The Blog of Siram

Yesterday, one of our members suffered a terrible personal tragedy. Out of respect for her loss, the UCF member blogs will be offline today. Our thoughts and prayers are with her. We will return tomorrow.

I have nothing to say.

I have lots to say, actually. I'm just not in the right frame of mind to organize my thoughts into anything coherent, that won't somehow manage to offend everyone left and right. I haven't been in a good frame of mind for almost a month now. Hence the silence, which is better than anything I might possibly say.

So instead, I'll just list everything I've been up to lately. Maybe it'll be an interesting read to someone somewhere.

1. Work

a) I'm making a database of every satellite image I've ever made. They date from late 1997 to present, and I've finished 2003 but haven't yet started 2004.

b) There's either something odd going on in the water off the southeast U.S. coast, or both satellites pointed at it are glitching in exactly the same way. Which is it? I'm assembling the overall big picture so that we can look at it and hopefully figure that out. This is taking a while.

2. Play

a) The RPoL chat community has become about twice as active as it used to be. First there was a keystone banning; suddenly, a slowly dying chat sprang back into full health and vibrancy overnight. Less than a week later, someone posted a thread in RPoL's community forum, asking about the chat - and for a while we were getting a dozen new visitors per day. That's settled down to 3-5 new regulars now, but it's still quite busy.

b) My favorite GM came back after a 5-month absence, restarted two of his games and made a third.

c) Mad Scientist on Facebook. T.T I have zombies, robots, a SkyCom AI, and a doomsday device. And I'm making more! It turns out that this particular game is the perfect speed for playing in between rounds of working, so I expect I'll be playing quite a lot.

3. Writing

a) Nonfiction is basically at a standstill (in case that wasn't obvious by observing my blog). I haven't written any new eHow articles either.

b) I've been putting a lot of work into Vengeance Returns. It's accumulating a few hundred words or so every other night. It turns out that midnight to dawn is an excellent time for writing. Unfortunately, this also means less sleep, which is probably contributing to the whole bad frame of mind thing.

That pretty much covers it, I think. How are you?

Last summer, a bunch of overhanging tree limbs got removed from the fenceline between my apartment building and the patch of woods behind it. They destroyed some of the brush lower to the ground in the process, and I was afraid there wouldn't be any more azaleas.

Well, there aren't any in front of my own patio anymore, but some of the other ones are still alive. They started blooming last weekend:

There are also a couple other colors, but they're farther into the woods and I can't get close enough for good pictures. Here's last year's pictures (which technically weren't actually taken last year, but that's when I posted them ;) ).

What electric outlets and light switches look like in Croatia

Comment about the light switches in particular: the Europeans in my audience took one look at the example in my post and basically all thought, "wow, retro." Apparently light switch technology is more advanced over there than here.

So is their dishwasher technology, for that matter. Ours are big clunky obvious machines that tend to be fairly noisy when they're running. Theirs come with front panelling that match their cabinets, and are so quiet it's hard to tell that they're on. I wouldn't mind having one of those. :)

Some insightful commentary inspired by the 25 Things meme

It started as a reply to some whining going on in the mainstream media about the meme, and tangented out to observations about modern-day racism. Good food for thought.

Today I went to a pizza buffet for lunch. I foolishly chose a seat right under one of their TVs without checking to see what was playing. It turned out to be Fox News.

I now understand why everyone calls it Faux News. o.O Did any of those people even go to journalism school? What happened to reporting verified facts and all the opposing viewpoints surrounding a newsworthy event in an unbiased manner?

Example: 16 year old girl found dead, another found unconscious nearby, at Fort Lewis (an army base in Washington). Something about drugs and one of the soldiers being involved (no really, that's all the info I managed to get out of their story). Fox News says "well gee, they were civilians, so we don't even know how they got on the base in the first place, I think they have to be escorted by a military person or something? And their IDs get checked? And there's some kind of curfew involved about that but we're not sure." Uhhh. IT'S YOUR JOB TO FIND ALL THAT STUFF OUT BEFORE YOU GET ON THE AIR.

They did have one report that I wanted to hear. Facebook is currently having a debacle about its Terms of Use. I learned this last night because they put up a big sign on everyone's home pages, and also a number of friends had status updates talking about it. I read the sign, then checked their terms of use page, found the problem paragraph, read it, discussed it with a friend, etc. What did Fox News say? "Oh yeah, Facebook is trying to claim ownershp of everyone's info." Uhhhh. No. >.< DID IT OCCUR TO YOU TO READ THE TERMS OF USE THAT YOU'RE REPORTING ABOUT? OR WAS YOUR COMPREHENSION SO BAD THAT ALL YOU CAN DO IS REPEAT THE HEARSAY?

