We’ve all been there– stop dead traffic on the highway that pops up for no good reason, a braking SUV that you can’t see around, cars spread out in an evenly spaced distribution on a 3 lane highway. If more people followed these 3 unselfish rules then everyone could selfishly get to where they want to be faster!

It’s quite simply really:

1. Negate traffic waves
2. Minimize use of brake lights
3. Keep to the right!

Negate traffic waves
These are those pointless bottlenecks you get on the road when 1 or 2 cars apply their brakelights and everyone behind them follows in suit. This in effect creates a wave of brake lights back down the road that worsens exponentially when the wave is not dampened. To dampen and lessen the impact of a standing traffic wave for those behind you, some of the slowdown should be absorbed through greater following distance and less braking (see below). Check this link for an excellent discussion on traffic waves.

Minimize brake light usage
The point here is to not tap your brakes in an unnecessary manner. How can you regulate your speed without using the brake lights you say? Downshift! Downshift! Downshift! This is easy for those of us with manual transmissions, but it is still possible with Automatics. Most Auto Transmission cars still have a 3rd, 2nd, or “L” gear you can manually shift into out of your standard “D” position. That “D” position is the worst on many cars when trying to regulate your speed, because the ‘overdrive’ feature is often particularly strong (the continual positive acceleration even when your foot is off the pedal), requiring constant braking in heavy traffic, going downhills, or in snow and rain (dangerous!).

A brake light coming from a car in front of you can typically only communicate one of two messages (off=’go’; on=’stop’), but often people simply want to communicate ’slow down’. Sometimes when you’re lucky, you can see all the traffic forward of that car in front of you, so you can interpret the brake light message accordingly (if all traffic brake lights are on, then the message is probably ’stop’). But often you can’t see most of the traffic forward of you, because the car just in front of you using their brakes and blocking your view is a large SUV like a Humvee or a SuperAvalancheExploringExpeditionaryDominator or equivalent.

Stay out of passing lanes
This one is very simple and would lessen the amount that #2 and #1 happens. Sometimes I swear I’m in Britain because of peoples choice of traveling in the left lanes. But I’m not in Britain, just surrounded each day by drivers with bad etiquette. Not that I’m one to talk about etiquette or anything (why do I need two forks? Or any forks?), but we are talking about traveling here. Traveling requires efficiency, and greater efficiency equals saving money and more time for fun things like golf.

How do I stay out of the passing lanes? Simple, whenever you are not passing a car, move to the rightmost lane you are able to. That’s it! Remember, there are no slow or fast lanes, just traveling and passing lanes. No, just don’t be lazy and stay in that ever comfortable middle lane, because it is also a passing lane. Much of the moderate traffic congestion we encounter could be prevented if we diligently stayed in the traveling (rightmost) lane whenever not actively passing a vehicle in all traffic conditions.

Hell, we don’t even need more offshore drilling; with better driving efficiency as a population we can create less demand, and lower prices!!

Some tips from our experience in using Address Book under OS X to print mailing labels for us (like long Wedding mailing lists!)

There is a known ‘missing spouse’ problem that we and others have encountered. Here are some tips on what it is and how to simply fix it.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051223120527834&query=bugs
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051221232010333

Tip: Rather than fight to get the formatting perfect, print to pdf from Address book, then open and edit in Adobe Acrobat. A caveat is that the printing may be slightly off center on the Avery labels after editing in Acrobat, though we didn’t attempt to resolve this.

An article to get your blood boiling over ridiculous governmental regulations disguised to protect consumers but which in reality only limits your freedom of choice as a consumer and caters to lobbyist groups working for self-interested segments of the economy.

Recently The Economist published a good article on the history and future of recycling.

Conclusion: with technology and leadership, there may still be hope for the planet yet.

A break from our two-party system will not be possible until the our system of party primaries and electoral rules is revamped. This requires the election of lawmakers willing to make the necessary changes– changes that would ironically demolish the dual-party power sharing architecture that allowed the lawmakers to get there in the first place.I don’t yet know who will receive my vote for in 2008. I do know that my continued desire to be an independent only results diminished power of my vote– I won’t be able to have a say in who gets to be a front-runner in either of the two parties. However none of that would matter, if we only we had a ranked-ballot voting system. I can only hope that someday enough people will be fed up with the electoral status quo that fundamental change to our voting system will be implemented. Changing the electoral system is fundamental to improving the American political process.

google “itunes 7 missing files” and you can read all about this wonderful <\srcsm> feature in itunes. (I recently lost 2 purchased TV show episodes).

The following report is an illustration of what not to do if you don’t want your purchased media to suddenly vanish.

1. I was downloading Battlestar galactica from itunes

2. Stopped download, brought laptop home and continued on the (very slow) wireless Livebox network.

3. Connected and mounted my external Lacie Hd, started itunes, continued downloading. In the mean time I switched my music library under iTunes–>Preferences to the external HD (which it usually automatically does in itunes whenever my external is connected).

4. Temporarily viewed first downloaded episode, stopped, then quit itunes.

5. Ejected external HD.

6. Restarted itunes so that my library was reverted back to my laptop HD, tried to watch the first downloaded episode but itunes reported the file not found.

7. Quit itunes, remounted external HD, restared itunes (so that my library was set back to the ext HD again)

8. The first downloaded episode, and third downloaded episodes were not found but several subsequently downloaded episodes were found. Checking the ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Downloads and ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/TV shows folders revealed that the 2 missing episodes were indeed missing. Spotlight searches turned up nothing.

Many others have reported bugs and odd behavior in itunes 7 since its release.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=595144

Interesting article on research supporting the idea that morality — decisions based on empathy — are hard-wired to the brain. Further work in this area should help address the relative contributions of ‘nature vs nurture’ in decisions based on moral conflicts. Some of the original research can be read about here.

Life is one big iterated game of Prisoner’s Dilemma.

No I’m not talking about the state of affairs right now in which our politicians on both sides seem to release “declassified” intelligence information each day arguing whether our case for the war was/is strong or not.

I’m talking about the opening of the Creation museum in Petersburg, Ky. The intriguing question here is not the fact that a museum such as this exists, but rather are there really $27+ million dollars worth of sheep out there that will flock to the museum to recoup its building costs?

Sadly I think the answer is Yes.

Everyone agrees that the American voting system has flaws. Not everyone agrees on what should to be done to improve it.
One idea growing in popularity is switching to a ranked voting system called Instant Runoff Voting.

http://www.fairvote.org/
This would enable people to vote their conscience, while still casting their vote for an electable leader. I think the result would be the evolution of a third party that would keep the major ones in check and enable the election of leaders that better represent the wishes of the American people.

Some would argue that a change may create a downward spiral into a multiparty system in which nothing ever gets done (though some would argue that hardly anything positive gets done within the current system). I don’t think this is the case, as we can just look into the histories of the multiple municipalities that have already adopted this voting system. In fact, I think this system would actually facilitate cooperation between candidates/parties with similar political leanings as their clustering together at the top of the list would improve the chances of one of them winning. We only need to look to the basis of selfish vs altruistic behavior in animals to understand why this would be so.

This following article describes how our economic system is not the only idea being exported around the world.

Link to Economist story

A link to reader comments on the above article, including my own is here.