AOL to update Netscape 7.x
According to an article in The Inquirer, AOL will release a new version of Netscape based on "the latest Mozilla code" early this summer. They'll probably use the 1.7 branch, which Firefox 1.0 will also be based on. (via apeiron in #bs)
Firefox shirts
http://www.cafeshops.com/mozilla has been selling unofficial Firefox shirts for a few weeks. I suspect that the shop is run by a Mozilla developer (it used to sell "I kicked blake from #mozilla" shirts), but I don't know whether he/she has permission to sell Firefox merchandise.
I bought the "Futured" shirt, which Kerz and I designed, from Cafepress several years ago. It faded faster than most shirts I've owned. I don't know whether Cafepress has improved the quality of their shirts since then.
Update Mar 29, 2004: curious points out that The Mozilla Store now has official Firefox shirts. Yay!
Bug 233625 kills bunnies
From a bug-advocacy comment:
I cannot overstate the severity of this problem. This is not a minor inconvience. This is CARNAGE!!!
Infix placement
Poll (pick one): Un-fucking-believable or Unbe-fucking-lievable?
Blogs about bad design and bad software
We Hates Software (blog-like archive for a mailing list)
- Having to make clean
- Useless car websites
- File pickers
- Browser detection: broken, let me bypass it
- Browsers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Why paper is transparent when wet
Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 13:07:09 -0800 (PST)
From: Geoffrey M. Romer
To: East Chat
Subject: Re: ask SchmackWhy does cloth appear darker when it's wet?
Apparently the wet cloth becomes more transparent and less reflective.
...
It's not clear to me why wetness makes cloth transparent.We covered this one in my class too. Mbrubeck's source is on the right track with the index of refraction business.
Cloth and sand and hair and paper and all the other materials that get dark when wet have the common property that (as the source notes) they are dielectrics, and so they're transparent. They also have the property of being composed of a whole bunch of tiny components, separated by air. In the case of cloth, cloth is made of threads and fibers, with air in between.
When light illuminates dry cloth, a typical light beam will hit a fiber, refract into it, and then refract back out of it. Because cloth has a high index of refraction, the light usually gets bent a lot at both refractions (remember, Snell's law says that the greater the difference between the indices of refraction, the greater the change in the angle of the light), and so it comes out in a different direction than it went in. Also, because cloth is not perfectly transparent, the light comes out a little dimmer than it went in. A typical light beam will undergo this process many times, passing through many fibers in succession, and so effectively, a lot of the light is scattered off the cloth in a more or less random direction. Some of this light hits your eye, which is how you can see the cloth.
When you get the cloth wet, the air between the fibers is replaced by water. Water has a much higher index of refraction than air, and so the relative index of refraction between water and the fiber is much lower than between air and the fiber. Thus, each time a light beam enters a fiber, it is bent much less than it would be with dry cloth. Thus, on average, the light beam has to pass through many more fibers before it is turned all the way around, and can come back out of the cloth to hit our eyes. Remember, though, that each time the light beam passes through a fiber, it gets dimmer, in a way that *doesn't* depend on the index of refraction. Since the light is now passing through a lot more fibers, it gets a lot dimmer before it leaves the cloth, so a lot less light is coming back to our eyes. Hence, the cloth appears darker.
This is a lot easier to explain with a blackboard, but my ASCII art skills are somewhat lacking, so I guess words will have to do. I can make this argument more formal, in terms of transport theory, but I suspect you folks don't care.
As is probably obvious, I love this stuff. I'm in grad school studying graphics specifically so that I can spend the rest of my life asking and answering these sorts of questions.
If you're shining a light onto the cloth, this makes it darker because it is reflecting less light back to you. If you shine a light through the cloth instaed, it's lighter when wet because it is more transparent.
caused by loose fibers being bound by surface tension. This person suggests that the liquid changes the cloth's index of refraction:
http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/g/o/goodmanj/Public/madsci/889017307.Ph.r.html
Related: The history of see-through bikinis (NSFW)
Observations and photos from trip to Bellevue
Shortly after my plane took off from Long Beach Airport, I saw an empty parking lot that perfectly demonstrated the Zollner illusion.
On the flight back, I noticed that lakes and rivers looked colorful through my polarizing sunglasses. I don't have an explanation.
Racist vandalism at the Claremont Colleges
From a thread on cmcstudents, hyperlinks added:
[Tuesday], at 4pm, there was a community forum at CMC's Athaneum called "Hate Speech Versus Free Speech". During this, Professor Dunn made statements in support of minority groups and against hate speech, actions and perpetrators of such. She criticized the recent incidents* on the 5 C's [Claremont Colleges]. Sometime between 4pm-8pm (so right after her speech), her car was found vandalized in the parking lot on 6th and Amherst, all tires slashed, windows smashed, and spraypainted were the words, "nigger lover," "bitch," "SHUT UP," and "kike whore." The Claremont Police classified it as a hate crime.
WTF.
*the recent incidents had varying severity and racial motivation:
- Four students stole and burned a cross during winter break. (This incident divided students in several ways.)
- A club's scavenger hunt included the item "Photograph yourself with 10 Asian students".
- Someone took a green marker and wrote "NIGGER" next to George Washington Carver's picture in a calendar. The calendar was on a hallway bulletin board at CMC.
- Scripps students put up posts such as "'Nigger.' Renewing old hate in the new millennium." and "'Nigger.' This is the ignorance that a $35,000 a year education produces." Some students didn't see the satire indended by the creators of the posters.
How to report a security hole to Microsoft
Hixie helped me report a security hole to Opera. Then Hixie and his friends at the W3C Technical Plenary tried to help me report it to Microsoft, offering these suggestions:
- "There's probably a form on microsoft.com/ie."
- "You report it to cnet."
- "You break into Microsoft's systems using the exploit, and insert the bug into their bug system. Since you can only do that with security bugs, that filters out the non-security ones."
I think I reported the bug to Microsoft successfully. The language on Microsoft's form ("enchancement suggestion" and "wish" rather than "bug report") was discouraging, but I did get to check a box labeled "Security".
NeonGecko's demo
The NeonGecko Clinic team demonstrated their forum post categorization software with two examples. It correctly classified
I have a feisty persian. How can I save the furniture?
as "cats" (91%) and
I have a feisty Persian Gulf crisis. How can I save the future?
as "politics" (84%) and "bush" (9%). If you mix the two examples, it gets confused, as it should.
Experience Google's new look
Google has been testing a new look with a small percent of visitors. I wrote a bookmarklet that lets you make Google show you the new look:
(Drag it to your bookmarks bar, visit google.com, and click on the bookmark.)
It works by changing the ID in your Google cookie to 102c51875a8839e9, the ID of one of the visitors Google randomly selected to test the new look. If your ID is already 102c51875a8839e9, it sets it 0000000000000000 (anonymous), letting you switch between the old and new looks quickly. Since the bookmarklet only changes the ID part of the cookie, it preserves your settings, such as the number of results per page.
Thanks to jcurious for pointing out the Neowin thread in which "poind" posted the ID from his Google cookie.
Update March 28, 2004: Google is now showing the new look by default. The bookmarklet no longer has any visible effect.
Update January 27, 2005: iMilly has created a modified version of this bookmarklet to anonymize your Google cookie.
Illusory contour in an advertisement
The woman in this clever clothing advertisement is as convincing as the white triangle in the Kanizsa Triangle illusion.
Color-constancy illusion
Michelle, Lauren, and I stumbled on a strong illusion last night. It's similar to the checkerboard illusion but involves color rather than just shades of gray.
The "blue" tiles on top of the left cube and the "yellow" tiles on top of the right cube are actually the same shade of gray.
Articles that talk about this illusion: American Scientist: Why We See What We Do and Discover Magazine: Sensory Reflexes. (The authors of the American Scientist article wrote a book with the same name.)
Berkeley's dilemma (as described by the American Scientist article) reminds me of Quine's Gavagai problem in the acquisition of language. Berkeley's dilemma is that retinal images are inherently ambiguous -- for example, there's no difference in the retinal image created by a large object at medium distance and a small object at a large distance. In the Gavagai problem, an island native points to a rabbit and says "gavagai". Do you interpret "gavagai" as "rabbit", "there goes a rabbit", "white", "animal", "hopping", "it's a nice day", "cute", "lunch", or something else?
Both Berkeley's dilemma and the Gavagai problem are problems of infinite ambiguity. Humans have clever heuristics for dealing with both problems. Examples include color constancy and overestimation of acute angles in visual perception, and the whole-object, taxonomic, and mutual-exclusivity assumptions children use to interpret new nouns.
Synesthesia
My friend Michelle sees English letters and some Chinese characters as having colors. She doesn't like sites about letter-color synesthesia because they always get the colors of the letters wrong.
