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Even Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the whole darn thing, said back in 1999 that the WWW prefix was outdated: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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How was this discovered? The Gregorian calendar – the one we use in modern 21st century western society – repeats itself every 400 years. Therefore, to calculate how many times the thirteenth falls on each day of the week, we only have to examine 400 years, or 4800 months. A bloke by the name of B.H. Brown did this by hand in 1933, but now we have computers. The program to do this is completely trivial once you have a calendar algorithm to follow the Gregorian calendar like all modern computer languages have built-in. Trivial or not, I couldn’t resist…let’s calculate how many times the 13th falls on each day of the week, shall we?

13th Histogram Calculator

When you click “GO!”, the calculator will start from today, January 13, 2012, and count which weekdays fall on the thirteenth of the month over the next 400 years until January 13, 2412. Here’s a hint: it goes up to 688.

GO!Reset

Exciting, huh? There was only one Friday the 13th in 2011, in May, so I've been waiting months to post this.

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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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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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Naughty Miley

The most recent manifestation of this phenomenon is with a supposedly naughty video of Miley Cyrus. On someone’s wall, and in your news feed, it looks like this:

When you click on the link, it takes you to a webpage that looks like this:

Look like a video sharing website you’ve seen? The first thing that I noticed when I saw this page is how the font looks the way crappy non-anti-aliased fonts look in Internet Explorer on Windows machines. Sure enough, any click anywhere on this page results in Facebook posting this to your wall.

While I don’t know the intricacies of how Facebook’s “Like” button code works, I’m pretty sure that they could fix this with more careful javascript checks to verify the exact element the javascript event was fired on.

Until then, be very careful of what you click on after you see that a friend has “liked” a link that seems a little too interesting. And if you do fall for this (I did once), go to your wall and remove the post immediately to stop the spread of the spam to your more gullible friends.

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In Spain, however, there is a big “buying rounds” culture that was very foreign to me at first. While this somewhat extends to meals, in Spain the “no, let me pay!” issue comes up more often with buying rounds of drinks. Due to the geographical layout of towns and the prevalence of bars, there is a big bar-hopping culture. So it’s very common to visit several bars on a midday walk with your friends, and in each bar, only one person in the group pays for the drinks. It rotates at each bar, and if you go an outing or two without paying for any rounds, people notice. I’m fine with this. The drinks are so cheap and the company so good that I rather enjoy it. You pay for a round, and then it feels, emotionally, that you get a bunch of “free” drinks after that.

What I don’t get is when people get insistent, or even angry, about the right to pay. This is not unique to Spaniards. Americans do this too, but mostly over whole meals, which is even stupider.

First of all, let’s admit that the person that pays for everyone’s meal comes off worse than everyone else who just had a free meal. It’s true. There may be some pride of “providing for loved ones” or something, but you’re still out a bunch of money that no one else spent. Why would people fight over wanting to be the losing party? In Spain, I have seen people take the money someone else has put on the bar to pay and throw it on the floor, or forcibly put it in the attempted owner’s pocket in order to pay themselves. So sacred is this “right to pay” that people go a little crazy. I’ve never seen it reach actual physical violence, but I’ve seen some nasty name calling.

I have friends with whom I have had dinner on half a dozen occasions, and they have insisted on paying every time. At some point it becomes insulting, like they think they are better than me or that I am too poor to pay. Ironically (or perhaps not), it’s almost always someone poorer than me that exhibits this behavior.

How many times have you heard this conversation at a table when the bill arrives?

A: “I’ll get this.”

B: “No, let me pay.”

A: “No, I’ll pay.”

B: “No, really, I’ll pay.”

A: “No, let me pay.”

B: “No, I’ve got this.”

…

It’s fighting over who will have the “privilege” of leaving the restaurant with less money.

I absolutely refuse to participate in this bullshit. I’ve decided to no longer be insulted or feel guilty about letting you pay even when it’s my turn. If you want to choose to be the loser in our social relationship, that’s your prerogative.

My Policy

If you ever go out to dinner with me, and we aren’t splitting the check, remember this:

I will offer to pay ONLY ONCE.

