The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.

— Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

In Spanish, it’s even worse, since each W requires four syllables with uve doble. Stephen Fry has suggested we say “wuh wuh wuh”, but that sounds like a dog barking to me.

Given the ubiquity of hypertext “web” documents, for me, it comes down to this:

The fact that you have to put the http:// before all of your web addresses anyway already tells your browser and the server and everybody that you’re looking for a hypertext document, so the “www.” is entirely superfluous!

But old habits die hard, even if they are a waste of resources. Just think of all the bandwidth we are dedicating on a daily basis to sending those four bytes to represent the “www.” across the wires!

Even Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the whole darn thing, said back in 1999 that the WWW prefix was outdated:

Nowadays, however, the web server may be far and away the biggest service foo company has, and it might make sense to give it pride of place. Remember you can only do this with one service. You could use http://foo.com/ which is after all easier to type, even though people expect to have to type the “www”.

This issue seems even more important now that we’re in the age of Social Networking in which web links are passed around in dizzying quantities, giving rise to an entire industry of URL shortener services.

I hope that more and more companies will figure this out and buck the trend. It’s easy enough to forward a URL with “www.” to one without it, so your customers will still find you. In the mean time, you can find me at erikras.com, not www.erikras.com.

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I found the following video on my phone recently. I had no idea that she had shot it.

It’s a pretty common practice lately for her to say something, and if I don’t understand what she’s said after about four times she’s attempted it, and I ask, “What are you saying?”, she’ll look exasperated and say, “I don’t know!” and leave the topic.

Now that I’ve seen the video, it’s clear that she was asking “How do I get this thing into ‘photo’ mode so I can take a photo?” She’ll figure it out soon enough.

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Lest you think I’m implying that Americans are much more polite than Spaniards, let’s look at another set of customs: the dinner party.

When you are a guest in someone’s home in Spain, there is an unspoken rule that you shouldn’t ask for anything to eat or drink, and that rule is remedied by the expectation that the host will offer you things to eat and drink. Americans have this same system to some extent, but where Spain and the US diverge is at the dinner table.

In the US, when a host lays out a bunch of food on the table at a dinner party, the guests more or less understand that it’s all for them and they can ask each other or the host to pass the potatoes if they want more. In Spain…not so much. A Spanish guest will tend to eat only what he is expressly offered to take. As a result, proper hosting etiquette is to constantly suggest that people with empty plates take more food. Sometimes it’s even considered polite for a guest to decline food that he really wants to give other guests, or the host, the option to take it. Since both parties understand this, a polite host will continue to persist even after the guest has declined.

Personally, this drives me mad. I really can’t stand customs where no doesn’t mean no. I prefer to tell the truth and not have to repeat myself. But, I have to remind myself that I am in a different culture where my host is only being polite. It takes effort. And I’m not the only one. My wife had the opposite problem of waiting for food to be offered to her in the States, and sometimes walking away from the table hungry and annoyed at how rude Americans can be. Now that she and I fully comprehend the cultural difference, we know not to get annoyed, or, if we do, that no one is to blame but ourselves.

When you visit other cultures, the people will, by definition of being from a different culture, seem rude to you, and you will seem rude to them. If you can’t bend your mind around to the opinion that experiencing and learning about these differences is the very thing that makes traveling and living abroad so much fun, then you should go back to your hometown where everyone behaves just like you.

This ad for HSBC got a lot of airtime back when I was living in England. It illustrates my point perfectly and humorously.

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Think, People!

Here are two particular offenders that I’ve seen in the last week posted by more than one of my Facebook friends. If you have posted this, I’m not directly calling you an idiot, just pointing out that, either you and I have very different ideologies, or you did something without thinking, which is something I do all the time. If you still believe your support of the statement to be valid, then by all means explain yourself in a comment.

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered, “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

He’s saying, in terribly fragmented sentences, that what most surprises him about Humanity is that we plan and worry about the future and strive for wealth. Seriously?

My friend, Lance, who re-posted this in order to mock it, nailed his comment. I’m paraphrasing, since I can’t find the exact comment:

The Dalai Lama is a doofus. That’s what we do! That’s like “our thing”. Saying that’s what most surprises you about humanity, is like saying that what most surprises you about cows is that they go moo.

I get the whole romantic Carpe Diem, “dance like nobody’s watching”, vibe, which is great, but no one actually does that. The very reason our species has become so dominant is that we, unlike all our furry planet-mates, developed the capacity to not live solely in the present.

