The efficiency of mass transit may surprise you...

Here is an interesting string of blogs that I picked up regarding the relative efficiency of various means of transportation:

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2008/08/update-on-my-li.html

- Discusses San Jose Light Rail versus automobile, and others, very clean graphics

http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

- Illustrates that light rail in the United States is terribly underutilized and thus very inefficient

I was very surprised to see how much cars have improved, efficiency-wise. In the last 30 years, cars have become 30% more efficient!

Electric vehicles are the clear winner, however. Check out this graph from Coyote Blog:

Even more interesting is that my bicycle is less efficient than an electric scooter. I wonder if this is due to regenerative braking? Maybe this is a mistake.

BLM Land Color Key

Everyone who camps a lot probably already knows this, but I had a hard time hunting down the information online.

Yellow - Bureau of Land Management (BLM),

Darker yellow-orange - Wilderness Study Areas within BLM lands

Purple - National Park Service

Green - National Forest

Dark Green - National Forest Wilderness Areas

Blue - state lands

Pink - Bankhead-Jones Land Use Land

Private lands are untinted.

Backscatter X-Ray Systems Could Pose Health Risk

Here's an article too important not to share. Last time I was at LAX, I submitted to one of these scans, lacking this rather important information.

I'll always get to the airport a little early and opt for the pat-down now.

http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/pilots-boycott-naked-airport-scanners-over-health-fears/story-e6frfq80-1225947834443

Here's the chewy, tasty part from a health perspective:

“While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high,” Dr Agard said.

"Ionizing radiation such as the X-rays used in these scanners have the potential to induce chromosome damage, and that can lead to cancer."

David Brenner, the head of Columbia University’s Centre for Radiological Research, says the concentration on the skin – one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the body – means the radiation dose is actually 20 times higher than the official estimate.

The researcher was consulted to write guidelines for the security scanners in 2002 but said he would not have signed the report had he known the devices were going to be used so widely.

Please make the privacy machines go away.

Silk Hazelnut Creamer Review

Product Review: Silk Hazelnut Creamer

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Silk Hazelnut Creamer tastes and smells like acrylic paint.

Customizing Google's Chromium Browser Using Custom Stylesheets

I finally got fed up with Windows XP, and installed Linux Mint 9 on my HP Mini 210; Mint is a vast improvement, with the exception of the clickpad, which is still a bit wonky in X11.

My biggest issue was configuring Google's Chromium web browser to use larger fonts by default, since the screen of the HP mini is such a high resolution screen. The trick was to edit the following file:

~/.config/chromium/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css

The contents of my file is the following:

* {

font-size : 15px ! important;

}

body {

background-image : none ! important;

}

This causes the default font size to be 15 pixels, and all body background images to go away (I hate them).

What's really cool: if you edit this file while Chromium is running, you will immediately see the changes to the default stylesheet whenever you save your changes to the file :-)

HP Mini 210 review

A lot of people have asked me about my netbook at school. I've decided to write a blurb about my impressions regarding the HP 210 Mini.

I purchased the HP 210 after performing exhaustive research regarding other options. The biggest selling point (for me) was the availability of a high-resolution screen (1366x768). The larger size of the trackpad is also a big benefit.

This netbook is noticeably faster than my wife's Asus EEE 1000HA, and works surprisingly well for video playback (especially when using VideoLAN client to play flash video files).

HP Customer service has been EXCELLENT, and I cannot say that I have ever had a better experience with customer support from a big-box as an end-user.

However, here are several unfortunate detractors regarding this model.

1. Severe trackpad issues:

Although the trackpad is very large on this model, the click-hold-drag gesture is nearly impossible to perform on this laptop. This device actually has a "click-pad," meaning that the buttons are integrated into the trackpad itself. Want to scroll a scroll bar in a window? You'd better get used to using multi-finger gestures (or configuring the trackpad to have drag areas that correspond to scrolling). Because of this, my wife absolutely *refuses* to use my laptop; hence, two stars on overall rating. IMHO this would be a deal-breaker for many users out there.

Now that I have been using the laptop for a while, I *never* use the "click" of the clickpad. I always tap, because the only way to click-hold-drag is to use tap gestures anyway.

Furthermore, this trackpad doesn't respond well to multi-finger gestures. My wife's ASUS EEE PC 1000HA, with its Elantech trackpad, is EXCELLENT at detecting one, two, or even THREE fingers being pressed on its tiny(!) surface. If you like how you can use two fingers to scroll windows on the Mac laptops, you can forget about it on this HP -- it never works reliably.

2. The screen is *very* high-gloss. This makes it extremely hard to use in my classrooms when the lecture halls' overhead lighting is turned on. I'm considering cutting the plastic screen film with an exacto knife and replacing it with some other protective material. If the screen was as anti-reflective as my wife's ASUS EEE PC 1000HA, I would consider it to have the *perfect* screen.

3. The HPDirect website implied that the wireless card was compatible with 802.11a. This is patently false; the BIOS of this laptop actually restricts the types of wireless cards that can be used in this device, and none of them actually support 802.11a (after 2+ spending hours with tech support on phone). This is why I knocked off a star on the "features" rating.

Hopefully HP listens to this review and offers another mini that addresses the shortcomings. I really think the trackpad/clickpad issue will force customers away from the otherwise excellent HP 210.

Amazon: Item ratings

Sarah and I have been using Amazon heavily now that we are building our new home together. In particular, we have been relying on the user-supplied ratings when making our purchasing decisions.

Today I was musing about how useful the Amazon ratings are. However, Sarah had a very good insight: "Really, who actually spends time rating all the stuff they buy off of Amazon?"

"Hmmm. People who like to waste time, I suppose."

"Exactly."

Maybe Amazon ratings aren't all that useful...