© 1996-2008 Robert P. Munafo. Email the author
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
| Miscellaneous Data |
All of this stuff seems too small to put on its own page.
Topics:
the idiot test, a set of easily-misinterpreted questions
laplink cable
amway
SPEC benchmarks
MetaSpy data
ACN, LCI, Quest
Web Hosting
The Four Types of Markets
Ethernet Wiring
Install notes for wavplay 1.0 for Linux
Data I am looking for (unanswered questions, mysteries, etc.)
Some recent trends in operating system popularity
Background check on the new (1978) JATO story
Bug in fgetpos/fsetpos when used with read
South Park movie
Old British Monetary System
Sentence (in English) with all the Letters of the Alphabet
Dewey Color System
SmartMedia Card Reader UIS4S
Where Is the Finder's Hidden File for Burning a CD-R?
Circus Peanuts
Origin of "29.97" frame rate in the NTSC television standard
Pilobilus Article (partial)
MAD Magazine Neuman Photo Ad
Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) Finder List-View Folder Collapse Bug
This type of thing was very popular in the USENET/email list days of the Internet. I encountered it in 1997. I assume it is much older.
1. Do they have a 4th of July in England?
Yes. They also have a 1st of July, a 12th of April and a
27th of October.
2. How many birthdays does the average man have?
Just one, but it is celebrated once per year.
3. Some months have 31 days; how many have 28?
12. "I have 28" implies "I have at least 28", not "I have exactly 28".
4. Lisa gives a beggar 50 cents; Lisa is the beggar's sister, but the beggar is not Lisa's brother. Why?
Because the beggar is Lisa's sister.
5. Why can't a man living in the U.S.A. be buried in Canada?
Because if he's living, he isn't dead yet, and Canada has a law
against burying someone alive.
6. How many outs are there in an inning (of American baseball)?
6 (3 for each team).
7. Is it legal for a man in California to marry his widow's sister?
No, because if he has a "widow" then he is dead, and they don't let
dead men marry in California.
8. Two men played five games of checkers. Each man won the same number of games, but there were no ties. Explain this.
They didn't play all five games against each other.
9. Divide 30 by 1/2 and add 10. What is the answer?
70. "30 divided by 1/2" is the same as "30 times 2".
10. A man builds a rectangular house; all four sides have southern exposure. A big bear walks by. What color is the bear?
White. The house straddles the north pole.
11. If there are 3 apples and you take away 2, how many do you have?
After you take 2, you have at least 2.
12. I have two U.S. coins totaling 55 cents. One is not a nickel. What are the coins?
A half-dollar and a nickel. One coin is not a nickel, and the
other coin is a nickel.
13. If you have only one match and you walk into a room where there is an oil burner, a lamp, and a wood-burning stove, which one would you light first?
You would have to light the match first.
14. How far can a dog run into the woods?
Halfway; after that he's running out of the woods.
15. A doctor gives you three pills and tells you to take one every half-hour. How long would the pills last?
1 hour or
Each pill lasts until you take it.
16. A farmer has 17 sheep, and all but 9 die. How many are left?
9
17. How many animals of each species did Moses take on the ark?
None. Perhaps you were thinking of Noah?
18. A clerk in the butcher shop is 5' 10'' tall. What does he weigh?
Butcher shop clerks weigh meat.
19. How many two-cent stamps are there in a dozen?
12.
20. What was the President's name in 1964?
The current U.S. president had the same name in 1964 that he has now.
This info has moved here
The phrase "personal business management" refers to the AMWAY sales and distribution system, a multi-level distribution system where (for the most part) everyone does business with people they already know (friends family and neighbors, etc.). Your customers are called "downlines" and your supplier is called an "upline". Apparently, AMWAY is stigmatized and has a bad reputation with many people, but there is nothing inherently wrong with it. However, it suffers from a few drawbacks —
1. The need to send products through many "middlemen" means that the profit at each level is comparatively small, not enough to live off of unless you're at least 3 or 4 levels up from the bottom. And once you get there, distribution and promotion of the business become your job.
2. In order to do well you have to like the AMWAY products, which means you have to use them all the time (in place of competing products) so that you get used to them — you can't sell something you're not using yourself. But the products aren't that much better than competing products, at least not enough to make you want to buy them all the time. Because AMWAY people are distributors, many products need to be purchased in quantities (like 12 at a time). And because of drawback 1, they aren't much cheaper than competing products.
3. Once you become a distributor (i.e. once you start selling more to others than you use yourself), in order to stay at the "level" you're at you have to keep working to spread the word and invite other people to buy from you, in order to replace the people you lose from attrition. This "evangelizing" is a special skill distinct from ordinary sales skills (Werner Erhard calls it "enrollment") that most people just aren't all that good at.
