Miscellaneous Joy

- A wonderful, rambling essay about crows as a metaphor for the working poor. There's plenty in The Exiled to disagree with (including, herein, gratuitous enjoyment about the Blackwater deaths at Fallujah), but they'll sometimes have these kinds of brilliant pieces that you're unlikely to read elsewhere.

-A great rant about how bad the websites are for Indian trains. Having been in the unfortunate position of having to once book railway tickets in India, I can attest to every word.

-Copyright troll who sued people for reproducing newspaper articles loses, big-time. Popehat has more on the background to this development.

-JWZ had this great post about how ridiculous Google's claimed 'support' for pseudonyms was, offering instead the following alternative policy:

Google's statement is obvious bullshit, and here's why. The way you "support" pseudonyms is as follows:

1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect that the name they are using is not     their legal name.

2. There is no step 2.

Sure enough, they didn't take him up on the offer.

Miscellaneous Winners

-What would the world look like as you approached the speed of light? Apparently, it would look like this.

-Gary Brecher continues to provide interesting descriptions of military history that you won't find anywhere else on the web. Here is a piece on Ben Grierson, a Civil War hero (no mean praise from Brecher). Here is his take on the wars between the Mayans and the Spanish in Mexico.

-Futility Closet describes a weird maths problem that I still don't quite understand the answer to. More details here.

The Number of Traffic Accidents

Sometimes it seems odd how comparatively safe driving is. When you're barrelling along the freeway at 65 miles an hour, you don't actually have much margin for error. It's a fair assumption that if you crash badly, you'll die. Even if the car cushions the blow, the real problem is that your brain is also decelerating against the inside of your skull, and that tends to be problematic.

In addition, there are lots of ways that you can make mistakes. The range of human abilities is vast, ensuring a reasonable number of woeful drivers on the road at any one time. In addition, there are loads of people who are tired, or fiddling with the radio, or text messaging their friend.

Given all this, it's not surprising that people have fatal accidents. What's surprising is that there aren't a whole lot more of them. In a major city, hundreds of thousands of people drive around every day without incident.

If I were from 100 years ago and were explained how the road system works, I think I would estimate far more accidents than there are.

I think it shows the surprising ability of the average person to act in a safe manner, anticipate other people's mistakes, and correct course before there's a problem.

Humans - they'll do all sorts of stupid stuff, but every now and again they'll surprise you with a pretty damn good and resilient system that operates with a fairly low level of central oversight.

Bad News, Good News

The bad news is that the world is full of assholes, and sometimes they get together to form fraternities.

The good news is that my priors seem well-calibrated.

The bad news is that lots of people desperate for social validation put up with a lot of misery from such assholes.

The good news is that, at least in this regard, I wasn't one of them.

Questions you probably never thought about...

...but are nonetheless fascinating once you consider them.

What would it be like to walk around the earth if it were shaped like a cube?

Cecil from The Straight Dope gives a thoroughly fascinating answer, and it conforms with the 'Ask a Physicist' answer too.

For starters, all the atmosphere and oceans would be concentrated in blobs in the centre of each face. So when you walked far enough, you would be out in space.

The comment thread on Hacker News had a good rough metaphor for it: imagine that you're on a regular spherical planet, but with 8 big three-face pyramid mountains bolted on for the corners. This gives you an idea, but it's not exactly correct - when you think of walking up the side of a pyramid, you imagine a constant slope. Here, the pull of gravity would make it more like walking up the sides of a round bowl (even though it's geometrically a pyramid). So walking towards the corners is like walking up a mountain that keeps getting steeper and steeper.

You should read the straight dope column for the full low-down.

'morsch' at Hacker News also quotes a description of a water moon from 'The Algebraist' by Iain M. Banks

I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter, 'moon' seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just liquid water, all the way down to the very centre of the globe.

If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) The moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pressure, make one's way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very centre of the moon.

Where a strange thing happened.

For here, at the very centre of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was colossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless (on the outside of a planet, moon or other body, watery or not, one is always being pulled towards its centre; once at its centre one is being pulled equally in all directions), and indeed the pressure around one was, for the same reason, not quite as great as one might have expected it to be, given the mass of water that the moon was made up from.

For some reason, once I read this I've been thinking about the cube-earth for the past two days. Weird but cool stuff.