Rants – Page 50 – a sibilant intake of breath

The inaccessibility of rail

There seem to be a lot of rail fans who read this blog. Like me, they would probably lament how the main train station in Ottawa was moved from downtown to a site 5km out of town that is only easily reached by highway. Admittedly, this happened in 1966, but it only came to my attention recently.

Definitely one of the most annoying aspects of inter-city public transit is how the stations tend to be located in inaccessible and often dangerous parts of town. Of course, with real estate prices being where they are – and with the ever more entrenched dominance of the automobile – that seems unlikely to change soon.

Hollywood physics

Deficiencies in movie physics can be good fun to dissect and mock, but a recent paper suggests that they are less benign. “Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy” suggests that the absurdities that abound in popular films actually weaken the people’s ability to understand how the world works. The paper concludes that:

Hollywood is reinforcing (or even creating) incorrect scientific attitudes that can have negative results for the society. This is a good reason to recommend that all citizens be taught critical thinking and be required to develop basic science and quantitative literacy.

Specific issues discussed in the paper include projectile motion, Newton’s laws, impulse, buoyancy, and angular momentum. Certainly, some films underplay the dangers of high falls and similar phenomena – as well as playing up the dangers of things like automobiles spontaneously exploding.

Personally, I would prefer a world in which movies portrayed all the sciences in realistic and accessible ways. Unfortunately, such films are in perpetual danger of being ignored in favour of flashy absurdities like the The Core or the egregious recent Star Wars films.

Reading these entertaining reviews is a good after-the-fact vaccine.

Bad design and the Nokia 6275i

The way my Nokia 6275i stores text messages is very stupid. To begin with, it can hold 100 of them. Whether the internal memory (32 megabytes) is completely full or empty, that is the number. The message “hi” uses up a slot, just like any other message would. If you can use the internal memory for photos or videos or ringtones, why can’t you use it for text messages? 32 megabytes is enough for several novels worth of text.

Also ill considered is how it deals with the limit. You have three choices. You can set up the phone so that, once it is full, it explains this fact to you whenever someone sends you a message, which it does not store. Alternatively, you can tell it to automatically delete messages from your inbox, sent items, or both. If you set it to overwrite inbox, it slowly fills with sent messages, until you have 99 messages in the sent folder and can only keep one in your inbox at a time. If you set it to overwrite sent items, the converse occurs. If you set it to overwrite both, it lets the inbox fill while still deleting all sent messages. Keeping at least the last five of each would be far more sensible. Often, you send someone a message and – an hour later – get a response that only makes sense if you still have (or still remember) exactly what your original message said.

If you want to ensure that a particular message not be deleted, you can put it in your ‘archive.’ It still uses up one of your 100 slots, but at least it will not be deleted by the over-writing algorithm.

Finally, if anyone sends a message of more than 160 characters, it just deletes all the text beyond that. Every Nokia phone I had previously would split overly long messages into multiple versions. With this phone, written conversations with some people take on the feeling of reading a heavily censored CIA document.

To Nokia’s software engineers: please try to be less obtuse in how you design the critical functions of your phones. Those of us who send more than thirty text messages a day consider it a key feature. A few sensible changes will leave your customers a lot less annoyed.

oint(Musca domestica)ment

The 6:15am rumble of heavy trucks is one limitation of living three metres from a busy road. They are joined in cacophony by commuters in cars and on motorbikes, building into an intense parade by the time when I need to walk to work. The level of sound is more than sufficient to make attempts at sleep fruitless.

I am considering switching the placement of my bedroom and living room. It would make the flat somewhat awkward, but it would allow greater privacy (especially while I have no blinds) and hopefully sounder sleep. In any case, I need to pick up a box of industrial strength earplugs for myself and any guests who I have in the future.

Persistently homeless

A third apartment (65 Robert St, in the Golden Triangle area) has gone to someone who submitted an application first. This time, it was especially galling. The landlord refused to give it to me until I paid the first and last month’s rent in the form of a cashier’s cheque. It took some scrambling to get that much money together at short notice. Still, I managed to get it together this morning, called the man, and learned that he rented the apartment yesterday to someone who paid in cash.