My discussion of the SPEC benchmarks has moved here
Some of 1999's silliest, most incomprehensible or most frightening queries issued to MetaCrawler:
"Nuculear bombs" — The CIA has nothing to worry about so long as Saddam can't spell.
"mp3" — Let's not get too specific, huh?
"space shutte" — I guess NASA has nothing to worry about, either.
"satans realm" — Probably quicker just to point your browser at microsoft.com
"love coupons" — Sounds pretty good, out of context
"wheather" — HotBot's 3268 matches are almost evenly divided between people who can't spell "weather" and those who can't spell "whether". Scary, huh?
"illegal nude girls" — You'll have to try harder, Meese — they're not that stupid.
"lyrics to the song surrounded by chantal kreviasuk" — Returned 0 matches. Sadly, all they needed to do was type in a few key words from the song and they would have found it.
"passwords" — A cracker exhibiting about as much imagination as Meese.
"m" — The "mp3" guy broadening his search? — or a fan of the early 80's one-hit wonder pop band?
"big big tits" — "big tits" must have returned too many matches.
American Communications Network (Troy, Michigan) is a multilevel
marketing organization that sells domestic long-distance service to
United States customers at a rate of $0.09 per minute (last I
checked). The long distance service is provided by LCI International
(McLean, Virginia), which merged in March 1998 with Qwest
Communications International.
Some low-cost Web hosting prices I found while doing research.
Most prices here are from 1999 March 25th
| provider | cost | Disk | Xfer | ||
| (based on setup fee and one year of service) | (MB of webpage storage space) | (maximum data transfer, GB/month) | (number of separate POP mailboxes) | ||
| Web hosting only | |||||
| www.pair.com | 5.95 | 30.0 | 3.000 | 1 | |
| www.coastline.com | 18.00 | 50.0 | 1.000 | 5 | |
| www.coastline.com | 36.00 | 100.0 | 2.000 | 10 | |
| www.hostsave.com | 6.95 | 15.0 | 1.000 | 2 | |
| www1.simplenet.com | 27.00 | ? | ? | 2 | |
| www.westhost.com | 10.53 | 10.0 | ? | 1 | |
| www.westhost.com | 17.53 | 25.0 | ? | 3 | |
| www.westhost.com | 21.53 | 50.0 | ? | 5 | |
| Net access and web hosting | hours/month | ||||
| www.channel1.com | 25 | 13.33 | 10.0 | 0.200 | 1 |
| www.earthlink.com | 744 | 19.95 | 10.0 | 0.500 | 1 |
| www.shore.net | 100 | 24.58 | 100.0 | 0.300 | 1 |
| Net access only | |||||
| www.ibm.net | 3 | 4.95 | 1 | ||
| www.ibm.net | 100 | 19.95 | 1 | ||
| free.msn.com | 744 | 19.95 | 1 |
Auctions have recently become more popular thanks to the many Internet auctions. Much misunderstanding exists about what influence auctions have on the economy as a whole and the role of traditional fixed-price sales. This is complicated by the fact that there are lots of different types of auctions.
There are many variations as to how auctions are conducted, who bids, how much information about other bids is available, and how a winning bidder and price are selected. However, the most important factor in an auction is which side does the bidding (buyer or seller). When sellers bid, it's called a "reverse auction".
In a reverse auction the buyers are committed (they must conduct a transaction) and the sellers are uncommitted (they'll conduct the transaction only if there's a good price). In a standard auction, it's the sellers who are committed and the buyers who will participate only if the price is good. Either type of auction can (at the option of the committed party) involve an "opening bid" which will result in no transaction if the opening bid isn't taken by anyone. When the first real bid is made, it is almost always equal to the opening bid.
In a reverse auction, the first bid by a potential seller sets a transaction price, which must be underbid by other sellers. In a standard auction the first potential buyer bids, setting a price which must be over-bid by other buyers.
In a reverse auction the price goes down as the auction proceeds. In a standard auction it goes up as the auction proceeds.
Perhaps most important is to realize why auctions and reverse auctions are used. There are actually four fundamentally different types of transaction markets, of which auctions are two. The crucial difference in the four types of markets is in which side knows more about value.
- Reverse auctions are used in situations where the buyers do not know in advance how much the good or service is worth, so they give complete control of the price-setting to the sellers. All bids come from sellers. Examples include contractors bidding for a publicly-funded civil engineering project: the government has no good idea how much it should cost.