There are people who have suffered brain damage and specifically lost their ability to form memories and plan for the future, and no one would call that state the pinnacle of human existence. In fact they require constant care and attention (which requires wealth that the Dalai Lama would prefer that we not have saved up for a rainy day). The Dalai Lama himself is so concerned about the future that he’s discarded the millennia-old tenet of his religion about how the Dalai Lama is reincarnated throughout history, and wants to appoint a successor before his death. The irony of his power play is that by discarding the reincarnation doctrine, he’s also discarding his entire claim to authority. That’s the problem with Religion’s trick of setting the standards just out of human reach and claiming that past dead leaders really did attain those standards (e.g sinlessness, enlightenment, etc.). Present day leaders can’t possibly live up to them, and are destined to appear as hypocrites. I could say that what most surprises me about the Dalai Lama is that, as a leader, he’s such an egotistical control freak, but I won’t…because that’s so incredibly human of him.

I always say to people, “No one earns $100 million. You steal $100 million.” People earn $10 an hour. People earn $40,000 a year. “Earn” means work. Okay? It doesn’t mean steal, which with these vast amounts of money, of course you steal them.

Fran Lebowitz

This sounds very clever and empowering at first glance, particularly in the midst of the present Occupy Wall Street movement against bankers. Believe me, I’m very much in favor of Wall Street reform and taxing the billionaires at a much higher rate than the rest of us, but this statement, after a little thought, is absolutely ridiculous. It’s logical conclusion is not a place I want to live.

Bob is working hard at his sweat-inducing factory job earning a $40k salary. One day, Bob realizes that the weather hasn’t been very good this year, and, having grown up on an apple orchard, knows what that means. So he goes down to his local farmers market and, at the opportunity cost of foregoing some of the pleasures his $40k-earning colleagues enjoy, buys up as many barrels of apples as he can afford. Sure enough, when harvest season comes along, there aren’t many apples on the store shelves, and the price shoots up. Bob then backs his pick-up into the farmer’s market and starts selling his apples that he bought at the original price at this new elevated price. According to Fran Lebowitz, any profit he has made merely by foresight and thought has been stolen! She doesn’t specify from whom, but I assume she means that Bob should apologize and give that money back to society.

John works with Bob at the factory and also earns $40k sweating away his 40-hour week. One particular part of the manufacturing process at his plant has always struck John as particularly laborious, and he’s certain there’s another way. While his coworkers are out at the pub most nights, John stays in his garage at home tinkering with his workshop. After years of refining his design, he patents it and starts up a company to market it. What he’s designed is a piece that can be fit onto one of the machines at his factory to make the process much more efficient so they can produce twice as many units per day. His device, which costs only $50 to manufacture, will save his ex-employer, and thousands of similar factories around the country, at least $5,000 per day. How much should he charge them for the device? Fran Lebowitz would suggest that charging any more than what it costs him to pay his $40k/year employees to manufacture the device would be stealing. WTF, Franny?

The worst thing about this Lebowitz quotation is that it leads logically to exactly to the “no incentive for innovation or hard work” communist hell hole that the Conservatives think all Liberals are trying to take us to with “class warfare”. Passing this stuff around only hurts the Liberal cause.

I totally stole this idea from Dustin Timbrook, the artist that did this masterpiece.

To conclude, I’d like to state that I enjoy these little quotes as much as the next social network addict, and some of them are really good, thought-provoking and important to spread. And the social networks have done an excellent job in facilitating the spread, haven’t they? Zuckerberg’s term is “frictionless sharing”. I just wish that people would put some more thought into whether or not they really want to support a statement before hitting “Share”.

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Recently I read an article by Washington Post columnist, Ezra Klein, about some research into the forces acting on this political pendulum. He cites a paper written by Larry M. Bartels, of Vanderbilt University, entitled Ideology and Retrospection in Electoral Responses to the Great Recession. Here’s a bit of the abstract, although the entire paper is worth reading:

My analyses suggest that voters consistently punished incumbent governments for bad economic conditions, with little apparent regard for the ideology of the government or global economic conditions at the time of the election. I find no evidence of consistent ideological shifts in response to the crisis, either to the left or to the right, but some evidence of electoral responses to specific fiscal policy choices—most notably, a boost in incumbent governments’ electoral support associated with spending on economic stimulus programs.

