Cars Kill Cities

Reblogged from Progressive Transit:

OK, I’m finally getting a chance to make another post.  I have temporarily relocated to Mountain View, CA and have been up to my eyeballs in work, both ‘real’ work and research work.  It’s nice to get back to this blog. Cars do not belong in cities.  A standard American sedan can comfortably hold 4+ adults w/ luggage, can travel in excess of 100 miles per hour, and can travel 300+ miles at a time without stopping to refuel.  These are all great things if you are traveling long distances between cities. …

Need a good screen dimmer? Try PangoBright

I’ve found myself stuck in many situations where my laptop screen is too bright for my eyes, and yet the brightness is as low as it can go. Up until recently I’ve tried to work around it, including wearing sunglasses at the computer (tip: that doesn’t really help.)

Then, I discovered a utility called PangoBright. While it cannot call your neighbor or help you hack into the FBI’s private files, it does one thing very well, and that is making your screen darker than its lowest setting. It’s a cinch to install, starts up in less than a second, and takes up very little space on your hard drive.

There are some annoying visual artifacts though: portions of your screen will become undimmed when you perform certain tasks, such as switching windows. And since the dimmer directly affects the display and not the backlight, your screen will start losing color intensity at the lower settings. Other than that, the program is simple to use and I recommend it for anyone who suffers from SOBS (Screen Over-Brightness Syndrome.)

Grab it

Link: http://www.pangobright.com/

Platforms: Windows only

Pro tip: Using 100% of your tab button

Recognize that? It’s the infamous tab button on your keyboard. You’ve probably used it for two things: indenting paragraphs and filling out forms without using the mouse. Today, we’ll focus on the filling-out-the-forms part.

Ever wonder why your TAB button has two arrows, one going backwards and one going forwards? It has a double function. If you’ve only used it to go to the next field or text box in a form, you’re missing out on 50% of its functionality.

The other 50% is it’s ability to go backwards through text boxes and fields. How do we harness this awesome power?

Shift + TAB

Give it a try next time you’re filling out a giant, ugly form. After you start using it, you’ll never stop.

Bored of video games? Try this.

I stumbled across this website a few days ago while I was flipping through the pages of Scientific American. The name of the website is “Old Weather“, and it’s a project that aims to fill the holes in the earth’s climatic record between the years of World War I and World War II.

Now you may ask, who the heck cares about weather that’s 100-or-so years old? The fact is, between the two World Wars, we have a paucity of climate data, because weather recording was affected by the wars.

Then how do we get the data if it’s missing?

While ground-based weather stations lacked sufficient records, there were numerous ships at sea that kept records of weather on a day-to-day basis. OldWeather.org is a treasure trove of these ship logbooks, which typically contain six weather reports per day taken at four hour intervals. Unfortunately, the handwriting in these logbooks is almost impossible for a computer to read without horrendous mistakes. And that’s where the power of the HUMAN BRAIN comes in. Or rather, 550-thousand-plus human brains.

An update on SOPA/PIPA

See my last post about these two bills: SOPA (and PIPA): What they mean for your Internet.

Since my last post, I’ve gotten numerous emails from Demand Progress and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thanking me for my opposition against the bills, and ironically, asking me to sign more petitions. It turns out that the activism on the Internet has pushed these bills to the “ropes,” as Demand Progress claims. Now, they’re asking me to push Obama to veto the bills. “President Obama has expressed concerns about the bills, but hasn’t pledged to veto them,” the organization claims.

Why Five Guys makes the best burgers

Though I don’t eat out much, I am a fan of burgers. Some of my friends call me weird; because I’m Asian, I’m supposed to like rice and noodles, not burgers and pizza. While there are times when I want dim sum, there are also times when I crave for a burger.

Last year, my friend told me about this place called Five Guys burgers. I thought, “oh great, another burger place.” McDonalds makes burgers and they’re good. Burger King makes burgers and they’re good. Heck, Subway makes delicious sub sandwiches. What’s the big deal with this Five Guys Burgers you’re talking about? Nevertheless, he pestered me about it almost daily, so I said to him and two other friends, “let’s go there one day for lunch.”

We headed down to the nearest Five Guys and to my surprise, it was right next to a movie theater. The place looked very nice; its glass walls gave us a great view of the other shops outside. Upon entering the fast food place, it was quite clean, and looked much nicer than McDonalds or Burger King. In place of the ugly, ubiquitous Tensabarriers were bags of potatoes and peanuts stacked three high; and boxes of ketchup and peanut oil. The kitchen was open and plainly visible; no giant grey steel machinery blocked our view of it. Oh, and did I mention that the peanuts were free?