Yeah, I think I'll go back to getting all my news from other people's blogs now.

Today I caused the collapse of a house of cards.

I also learned some disturbing things about a second house of cards. Will it also collapse in the wake of the first one? Or will it remain standing to get bigger until, when it finally does collapse by some other force, its dust will take months to settle instead of only weeks?

And will the house builder ever learn a thing?

My original low-resolution scan of a photo I took in southern California in 1994:

I passed a more recent, higher-resolution version of the scan to a friend (Robert Sloan 2), who turned it into art:

It's in soft pastels, for a contest that involves expensive prizes if he wins. He hears back about it probably in April.

Then I sold the high-resolution scan to BigStockPhoto.com. :)

(... and that's pretty much it for "good things that have happened to me this week." The rest of the week has been from blah to crummy.)

This cliff is part of a rocky beach somewhere in southern California. Notice how there's a dark-colored band of rock that winds around the bottom, like a bowl, that there's more tightly folded light-colored rock in the bowl, and there's a big crack down the middle (with the trees growing in it) that doesn't seem to go through the bottom of the bowl.

My first thought was that the crack is a fault. The light-colored rocks on either side of it don't appear to meet up with each other. However, because the dark-colored band is continuous along the bottom, it might be a dike that just weathered faster than the surrounding rock.

Which is not to say that there aren't faults in this picture. To the right of the bowl, some of the light-colored rock is doing some interesting folding action, and in one spot it comes to an end against another band of the same stuff.

All in all, a fun little head-turner for the casual roadside geologist. ;)

As for where it is, I hope someone out there can tell me. The picture was taken in December 1994, and is of the same place as these:

I was there with some extended family during a two-week visit, my first trip to California, and they were showing us around.

I mention all this now because I just found the original photos while excavating my storeroom, and was rescanning Crash of Waves for a friend to turn into art.

There's been an Internet meme going around Facebook for the past month or so, and recently it has spilled out into the blogosphere. The basic gist is: "list 25 random things about yourself."

I'm going to cheat on mine, and use a similar meme from last year for ten of them. Also, I'm planning to copy/paste this into Facebook as well, where some of the audience hasn't heard from me for 17 years, so not all of this will be new stuff to people reading along here ...

1. I was supposed to become a world-famous concert harpist. My instructor, a world-famous concert harpist herself, so believed in me that she gave me lessons worth $100/hr for free. Unfortunately, it turned out that I wasn't that big a fan of classical music, and was even less a fan of the associated social trappings that went along with being a concert harpist. Me and high society fancy schmancy schmoozing - they don't go together.

2. I was in the children's choir for a production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, which we performed for him on his 70th birthday (1988) in Massachusetts.

3. I once stood in the eye of a hurricane. Bonnie came straight up the Cape Fear River in North Carolina in 1998, and she moved so slowly that we were in her eye for an hour.

4. I spent a couple summers helping a fellow grad student do research on royal terns. It involved lots of time on small sandy islands in the middle of the Cape Fear River (their breeding grounds).

One time we were late getting off before low tide, and we got stranded. There's a picture somewhere of us tugging our 8-foot motorboat through ankle-deep water, between the channel markers (for a channel that clearly no longer existed; they'd evidently not dredged recently).

5. The most fun part of the tern study was the annual banding event. Once the tern chicks are old enough to be out of the nest but not yet old enough to fly, they all get herded down the beach into a corral. Then they get metal bands clamped around their legs. They're really cute at that stage - little white fluffballs with feet.

We also did a few laughing gull chicks. They're pretty cute too, if you don't think too much about what they grow into. Laughing gull chicks will fall instantly asleep if you drop a towel on their heads. So, there was much chasing them around with towels after we were done with the terns.

6. I also helped another grad student with an age and growth study on some juvenile groupers. My part in it was to keep them clean and fed in some outdoor fishtanks. While I was doing that for the groupers, I also kept some snappers - since they were the subject of my own research. They were supposed to all die of cold before the winter really set in. The groupers did. But the snappers, whose range is farther south than the groupers, were a lot tougher than anyone expected. So every two weeks all winter long, I put on five layers of short-sleeved shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, scarf and winter hat, and plunged my arms up to the armpits into icy cold water so I could suck the uneaten food and algae out of their tank.