- Standard auctions are used in situations where the sellers do not know how much the good or service is worth, so they give complete control of the price-setting to the buyers. All bids come from buyers. Examples include FCC radio bandwidth blocks, "A night on the town with Robert Munafo", antiques and curios: the seller has no idea how much their property or service is worth.
- When both sides of the market have a good idea of the value of the good or service, traditional fixed-price transactions are used. There are no bids of any kind, just an established fixed price. Most mass retail markets serve as good examples. Neither side allows haggling because both sides know how much the thing should be worth.
- When neither party has a good idea of the value of the good or service, one-on-one or many-to-many haggling is used (the modern term for this is "double auction"). Bids come from both sides. Most stock and commodities exchanges are good examples of ongoing markets based on haggling. The "double auction" can be either like a haggling session where the buyers start low and the sellers start high and they eventually meet somewhere in the middle, or it can be continuous like the stock market. In the continuous case, whenever a buyer's and seller's bids meet they conduct a transaction, and only one is satisfied (the one who was trading a smaller number of items). All the remaining buyers and sellers haven't "met in the middle yet" so future transactions will usually occur at a different price. Also, both sides will frequently "move away" from the middle by cancelling their bids and making new bids more favorable to their side. It is harrowing work.
All four scenarios are subject to various inefficiencies, and all are potentially vulnerable to conspiracy (collusion) between buyers or between sellers. None is an adequate substitute for any of the others, although the continuous double auction (stock exchange model) is the best approach to use when you don't have any idea of which approach is best.
It is misunderstanding of these few basic concepts that lead to so much
misunderstanding of auctions and what purpose they serve.
This info has moved here
Getting wavplay 1.0 for Linux to build under Mandrake 5.3:
When I tried to build it, I got the errors:
The problem results from the use of structure fields named "errno", which causes problems because "errno" is a #define that translates to a function invocation.
To fix it, first make the source code editable by doing:
chmod +x *
then edit the file "wavplay.h", and search for "errno". Each one that occurs as a structure field should be changed to "errnox". That is, just add an "x" to the end of the name.
Then edit the source files server.c and xltwavplay.c. Find all occurrences of "errno" that are references to the structure firleds you edited in "wavplay.h", and add the "x" to them.
Finally, add the following to the includes at the beginning of "recplay.c":
#include
That should be enough to get the no_x binaries to build. I haven't bothered trying to get the X stuff to build.
On the Unity Through Percussion page
they mention the "African rock game" used to build community and
"team". Is this African rock game related to the "hot potato" game
played by children in America?
Operating System Statistics
The pretty awesome Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter presents current statistics on what the Internet community thinks of all the most well-known computer operating systems. It also has a link to a July 1998 DARPA report giving the same statistics at that time. Some useful conclusions can be drawn from the data. First, the numbers I used (these were provided by Don Marti; for more recent numbers please go here):
Here's what I noticed:
- Windows' suckiness has increased from 7-to-1 to a bit over 8-to-1. This reflects the assertion that Windows is less well-suited to the public at large today than it was two years ago. Perhaps because it is getting buggier, more out-of-date, or maybe the people are becoming more demanding.
- Conversely, Linux's ruleziness has increased from 4.6 to 6.2 in the same period, a larger increase. One would conclude that Linux is more well-suited to the public, at least to those who have tried Linux. Perhaps this reflects its gradually more stable and usable installation and graphical UI.
- Both Linux and Windows are mentioned about 3 times more often than they were a couple years ago; both are roughly in line with the growth of the Internet as a whole (Internet Host Counts have increased by 3.0 per 2 years; Americans with Internet access have increased by about 2.5 every 2 years and worldwide rate is somewhat greater because the US is already well over 50%)
- The only statistic that has gone down is the "MacOS rules" statistic. From 364 to 80 in 2 years, and no corresponding rise in the "sucks" figures. Hard to believe with the growth in the Internet. Is there an error in the 1998 figure, or did all the MacOS supporters silently go away?
- UNIX and FreeBSD are experiencing the same trend as Linux, while VMS is holding steady. However, only FreeBSD is growing in number of mentions, probably an indicator that it is the only one actually growing in number of users.
If you like this sort of thing, you should also check out my
Computer Languages Popularity Chart
The "cardhouse" JATO Story
The August 2000 WIRED magazine included a story that appears to be written by an author ("John Pelligrino", carinthecliff@hotmail.com since Jul 10 1999 or earlier) claiming credit for inadvertently starting the urban legend that is now known as the "rocket car" or "JATO" story, and which was popularized as one of the Darwin Awards legends in 1995.
This discussion is now a bit out of date, due to much investigation which has pretty much proven that the story is fiction, thanks to a lot of investigative work documented on alt.folklore.urban. But I'm leaving it here just as a record of my own theories.