I ordered my burger, which, to my delight, I could customize. I told the cashier. A few minutes later, a steaming hot cheeseburger with onions, lettuce, tomato, pickles, grilled mushrooms, and ketchup was handed to me in a bag, with an overfilling side of gourmet fries. The place was crowded, but the four of us found a table. Meticulously, I unwrapped the wrapper to the juciest, most mouthwatering burger that I had never seen.

I closed my eyes, and with my hands, I carefully grabbed the burger, and took a slow, deliberate bite. As my teeth sank in deeper into the sandwich of angelic perfection, the flavor seized my taste buds. Soon, I found myself in a burger heaven, oblivious to the worries of the outside world. In this heaven I wallowed in a lush, verdant field of lettuce and tomatoes, covered in scrumptious tomato ketchup of the finest quality. If that wasn’t enough to induce a food coma, the heavenly grilled mushrooms and tender onions knocked me into one easily.

A few days passed before I finally awoke from my food-induced coma (or that’s what it felt like.) I realized what my friend said “I’d been missing out on.”  No McDonalds, no Burger King, no Jack in the Box, or any fast-food chain for that matter, prepared the same caliber of burgers and fries that Five Guys did. The big difference between Five Guys and the “Other” guys: handmade burgers, straight from scratch. While they’re not hardcore enough to raise cattle in their storage closet or press their own peanuts into peanut oil, they take great care in making every burger. All the ingredients put into a great burger are fresh, not frozen. Unlike McDonalds, Five Guys makes their burgers fresh on the spot, cooking the beef patties on an open stovetop, sizzling the grilled onions and mushrooms on an open flame, and even cutting the potatoes, which are supplied by a different farm every day.

Five Guys defeats the fast-food competition, two hands down. You would be hard-pressed to find another nationwide burger chain that offers the same quality of burgers at the same price. As a word of advice from the friend who encouraged me to dig into one of their burgers: if you haven’t tried it yet, “you’re missing out.”

“Life is a journey, not a destination”

This post isn’t any ordinary post. It’s the 200th post in Thought Box history.

Way back in May of 2009, I started this blog, very unclear of what to write about. Eventually, I found a niche in the fields of science and technology, which are my two passions. Here’s a timeline of this blog’s milestones:

• First post: May 30th, 2009
• Post No. 10: June 15th, 2009. 16 days from 1st post
• Post No. 20: July 4th, 2009. 35 days
• Post No. 30: July 16th, 2009. 47 days
• Post No. 40: July 30th, 2009. 61 days
• Post No. 50: August 24th, 2009. 86 days, and this is still one of the most popular posts!
• Post No. 60: September 27th, 2009. 120 days
• Post No. 70: November 4th, 2009.158 days
• Post No. 80: December 1st, 2009. 185 days
• Post No. 90: January 5th, 2010. 220 days
• Post No. 100: February 15th, 2010. 261 days
• Post No. 110: March 15th, 2010. 289 days
• Post No. 120: April 10th, 2010. 315 days
• Post No. 130: May 18th, 2010. 353 days
• Post No. 140: July 4th, 2010. 400 days. Interestingly enough, a reblog of a previous milestone!
• Post No. 150: August 11th, 2010. 438 days
• Post No. 160: September 11th, 2010. 469 days
• Post No. 170: January 2nd, 2011. 582 days
• Post No. 180: June 5th, 2011. 736 days
• Post No. 190: January 5th, 2012. 950 days
• Post No. 200: January 16th, 2011. 961 days; or 2 years and 231 days

A graphic representation for those of you visual learners (including me):

Like that quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, this blog will never stop growing. Who knows when No. 500, No. 1000, or even more, will come out?

Then again, I don’t blog because of the milestones. I blog because I love it!

Well well well, look what finally happened

This gallery contains 6 photos.

UPDATE: Got more pictures from around the area!

SOPA (and PIPA): What they mean for your Internet

I hadn’t heard of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) or the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (Protect-IP Act or PIPA) until an email from Demand Progress showed up in my inbox. Since I hadn’t received any politicking emails in a long time, I became interested when I read that the PIPA and SOPA would ruin the Internet as we know it.

As with all emails concerning political issues, I took the opinions with a grain of salt. Are those two aforementioned acts as bad as Demand Progress portrays them? To find out, I started doing some personal research. Here’s what I found out: