Amusing post by Dave Winer today, “It’s their world we just live in it”:
Something funny happens when I put my iPhone 6 and my Nexus 6 together on my desk (charging them up).
Author: fish1964
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An iPhone and a Nexus walk into a bar…
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SpaceX–Close but again no cigar
Another attempt to land the booster rocket on a floating barge (described as landing a broom stick on your hand).
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/588142879245238273
And Elon Mush’s hilarious tweet:
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Pick your taxi wisely
This article is brilliant. It starts by being skeptical of a Bloomberg Business article showing how the most common tip amounts are 20%, 21% and 22%, with 19% strangely unusual.
Any NYC taxi rider would expect 20% to be the most common. The credit card touch screen in the cab gives you three one button tip amounts and the option to manually enter amount. The one button amounts are 20%, 25% and 30%.
Unless you are rich or you just told your driver, “I’m late for my flight, get me to LaGuardia as fast as possible”, you press 20%. Even if you were thinking 15%, pressing 8 extra buttons and doing the math just isn’t worth the 47 cents you might save.
But why is 21% popular? And the study showed that the average tip increased after 4PM. The article quoted a taxi spokesman who basically said “in rush hour people appreciate cabs more”. No indication why this is only true in the evening rush hour. And are you really saying that at 4:01 people suddenly feel like pressing 8 extra buttons to tip 1% more? Please. Again, the initial study showed that 21% was the second most popular tip amount, not an overall average of 21%. Seriously, who tips exactly 21%.
So someone calls BS on the article and digs into the data. NYC has been very good about making data open. You should read the article, but basically he figures out that there are two different software versions in NYC cabs. One of them calculates tips on fare only and the other calculates on fare+surcharge+toll. From 4-8 PM there is a surcharge added to the fare. If you don’t take that into account in your tip calculations, people are suddenly tipping 21%. If you do, you see a chart like this:
Which is exactly what any NYC person would expect.
There are two lessons to be learned here. First, question the data. Second, if you drive a cab in NYC, get one that calculates tip percentage generously…
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BK Hillary
Apparently Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters will be in our neighborhood. Actually it’s in the same building as my daughter’s pediatrician. Maybe we’ll see her in the elevator.
I’m amused by the building’s website. “Modern Offices. Brooklyn Cool”. Seriously, it’s an office building. It’s nice, and it is quite convenient for a nice stroll in Brooklyn or even across the Brooklyn Bridge. But it’s just an office building.
It’s also pretty convenient if you want to drive to Manhattan (right by both Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges) or to LaGuardia Airport. I’m guessing that had more to do with it than Brooklyn Cool.
I’m sure her motorcade won’t mess up traffic at all…
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Free After 30 Years
These stories simply drive me crazy. A completely innocent man spends 30 years on death row. For almost half that time, it was clear he was innocent but state officials would not reopen the case.
Anthony Hinton, 29 years old with no history of violent crime, steadfastly maintained his innocence. A polygraph test given by police exonerated him, but the judge (now-retired Circuit Judge James Garrett) refused to admit it at trial. Mr. Hinton was appointed a lawyer who mistakenly thought he could not get enough money to hire a qualified firearms examiner. Instead, he retained a visually-impaired civil engineer with no expertise in firearms identification who admitted he could not operate the machinery necessary to examine the evidence. With no credible expert to challenge the State’s assertion of a match, Mr. Hinton was convicted and sentenced to death.
The State’s evidence of a match was wholly discredited by three highly qualified firearms examiners, including the former chief of the FBI’s firearm and toolmarks unit, who testified in 2002 that the bullets from all three crimes could not be matched to a single gun at all, much less to Mrs. Hinton’s gun, and found that her gun could not have fired the bullets from the third uncharged robbery. For more than fifteen years, attorneys with the Equal Justice Initiative repeatedly have asked state officials to re-examine the evidence in this case, but former Jefferson County District Attorney David Barber, and Attorneys General from Troy King to Luther Strange, all failed to do so.
A productive life pretty much thrown away.
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April Fools
I think the whole tech company April Fools thing has become pretty old. Google Maps Pac Man is a nice thing (not a prank, just something fun).
This Citi Bike tweet amused me:
The @CitibikeNYC unicycles are an exciting addition to the fleet! http://t.co/08kOXxjWYq—
Peter Burka (@pburka) April 01, 2015And Seth Godin’s post today was amusing…
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Disney Dreaming
We just got back from a vacation on a Disney cruise ship, the Disney Dream. It was a very good vacation. Disney does cruise ships like they do everything, which is to say very, very well.
Of course there were princesses and other characters which my daughters loved. Disney has a private island in the Bahamas which was very nice.
The kids clubs are very well done, and there was a super cool water tube right at the very top of the ship. The shows were very well done.
Speaking of kids clubs, they have a great system for checking young kids in and out. The kids wear a wrist band with a tracker. The tracker is associated with our account and the people working the kids club can see a picture of the two people (me and my wife) who are authorized to pick up Victoria. And as an added precaution, prior to the cruise, I had to set up a “secret word” to be used to pick her up. So they would see my picture and ask for the secret word, then Victoria swipes her band to leave.
Nice.
Contrast this with the system to buy a drink. I hand the person my key card (which has all my info stored). They hand me a paper receipt with the total and 15% tip already added and require me to write five things on this piece of paper:
- Additional tip (optional)
- Final total
- Room number
- Print last name
- Sign
What a pain. Can we apply some technology to make this frictionless? Give me one of those wrist bands, bump the automatic tip to 18% and let me just swipe my band.
That, of course, is a tiny quibble over the entire cruise, which was excellent.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Favorite Science Joke
According to Business Insider:
Higgs boson walks into a church, and the priest says, ‘I’m sorry we don’t allow Higgs bosons to come to churches.’ And [the Higgs] says, ‘But without me, you can’t have mass.’
Only geeks are laughing right now…
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 