Archive for November, 2005

Hilariously Horrible Bathroom

Tuesday, November 15th, 2005

(via Simon’s Blogmarks) This has got to be the worst bathroom design, ever. Nothing is intuitive and goes against everything you would expect out of even the simplest design. Just had to share this.

amfm.cc Launch

Monday, November 14th, 2005

I am pleased to announce a project that I have been tinkering with for the past 3 weeks. amfm.cc is a web application that allows you to search for radio stations based on a given zip code. Where this is really meant to shine is on a mobile internet connect device (i.e. a WAP enabled phone). The URL is easy to enter on a numeric keypad. Even the non-WAP version of the site will render in a useable fashion on a mobile device.

I still have a lot of work to do with the site such as:

  • expanded user input abilities,
  • better searching algorithims,
  • search stations by format / genre,
  • better formating.

The idea for this site came form my dad who said it would be great if there was a WAP site that allowed this kind of functionality. The FCC freely publishes the radio station information, so writing an application that uses the info is the only hard part. Feel free to submit your thoughts and comments to me at william@my-dimension.com, or leave a comment here. As development progresses, I will add updates to the amfm.cc category.

Enjoy!

Killer Caffeine

Saturday, November 5th, 2005

So it would take just over 350 cans of Coke to kill me. And 170 of my favorite Starbucks drink, a Venti Cafe Mocha, to do me in. How do I know all this? Easy, I calculated it over on Death-by-Caffeine. Input your poison of choice and your weight and you now have a recipe for a super charged death sprawl. (Via Boing Boing – How Much starbucks is fatal?)

Controlling the Weather?

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005

Read a disturbing article over on Teachdirt. Apparently people have got this prideful notion that they can control the weather. This only proves that people will do anything to make a quick buck. Anything to advance the purported technological expertise of the human race. Indeed mankind has advanced in many things that are simply amazing: fire, electricity, the telephone, computers, surgical procedures, to name a few. I am all for learning to do new things but the line has to be drawn somewhere.

Controlling the weather is not a task to be taken lightly. Back in high school I did a study on strange attractors and their applications in science. From this I learned why the weather is never predicted beyond a certain point. There are simply to many variables to take into account, many we don’t even know about, that make that kind of prediction very difficult. Chaotic systems do exhibit certain behaviors within a short time-span, but beyond that the unknown factors render such predictions useless.

In reality you can’t predict beyond a 5 day span what the weather will be like with a better than 50% chance of accuracy. Anything beyond that is fancy guess work, fuzzy math. So if we can’t predict beyond five days what an uncontrolled, un-human-influenced, weather system will do, what makes scientists think they can do better by adding their own influences to a system they don’t fully understand. Pride, pure and simple. My belief: God put chaos in this world to keep us baffled and from becoming all powerful.