Blizza Blizza

We here at the blog would like to remind everyone that playground equipment and motor vehicles do not mix.

Fie on Jalopnik for calling a piece of junk scooter a “crotch rocket”, though. Eeediots.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

From a recent comment:

PLEASE READ

Yo Ok so I Have Just Got A Website And am Now looking For Visiters Ok I Will Make A Deal With You I Own 4 blogs i will add Your Name {Name Of Your Blog} if You Just Add My Website URL to your Blog Ok The Blogs i Own In Witch I Will Add Your Blog URL To are Switchhate i will promise to keep adding Your Blog URL into everywhere it will make sence in//My Website Will Also Have Your URL in it With nice Little Comments. Thank You For Your Time
The Website You Should Add Will Be Sent To You Through Your E-mail Like Yahoo or something

No.

No.

Uhm, no.

And just for good measure…

No.

Idiot.

This time we’re taking aim at HowStuffWorks, which is normally a good site to check out if you’re in need of an explanation of some mechanical gizmo. The guy who answered the latest entry in the Question Archive was sleeping on the job, though.

The question: If daytime running lights were mandatory in the U.S., and all vehicles had them, how much extra gasoline would that use each year?

HowStuffWorks’s answer, after a whole bunch of calculations and assumptions: about 406 million gallons per year.

Where did they screw up? Let’s break it down.

A typical headlight bulb uses about 55 watts; sometimes the daytime running lights run at a lower wattage so they use a little less power. Let’s say the daytime running lights use 100 watts since there are two bulbs.

No problems here. That seems quite reasonable, if possibly a marginal over-estimate.

To calculate the energy used, we need to figure out how much time people will spend with their lights on.

And herein lies the enormous erroneous assumption: that having the lights on places sufficient additional load on the vehicle’s alternator so as to cause extra drag on the engine.

I drive with my lights on literally all the time, in both my car (a 1992 Honda Accord EX sedan) and my motorcycle (a 2001 Suzuki SV650S). On the bike, I don’t have a choice — the headlights are hardwired to the ignition. On the car, however, I do have a choice. So it becomes a very simple matter to test this assumption. Drive for a few tanks of gas with the lights on, and a few tanks of gas with the lights off, and calculate the mileage returned by the vehicle over those tanks of gas.

With the headlights (or DRLs) on, we ought to see a noticeable decrease in mileage if their assumption is correct. We don’t. Q.E.D.

If anyone has hard figures for the no-load drag of a typical car’s alternator, as well as for the drag at various loads, I’d be very curious to know just how erroneous the assumption is.

From feedback:

I just downloaded Camino after reading about it today in the WSJ…

Right hand, allow me to introduce you to left hand. Talk amongst yourselves. Discuss each other’s actions.

This week’s award goes to Apple’s Mail.app for generally sucking at life.

More specifically, it took 12K worth of HTML in order for a correspondent to say this:

Hi,

I am looking for a way to bring in my passwords for websites that I have been using in Firefox.

Aloha,

[name withheld]

__________________________________________________________

[contact info in sig removed]

Highlights from the 11.5K of extraneous HTML code in the message:

SPAN class=”Apple-style-span” style=”border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; “

along with

P style=”margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px”

Note the multiple “0px” values. CSS specifies that 0 requires no units, so that’s two wasted characters (at minimum) every single time it occurs. In the second case, Mail’s HTML generator has wasted 22 characters (and that string occurs several times in the message). Furthermore, good programming practise dictates that you don’t generate output for empty attributes. Since a SPAN tag is an inline element, it will never render with a border unless you specify one in CSS, so you should never have to set its border to 0.

Which segues nicely into point two — namely, since Mail isn’t including a stylesheet anywhere in the message, 2a) why is it giving a named class attribute to all these spans, and 2b) why is it necessary to manually specify default settings in their style property?

Here’s another great WTF:

SPAN class=”Apple-style-span” style=”border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; “

The above is the very first SPAN tag in the document. HTML parent elements pass their properties on to their children, and “Cascading” is part of the name of CSS, fer Chrissakes. So why the hell is Mail including the exact same (manually specified default) values in the next six (!) SPAN tags?

That brings us to WTF #4 — why have seven nested SPAN tags all containing the same attributes? Is Mail trying really really hard to make sure that style gets followed or something? Nesting seven <em> tags in HTML doesn’t give the tagged text seven times as much emphasis. It just wastes 54 characters! This takes that waste to a whole new level.

