I had a lot of fun putting together today’s comic. Anyone who likes strange charts like this should check out Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It’s long been one of my favorite books. Thank you to my friend Tina for color advice, and to my brother Ricky for some Lord of the Rings detail corrections.

Also thank you to Olga and Noam for the lovely animated version of comic #442.

When I put my book up for sale, I thought it would be neat to offer the option of a signed copy to people who ordered in the first 24 hours. It was a popular option (more popular than we expected), and some people are wondering why they took so long to get there (most should have arrived last week, the last few American copies should have arrived by now, and overseas orders will be shipping outas soon as I finish signing them).  I had put a note on the order page warning that the signed copies would take longer to ship; if anyone’s interested in why they took as long as they did, here’s the story:

The regular copies were shipped immediately, and continue to ship on time.  The people who ship the books get them out fast — orders are generally shipped within 36 hours of when we get them.  The signed books started shipping out within a few days of the initial sale, and generally arrived promptly.  The books were being printed right up to the publication date, so I didn’t actually have a large stock of them beforehand.  Since I had no idea how popular the signed copies would be, I put up a note saying that the signed books might take longer to ship, since I’d be signing them after they were ordered.  This meant they had to be shipped to me first, before going to the shipping people.  It turned out (to my delight and horror) that they were extremely popular, and we had to raise the price just to make sure there wouldn’t be more orders than I had time to sign.

Since I was going on the book tour soon after the book went up for sale, we had the bulk of the books sent out to the reddit offices in San Francisco.  For the week after my book tour, I sat up late at one of their desks signing books (and working my way through the entire run of The West Wing).  I got all those signed by the end of the week (leaving an impressive callous on my right middle finger) and left the reddit office full of boxes for FedEx.  They picked them up Monday the 28th and took them to the shipping place in Virginia.  Because of the weight, they had to go ground, so they took all of that week to go there.  Those books shipped out within 36 hours of arriving, so they should have arrived late last week.

I got back to Boston, and later that week the next set of books arrived there.  I signed a large set of those, which finished off the US orders, and they went to the distribution office for shipping out sometime last week.  For the last week, I’ve been signing boxes of mainly European orders (followed by Australia and other overseas, which take longer to ship), and I should be finishing those up in the next handful of days.  Then there’s a four-or-five day delay as they’re sent to the shipping people (too heavy to send by anything but FedEx Ground), and they’ll go out then.  I apologize to anyone whose signed books took longer than they expected to arrive.  If you have any questions or problems regarding your order, email orders@xkcd.com.

Thank you so much to everyone who ordered a book.  If you’re interested, there are some pictures of the xkcd school site in Laos over on the BreadPig blog.

Just a note: thank you to everyone who made it to the events. We raised enough money to build a school!  It’ll be in the Salavan Province, on Road No. 13 South.  We’re not going to torment the kids’ ability to learn phonetics by calling it The XKCD School, but we will be writing a dedication which will go on a plaque.  You guys made this happen — does anyone have any suggestions for what it should say?

Also, I’m currently happily hiding out for a while working on drawing and other projects, but I’ll hopefully be doing some less fundraise-y free signing events around Boston in the next month or two.  I’ll let you know once we have any places or dates!

Update: I’m finally home after a month or so of nonstop events, including several xkcd book fund-raisers/signings.  I met tons of cool people, we raised a lot of money for the EFF and Room to Read, and at one point I signed a book for a robot.  Thank you to everyone who ordered a copy, by the way!  I hope you like it.  They’re shipping out nicely, and we’re about ready to order a second printing.

The events and travel were a huge amount of fun, and I loved getting to talk to (or at) so many of you cool people.  But I’m an introvert at heart, and after doing that much socializing I feel a powerful urge to hide in my room for about a month.  At some point in my travels I seem to have picked up a cold that’s been keeping me down for a couple days, so it’s just as well that I don’t have any more events on the immediate calendar.  There’s no fever, so it’s not swine flu, but it’s keeping me awake at night and I’m going through a lot of tissues and cough medicine.  But it should blow over in a couple days, and then I’ll get to spend a while quietly working on new projects!