If you get to the bill first and declare you will pay for it, I will say, “No, let me pay,” once. At that point, you can either agree to let me pay or not. If you say, “No, let me pay,” after that, I will let you pay. Every time. This policy will result in one of three outcomes:

1. You will always pay. I win.
2. Eventually you will get tired of always paying and will accept my offer. We both win.
3. You will become so annoyed with my unwillingness to ask to pay six times that you will stop going out with me. In which case perhaps we shouldn’t be friends anyway.

Society has some truly ridiculous rituals, and this wallet martyring is one I will never understand.

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Spoiler Alert: I will not discuss any aspects of the plot in this post, nor any of the puzzles that are solved along the way. What I will discuss is thematic elements, particularly as they relate to the “science” in the book. If you want to be completely surprised by everything you read in The Lost Symbol, read no further, but I promise you can read this post and still enjoy the exciting twists of the book.

The lone breakthrough scientist

In The Lost Symbol, there’s a character that has her own isolated super-secret research lab where she “does science”, particularly in the pseudo branch called Noetic Sciences, where she makes mind-blowing (kind of literally) breakthroughs that will forever change the way we look at the human mind. Her research shows that human thoughts can, and do, affect the physical world.

She “proves” that group prayer can heal the sick.

This experiment has been run hundreds of times, and when it is done properly (i.e. double blind), absolutely no statistically significant effects have been shown. In fact, when it’s not double blind, and patients know that they are being prayed for, they actually get sicker because they stop trying as hard as the patients that know they are not being prayed for.

She records, with super-chilled CCDs the actual energy flowing from a healer’s hands into a cancer patient’s body.

One of the first things that a scientist will tell you about being skeptical of pseudo-scientific claims is, “As soon as someone refers to ‘energy’ as a physical thing that can be seen, rather than a ‘the ability to do work’, you can be reasonably certain that they are full of shit.”

She mentions the noticeable shift in the randomness of the world’s random number generators following September 11th, 2001

This episode of Skeptoid is all you need to know about that.

She has a terminally ill person die on a scale and measures a noticeable weight drop, and concludes that this is the soul leaving the body

This experiment was actually performed by a Dr. Duncan MacDougall, who really did measure a slight decrease in body weight. Unfortunately, his methodology was suspect and his results inconclusive.

Science is not done in a hidden secret laboratory by a single researcher! New scientific theories are published and then critiqued and torn apart by other scientists with more voracity than anyone has ever criticized Dan Brown’s writing. Only the strongest most correct theories can withstand such an onslaught.

I wouldn’t be so ticked off about this if the very first page of the book didn’t say:

All rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.

This statement demonstrates a truly profound ignorance of what Science is. It is equivalent to claiming that some wacko in California claims that drinking his urine will cure cancer is Real Science just because the wacko calls it such. It doesn’t work like that Danny boy.

Ancient peoples knew more about Science than modern scientists

This is the classic ploy behind all kinds of New Age scams, often involving crystals or astrology, and it is also, unfortunately, the basic premise of this entire book. Brown equates quantum entanglement to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs that, “We’re all, like, connected, maaaan!” What a joke. When challenged with the cutting edge superstring theory, a character pulls out a copy of Zohar, a thirteenth century religious text written in medieval Aramaic, and reads (not out loud, conveniently) a passage that convinces his challenger that mystics in the 13th century clearly understood superstring theory. From my limited knowledge, I understand superstring theory to be based almost entirely on very complex mathematics. Call me a skeptic, but I find it just a little hard to believe that medieval priests were calculating the effects of ten-dimensional D-branes. As it does not support his case, he mentions nothing of astronomy, knowledge of galaxies or the nature, size, or age of the universe. In fact, even worse, he repeatedly implies an equivalence between astronomy and astrology. Talk about a pet peeve for scientists!

But people believed the Earth was flat!

In every case where a skeptic challenges some claim in The Lost Symbol, rather than present any sort of evidence, the claimant pulls out this common fallacious argument:

Can’t you see you’re being closed-minded? People used to believe the Earth was flat, until brave pioneer explorers sailed around it and proved it was round! You’re being just like those people who wouldn’t believe the Earth was round!

