Here are several trends I've noticed on the road, displayed in graphical form.

The first seems to be standard across the USA. At least it holds everywhere I've spent a significant amount of time. The notation "Pr(x)" means "Probability of x".

( Continue for pictures… )

As a rule we don't eat fast food (now that 4000 km separate us from the nearest Dick's Drive-in), but once in a great while we develop a hankerin' that only the rectilinear patties of a Wendy's hamburger can fulfill. What really makes Wendy's unique, though, is the little corrugated packets of finely powdered salt at the condiments station. I ( Read more... )

You know someone's using far too much aftershave if you're standing on the sidewalk and you can smell it on someone driving by at 25 MPH (40 km/h).

Here's a little spatial reasoning problem you can try to solve in your head, if you haven't already seen it in real life. Suppose you have a bumper sticker on the rear window of your car. (I do; it's ( Read more... )

Alas, I must retire my bicycle for good, after a little over ten years and 15,402 miles of loyal service. On the way home yesterday evening, my front dérailleur cable snapped in two just where the cable meets the shift mechanism. (This has happened distressingly often over the past several years. I can still ride without shifting in front, but ( Read more... )

(Thanks to jillbertini for reminding me of two of the following snippets. Here, I expand on comments I made in her journal.)

An Assesment:

When you read the exclamation, "What an ass!", is your first reaction to interpret it as an insult or a compliment? It probably says something about your personality, or at least about your age ( Read more... )

Edited 11/30/05

A recent study conducted by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis concluded that about 2600 Americans die each year, and another 330,000 are injured, from the use of cell phones while driving. Assuming an average of 600 minutes of cell-phone driving per year, the excess risk of death due to using the phone was estimated to be 13 ( Read more... )

I just spotted a cell-phone-oriented meme out there somewhere, and before it rages through my Friends List like a bad case of stomach flu, I'd like to say this for the record:

I hate cell phones. Really, really hate them. I'm not joking. I detest them in a car; I detest them near and far. If I had to choose a word to describe my feelings about ( Read more... )

I really enjoy my status as a free-living organism. I'm not entirely independent-I rely on society for the basic necessities, and I greatly value my close personal relationships. Still, I can isolate myself from any manifestation of human society (apart from clothing and perhaps shelter), including the people therein, literally for hours at a ( Read more... )