Finally, since this HTML/CSS code is never going to be seen by a human (in theory), and is being used strictly to make an e-mail message look like a goddamn glossy brochure (that’s another rant entirely), there’s no need for spaces after colons or semicolons in the style attribute, and there’s certainly no need for a trailing semicolon and space at the end of a style attribute.

Not that it’s an excuse for sending HTML mail, but if Mail would bother remotely optimising its HTML/CSS, that message would have been about 3K. Still a waste of 2.5K, but that’s at least 75% less wasteful than it was before.

Apparently Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey needs a refresher. Quoted in today’s Freep:

Pro-Tigers people say the more apt comparison would be the 1991 Braves. You know, the Braves of Glavine, Smoltz and Avery. What do you say we let Bonderman and Verlander, both 23, finish being burped before we enshrine them in the Hall of Fame? You have to go through some fire first, and the Tigers haven’t.

Would that be the then-21-year-old Steve Avery, the then-24-year-old John Smoltz, and the then-25-year-old Tom Glavine? The same Avery, Smoltz, and Glavine who had combined for a 27-34 record in 1990 and put up an unspectacular 4.35 combined ERA?

Because I was thinking it sure sounded like you meant the Avery, Smoltz, and Glavine who hadn’t, up until that point, been incredibly mediocre. (You know, like the Tigers’ pitching staff for the last decade.) Except for the fact that that trio — the non-mediocre Avery, Smoltz, and Glavine — didn’t exist until 1991.

But then, what do I know?

Wes digresses into the culinary again with an essay on the coffee market, which is fascinating in its own right.

However, this blog would like to take the opportunity to point out that Wes has apparently never heard of, as Dave Barry so charmingly described it, “weasel-poop coffee”, which sells for — you guessed it — over $250/pound.

Thanks to Todd for the forward, which I’ve turned into a blog entry.

Zidane recently remarked in a press conference that the infamous head butt was a result of repeated sister and mom jokes. The below serves to remind us that it’s important to hear both sides of the argument and to take into account different points of view.

As seen by the Germans:

As seen by the French:

As seen by the Italians:

As seen by the Americans:

As seen by the Bild-Zeitung (a German tabloid):

“Pete” wins today’s award, and possibly this month’s award, and maybe even this year’s award, for his amazingly clueless “March Together for Life” blog entry entitled “Murder without conscience”.

Having 634 people (now 635, including this entry) call him a giant raging idiot for taking satire seriously was apparently not enough, though. The guy can’t admit he’s wrong, either, a fact which a further 546 people have pointed out to him.

That’s just amazing. Thank you, Onion writers, for a good belly laugh the first time around (all the way back in 1999), a good belly laugh the second time around (five minutes ago), and for making this guy think you were serious, which was good for another half an hour of belly laughs.

UPDATE: Holy mother of God, Pete can’t leave well enough alone and has posted another followup! Uhm, yeah. Buddy, you already lost. Just shut down your blog and move along with life, preferably away from computers where you can’t be exposed to any more humour your addled brain can’t comprehend.

UPDATE2: Pete has moved to a new address where comments require a Blogger account. I seem to recall a well-used phrase about a day late and a dollar short.

Meta note: Pete is the only Dumbass of the Day in the history of this blog ever to receive the coveted Five Dumbasses Award for a non-fatal exhibition of stupidity.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Because what other media outlet would give their regular movie reviewer the week off and hire the Ninja from AskANinja.com to review Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest?

(More about the historical feud between ninjas and pirates can be found at The Official Ninja Webpage, duh.)

Dan Briody over at InfoWorld has a great op-ed piece entitled The Ten Commandments of cell phone etiquette.

This seems like a good opportunity to point out the overarching Don’t be a dick rule, too. “It’s not just for Wikipedia. It’s for life!”

Minnesota Timberwolves center Eddie Griffin is the target of a lawsuit filed Thursday alleging that Griffin was drunk, watching porn, and masturbating when he crashed his Cadillac Escalade into a parked vehicle outside a store in Minneapolis.

Despite multiple 911 callers’ insistence that Griffin was intoxicated, the two officers who responded to the scene did not test him for alcohol, and to add insult to injury, gave him a ride — leaving the city limits against department policy — to his home in St. Paul!

Does anyone think, even for a second, that Joe Citizen would get remotely similar treatment?