Physics do not apply in the Star Wars universe.

I'm not just referencing Solo's "Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" claim, which can be explained away as a boast about navigational and piloting ability rather than ship speed. (Though there may be relativistic reasons for why speed would affect the ability to accomplish the Kessel Run in a shorter distance.)

In the latest BrickMaster (LEGO's magazine), there's a fake ad from Koensayr for the Y-Wing that claims "Goes from 0 to 2,700G in less than a parsec!" I was going to try and figure out what that meant, and then realized that 2,700G is acceleration and parsec is distance! When car manufacturers boast that a car goes from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, what they are bragging about is acceleration, that within 4 seconds, the power is such that the car can be accelerated to 60 mph from rest. What the hell does 2,700G mean? (Besides the fact that G is meaningless in Star Wars unless it references a specific planet.) If we take G to be 10 m/s^2, then 2,700G = 27,000 m/s^2. At that acceleration, it would take about 7 seconds to accelerate to lightspeed. I'm fairly certain that's not possible in the X-Wing flightsim games. Hyperspeed, yes, STL acceleration, no way.

Why I hate MS more and more...

I used to be fairly positive towards Microsoft in the past: sure, OS X is a much nicer experience, indie applications for the Mac are polished to a much higher degree than on Windows, and the free (!) IDE in XCode is quite good, but Windows has to deal with backwards-compatibility, it is *the* platform for PC gaming, and sometimes Microsoft Research churns out some cool stuff.

Still, I find myself more and more annoyed by Microsoft's UI design sense (or lack thereof). Perhaps I have merely become spoiled by living on a Mac or become more observant due to reading Siracusa's rants (exhibit A, exhibit B). Yes, Apple doesn't listen to its own UI guidelines - everyone (well, anyone in the "know") admits that - but sometimes this gives us good things. (And sometimes, horrible abominations), but at least it has the good sense to make sure at least one engineer brings key interfaces up to new UI standards. (Yes, I'm talking about the control panel UI crap shown here.)

I feel like Microsoft has become a company with no guiding vision - some people work on cool things, some people work on the behemoths known as Windows and Office, but there's no one there with the bullwhip making sure things are consistent. Just look at the Office UI - for something that is the de facto office productivity suite, you'd think they wouldn't just up and change the interface on us. (but that's what Office 2007 did). And then when they released the next update for OS X, you'd think they'd fix things or add functionality, but instead they removed VBA scripting. And if the Ribbon is such a GREAT UI idea, why isn't it in Office 2008? Yes, I hate the Ribbon, but it's super-annoying when I'll work on something at school, transfer the file to home, and suddenly wonder why everything behaves differently. Formatting titles in Excel charts used to be so easy! I do like the fact that Office 2008 UI behaves more traditionally, but what I don't like is the formatting palette that is clearly an Inspector Tool wannabe. Do the people at the Mac BU not know how to make OS X native apps, do they just don't care, or are they hideously understaffed? (maybe all 3?)

One would think that Office 2008 would run faster than Office 2004 on an Intel Mac (because 2008 is a Universal Binary and 2004 is PPC-only and requires Rosetta). Nevertheless, I find that Office 2007 running on emulated Windows XP using half the memory and one core still runs rings around both "native" Office versions. (at least as far as computation in Excel is concerned.) Any version of Excel still seems to be faster than the Numbers app in iWork, though...

I already use Keynote for presentations, and Pages / LaTeX for word processing - can someone please make me a good/fast spreadsheet app so that I can put Office out of its misery?

The quest for resolution independence

I sent this in an e-mail to a friend who was complaining about the lack of high DPI (dots per inch) consumer-grade LCD desktop displays. (Some models do exist, but are intended for the medical community and are pricey.)