And every damn time the skeptic agrees, “Yeah, maybe you’re right. I should open my mind!” For the love of Zeus! Eratosthenes, using simple geometry and shadows, calculated the circumference of the Earth to within a 1% error back in 200 B.C.! No one by the time the sixteenth century circumnavigators were around had any doubt that the world was round. Dan Brown obviously didn’t research this beyond his grade school textbook.

If a story survives, it must be true.

The likelihood that a story will be passed on from one person to another is a matter of how entertaining, dangerous to not pass on, advantageous to pass on, the effort required to pass it on, and how believable it is. In the modern world, we see this every day with viral emails that promise good fortune if they are passed on and bad fortune if they are not. There is an entire field of study, called Memetics, devoted to the reproduction and mutation of ideas. No one really believes that Oedipus Rex or Odysseus, or Pyramus and Thisbe actually existed, but the stories about them are didactic and entertaining, so we continue to tell them. [I'm looking at you, Mr. Shakespeare!]

Humans are special

The Lost Symbol talks at great length about the relationship between humans and God, never once mentioning a little totally proven scientific theory we like to call Evolution. Dan Brown mentions that the founding fathers of the United States were Deists. What he fails to mention is that Deism is just about as atheistic as any thinking person could be until a gentleman by the name of Charles Darwin came along and explained how complexity could arise from simplicity without a designer. Just because they loved ancient Greek symbology and mythology doesn’t mean they believed any of it.

Conclusion

In The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown does his best to make his spiritual message non-denominational, not favoring any sacred text over others (well, okay, The Bible is pretty prominent), and definitely preaching an allegorical interpretation of the scriptures. Frankly, I was very, very underwhelmed by The Big Secret that the whole book is about chasing. Let’s just say it was the spiritual equivalent of Ralphie using his Secret Society decoder ring to decode the Little Orphan Annie secret code, only to discover that the code translated to “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!”

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The Computer Radiation Myth

The idea that a consumer electronic device is producing enough harmful radiation to damage your health is ridiculous. These products are tested. Thanks to Chernobyl, the Cold War, and the microwave oven, the general public is terrified of “radiation”, but almost no one differentiates between regular old radiation, the emission and absorption of electromagnetic waves/photons, and ionizing radiation, where the photons have enough energy to damage atoms. The kind of radiation your computer is giving off is not ionizing radiation:

Multiple studies have been completed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Center for Radiological Health and Devices, Bell Laboratories, and The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. The data from their work indicates that computer VDTs “emit little or no harmful ionizing (e.g., x-rays) or non-ionizing (e.g., infrared) radiation under normal operating conditions.”

As long as you’re not working for twelve hours a day with your head sandwiched inches between the backs of two CRT monitors, you’re gonna be just fine.

The Cactus Myth

I’ve done a little internet searching, and the only evidence I can find is the same plagiarized paragraph on hundreds of “living green” websites, which I will paste here onto yet another web page:

In the mid-1980s, researchers at the Institute of Geobiology in Chardonne, Switzerland, announced that tests showed employees who used to suffer from headaches and tiredness felt better after working for two years with a cactus next to their monitors. A hypothesis has been suggested that cacti evolved to counter the effects of harsh solar radiation. The science is unproven, but why not play it safe and enjoy a little nature while you work?

That’s it. Everywhere that mentions this “phenomenon” specifically says that the science is unproven. Not only that, but the study involved no measurement of radiation whatsoever, only tiredness. But that’s how myths form, isn’t it? It sounds clever and reasonable, assuming you don’t understand anything about radiation.

To The Next Level

Let’s take this myth to the next level and assume the worst case scenario: your computer monitor is built of Cobalt-60, a gram of which would kill you after a one month exposure, and the cactus on your desk has the radiation absorption properties of a block of lead. Unless you placed the cactus completely between you and the computer you would get no benefit whatsoever! There’s no way to “attract” the radiation towards the cactus. Radiation goes out in all directions until it is absorbed or reflected by something. You can’t even bend light with a strong magnetic field. Your best bet is to bend space-time. So here’s a health tip for you that really works!

Place a black hole on your desk next to your computer to absorb radiation. Why not play it safe and enjoy a little nature while you work?

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