Steve Kass

Not that it matters exactly why the woman in front of me at the express self-checkout line earlier this evening huffed for sixty seconds as the man in front of her dug repeatedly into his pockets for penny after penny so that he could deposit exact change into the coin slot for his purchases, but she did neglect to spend any part of those sixty seconds retrieving her Stop & Shop Card from her purse, beginning the thirty-second task only after the punctilious fellow left, and this oppugned my naïve assumption that impending delay was the primary object of her disapprobation. Also, I discreetly snickered when, a moment later, the conveyor belt abruptly reversed direction, and the self-checkout machine’s computerized voice instructed the woman to rescan all of her items.

The Wayback Machine at archive.org has archived much of the web since 1996. Today I found a couple of posts that had fallen out of the van in 2007 when I moved from Yahoo! Small Business to Bluehost. They’re now back where they belong. Thanks, Wayback Machine!

• Math is fun, and that’s ok.
• Windows Live Writer
• Tax returns aren’t due quite yet

In January, 1985, Bob Moody and I visited Dick Slansky at Los Alamos National Laboratory to begin collaborating on what would eventually become a book. Driving back to the Albuquerque airport, we stopped to fill up at a NewMexigas service station. This is what I saw at the cashier’s window.

I lost it. Doubled over laughing, I stumbled back to the car, managed to grunt and point Bob towards the sign (he immediately lost it, too), and, thanks be to god, controlled the convulsions well enough to grab my camera and take a photo. [Click on the thumbnail for a larger uncropped version.]

This being the funniest thing ever, I jumped on the chance to share it later when I started posting stuff on the internet Bitnet. You can see the quote in my signature in this 1989 post to comp.dcom.telecom. (Also available in the TELECOM Digest & Archives.)

I used the quote in my signature off and on for some years, and in 1995, I contributed it to a web collection of funny signs. You can find that contribution here.

Unfortunately, an apparent misquoting of this sign (“We will sell gasoline to anyone in a glass container.”) now appears in many places on the web. The misquoting makes no sense to me as a funny thing, and I’ve seen no photo to back it up.

Here’s for setting the record straight.

How big was this weekend’s really big mid-Atlantic snowstorm? So big that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson noted it in their diaries!

Really. The New York Times said so. Our founding fathers wrote in their diaries about this weekend’s storm. Awefomenefs.

This snowstorm was bigger than the U.S. Civil War, bigger than the moon landing, and bigger than Lady Gaga and Elton being on stage together last week! Geo. and Th. didn’t write about those other things, right? I mean, I spent most of the summer of ‘69 reading and would’ve seen something about the moon landing being in those guys’ diaries, I think. Yeah, Nixon was president, but still, we’d know, right?

Here’s the Times quote:

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although it was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Unless I missed something in Bits about time machines, I’m pretty darn sure the Times is wrong. Maybe they meant to write something like

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although it that was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

or

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, which occurred long before record-keeping began and was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Or maybe they meant this for an audio-only story, where it would be possible to say “Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although IT was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,” (still sloppy, but talk is a whole nother language from written) because if you say “it” very emphatically, you can intimidate it and make it change its antecedent.

And maybe I understood what they meant, too. But writers should write as precisely as possible; they shouldn’t write in the spirit of nearest-neighbor error-correcting codes and assume it’s fine to publish written nonsense assuming the reader will subconsciously refer to a Hamming distance ruler and an unabridged vector space of things that make sense and infer the right thing.

Any errors, whether regarding pronomial antecedents or otherwise, are my responsibility.

Starting today, funny math is moving to a new and better home, www.lolmath.com. Vulpigeration and other serious number-related topics will stay here.

In most of North America, Daylight Saving Time ends early tomorrow morning. You know the drill: when the clock strikes 2:00 AM tonight, turn it back to 1:00 AM. (Just once. At 2:00 the second time, leave it alone.) If you’re in Newfoundland, however, you have a lot more work to do. You flip your calendar to November, wait one minute, flip it back to October (and turn your clock back), wait 59 minutes, then turn it to November again. I’m not kidding. Daylight saving time in Newfoundland ends at 12:01 AM (which occurs at 10:31 PM my time), not at 2:00 AM like everywhere else.

As far as I know, this is the only place on the planet where the day of the week (and this year, the month, too) ever goes backwards. Hasta ayer!

Instructions Turn your calendar forward to November 2009 right after 11:59:59 PM on October 31, 2009. November 2009 (first time) lasts for one minute (red line), until 12:01 AM (Daylight Saving Time). At 12:01 AM on November 1, 2009, set your clock back an hour and also turn your calendar back a month, to October 2009. October 2009 then resumes for another 59 minutes (shaded box), until 12:00 AM (Standard Time) on November 1, 2009. Then turn your calendar forward to November and go to sleep.

[Added 1 Nov 2009] Thanks to my brother for pointing out that DST ends at 2:00 AM, not 3:00 AM. FWIW, I wasn’t the only one to think DST ended at 3:00. The TV listings at titantv.com showed the change an hour late also.

Almost every semester, I use the AOL Breach data as a point of departure for something in at least one of my classes. The data is fascinating. Most data is fascinating, but this data is particularly so: at once shocking, funny, creepy, poignant, sad, frightening, noble, ignoble, shrewd, and lewd. It’s also rich in the way data can be rich. It’s completeness—for a sample of several thousand AOL accounts, it includes the complete account search history during March, April, and May of 2006—which includes timestamped search strings and the result rank and destination of clicks-through, makes it ripe for discovering all sorts of patterns of human thought and behavior.

