Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Stickers and SUVs

You know those "Support Our Troops" stickers on the back of every SUV in America? I had, until recently, never seen them for sale. There was only one explanation: I don't shop where those people do. Since everyone seemed to have one, that could only be WalMart. It certainly isn't at the Apple store or Think Geek. I finally checked and, sure enough, WalMart has them by the metric tonne. Coming back from Thanksgiving I also saw some at a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike. Is this intended to be an elitist comment on SUV drivers? You decide.

404 Self Storage

Choosing a name for a company can be hard. A good name should be short, pronouceable and memorable. A name should also not cause one to think of a double entendre. Newly emerging culture can have unexpected ramifications for names, as in the case with 404 Self Storage in eastern Maryland. I tried to find their Web site but, umm, couldn't get to the page :)

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Five Days in the West of England

I had the opportunity to spend a long weekend in Bristol, England preceeding a W3C Semantic Web Best Practices & Deployment Working Group face-to-face meeting (I suspect that words in organization titles are like keys; the greater the number you have, the less important you are).  The story is here and the photos are here.

Did only stupid people vote for Bush?

What happens if we compare the locations of the top institutions of higher learning with their host states' electoral results?

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Driving on the umm, Right

I have recently noticed that in countries that drive on the left the
pedestrian traffic generally bares to the right. In countries that
drive on the right, the pedestrian traffic also tends to the right. I
found that counterintuitive until I realized that pedestrians will also
tend to the right when entering movie theatres, which is blamed to the
propensity toward right-handedness. If human society is of
predominantly right-handed people and right-handers tend to the right,
then I think Britain got it wrong; we should all drive on the right.

The seemingly natural movement of people to the direction of their
handedness is particularly complicated in left-driving cultures by the
placement of up pedestrian escalators on the left. Have you ever
watched the traffic jams at the bottom? Even when people are
experienced, they seem to happen more often than in right-driving
cultures.

Sorry left handers!