I have long since been irked that voters don’t vote based on issues, and now this paper has made me even more cynical about the knee-jerk thoughtlessness of the electorate. Apparently, when we are all averaged out, we tend to vote with the simplest of algorithms:

And what is the best indicator of whether or not the average voter’s life sucks? That’s right! The Economy! Check out these depressing charts from Bartels’ paper…

You can think of the x-axis as being how well the economy is doing, and the y-axis is how well the incumbent governing party did in the election.

What the incumbent government does during the crisis can have some effect, however. For instance, if there is some stimulus spending, they can soften their inevitable decline a little bit. But the absolute worst thing a government that wants to stay in power can do during an economic crisis is to cut spending. Behold:

Surprise, surprise! What do the Republicans in the US Congress – who have, on more than one occasion, mentioned that their primary goal is not to better the nation, but to defeat Obama in 2012 – want more than anything? To cut discretionary stimulus spending! Republicans are such political geniuses. Of course, they have to be, since their ideology tends to screw the majority.

I really wish, more than anything, that, as I get older and incrementally wiser, I could find reasons to be less cynical about politics, but that just isn’t happening. Can anyone see anything to be optimistic about in this data? This strong correlation between the economy and government turnover is, of course, terrible news for Obama. If such a charismatic leader can’t buck this trend, then it really is a law of human governance.

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To allow their content to be crawlable by search engines, they display it all, but then put up a translucent element on top of the entire page to block navigation and easy human consumption. If they really wanted to get serious about the paywall, they could do so pretty easily, but I guess they assume this tactic will stop most people.

AdBlock rules to disable The Onion’s paywall

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International Only

At the moment, this paywall is only in effect for international visitors. A statement from The Onion:

We have found that most of our readers share articles with each other, and flow in and out of our site, and we do not want to limit that behavior.

There is also a set of avid readers, and we have chosen an article limit which allows that fan base to support us directly. On other platforms like the Kindle and Nook, we have had great support from our fans and other interested readers, which has given us confidence for this move.

We are testing a meter internationally as readers in those markets are already used to paying directly for some (other) content, particularly in the UK where we have many readers.

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Close Encounter of the First Kind

It was before we moved to Spain. My future wife and I were living in England and had flown to Spain for August vacation. The first time I went to Extremadura with her family was in 2003, and I think this encounter with the law probably happened the second year, in 2004. We had flown to Madrid and rented a car. To save money, I agreed to be the sole driver. My future in-laws’ car didn’t have air conditioning, so we took most of our excursions in our rental car. We were on our way to my future father-in-law’s hometown of Zahínos, which took us through the lovely town of Zafra.

In the middle of downtown Zafra, there was a cop directing traffic. He had one arm straight up in the air and was waving his other arm under the other one. I saw his waving arm and thought he was waving me to continue, so I continued, as my future wife and father-in-law erupted in “What are you doing!?” dismay. But by then, it was too late. The cop was whistling and gesturing angrily for me to pull over. I understood this gesture, at least.

As the policeman was approaching, my father-in-law had a brilliant idea: he told everyone in the car to be quiet and “let Erik do all the talking”. My Spanish at this point was very, very limited. When the cop asked for my carné (license), I wondered what piece of meat he wanted me to show him. From a general knowledge of how these things go, I figured I should show him my license. “Americano,” I said. The cop took one look at my North Carolina driver license and decided dealing with a foreigner with a foreign language and documentation while he was supposed to be directing traffic in a busy intersection was too much of a hassle for such a light infraction and he waved me on and said something about “más cuidado“.

The lesson here is, when dealing with an overworked, underpaid cop, the bumbling foreigner tourist act can save you a lot of trouble. I plan to use it as the first line of defense should I ever find myself under mild legal scrutiny.

Close Encounter of the Second Kind

The second time I had to deal with the Guardia Civil, they actually gave me a ticket for not having proof of car insurance in the car, a stupid law that has since been repealed.

On a side note, did you know that, in England, you don’t even need to have your driver license with you. If a cop asks for it, and you don’t have it, you just have to send proof that you have one to a certain address within a certain period of time. How reasonable is that?

Close Encounter of the Third Kind

Last Thursday, August 18, 2011, I was driving my wife and daughter to a nearby town to take my daughter to the emergency room. Well, not really to the ER, but we did go in the ER entrance before getting directed to the main reception area and sent to the pediatrician. She had a bug bite on her foot which was swelling considerably. The doctor gave us a topical antihistamine and the swelling went down in a day or two.

