I just saw an advert on Facebook:

Buy rare Hubble photos
Buy high resolution fine art images printed and framed from rare NASA Hubble Space Telescope archives. Free shipping.

Gee, I'm pretty sure all NASA images (and all Hubble images, obviously) are PUBLIC DOMAIN.

But best of all, the advert has an example image: the Eagle Nebula image, probably most famous and un-rare Hubble image ever.

Oct 31: ICC General Membership Meeting. Hey ya’ll, the meeting is scheduled for Sat Nov. 15th. Be there, or be tagged “uncooperative.” --Jenn from the office

Great! I'll be there. What time? And where?

Nov 12: Get hyped for some ICC charades at the General Membership meeting on November 16th on the deck of Hillel from 2:30-4:30. -- ICC Ed. Coordinator

Great! Where's Hillel? (Google gives the address of a 'Texas Hillel' as 'The Drag', which covers about ten square blocks) And, wait...November 16?

The three things that should always be known about a meeting:
* Who - This has been explained. everyone in ICC. That includes me. Shiny.
* Where - This has been vaguely established.
* When - This is unclear.

My education feels uncoordinated.

UPDATE (before I even posted this): I went to the ICC office for other matters (open on a weekend? Amazing!) and asked the person working there when the meeting was. She told me Sunday, and showed me the flyer posted on the office door. She, however, had no clue at all what or where 'Hillel' was. I told her what I had determined using the magic that is Google, so now at least one member of the ICC staff(-like people) knows where the meeting is.

So, we're using eSlate, (online demo available! In fact, part of my knowledge of the interface described below [such as write-ins] are derived from the demo, not trying it on the actual ballot) electronic voting with a very stupid interface.

Inputs are:
* A dial.
* An 'enter' key.
* 'Prev' and 'Next' keys.
* A 'Cast Ballot' key.
* A 'Help' button.

You enter your 'access code' ([0-9]{4} or perhaps [1-9][0-9]{3}) by using the dial to scroll through the digits 0-9 and selecting 'enter' for each one'. (Scrolling wraps around, and there's a 'Clear last' button after the 0.) It doesn't reset your position after choosing a digit, which was good for me, because mine ended with '22'.

Dial's are hard to use. They're inconvenient. Why are they better than arrow keys, even just two? Maybe people with palsy can more easily manipulate the dial? Sure is a lot harder for me.

After you enter your access code (hope you didn't need to 'Clear Last' on that last digit--it automatically moves on!) Then it has a page of instructions, and then pages of the ballot. Prev/Next will skip between pages, as will using the dial to scroll off the top or bottom of the page. The dial scrolls through each option of each question on the page, so to get to an option for something on the middle of the first page, you first must either scroll through the first half (President, for one), or go to the next page and scroll back through the last half. Write-ins are done similarly to the access code, but you have 26 letters + clear last + space, you only get eighteen characters max, and you get to manually say 'Accept' when the name is complete. If you do a write-in and then switch to something else, it will blank the name in the write-in box, so if you switch back, you have to re-enter the name. Possibly reduces the risk of people accidentally entering a write-in and then accidentally selecting a non-write-in without realising it.

After you've done all pages, it has two pages showing what you selected for each (good: confirmation!) and then you press 'Cast Ballot' and it says the ballot has been cast and to leave the booth. Also good.

Here's the thing, though: when I first switched to the second page and tried scrolling, it didn't scroll through the options as it should. It went to the next page. I went back to the instruction page, saw that I'm right and they're wrong, and after going back and forth for again, the dial started working.

This is really broken and really bizarre behaviour. As a programming, I can say with confidence that it didn't really happen. It's just user error.

As someone who has read a lot about electronic voting in the US, though, and as the user, I'm a lot less confident.

Lessons of the day:
1. Don't reinvent the UI.
1a. You'll just make it worse.
1b. Familiarity is very valuable, especially for UIs a user will see once for a couple minutes every two years, or (more likely) once for two minutes once.
2. Test your voting equipment thoroughly.
2a. Ensure proper behaviour.
2b. Ensure user error is exceptionally rare and is handled gracefully.

Earlier I heard a car commercial trying to sound old-timey comment on how cars are approaching 5 mpg.

Isn't it great how far we've come since the early days when we got under 5 mpg?

Problem: The Ford Model T got 13-21 mpg, better than some modern vehicles (thought it drove slower, and the exhaust was much, much worse).

Earlier, I felt tingly, and then cold sweatish and then slight lightheadedness, so I was like, 'Hmmm...I'll be like that moron on Google's Testimonials page who thought she was having a heart attack so she finished walking home, Googled the symptoms, and then called an ambulance'.

So I read the symptom list for heart attacks (which I already knew, but why not?), and was like 'Hmmm, that's me to a large extent' so I mentioned this to Bryan just in case I suddenly passed out. (Actually, a bit before mentioning it to Bryan, I typed 'Gee, I hope I'm not having a heart attack.' into an IRC tab, but didn't send it. 'Luca's passed out! Let's look at what he was writing in IRC. Looks like maybe he was having a heart attack.' See, just in case.)