The story that was published in WIRED is called the cardhouse story because WIRED says they found it first at this URL on cardhouse.com, also exists in several other places including these: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 . It was also posted on alt.folklore.urban on 12/28/1999 by "mister meat".
It's a good story, but like all urban legends it is difficult to verify. The author specifically avoids identifying the county and state, the military base, etc.
So, like any urban legend this one needs to be verified or refuted on the merit of its own internal consistency. Here's a start:
Motives for Falsification
When examining a story for consistency, it is important to consider any motives the author or any editors might have had for deliberately changing the facts in the story. Anything that has a motive for being changed cannot be used to refute the story's validity. For example, if the story incriminates the author, he might change facts to hide his identity.
In this story, the primary motive for falsification is to hide the author's identity in connection with the alleged crime of posessing and using the solid-fueled rocket ("JATO") described as having been acquired at a military surplus auction.
Possibly Falsified By Motive
M-23 JET ASSIST UNIT
"JATO", of course, is a real military acroynm. Solid-fuel rocket boosters for cargo transport planes were made throughout US involvement in World War II by the Aerojet corporation, and JATO for "Jet Assist Take Off" was the acronym they used. In trying to verify "M-23" I searched on "m-23 jet assist" and "jato m-23" and found:
It should also be noted that 23 is a psychologically random number which fits the theory that the number is an invented fiction.
Gratuitous Substantiation
One common feature of fabricated stories is extra bits that appear to have been included for no particlar reason except to make the story easier to believe.
mineshafts cave in
The author describes his recollection of the tendency of old mineshafts to cave in. This seems to help make the reader believe the result of the car's collision at the end of the story.
Inconsistencies Without Motive
The following points make the story appear to be inconsistent and therefore fabricated.
around four feet long, and less than a foot in diameter
The dimensions of the JATO allow one to calculate their energy output. The result is hard to believe, to say the least. If the author falsified the specs of the JATO, he probably would have described it as being smaller than it really is, rather than bigger.
Solid-fuel rockets contain fuel and oxidant and their output (thrust multiplied by burn time) is proportional to the mass of fuel and oxidant. The author specifically states that the JATO used ammonium perchlorate, the very same oxidizer used in the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, which I'll abbreviate "SRB". The idea that the JATOs, probably built for use during the Vietnam war, used the same fuel as the SRBs makes sense; the entire Shuttle design used technology available in the early 1970's. The SRBs each provide 1,200,000 kilograms or 12 million newtons of thrust (at sea level) with a burn time of about 140 seconds, or 1.68 billion newton-sec of energy. The SRB's were about 7100 cubic feet in size and weighed 1,300,000 pounds. Scaling down from the SRB's size to the JATO's size, we estimate the JATO's output at 740,000 newton-seconds, and weight at 575 pounds. Divide the thrust output by the rocket car's mass (about 1 metric ton) and we find that the JATO could have accelerated the car to a speed of 740 meters/sec, or 1654 miles per hour, Mach 2.2. Team Rocket Car would have heard a sonic boom.
To match the story, the car's speed would have had to be below the speed of sound (let's say 500 miles per hour) which makes the car's trip about 9 seconds (for the first mile to the brake actuator) and then another 18 seconds to the mine shaft. This doesn't really leave much time for running up the embankment before spotting the steam coming out.
The JATO's weight of 575 pounds agrees with the story, which says "it took two people to even budge the things". If the story is real, the JATO was definitely full of fuel.
over two MILLION sites listed as being Darwin-related
Of course, the author probably means two million sites, pages or matches, depending on what search engine he used; and his later claim that they're all related to the Darwin Awards and not Charles Darwin is just poetic license. But the number "2 million" is easy to check. Today, July 12th 2000, I got 333,116 hits for "Darwin" on Lycos, 286,410 on Alta Vista, and 326,000 in Google. These search engines are representative of the other search engines and almost certainly reflect the results the author would have gotten on any other engine. Furthermore, query hits on almost all search engines are increasing as the Internet expands; the rate is about double every year. The author says his search was conducted in 1998 (as shown below, it was most probably before June 1998). Therefore, if his "over 2 million" were true, then my search would now yield over 5 or 6 million results. So we're off by a factor of 10 or 20 there.
Verifed Facts (Supporting Story Validity)
The following points support the validity of the story.
ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) is real.
golf ball myth is a real myth, see here if you want to know why the liquid is there.
