potpourri

[xela]

I'm closing all my Firefox tabs in preparation to reboot, and in the process am being reminded of a bunch of interesting things I've seen on the web lately and meant to share. In no particular order:

• Salon review of what sounds like an actually good TV show for small children, Yo Gabba Gabba.
• Mythbuster Adam Savage gives a fascinating talk on nerdy obsession. This was a talk at a geek conference I'd never previously heard of, and he really gets going with that audience. (The video is an hour long,but more than half of it is questions from the audience. The talk itself is fantastic; I gave up about ten minutes into the audience questions. YMMV,)
• Need new glasses? Consider ordering them online. Seriously — the savings are impressive, and I see no reason to believe the quality wouldn't be as good as your local shop. The article (from 43folders.com, a site I recently discovered and find generally excellent) hand-holds you through the process, which turns out to differ in little other then price from what you'd normally do anyway. (See also this New York Times article. I totally plan to try this myself next time I need new glasses.)
• Not the Parrot Cheese Shop sketch, starring Sarah Palin as the shopkeeper. [Edit: Thanks to kareila for catching my braino on that.]
• Google has released what looks to be a totally cool new web browser — and introduces it by way of a 30+ page comic book.
• A review of Traffic, a book about driving and drivers that appears to present a reasoned and researched argument for something I've believed since my early twenties: that if people treat driving as a co-operative game, everybody wins — and if not, everybody loses. See also this review form slate.com, which features this fantastic paragraph:

  At one point, Vanderbilt visits with celebrated Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who created the "intersection heard around the world." Monderman redesigned a congested four-way crossing in the city of Drachten by basically removing all of the traffic signs. The lack of signals created uncertainty and forced drivers to slow down, cooperate with one another, and watch out for bicyclists and pedestrians. It also allowed traffic to flow more smoothly. His animating idea was to put some of the "social world" into the "traffic world." While talking with Vanderbilt, Monderman demonstrated the success of his concept by walking backward into the street—with his eyes closed.

• Why I Will Not Vote for John McCain by a highly decorated retired officer who was both at West Point and in prison with McCain.
• Letter written by a resident of Wasilla, Alaska, about Sarah Palin. As authenticated by snopes.com, a neighbor who knows Palin well, gives more straight talk than we'll ever see out of the McCain campaign in a letter originally intended for a few friends and family.

Comments

[kareila]

Just to prove no two people see things eye to eye, I'm watching Yo Gabba Gabba right now, and my initial impression of it is that it's even more obnoxious than Barney. At least the purple dinosaur tries to engage kids in acts of kindness and discovery; these guys are just being noisy and colorful, kind of like if the Teletubbies starred in a 1980s MTV video.

I've gone back and watched reruns of Electric Company and was amazed at how high its education content was. They probably put 50 words on the screen inside of 5 minutes. The only similarity I see between that and this is the amount of trippy colorful graphics they use, but in Yo Gabba Gabba it's all shine and no substance.

Also FWIW, the Python parody you link to (which I did like) is based on the Cheese Shop sketch, not the Parrot sketch.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

So it really wasn't the Parrot sketch....

Fixed.

I'm sorry to hear that about Yo Gabba Gabba. The review made it seem so promising.

[canthelpyou.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I believe Monderman's theory. His sample intersection is in the Netherlands. Of course people are courteous and take turns -- they're Dutch. Contrariwise, there are intersections with inadequate traffic signals all over the third world, and nobody's lauding the paradise that is driving in Egypt or India. (Neither of which probably counts as third world any more, but the traffic hasn't changed.)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I'm dubious about it too, but it's interesting. In the traffic culture I grew up in (the Pacific Northwest in the '80s, roughly) there were certain things that were pretty much invariably understood and adhered to by essentially all drivers. For instance, if a merge is slow, you take turns, each merging car slotting in behind the next already-on-the-road car (so that an abstract view from above would look like a zipper). I doubt that everyone understood that zipping to the very front and wedging your way in the way drivers do here would have the net effect of slowing traffic down, so that while it might be a local optimization for you when you did it, if it became commonplace everyone would lose. But everyone understood that doing that made you an asshole.

But for the most part it wasn't so much a matter of courtesy being customary as adherence to the stated rules being customery. Nobody in the Northwest in those days tried to make a left turn immediately when the light turned green when there was oncoming traffic. People respected lane markers to the extent that even in heavy traffic on two-way roads in crappy weather, you could go fairly fast so long as you stayed in your lane — it never occured to me to worry about oncoming traffic straddling the yellow line til I moved here in 1990.

I could go on. Suffice it to say I liked driving til I moved to Boston.

[canthelpyou.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess I'm weird. I like driving in Boston. I yell at tourists, and get impatient when I'm elsewhere where people take turns and wait for each other and shit. C'mon people, move your butt! We could have gotten six of us through that red light while you were waiting for that fart to see if turning left was in his plans for today!