7. Whenever I go on offshore science cruises, there's always at least one crewmember who is really big into deep sea fishing. This works out well since we get to eat a lot of fresh fish that way.

One time someone caught a 100 lb yellowfin tuna. It took 45 minutes to reel in. The guy cleaned it immediately after it was caught, and sliced off chunks of superfresh sushi for the rest of us. While its muscles were still twitching, even. It was a bit warmer than I liked, but the next day it got served up properly chilled with the wrong kind of rice, the wrong kind of soy sauce, and tubed wasabi. It was still yummy. :)

8. The most unusual thing I ever pet-sat was a 10-gallon tank of 20ish juvenile clownfish. (The kind that likes anemones.) The clownfish in the biology building's lobby aquarium had spawned, the eggs had hatched, and one of the other grad students had taken them under her wing. They were about half-dollar sized or so when she brought them over and set them up on the floor of my living room for three days.

9. I once swam with a barracuda. This was in the Florida Keys, near the end of high school. Without my glasses on I couldn't see what it was, only that it was long and skinny and fairly large, so I was following it around. Then I noticed that everyone else had fled to the other side of the boat...

10. Every year, the place where I work holds an Open House, where we let the general public mob the place. It's supposed to show off what great science we do, so that they'll want to give us more of their tax dollars. But in practice, most of it is a bunch of games and activities for small children. I've done the rounds to all sorts of things, from manning the check-in desk to helping with boat tours to explaining arcane oceanographic equipment. One year I was dressed up as Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants. It was like being a celebrity. Small children loved me, grownups were confused ("is that a cucumber?"), and the DNR boat patrol staff wanted to use me for target practice.

11. I've been on a horse exactly once. (Not counting the merry-go-round live ponies at travelling carnivals and etc.) It didn't much care for my opinions on where we ought to go, and kept trying to run me into low-hanging tree branches. I was sore for a week after that ride.

12. The most fun thing I saw in Hanauma Bay, Hawaii, when I was snorkeling there last spring was a sea cucumber. It looked like a gigantic fat black worm. It was kind of squishy when I prodded it with my foot.

13. In college we were required to take a foreign language, and the language I took was Tibetan. The first year was awesomeness. The instructor was all about an immersion approach, and we learned things in the same order that we would've if it was a first language - first some hearing and speaking, then the alphabet and reading and writing. I also had fun comparing it to Mandarin, as some of the basic words are similar. I remember a lot more of the basic phrases ("what is this/that? this is a table, where is the library" etc.) than I do anything about French, which was three high school years of grammar drills.

The second year got very esoteric, with an instructor who thought we wanted to learn how to read ancient religious texts rather than be passably conversational if we went there. I lost interest and didn't take a fourth semester like I'd originally thought I would. The only thing I learned there was that I have an excellent short-term rote memory. The exams asked us to translate 2-3 passages of Tibetan into English, given 20-45 possible ones that might be on them. The final exam had a ton more passages than the midterm, I think because the instructor didn't understand how I could've possibly passed the midterm, and wanted to make sure I couldn't do it by sheer memory alone. I did.

14. It was in Montana that I learned just how short my physical limits are. Most of us started out the 6-7 week geology field courses in bad physical shape. The difference was that they became fit, while I did not. I reached an early plateau, and thereafter I had to start walking much earlier than everyone else if I wanted any hope of being not so far behind that I couldn't still see the next farthest behind student when they reached the next station. It was the first I'd ever really run into any limits on things I can do if I put my mind to it. Those field courses are a large part of the reason why I dropped geology, though I still love rocks.

15. My favorite subliminal advertising is Wall Drug.

16. Someday I want to do a grand months-long roadtrip all around the continental U.S. I figure I'd go across on 80 or 90, down the west coast, then across again on 20, hitting all the major national parks along the way.

17. I've been to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and Tijuana in Mexico, and I didn't drink at either of those places. There was plenty of fun to be had by watching other people having fun, and enjoying the company I was with.

18. When I was ten I wanted to be a writer. Then I was supposed to become a world-famous musician (see #1). Then in college I fled from music into science. Then near the end of grad school I lost all will to live for a while, and passion for doing science along with that. Now I'm working a science job (but nothing resembling anything I studied), and I'm back to wanting to be a writer.

19. I've worked at Wendy's, Einstein's Bagels, and a local-run Chinese takeout. Each time I learned all sorts of interesting things about life, the universe, and everything. Everyone (able-bodied) should do some food service at least once in their lives, especially at a well-managed, well-run one, and see what the world looks like from the other side of the counter.

