The carefully researched random thoughts of Ryan Long

Yellow traffic lights, helpful companion or Satan incarnate? February 24, 2008

I’ve been thinking about the traffic lights in Fairbanks, Alaska recently. They only begin to bother me in the winter time, because that’s when they try to make people wreck their cars.

The way they accomplish this is by having a caution light timer that is too short for winter driving. 5 seconds on Airport Road, to be exact. During the Winter time, it begins to snow and become icy; the caution light doesn’t take these conditions into account.

Worse still, not all yellow lights are the same. In some places it may be as short as 3 seconds and other places that have 5 or 6 second lights. How do they pick what duration the yellow light gets? This magic number is thought up by the ITE using the formula:

“ITE Formula for yellow”:
y=yellow time=t+v/[2(a+G*g)]
t=perception-reaction time=1 s (typical)
v=initial speed=50 *1.47 fps (1.47 is the number that sticks in one’s head
after one has divided 5280 by 3600 enough times)
a=vehicular deceleration rate=10 ft/s**2 (typical)
G=32.2 ft/s**2(acceleration due to gravity at sea level on earth, change as
appropriate for signal on other planet)
g=grade expressed as decimal fraction=+/-0.006 in this case
You didn’t definitely indicate whether the grade is uphill (positive) or
downhill (negative). For uphill, equation gives 4.61 sec, for downhill it gives
4.75 sec, which values would round to 4.6 and 4.8 sec, respectively. Length of
RT lane is not a factor, since the signal should be visible before one enters
RT lane. Engineering judgment should be used in the application of the equation

Sure it looks impressive, but if you look carefully at the formula it limits what you can do with it. Your effective range is only 3-6 seconds and 6 seconds is reserved for roads with extremely high speed limits.

The problem with this is that in the winter time, you should be following other vehicles at a distance of 6 t0 8 seconds behind them. Most traffic lights are at 4-5 seconds for their duration.

Changing the light duration to accommodate winter isn’t unheard of. Many other cold weather countries have made this change to keep their drivers safer. I think Alaska should as well.

Does Gold Have The Metal To Combat Our Recession? February 10, 2008

Recession panic is starting in the US and many people are buying gold to hedge their savings against the plummeting dollar. After all, it’s the first thing most people think of when you mention precious metal. But this is an assumption on their behalf, and a costly one as well.

Gold has not gone up in price to match inflation. It’s just over double its price since the early 90s. And since it’s sought after to combat recession, most often it will be dumped as quickly as it was bought when the recession ends. This will flood the market and devalue it further. I don’t think that precious metals are entirely bad to secure savings, some are just less deserving of our attention.

The two alternatives I think are more lucrative are copper and platinum. These metals have prices that are much less likely to be severely affected by a sharp sell off. Platinum has tripled in price since the late 80s and early 90s. People are scrounging and stealing copper: radiators, AC Units and wire, because the value is increasing so fast. In fact, the US Mint has made a law against melting down pennies. This is due to the penny being worth about 1.6x its current value.

As Platinum begins to gain more and more momentum, it seems foolish to invest in something as volatile as gold is.

Why I will never ever own a Mac… again February 4, 2008

As soon as the MacBook Air was announced, I had friends talking about how cool it was and asking if I was going to buy one. I always told them no I wasn’t and explained that there were several important reasons why.

The processor is clocked at 2.0 Ghz and up. Everything is crammed into a tiny notebook shell, which is made of metal. There is next to no ventilation. It’s going to run hotter than hell. I was one of the people who bought the Titanium Powerbook when Apple started making them, and it had the same problem. Even the guy in the MacBook Air guided tour doesn’t have it on his lap, despite the smug look on his face at the end of the commercial. I think this smugness Apple has relates to my next point.

Mac’s only have one mouse button. The train of thought is, ‘we’ve made it so simple to use, it only needs one button’. Apple has decided that their user base cannot handle the complexities of two mouse buttons and has simplified matters by removing one. Their boolean logic goes something like this: computers with one button mice are easy to use -> Mac’s have one button mice -> Mac’s are easy to use. However, I live in the real world, performing tasks that are more complex than just checking email and sending instant messages about how great my Mac is. Having, at least, a right mouse button gives me a contextual menu at my disposal. This speeds up creating files, accessing programs and editing documents.

This even helps me in organizing my data, which is probably why many mac users’ desktops end up looking like this. I know there are some of you saying, “Mac’s have a contextual menu, just hold down the control key.” But if Mac’s are so simple that they only need one button, why do they even have a contextual menu? This performs the same action as having two mouse buttons. And if having two buttons complicates things for the user, wouldn’t requiring them to hold down a combination of keys to access a menu be even worse? This Brings me to my next point.

Mac’s suck, and the biggest reason of all is OS X. Every time there is a major OS revision, you get to spend another 129.99 to upgrade your current OS X to one that isn’t plagued with glitches. Even then, if you have any major problems with your OS X, unless you’re a whiz with unix commands, it usually results in having to format and reinstall the OS. Besides, what kind of modern OS needs their user to be educated in unix console commands to fix problems anyways? I’d say thats a departure from their simple ‘one button’ logic.

The last thing that gets to me about Apple is their constant effort to bury useful tools in their OS. I still remember finding out OS 9′s secret way to kill a program and avoid a crash, SMFA700A9F4 <return> PCFA700 <return> G <return>. Why did they make that a secret, instead of putting it in the stupid manual? Macworld has an article on this very subject, Mac OS X hints, tricks and secrets. Like how to add an eject drive icon, if you don’t have an eject key on your keyboard. How about creating an alias of your folder, with your one button mouse. Why that’s as simple as 1-option-drag your alias folder to another destination. Inherit knowledge that shouldn’t be bogged down by ‘instructions’.

For now, I think I’ll just stick with my PC and XP. If I really want to work with a console, I’ll go use Linux. At least it will be worth the effort.

Website Rankings February 3, 2008

We discussed website rankings during my first pods, blogs and new media class. I think some people were under the impression that, since Google was the most popular search engine, they must have the highest number of hits. However, this isn’t true. I knew that Yahoo was the highest ranked site around march 2006, but I wasn’t sure if that was still the case. What I found was far more complex than I had imagined.

I searched on alexa.com, I’m sure I’ll have loads of tracking cookies to kill after this post, and found that the most visited site on the internet was still Yahoo. Google was right behind it though, ranked at number 2. I didn’t think that Google was that close because, I researched this before, it used to be so seasonally dependant. I found this data on Hitwise, while this was true for 2005 and 2006, was no longer true for 2007. Their site ranking is much more consistent overall than it used to be.

 Counting hits isn’t as simple as it sounds. Site counters don’t take into account repeat visitors, especially if they are not using a static IP or do not accept cookies. But should you only count unique visitors? Repetition is great tool to market to consumers. You also have to think of duration for each visit, duration per page and what time are they busiest. Computerworld has an article which helps explore these factors.

 Yahoo is ranked as high as it is because of all the different services they offer, their messenger application and the fact that they are a home page for many people. However, Yahoo’s search site isn’t nearly as popular as Google; the search portion of Google is visited 3 times more often than Yahoo Search. What Google is finally doing is branching out to compete in these different areas.

This branching out couldn’t come at a better time as Microsoft has now made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo. Combining these 2 sites would create one of the most visited sites, driving up the competition to advertise there and subsequent revenues.

Hello world! January 29, 2008

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