A comparison of DPI for previous/current Apple computers and display products

Laptops:
13.3" (1280 x 800) = 113.49 DPI
15.4" (1440 x 900) = 110.27 DPI
17" (1920 x 1200) = 133.19 DPI

Cinema displays and old iMacs:
23" (1920 x 1200) = 98.44 DPI
24" (1920 x 1200) = 94.34 DPI
30" (2560 x 1600) = 100.63 DPI

New iMacs: (note that these are now 16x9, suitable for watching "widescreen" video without black bars instead of the 16x10, which is much more common for widescreen computer displays)

21.5" (1920 x 1080) = 102.46 DPI
27" (2560 x 1440) = 108.79 DPI

And while Apple has touted a push for resolution independence (along with 64-bit) for a while now, some things still appear to be broken (at least in the first Snow Leopard release. I haven't installed Snow Leopard yet, so I can't say if it's been fixed since then.):

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/21
(scroll down to the Resolution Independence section)

On a further note, I do have minor gripes about the 16x10 computer displays, since my current HP display scales up widescreen input (via component) to the full size, so video games are stretched vertically ever so much (+11.1%). I believe this is simply because component is analog, and is being decoded by an onboard chip that then gets sent into the analog to digital converter (probably the same one that would decode a VGA signal). Not sure if this is still an issue on the newer LCD displays from HP and Dell that take consumer digital inputs like HDMI. (not that I have a PS3 or 360 to test anyway) I imagine it's still an issue with component video in. On the other hand having 16x10 IS useful for watching 16x9 video, because the black bars allow for UI popup that does not obscure the video at all.

stats on tv

I just saw a Toyota ad on tv that claimed that 80% of Toyota vehicles sold in the last 20 years are on the road today. What this statement would like you to believe is that if you buy a Toyota now, chances are good that it will be drivable for 20 years.

What the statement actually tells you is that of the cars sold over the period 1989-2009, 80% of those cars are on the road today. However, the distribution of "hard" failures is unknown, at least just from these statistics. It could be the case that all Toyota vehicles fail at exactly the 16-year mark: if Toyota sells the same number of cars each year, then the cars that would be running today were sold between 1993 and 2009, or 16 years worth (80%) of cars.

Alternatively, it is highly likely that the number of Toyota cars being sold today is much higher than it was in 1989, so of those 80% that are running today, most might have been sold in the last 10 years or so, which might put the average lifespan closer to the early teens.

powerpoint parsing fail

Yesterday, I was puzzled by this curious bullet-point at our weekly ecology seminar:
- recruitment unlikely due to Allee effects

Because I was parsing "unlikely" as an adverb modifying the verb "due" - of course, this didn't make any sense because Allee effects are not typically mentioned except as a mechanism to inhibit recruitment. Even more confusing was the previous sentence that no significant recruitment had been observed since the 1960s - so in some ways the statement that there *was* recruitment could have been new evidence to overturn earlier findings.

Eventually, I figured out that the intended parsing was for "unlikely" to be an adjective modifying the noun "recruitment" - recruitment is unlikely to occur because of low population densities (Allee effects).

Which begs the question of using complete sentences vs. phrases in powerpoint bullets: in this case, I think a complete sentence would have been fairly unambiguous, and would only have needed to be a bit longer - but in other cases, a complete sentence would take up a lot more space and be confusing as a block of text for the audience to read.

Loanwords in Japanese

Recently, I was eating in Sakura the other day and noticed something interesting on the specials menu, 黒豚ソーセジポトフ (kurobuta sausage potofu). Turning the menu over for the English side, all I found was the added word, soup, in parenthesis, which led me to believe that potofu was, indeed, derived from the French pot-au-feu. With that, I went ahead and ordered it, since the first and only time I had pot-au-feu, it was a delicious duck broth with seared foie gras and truffle oil. (thank you, Captain Jack!) Well, this one was not nearly so good - a rather bland vegetable mix with some decent sausage that tasted a bit more like hot dog than kurobuta, although in retrospect, I think that may be due to the rather unusual sweetness in kurobuta.

EDIT: This post wouldn't be complete without pointing you towards the wiki page on loanwords in Japanese, Gairaigo and the hilarious non-example "left-over", which refers to a "hit that goes over the left-fielder's head" in baseball rather than, well, leftovers. :)

clever spam

For the quick comic intro, see here.

In the latest round of human-blogs vs. spambots, I received this "interesting" comment on an oldish post. Since it's rather long, I'm only going to excerpt a particularly funny bit:

"School officials in Democratic-leaning New England say they have received relatively few charm bracelets." (with "charm bracelets" linking to what I assume is a jewelry site, but which probably sells viagra, too.)

Basically, it seems as though it's pulling random sentences from news clippings and then performing some basic parsing to replace certain phrases with its own links to create sometimes-grammatically-correct-but-always-humorous sentences.