20. For those who may have missed the memo (or joined us after it), I'm in the T part of the LBGTQ spectrum. This is a social birth defect, not a lifestyle choice. I say "social" because we transpeople aren't mentally or physically defective, by and large - but we have some interesting problems trying to interact with other people. I have male body language and male reactions to things, which nobody expects or comprehends out of a female body. People tend to get confused, some decide that I'm somehow being "rude" though they might not be able to pinpoint exactly why (it has to do with body language microcues), and a lot decide it's easier to just stop talking to me. Online I find it much simpler to present myself as male to people who have never known me in real life. (I'd prefer to not have to specify at all, but some people get really weirded out if they don't know. Also, English unfortunately has gendered third person pronouns.)

21. I love food. I'll try almost anything at least once (by "almost" I don't mean things like balut), and will discuss food at great length at the slightest excuse.

22. I used to be really big into Star Trek. Then when that started petering out, I was really big into Stargate. Now that's petering out too, and I'm not big into any particular sci-fi franchise at the moment.

23. Enya's Orinoco Flow (Sail Away), which I first heard while in high school, was the first I knew that there was any kind of music besides classical, pop rock, and country. I was really big into New Age instrumentals for a while (but not Yanni :p). Then at some point I discovered I liked alternative and metal. And that's where I am now, more or less, with my interests mostly for European metal. But I'll listen to just about anything. Even some occasional hiphop.

24. I'm an awful teacher, but an excellent tutor. Standing me up in front of a classroom of 20-30 students is a bad, bad idea. But sit me down with someone who just needs a nudge in their thinking in just the right place, and epiphanies happen. Partly I think it was because the tutee was of the right mindframe by asking for help, and was therefore listening to begin with. But there's still some art involved in knowing not only what to say, but also when to talk and when to wait in silence for the wheels to spin. Most of my tutees only ever came in once, and then I never saw them again - but then their friends all came. ;)

25. Yoga didn't seem like much when it was my mother doing the poses out of an exercise book when I was a kid. Then a year ago a chiropractor ordered me to start going to classes twice a week. Now I think it's awesome. I'm stretching all sorts of muscles I didn't know I had, and even building some new ones (slowly). And I keep trying to talk everyone else into it too. ;)

Hmmmm. It took me all day to come up with all that, even with help from the previous meme. Now I'm going back to not talking much about myself. :p

Hooking up a printer in XP is supposed to consist of these easy steps:

1. Plug the printer into the computer.
2. Turn on the computer.
3. Turn on the printer.
4. Wait for the computer to fail to autodetect the printer even though it's on a USB port, then go to Control Panel, then Printers, then Add Printer.
5. When the computer asks, insert the CD that came with the printer. (This step may take a while if the CD in question is nowhere near the printer and hasn't been thought of since printer purchase, and is lying in the bottom of a box somewhere.)
6. Wait for the computer to find the printer info on the CD and copy over all files.
7. Print out a test page. Voila.

What actually happened:

Well, we got through step 5 with only a minor bump in the proceedings (when there was much rummaging around the house to find the aforementioned CD, accompanied by rumors that it might've been thrown away, and also a fair amount of angst by the child who most wanted the printer to be working).

Then came Step 6.

I should stop and mention at this point that the XP in question was running in Chinese. I couldn't read a darn thing I was doing, and the friend who could read it wasn't at all computer-savvy and didn't understand everything she read. Also, her English is weak and my Mandarin is weaker. Yay for universal picture icons. :)

Anyway, so there was a bit of a problem when it turned out that the computer was unable to locate all files on the CD. It wanted to find a somethingsomething.dll that didn't exist, in a directory that didn't exist. As usual when dealing with Windows, I quickly gave up trying to look at files via the GUI and went over to DOS, so I could see what all was on the CD. There wasn't a "cht" directory, but there were a number of other three-letter ones that looked like "rus" and "fra" and "dan." Presumably different languages then. So, not knowing what the dll file was for, I found a dll file with the correct name in the dan directory, and told the computer to use that.

Moving on to Step 7! I tried to print something. An error box popped open. It was in ... Danish? o.O

It turns out that most freebie online translators don't do Danish, and the ones that do, don't do it very well. (Or "dan" stands for some other language that isn't immediately obvious.) I think the error was trying to say something about low ink. But I don't know. The printer itself complained that it was out of paper (it wasn't). We didn't get it to print anything. :(

Most people think of dandelions as a weed plant, but there's nothing like a lush green grassy meadow dotted with these cheery yellow flowers. They're edible, too. They don't grow well down here in the coastal southeastern U.S., alas.

