Odd Lots
- Dear Abby: God love ya. Go in peace. –Signed, Appreciative.
- Dear Appreciative: He does. And I did.
- An interesting piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal indicates that magazine publishers are successfully charging much more for their digital editions than their print editions. Lots more–like, twice the price. It may be the upscale “tablet demographic.” We’ll know as tablets work their way down the food chain.
- Many thought that a silent ride would be one of the great advantages of electric vehicles. Alas, no: People want to hear cars coming, so the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will eventually force manufacturers to build electronic noise systems into new EVs. The mandated noise makes them sound like internal combustion cars. Better than ice cream trucks, I guess.
- I’ve been testing bottled sangria lately, and after much grueling testing, I declare this one the winner.
- That goofball Kim Dotcom is trying again, and I give him points for balls: He’s opened Mega, a new cloud storage service that might be construed as designed to protect Mega from its customers. As best I can tell, it can work perfectly fine as a file-sharing system, along the same lines as the other bitlockers. It’s distributed, redundant, and entirely outside the United States. An insight: The war on piracy mainly creates better pirates. We’ll see.
- Why do we seem to remember our 20s better than any other period of our lives? First of all, I’m not sure we do. (My clearest memories are of my Coriolis years, from age 37 to age 50.) But if the phenomenon is about the time when we define ourselves, it may simply be that most people define themselves earlier than I did. Or it may all be nonsense.
- Admitting that he used a $5000 metal detector, this guy struck major gold. In eighth grade, I built a $0 metal detector made of parts pried out of dead transistor radios, and my big strike was three chicken bones wrapped in aluminum foil at Illinois Beach State Park. Maybe you really do get what you pay for.
- Of course, if you’re just looking for quarters in the sand, Hammacher Schlemmer’s $60 metal detecting flip-flops may be just the thing. I might have thought of that, but flip-flops barely existed here in 1966.
- Tribal epicosity metafail: Declaring silly little shit an “epic fail” because your tribe disapproves of it.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: electronics · humor · piracy · psychology · publishing
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The initiative to add sound to electric vehicles at low speeds has some merit. My wife bought one of the first Priuses to hit the U.S., so we’ve been driving it for 12+ years now (she far more than I, it being her car). My car is quiet, but the Prius is silent. I can’t count the number of pedestrians who have blithely walked in front of that car in parking lots, then become highly alarmed when they either notice the car moving or finally hear the brakes (or the horn, or some profanity from the cockpit). The silence, while novel and cool, is frustrating for the driver and dangerous to unwary (is there any other kind these days?) pedestrians. Weather permitting, I put down the windows and turn up the stereo when I’m trying to find a parking space in the Prius. Mostly, though, I avoid driving it and stick to my trusty internal combustion noisebox instead – my car doesn’t have nearly the “cool factor,” but it’s far less likely to produce an involuntary manslaughter charge. (If we ever retrofit the Prius with a sound generator, I’ll lobby for using the Jaws theme and a big subwoofer.)
I’d vote for using the sound made by the cars from The Jetsons. (OTOH, I’m not really the target market for an electric car, either. It’s not conducive to big road trips.)
The proposal to use The Jetsons’ vehicle sound may be the best idea to emerge from the 21st Century. Erbo, I hope that someday your picture is on a postage stamp [assuming that they still exist] for your idea.
I am a 9 month-per-year cycle commuter (not because I’m a granola-eater, but because I am a cheapskate) and I too have been startled by hybrid cars passingly me silently. They were not too close, nor too fast, nor aggressive; their conduct was unobjectionable, but it is unnerving not to hear their approach.
The only thing in the way of that would be clearing it with Hanna-Barbera, who might claim copyright infringement. (They’re not as sticky about such things as Disney, though, and there have even been documented cases where they’ve stepped in to redecorate preschools and day-care centers that had been threatened by Disney for having Disney characters painted on their walls, replacing the artwork with their own characters.)
Flip-flops existed in the 1960s. Back then they were called “thongs”, a name which is now applied to an entirely different piece of apparel.