Perhaps it was for the best. The man was extremely irritable and aggressive and, as such, might not have been somebody who I wanted to deal with on a regular basis for a year or more. Still, it is a shame to lose such a well situated possibility.

Forbidden features

It turns out the new cellphone that I got for Ottawa (Nokia 6275i) is technically capable of using any mp3 as a ringtone. Irksomely, Bell Canada has intentionally disabled that and other features, so as to force users to pay $3.50 or $4.00 a pop for using them. It’s possible to revert the phone to factory settings, but doing so requires buying a USB cable, downloading the software Nokia uses to program phones, and then updating your firmware in a way that will occasionally leave the phone as a worthless lump of plastic. Because it is a CDMA phone, rather than a GSM one, you cannot just download an unlock code and enter it manually. Another example of pointless crippling is how the phone will only store about 60 text messages, even when it has 15 megs of free space on it.

It’s just another example of how rarely digital rights management and related technologies actually benefit consumers. It also affirms the motto of Make Magazine: “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.”

[Update: 25 November 2007] Yesterday night, I finally unlocked my phone using Diego. Now, it can use any MP3 as a ringtone and can run any Java application.

Uniqueness is binary

Reading through various climate change reports, I am reminded of a linguistic error that has long annoyed me. Specifically, it is the use of moderating adjectives before the word ‘unique.’ Uniqueness is fundamentally a binary distinction; the Hope Diamond and Mount Everest are unique because they are singular and irreplaceable things. It is logically nonsensical for something to be ‘fairly’ unique, and it is redundant to call something ‘completely’ unique. Likewise, it is impossible to be ‘quite uniquely situated.’

From a slightly broader perspective, it is worth noting how the prevalence of adjectives diminishes both the variety and power of nouns in language. This is particularly true for expressions of degree like ‘very’ and ‘extremely.’ I try to avoid them, though it cannot always be managed.

Brain cubed

People are probably familiar with the method of avocado cutting therein the vegetable is cut in half across the axis of symmetry, the pit is removed, lines are scored through the flesh but not the skin in a grid pattern, and then one half of the vegetable is inverted, so as to cause rectangular sections to fall down out of it.

This is how I would approximate the general phenomena ongoing in my brain when waking up between 6:00am and 6:30am. This may need to be the end (perhaps temporarily) of my long-running and often cherished vampiric lifestyle.

The envelopes and minutes that matter

Today I learned for sure that someone else got the best apartment I have seen so far. It was the people who were leaving it just as I arrived to see it. No matter, because I found a less good but entirely acceptable place on Chapel Street, near Rideau. I submitted my application and then learned that someone else had already done so. There is some chance I will get this new place, but it seems likely that the slog will continue.

Next time I am presented with a renter juggling different application envelopes, it may be wise to introduce some confusion. I know that I have trouble remembering which envelope was on top when another suddenly appears with a neat collection of large bills inside…

I suppose it is all a bit ironic. The federal bureaucracy seems pretty amiable, very professional, and more laid back than expected. The housing market is opaque, full of frustration, and tinged with the unseemly on many edges.

[Update: 18 July 2007] It has been confirmed that the previous applicant got the second apartment I applied for. Having this happen twice in as many days is very frustrating. Clearly, good apartments in Ottawa are snapped up in hours. The bad ones, by contrast, linger for weeks on the various listings. Wearily, I must continue the search.

Three flops, one decent film

Normally, I try to give films at least a couple of paragraphs of commentary after I have seen them. Times of late have been busy, so I will be briefer here.

Ocean’s 13: The nonsensical plot was easy enough to anticipate, but what made this film stand out as particularly poor was the overwhelming lack of style. The first film in the series looked fresh and interesting. This one is a tired attempt at spinning more money out from a franchise long past its prime.

Shooter: I saw this on the plane, and regret not using the time to sleep. The plot was preposterous, the acting and action scenes poor, and the physics abysmal. Take pains to avoid this film.

Firehouse Dog: This one, I half-watched without any sound. Even so, it was a markedly better film than Shooter.

Last King of Scotland: Jonathan and I watched this film in the form of a DVD of dubious legitimacy I bought in Morocco. Overall, it is quite well done. At times, quite funny, at others, suitably dire for a film about Idi Amin.