It’s AOL data week in one of my classes now. This morning, I proposed several nontrivial questions about the data that could be answered with SQL queries. We looked at the results and discussed what they might say about the unwitting study subjects. Then I asked my students to suggest some questions of their own. What are the typical time-of-day and day-of-week patterns of an individual AOL customer’s searches? Are there identifiable differences in the patterns (and by extension in the sleep, social, and perhaps employment or school behavior) of people whose searches included, say, “britney”? For what kinds of searches do users most often click through several pages of results? And so on.

One of my students suggested an excellent simple question. What are the most common searches of the form “how to …”? Out of millions of queries in the AOL data, there were many thousands of “how to … ?” searches. The most frequent was “how to tie a tie,” requested 92 times by a total of 47 distinct users. The rest of the top ten (in terms of most distinct users asking the question) were how to write a resume, gain weight, have sex, get pregnant, write a book, write a bibliography, start a business, lose weight, and make money, each sought by a dozen or more different people. AOL converted the queries to lower case and removed much of the punctuation, but they didn’t correct spelling. Consequently, how to masterbate and how to masturbate appear separately at ranks 49 and 51 respectively. The question would have nearly hit the top 10 without the misspellings.

Here’s a PDF file of the top 1000 “how to” queries submitted through AOL explorer by a sample of AOL users in the spring of 2006. You can probably guess that it’s not safe for work. Although there are no pictures, plenty of sex, drugs, and gambling is spelled out, and there are more than a few questions likely to offend in one way or another. Have a look.

Not long after my recent experience of laughing and throwing up, I took preventive measures, or what I thought were preventive measures, to keep it from happening again. I added a couple of F**news [obscenity censored] domains to my firewall’s list of blocked sites.

Not long after I added them, my Internet connection started acting up. Just the browsing part. Lots of broken image links, web pages loading without style sheets, and not a few “not available” or “may have moved permanently” errors, sometimes on major domains like bing and Google. Facebook, several news sites, and Weather Underground were especially troublesome. It was strictly a browser thing, a little worse on Chrome maybe, but at the same time Chrome told me the page was unavailable, I could ping the AWOL site without a problem.

It was mysterious enough that I even tightened my router and modem cables. I finally figured it out, but newsgroups, blogs, and Google search results, which usually help, didn’t have the answer. Maybe this post will help someone out.

The domain I’d newly blocked didn’t have a static IP address. It’s an akamaized domain, it turns out, that resolves to any of a dozen or so numeric IP addresses, and the resolution changes every minute or less. About 10% of the Internet seems to live on those same dozen or so IP addresses, too. (Among the domains there are static.ak.fbcdn.net, i.telegraph.co.uk, and abcnews.com.)

My firewall was blocking what it thought was the right IP address, but when the IP addresses of these akamaized sites flipflopped, the firewall was suddenly blocking the wrong site. Moments later, maybe it was blocking nothing, then the site I’d added, then different wrong sites…

Insert various image and DNS caching mechanisms between me and the Internet, and it’s an erratic mess of a mystery. At least it was for me. No matter how bad it was, though, it usually got better in 10 or 15 minutes. I didn’t go so far as to start using OpenDNS, which was one web-grown remedy I heard about, but I can imagine it might have changed the caching and resolution landscape enough to have made some difference. Enabling or disabling Google’s DNS prefetching, another web remedy, didn’t work for me. Once I unblocked the offensive domains, the Internet was butter again.

If you’re having this problem (the dodgy Internet problem, not the laughing and throwing up problem), first try running a traceroute on one of the problem sites you can’t browse to. If traceroute says it’s tracing a route to something like a20.g.akamai.net, or if successive traceroutes over a few minutes show different IP addresses for the domain, it’s possible something between you and the Internet is blocking one route to some of the akamaized web.

• someone who’s shown an interest in baking pans and irons
• someone who has shown an interest in classical music recently
• someone who has shown an interest in toys
• someone who has shown an interest in hot cocoa
• someone who has shown an interest in men’s clothing
• someone who has shown an interest in men’s apparel
• someone who has shown an interest in men’s dress clothes
• someone who has shown an interest in Gillette, Old Spice, and Zest [1]
• someone who has shown an interest in cutlery
• someone who has shown an interest in joint health for your dog [2]
• someone who has shown an interest in computers and wireless devices
• someone who has shown an interest in camcorders
• someone who has shown an interest in men’s shoes
• someone who has shown an interest in GPS, sporting goods, or automotive
• someone who has shown an interest in headphones
• someone who has shown an interest in HDTVs
• someone who’s shown an interest in rice cookers
• someone who has shown an interest in Frito Lay chips and snacks
• someone who has shown an interest in Leonidas chocolates
• someone who has shown an interest in Haribo gummies [3]
• someone who has shown an interest in air tools and compressors
• someone who’s shown an interest in car care products or grinders and polishers
• someone who has shown an interest in plumbing fixtures
• someone who has shown an interest in hand tools
• someone who has shown an interest in mice, keyboards, and tablets
• someone who has shown an interest in groceries
• someone who has shown an interest in seasonal lighting
• someone who has shown an interest in ornaments
• someone who has shown an interest in seasonings

[1] I’ve never shown an interest in Old Spice.
[2] It wasn’t my dog. It was my God dog, Scudder (below).
[3] I’ve shown more interest in Albanese gummies.