Anyway, over the next minute or two it got worse and lightheadedness got bad and vision blurred, so Bryan was going to drive me to the hospital (having just Googled where to find such an institution), but 1. oh noes! a bunch of cars parked behind him in the driveway and 2. I didn't make it to the car. So he called the ambulance while I lay on the driveway (where I found myself alone upon awaking) with my feet up on his car, feeling better because, well, I was lying down with my feet raised (clever of me to think to put my feet up, eh? I'm like a doctor or something).

Eventually the ambulance came and checked my blood pressure, which was fine, and my blood sugar, which was fine, and something involving various electrode thingies, which were fine, and said 'You seem fine, but we can do a cardiogram-like-thing (not their term, but something like that) if you want and I was all 'yeah, probably a good idea' so they did and said 'You're not having a heart attack' and I was 'then screw the hospital. I'm actually feeling essentially fine by now anyway!'

Long story short: I'm alive and exceptionally healthy, with the exception of the rare bout of feeling faint and passing out, which hopefully won't happen again because I kind of run a chainsaw for a living right now, and those things can be dangerous, I'm told.

By the way, in the 'gee, I'm having a heart attack' moment, I was actually less concerned with making sure my brother (or someone trustworthy) would have access to my passwords and more concerned with deleting data that should die with me.

The moral of the story is: encrypt what you want to die with you and encrypt with a different key the data that shouldn't.

And Bryan says next time this happens, none of this sitting around Googling. Hospital.

We got whole wheat tortillas that are labelled as being '98% fat free'. While true, I consider it dishonest because it's intended to be interpreted as significant.

Whole milk is 96.3% fat free.

I recently was buying bug spray and opted against the one that used West Nile Virus scaremongering to market itself.

Premise: I currently lack any health problems associated with too much sugar.

So when determining the healthfulness of cereal for me, sugar content is not much of an issue. What is relevant? Whether it's fortified with loads of vitamins and the like. All too often, the 'healthy' cereal isn't. It's pretty much just wheat (so, some niacin and/or iron + fiber and a little protein). The 'junk cereals', on the other hand, are pretty much always fortified with 25%+ DV of oh so many useful nutrients.

For me, for now, Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops are a healthier choice than Autumn Wheat.

Grape Nuts are an exception, but they're disgusting. Things like Total probably would be acceptable.

Haha. Re: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: 'Spitsbergen was considered ideal due to its lack of tectonic activity and its permafrost, which will aid preservation.'

Five days before it opened, Svalbard was hit by a 6.2 (Richter scale) quake. (Centred a couple hundred miles southeast, I believe.)

Alles gut. Al Gore wrote about genetic diversity issues in Earth in the Balance. Worth reading. (I, sadly, haven't read the entire book. The copy I was reading is back home in NC.)

When asked to name a country starting with 'D', my first thought is generally 'Dominican Republic'. When asked for another, I think 'Deutschland', then 'Denmark', and then 'Djibouti'. None of these require much thought for me.

It seems, though, that you can safely assume that Americans will think Denmark first. At any rate, there's a fairly wide-spread game thingy that makes that assumption:
'Write down a country starting with "d", then write down an animal that starts with the second letter of that country, and then write down the colour of that animal. [pause] You have a grey elephant from Denmark.'

I first saw this on Zoom season 2 (1990s version), and my first thought was something along the lines of 'Good thing they had Claudio being the GM rather than a player'.

'Cause Claudio is from the Dominican Republic.

Strange none of his friends were influenced by that fact.

(I never think of 'Dominica'. Had I asked for a fifth, I'd have been stuck for a while. 'Democratic Republic of the Congo' probably would have been my next one.)

(Potentially relevant link)

I love the Economist, but this article is so...I guess not condescending, but just so...not the way they should be. I guess because it's about tech?
* 'a new web browser to rival that of Microsoft, called Internet Explorer (IE)'
* 'when it crushed Netscape, an early browser.'
* 'a rival web browser to IE, called Firefox.'

This isn't so much that they're telling us these things, but the way they say it. 'Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer' is very different from 'Microsoft's browser, called Internet Explorer'. The former gives information just in case it's needed, whereas the latter makes it sound like readers are assumed to be completely unfamiliar with this entire 'Internet' and 'Computers' thing. I'd rewrite these as:
* 'a new web browser to rival Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE)' (or 'Microsoft's own browser, Internet Explorer (IE)' if necessary.)
* 'when it crushed the previous leading browser, Netscape'
* 'Firefox, IE's chief rival'

I have a friend who does something along these lines all the time in ordinary speech. She'll call the maul, 'that maul thing' or Micah 'That Micah guy'. She's simultaneously demonstrating that she knows the terms, but separates herself from them by mentioning them instead of using them. Well, people familiar with this stuff call that a maul, but not me. Why say things in a roundabout way if the only effect is to make you seem clueless about what you're doing when you're actually not?

Once in Philosophy Club we were doing a 'Worst philosophical argument ever' thing, and one paper put 'reality' and the like in quotes. It's similar to the above, except in this case it was more of a 'people talk about a so-called "reality", but it's all nonsense' thing than a 'Let's treat readers as ignoramuses!' or a 'Let's appear clueless!' thing.

(Yes, Fannie and Freddie are being nationalized and I'm blogging about other stuff. Here's my brief F&F comment: OMFG! It's a bit overwhelming for me to opine right now, and I'll be away for the next ten days.)