asking themselves, “Will we have any dinner tonight?” In 1954, it was “Will we have enough dinner tonight?” And in 2004 the question was, “What impact does my choice of dinner have on polar bears who live in the Arctic?”

Don’t get me wrong: I realize that there are plenty of people suffering around the world. And I realize that the people who get upset about celebrity news are often upset in part because they see topics that they consider far more important that could have been broadcast instead.

But the fact that some people today have the ability to spend some time thinking about people and animals far away, and photoshopping captions on top of them, I find reassuring, in a way. And personally I’d prefer a future where the news is fluff instead of wars and hunger.

“A rise in the price of synthetic fertilisers and the boom in organic foods have renewed interest in guano, a traditional, sustainable fertiliser that is abundant here on Isla Guañape Norte – and many more islands off the coast of Peru.”

The phrase ‘sustainable fertiser’ is what struck me. How in the world can a fertilizer be ‘sustainable’?

The article mentions that there are 4 million seabirds in the area. Say that each produces one-quarter pound of droppings per week (Never before in my life, to the best of my recollection, have I needed to estimate the weight of droppings a sea bird produces. If my estimate seems off to you, then simply change the word ‘week’ to ‘month’ or ‘day’ or whatever other time period makes sense to you). At that rate, the birds would collectively produce 1 million pounds per week.

So, any rate of harvesting that is greater than 1 million pounds per week is not sustainable. Any amount less than that is sustainable.

That is, ‘sustainable’ is a description of the activity of guano-harvesting, not of the fertilizer itself. It is meaningful to say that the harvesting is being done sustainably, or that it is being done in a non-sustainable manner. But to say that the fertilizer itself is ‘sustainable’ is meaningless.

Perhaps the author simply meant that the guano is a ‘traditional, renewable fertiliser’. So let’s just say that.

So if you drive 15,000 miles per year and get 25 mpg, then you’ll use about 600 gallons of gas each year. With an extra 100 pounds reducing your fuel efficiency, it would take about 606 gallons to go the same distance. If gas is $3.30/gallon, then you’re paying about $20 a year just to carry that weight around.

It occured to me one time I was pumping gas that a typical car’s gas tank holds about 15 gallons and gasoline weighs a little over 6 pounds per gallon, so a full gas tank should weigh about 100 pounds more than an empty one.

Normally, I fill up the tank completely each time, even pumping a few times extra after the pump has shut off. But this means that, immediately afterwards I’m toting around a full tank of gas, reducing the car’s fuel efficiency as a result.

How much money could we all save by just filling our tanks to the halfway point instead? It would mean pumping gas more often, but by eliminating 50 pounds of dead weight on average, should save about 3 gallons per car per year.

Taking 606 gallons in 15 gallon increments means visiting the gas station about 40 times per year. But taking 603 gallons in 7.5 gallon increments means pumping gas about 80 times.

If each visit takes 10 minutes, then it would take 400 minutes (about 6.7 hours) each year to make those 40 extra visits and save that $10.

This means that the extra time spent pumping gas would save me about $1.50/hour, tax-free.

I am not certain that only filling my tank to the half-way point is justified by this level of savings, but if filling the tank half-way only took 5 minutes per visit and if gas prices were double or triple their current prices, then this strategy might begin to make sense.

There’s no real point to this post. This is just the sort of stuff I think about while pumping gas.