McDonald's worm myth
Yes, there is such a myth (it was new to me). The following is from Jill at straightdope.com:
When asked about this, Ray Kroc, owner of McDonalds, responded, "We couldn't afford to grind worms into our meat. Hamburger costs a dollar and a half a pound, and night crawlers are six dollars." But notice he knew the price. You'd better hope the cost of worms doesn't go down.
John Pelligrino
An author using this name also wrote this article about The Man Show. The character of the author and the writing style seem to agree. Conveniently, the practice of bullshitting (making up wild but interesting or engaging stories) fits in quite well with the Man Show audience. The tagline states "John Pelligrino is a man who dabbles online and watches lots of TV. Maybe too much."
He also contributed his Rocket Darwin Fish image to this page showing pictures of many variations of the "Jesus fish emblem".
There was a big investigation documented on alt.folklore.urban, which concludes that John Pelligrino is the pen name of a "Myles Lannak". (There are more details and evidence in Google Groups, search on "John Pellegrino JATO rocket" and select "view thread".)
Unsure
debunker "Road Runner" quote
The debunker's quote does not exist anymore on the internet, at least not in the form the cardhouse author quoted. The author probably either made up or substantially changed the quote. The closest match I found was "Maybe it's the Wile E. Coyote-ness of it all" on this page.
However, in looking for this quote I stumbled on several dead links to an earlier copy of the cardhouse story, here. From its URL the webpage owner appears to be someone named Eric with an account on TEISprint, a local ISP in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, PA area. The page was quoted:
There were also several links on bookmark-list pages (the typical "my long list of links" things people put on their home pages), for which dates could not be determined. It seems clear that the story came out during or after June 1998, because the author mentions 1998 right near the beginning, and near the middle goes into some detail describing how long it took him to write (where he mentions April, May and June). There's no reason he would have put these dates in if he posted the story to the Internet prior to June 1998, because it would have been such an obvious inconsistency.
"heater assembly" = smoke grenades — cannot verify.
return any "explosive, ordnance, fuse, detonator, ..."
Cannot verify this. All the forms signed by civilian bidders at military auctions are available online (start here) but there is not (as of the last few years, at least) any such wording anywhere that I could find. There is, however a description of how the government classifies and disables munitions before sale:
[code C]: MLI (SME). Remove and/or demilitarize installed key point(s) as prescribed in DoD 4160.21-M-1. Defense Demilitarization Manual, or lethal parts, components and accessories.
[code D]: MLI (SME). Total destruction of item and components so as to preclude restoration or repair to a usable condition by melting, cutting, tearing, scratching, crushing, breaking, punching, neutralizing, etc.
Nevertheless, although the words quoted in the cardhouse story appear only in copies of the cardhouse story, things may well have been different back in 1978.
something like 2,500 pounds of thrust
2500 pounds of thrust is 11,000 newtons, but if the burn time was 2.2 seconds, by the estimate calculated above the thrust would have been 336,000 newtons. Jerry's estimate was off by a factor of 30.
steam coming from "under the car"
At a distance of one mile there was no way he would see that the steam came from "under" the car. We assume this was a post hoc fallacy — the author saw steam, and figured out that the steam would have to be coming from "under", and therefore he thinks he actually saw that it came from "under" the car.
topography of the test-run site
As you know from reading the story, there is a mine entrance at one end of a 2-mile, straight and level run of narrow-gauge railroad track, near a road, and you have to go uphill to get from the track to the road in two places:
"Jimmy walked down the slope and stopped in front of the boards we'd re-nailed over the entrance": The road is close to the mine entrance.
"We all ran up the slope to get out of the artificial fogbank": The road is close to the launch site, 2 miles from the mine entrance.
Clearly the story is saying that there is a road and a track running parallel in a straight line for two miles, with the road higher than the tracks at two points (and possibly for the entire 2 mile stretch). That's not hard to believe. The problem is that, at the end of this two mile stretch of rail, the ground suddenly rises quickly enough so that the tracks can lead straight into a tunnel without any intervening grade transition, retaining walls, etc. Such topographical features are rare, and the story's use of such a feature increases the liklihood that the topography is fabricated rather than real. Consider: most tunnel or mine entrances have a grade transition with retaining walls. But if the JATO car crashed into one of those, the wreck would not be in plain view — the retaining walls would hide it.
This makes it seem likely that the details of the topography and "cave-in" event were designed to make the end result (car sticking out of a cliff) coincide closely with the simple "urban legend" version it quotes. It seems that the cardhouse author deliberately constructed the topography and events of his longer story to agree with the wreck's appearance as described in the urban legend, rather than simply discrediting the urban-legend version as having been altered or invented.
© 1996-2008 Robert P. Munafo.
Email the author
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
Back to my main page
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