As we were headed to the nearby town, a traffic cop was waiting at the edge of town and flagged me down. I rolled down the window, and, without thinking, some Spanish escaped my lips. But I was feeling pretty innocent, so I just wanted to be helpful and be on my way. He asked for my license, and I opened my wallet to search for my Spanish driver license, but I couldn’t find it. I dug around for a bit, but could only find my American driver license, so I gave him that and explained that I was an American. He examined it and addressed me by my first name, asking for the car’s registration. I found it in the glove box and gave it to him. “The car is in your wife’s name?” he inquired. I answered in the affirmative. He gave me back my documentation and sent us on our way.

When I was driving away, I had two thoughts.

First of all, why the heck were my tax euros paying two officers (his partner had been leaning against their car) to stand out in the heat in Middle-of-Nowhere, Spain (14.5 inhabitants/km², 37.7 inhabitants/mile²), to check drivers’ documentation? Their primary objective must have been to check for seatbelt use and people driving without a license, but I can’t imagine that would be very fruitful. Oh, and also, I was taking my child on an emergency visit to the doctor!!

My second thought was to congratulate my own cleverness in outwitting myself. I remembered that I had intentionally hidden my Spanish drivers license deep in a part of my wallet that I normally never put things specifically for this situation to make sure my future self didn’t chicken out, get too obedient, and proffer my Spanish license first. Sure enough, the nerves of dealing with an authority figure was enough to preoccupy me enough to the point where I was unable to find my Spanish license (and I was trying to find it). Not that it would’ve been a disaster, but giving him a document that he knew how to read would not have helped my cause in any way, and it might have led him to discover the traffic law I was actually breaking: driving with non-prescription sunglasses.

I often find that my future self is a bit of a clueless idiot that needs all the help he can get.

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Curious as to what the heck this thing was invading my domestic domain, I did a little research. The stories are actually pretty interesting, albeit laden with post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacious reasoning that our species is so prone to. First of all the cat is called Maneki Neko, and my favorite of the stories goes like this:

A long time ago, during the Edo period (17th Century) of Japan, there was a poverty stricken priest, who was the keeper of a run down Temple in the Western part of Tokyo. The kind priest shared what little food he had with his pet cat and companion Tama, whom he cared for despite his poverty. Life was very difficult for the priest. The cold winds whistled through the Temple and chilled his old bones, rain poured in through the dilapidated roof, and he ached with hunger and exhaustion, yet he always remained dedicated to his duties, and grateful for what little he had.

On one particularly dreary day, the cold was cutting through his damp clothing like a million tiny knives. He went to make himself some tea, in hopes to warm himself, when he was crushed to see that he had no tea to make. His good nature turned to utter despair and sadness, and he slumped down in a corner and began to weep.

Concerned, his beloved companion Tama went toward the man to see if he could possibly comfort him. The priest exclaimed in frustration “Oh Tama! I am so very poor, and yet still I keep you! Could you not one day, do something for this Temple? Do something for me?”. His head fell into his hands and he wept quietly until he went to sleep.

Tama was puzzled, and decided to go to the outside of the temple for a while. He sat in front of the door and began cleaning himself, as cats do, licking his paws and rubbing them on his face.

Just then a very wealthy and powerful man was passing by the Temple as the gentle rain grew stronger and a violent thunder and lighting storm erupted. Large droplets of icy rain poured down and pelted him as he took refuge by a large tree. “This place will provide adequate shelter until the storm subsides” he thought. At that moment, he noticed a cat in the doorway of the old temple, cleaning his face with his paw, gesturing as though he were extending an invitation. This gesture puzzled him so, that he just had to have a closer look at this cat, who seemed to be beckoning him forth.

Cold and wet the man quickly approached the cat and entered the building. Moments later, the tree he had been using as shelter was struck by lightning and caught fire. The tree broke with a loud crash and flaming pieces of it’s shattered trunk fell precisely where the wealthy man had been standing.

The man was extremely grateful to the cat, for having saved his life. He was immediately compelled to find the owner of the cat and reward him. He entered the Temple, looking to find Tama‘s owner, and found he old priest, living in such deplorable conditions. He soon befriended the priest and showered him with gifts. The wealthy man used his influence to bring many wealthy people to the Temple, and it soon became very prosperous.

The cat had not only saved a life, but also relieved the priest of the burden of his poverty. When he died, the cat was honored by being buried in a special cemetery, and a statue was made in his likeness, reflecting the beckoning, raised paw that had brought so much good fortune and prosperity to his owner. As word of the events spread, people began placing figures of cats with raised paws in their homes, shops and temples, believing it would bring the same kind of prosperity into their own lives, that Tama had brought to the Priest.

Cool story, huh? Not entirely unlike our western oral stories than end in, “And that’s why we believe X!”

The other interesting thing about the Maneki Neko is that the gesture is a cultural difference between the East and the West. In the East, an arm movement like that of the cat, with palm down, is actually a beckoning “come hither” gesture, whereas in the West, that’s a “go thither” gesture. As a result, some Maneki Nekos manufactured for the West actually flip the paw around…which seems like a bad idea, as that makes it resemble another insulting western gesture, but the Chinese manufacturers probably don’t know that.

In the end, the damn thing is somewhat growing on me…at least to the point where I don’t actively want to throw it into the dumpster. We have it sitting on our bookcase next to my golf trophies. The other day it caught my eye, reflecting off of my pewter golf trophy mug, and it dawned on me that it would make a great cinemagraph subject, especially with the reflection.

May this animated gif bring you prosperity…or at least relief in the knowledge that your house is free of perpetual golden cat gestures.

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Bad Education

In Spanish driving school, the students are taught that, when circulating in a roundabout you should always be in the far outside lane no matter which exit you are planning on taking. How ridiculous is that? Any driving student with half a critical thinking neuron should raise their hand and ask, “Then what are the other lanes in the roundabout for?” But no one does because the authoritarian Spanish school system has extinguished any such behaviors.

I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve narrowly escaped an accident when trying to exit a roundabout from the inside lane and somebody is trying to keep going around the roundabout in the outside lane. I suspect that if we were to collide, the authorities would rule the accident as being my fault.

This brings me to what I consider to be a fundamental flaw of roundabouts, specifically roundabouts with two-lane exits.

A Fundamental Flaw

Please focus only on the northeast exit in the image above, and the red and black cars approaching it. Follow my logic here:

1. If there are two lanes in the exit, then cars are meant to exit parallel with each other from the outer two lanes of the roundabout.
2. In the image above, if the black car wants to exit into the left lane of the exit road, it may do so legally.
3. Therefore the red car must exit to the right exit lane to avoid a collision.

The conclusion #3 is a necessarily consequence of the premises #1 and #2.

Not only does that fly in the face of what Spaniards are taught in driving school, it also is contrary to my speculation of legal fault above. There is something very wrong here, because I don’t think anyone, in practice, truly believes that the red car is prohibited from continuing around the roundabout to another exit. In that case, either premise #1 is false – in which case, why do they build roundabouts with two exit lanes?? – or premise #2 is false, meaning that the black car may only exit the roundabout if he somehow verifies the location and intention of the car to its right – in which case, why do they build roundabouts with two exit lanes??

This is the same roundabout exit, as seen from street level. If you’re in this lane of the roundabout, can you continue on around, or must you exit? Does it depend on whether or not there’s a car to your left that wants to exit? Who yields? Argh!!

In Practice

Personally, I am utterly dumbfounded that more traffic accidents don’t happen in roundabouts. The whole scenario seems so chaotic, and the proper rules can’t account for every situation, not to mention that they don’t even teach the proper rules in driving school. But somehow there is an emergent behavior of the system and swarm intelligence takes over to avoid accidents and make roundabouts safer and more efficient than they seem at first glance.

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I’m not a particularly tall man at 6′½” (184 cm), but I am on the taller end of the bell curve. There was absolutely no way, with my posterior as far back in the seat as possible, that I could keep my knees in the area that my seat’s passenger is supposed to occupy. If I had been next to someone of the same height, we would not have fit at all. I had to be constantly aware of when the flight attendants were moving carts around to protect my right knee.

Show off! Apparently they designed this plane for toddlers.

Although I am overweight – and never more so than when I’m flying back from the US – at 185 lb (84 kg), I am nowhere near obesity and am probably on the thin side of the bell curve for Americans. I could just barely get the tray table down to horizontal by sucking in my belly. And the tray table had those rails, so it could have theoretically extended even closer to me.

On the flight from the US to Madrid there was a woman that needed one of those seat belt extenders because she was too obese for the regular seatbelt to latch. I can’t imagine what she would’ve done in this A320…just not fly, I guess.

It was the tray table that really proved to me that Spanair was guilty of putting too many seats in the aircraft, seats designed to have much more space between them. Even if I were trying to skimp on some cheap holidays all inclusive package, I’d expect a higher level of comfort that Spanair afforded me. I don’t have the kind of money that allows me to be picky about which airlines I use, but I will do my best to avoid Spanair in the future.

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