What caught my attention about Warrel Dane's cover of Lucretia, My Reflection was, first, the singer's growly voice and impassioned lyrics, and second, the fact that the opening lines reminded me of Billy Joel's No Man's Land.

(actual song starts at 0:39)

Both talk about being near big machines, and at the time I couldn't remember what No Man's Land was about. Though someone better at BS than me could probably make a profound statement about the similarities between empires and suburbs.

Anyway, it turned out to be a cover of a Sisters of Mercy song.

I've never been a big fan of Sisters of Mercy (a classic goth band), possibly because I once had to listen to one of their albums on repeat every week for several months. It was the mood music for our Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop until I finally complained about it. After that we tried other music until we finally settled on silence.

Maybe what I really need is metal versions of all of their songs. ;)

My chives are the only plants left in my lush, expansive garden. Here they are, not so lush anymore, and with flowerstalk stumps everywhere. Ironically I eat more baked potatoes during the winter than the summer when they're growing well.

The tomatoes died to the last cold snap. :( Now that I have some clue what I'm doing with them, though, I'm looking forward to the next growing season.

There is a very simple, straightforward test for paranormal abilities.

Two people, one who sends and one who receives. The sender thinks about something (e.g. a number, a color, a geometric shape), and the receiver reports what the sender is thinking. Repeat that a few dozen times. To make it all scientifically rigorous, you put them in separate rooms where they can't see each other. To make it even more rigorous, you require that they don't know each other, and possibly have never even met before the test.

That last requirement basically dooms the test to fail, at least with the way it would work to my personal understanding. But even without requiring that they don't know each other, the average person off the street still has no idea how to send or receive.

Most people broadcast their thoughts the way a light bulb gives off light. It goes out in all directions with no particular destination. It's stronger if there's any kind of emotional attachment to the thought, and weaker if the thought is neutral.

But to send a thought to a specific person, two things have to happen. First, you have to be able to find the other person. How close another mind is has nothing to do with physical geography, it has more to do with whether they're thinking about you (so it helps if they actually know you). How easy they are to identify depends on how well you know them - how well you can recognize their unique signatures. (Everyone has a unique signature.)

Also, sending a thought is more like beaming a laser. You want to focus it. Otherwise it takes a lot of energy and you get tired really really fast - and then you can't keep it up for the entire duration of the test.

Then there's receiving. Most people would think of it as sitting there passively, waiting for the outside thought to appear. However, a skilled receiver can also go over to the sender's mind and actively retrieve the thought (which is useful when the sender obviously has no idea how to send). This is easier if sender and receiver have compatible minds (are operating on the same wavelength, so to speak) - and, of course, if they are actually familiar with each other.

I once sat in on an informal run of this test at a college parapsychology club. The club leader sent, and everyone else wrote down what they thought he was thinking. We did numbers and colors, I believe. It took me all of the first round and part of the second to work out the mechanism involved (that is, the sender had no clue what he was doing and I had to go there) - so I scored low on the first one and high on the second. Statistically speaking, however, if your scientific experiment consists of aggregating everyone's scores in the room (which is what sensible scientists would do), your conclusion will be that it's not significantly different from random. Because most people don't know how to send or receive.

Dear Shopper,

Once in a while we carefully select individuals in your community - those whom we feel represent the smartest, most value conscious shoppers. Then we use some of our research budget to find out exactly what these smart shoppers really want.

If our hunch is right, you are such a person.

[...]

When you speak your mind, better products get to market. The companies are happy. Consumers are happy. It's really that simple.

[...]

Sincerely,

Letter with a Consumer Survey where 90% of the Products Don't Apply To Me

I really only have one thing on my mind at the moment. Russer's roast beef was the most awesome pre-packaged deli-sliced roast beef EVER. It was the only one that didn't include sodium nitrite as an ingredient, and the taste was outstanding. It has disappeared from all of my local grocery stores. If the reason it's gone is because Russer has stopped making it, then the opinion on my mind is that they should BRING IT BACK.

I think that covers it.

Beyond that: I used to get paid in cold, hard cash to do these surveys. Now all that's on offer is coupons to products that I don't use, and auto-entries into sweepstakes. I much preferred the cash.

I should say something about the Chinese New Year, especially since today begins the year of the Ox, which makes it my year.

