Oh my.
Photo credit: Russ Roca
Last week the city of Long Beach installed the first sharrow/lane treatment of its type in the state of California. Its purpose is to communicate to both cyclists and drivers:
- that cyclists have the right to fully use the right-hand lane
- the safest spot in the lane for cyclists to ride, making them more visible and keeping them out of the incredibly dangerous door zone created by parked cars.
This really is ground-breaking stuff, for California and for the US. It’s a great step toward the ultimate goal: moving away from cities built around automobiles as the only mode of transportation.
Read more of the excellent write up by Russ Roca.
Exif Untrasher - Carsten Blüm: Mac Development
The Devil Is in the Digits: Evidence That Iran's Election Was Rigged - washingtonpost.com
The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.
As always, a good discussion about this is going on at reddit.
Street Clashes in Iran
Fun Fact of the Day
Diesel engines don’t need spark plugs.
Air is compressed, leading to an increase in the air’s temperature, and then fuel is injected into the cylinder. The air is hot enough to ignite the diesel, which apparently needs less heat to ignite.
There’s a decent explanation and spiffy Flash diagram at HowStuffWorks.
Coolest Thing You Didn't Know About Safari
Try pasting a link into the Downloads window. Safari will automatically begin downloading the file at the pasted URL.I recently purchased a Moka Pot to try and brew some stove top coffee. This is an interesting take on how to use it, though starting with boiling water and paying close attention for gurgling makes the process a bit more complicated than may be desired.
(via jimseven)
Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames - Anil Dash
Brilliant.
June 13, 4:04pm: A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he’s always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames launch.
(via Doug Bowman)
OS X Snow Leopard - Enhancements and Refinements
A good, pretty complete list of changes coming in Snow Leopard.
Especially interesting:
- Default gamma will become 2.2, replacing 1.8 (via @wilsonminer)
- Your Windows partition booted in BootCamp will be able to read (but not write) the Mac’s HFS+ partition
- Printer drivers can automatically download
- New Services menu which will pick up on context. I think this will be one of the most popular changes once Snow Leopard is widely adopted. See below about more contextual behavior by the OS.
- iChat can now show a snippet of previous chats a la Adium
- Safari 4 (Snow Leopard only) will sandbox browser plug-ins to reduce crashing. Seriously, I need this now. The Flash player development version is awful.
- Data detectors in a variety of applications will pick up on things flight numbers, dates, addresses. This is the kind of thing that we see some of already in the iPhone and which both desktop OS X and iPhone OS X will benefit.
- Some older laptops with “multi-touch trackpads” will gain support for three- and four-finger gestures. It’s not entirely clear which older models have these trackpads.
- Automatic time zone setting via Core Location (once your iPhone could do it, you realize your computer should too).
Stuff White People Like #126: Vespa Scooters
Finally, the Vespa has produced one of the great paradoxes in white culture. Vintage Vespas are infinitely cooler than newer ones, but the vintage models produce more pollution than most automobiles. If you know a white person going through this dilemma, just say something like “the amount of energy and carbon used to produce a new scooter will probably cancel out the emissions from your vintage one.”
Problem solved forever.