But I don't have anything grandiose to say. Life is sailing along, one day after another just like it would be at any other time. I'm alive, I'm awake, and I'm hopeful that this year, my year, I'll accomplish lots of things. I want to finally clear out the old, which starts with the storeroom I've begun to excavate. I want to finally finish a novel (any novel, just one!). I want to say the things I need to say, do the things I was put here to do, and generally just keep on living as well as I've been living.

The winds of change are blowing through the nation as well as my life, and I hope to make the most of whatever's coming.

Apparently, the most fascinating part of my previous post was the wall outlet. It inspired a lengthy conversation about wall outlet differences in appearance between the U.S. and Croatia. So, for bakho's edification, a documentary. :)

Here are the three main types of outlets found standard in most USian houses and apartments. From left to right, these are TV cable jack, electric, and phone jack:

On the electric outlet, note that there are two slits and a round hole, where one slit is bigger than the other. Originally (back a few decades), outlets were just two equal-sized slits. Then one day, for safety reasons, they started making them with one larger than the other, so that plugs can only fit into them one-way. A while after that, the third hole was added, for even more safety. I think it's for "grounding" purposes.

Here are the different types of plugs that go into the electric outlets:

The green plug has two equal-sized prongs. The gray plug has the type where one prong is bigger than the other. The white plug has three prongs. All three of them are in use, depending on what's at the other end of the cord, so our wall outlets are designed to handle all three.

And here are the phoneline and TV cable plugs:

(Maybe our next longwinded conversation will cover the differences between dialtones and ringtones from country to country.)

And finally, just to round things out, our standard USian light switch:

UPDATE: Apparently, the most fascinating part of this post is the light switch. :p

I moved into my current apartment in 2002. Before that there was a period where I moved around a lot - including one year where I moved three times. After a while, there didn't seem much point in bothering to unpack, because soon I would just have to repack it all again.

It's now 2009. It's probably safe to unpack now. So I finally started going through my storeroom full of boxes that I've hauled from place to place since 1991. After removing all the empty boxes (I never break down boxes, it's annoying to have to retape them back up again later, see) and some other miscellaneous things, here's (most of) what I have left:

Over half of it appears to be school-related stuff (class notes and papers from high school, college, grad school). There are at least three boxes worth of stuff belonging to former SOs/housemates (but not all together, alas). The harp is a lever harp that doesn't hold its tune so well anymore due to neglect; it's from a friend who bought it with a broken base from an auction somewhere for $50, fixed the base but did not prettify the fix, eventually lost interest, and handed it down to me. The mound of papers next to the big black bin is what I'm currently sorting through; it seems to be half junk mail, and half daily-life detritus from circa 1996 (receipts, paycheck stubs, utility statements, etc.).

It's a little like opening a time capsule. I have other such paper piles in the other boxes, probably one for every move, as it was easiest just to dump together whatever I had at the time instead of figuring out what to keep and what to toss (which would happen at a hypothetical "later" that never came around until, well, now).

Yay unpacking. :)

Seeing this picture is what brought home for me that President Obama is now really our president. Here he is, not speechifying or being in the spotlight of any ceremonies, but sitting behind a desk and doing his new job.

It's a nice thing to see. :)

(The picture is of him signing an order to close Guantanamo. I stole it from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. I'm pleased about that, too. (The Guantanamo closing, not the theft.))

There is a T intersection on my way to work, with a stop sign for the people coming out of the stem of the T. 90% of people on the main road turn right, into the stem. Therefore, people turning left out of the stem tend to assume that everyone coming down the road will be turning right; some of them are so sure of this that they don't bother to stop at their stop sign.

I go straight. I have no stop sign. In addition to slowing down and checking for cars as I approach (and occasionally wishing that there was a signal for "going straight"), I also routinely ping the minds of the other drivers.

This tells me several things:
a) their approximate emotional state;
b) their intentions for the intersection - which basically boil down to "stop and wait" or "go";
c) their receptiveness to outside messages.

Some of them will go through no matter who else is on the road, and they broadcast that at high volume (read: they're assholes). Some of them are completely oblivious to everything around them because they're driving on autopilot, and therefore won't notice any outside messages from the ether any more than they'll notice anything else, and they'll also go through no matter who else is on the road.

Most of them are fairly calm and alert, however. I go over to their minds and suggest that they wait. Once I've passed, I thank them for waiting, both as a message and with a puff of "feeling of goodwill" (assuming that I'm in a reasonably good mood myself, at least).

People at work (that is, part of the 10% of people who go straight) talk about how common it is to have accidents at that intersection. I've not had any problems.

20 March 2009

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