While I’m doing that, here’s a bit about a neat book I found recently:

Physics for Entertainment:

Physics for Entertainment was written by Yakov Perelman in the 1920’s (in Russian) and updated periodically through the 1930’s.  There are actually two parts to it, but Volume 1 is long out-of-print (though findable online — more on that later).  The book I have is a 1975 translation of Volume 2. The book is a series of a few hundred examples, no more than one or two pages each, asking a question that illustrates some idea in basic physics.

It’s neat to see what has and hasn’t changed in the last century or so.  Many of the examples he uses seem to be straight out of a modern high school physics textbook, while others were totally new to me.  And some of the answers to the questions he poses seem obvious, but others made me stop and think.  The diagram to the right shows a design for a fountain with no pump — it took me a while to get why it works.  (For an easier-to-build variant, click here.)  Later in the book, he explains the physics of that drinking bird toy.

It’s written in a fun, engaging, conversational style, as if he’s in the room chatting with you about these neat ideas.

There are a lot of diagrams:

And it’s hard not to like the guy:

“If you’ll bear with me for a moment, let’s analyze this fairy tale from a physics standpoint …”  That’s a man after my own heart.

He also spends a lot of time discussing why various perpetual-motion machines won’t work.  it’s interesting to see that there was as thriving a community of free energy people a century ago as there is now, many of their designs based on the same misapplications of physics.

Lastly, when he talks about space travel — from a pre-space-age perspective — he turns starry-eyed and poetic:

I alternate wildly between thinking that it’s totally crazy that we clawed our way up out of the atmosphere and walked on the moon, and thinking that it’s a shame that it turned out to be so boring.  But I really desperately want to see more missions to places like the Jovian moons. If it turns out one of them is teeming with life, we’re gonna feel awfully silly about how long we spent shuffling around in the Martian dust.  Also, Kepler is really exciting, putting us in a much better place to speculate about life in the galaxy.

You can get the printed Volume 2 on Amazon, while Volume 1 was supposedly unavailable for translation or reprint.  However, I mentioned this book at one of the events recently, and reader Matthias Kübel emailed me to let me know Volume 1 is available free online!  I’m looking forward to reading through it.

The xkcd book is now officially available in the store! (There are also a handful of new shirts available for preorder, and we’ve got the signed prints back in stock).

It’s been fun putting it all together.  It was neat to go back through various huge stacks of old drawings, some on the back of school assignments, and scan them at print resolution.  I also had fun with the marginal notes.  I’m really excited to finally have it in print, and I’m looking forward to seeing people and signing copies at the release events this weekend.  I’m also excited about getting back to work on some other projects which have been on hold for a bit, at least one of which will involve lakes and a recently-acquired Arduino.

P.S. Thank you so much for the help with the phone this weekend.  Through a bizarre set of exploits, I’ve gotten it unlocked without losing any data (for details, see the edits to the previous post).

Note: for anyone with a G1 with this same problem who found this entry by Googling, you don’t have to lose any data — we eventually found a workaround that doesn’t require a factory reset.  Details are at the bottom of this post.

I’ve hit the end of the flowchart, it’s 3 AM, and I’m turning to you all.

I’m at my cousin’s wedding and I’ve been locked out of my G1 phone.  I was idly playing with the screen unlock pattern (it’s fun to draw G1 unlock patterns) and it eventually said I’d made too many attempts and asked for my Google account email and password.  I typed them in.

They don’t work.  (Edit: and the username/password are correct — they work fine for logging in via the web, and they’ve worked recently in other parts of the phone.) I tried every variation on the email (it’s an @xkcd.com email, not @gmail.com) and every password I’ve ever used for anything Google-related.  It still says ‘incorrect username or password’.  It’s the middle of the night, I’m exhausted, and I was about to set my phone as an alarm clock to wake me up for the wedding.

I’ve googled around and found lots of other people with the same problem.  They seem to suggest it’s simply an Android bug, and the only solution is a factory reset of the phone.  This will lose all my app data.  Music, photos, and contact lists will be saved, but I’ll have to redownload all my apps, and I’ll lose my call history, Google Tracks, saved games, Shazam tagged songs, and a pile of text messages containing useful information and/or sentimental minimalist poems.

The phone is not a dev/rooted phone, so a few hacks I found with ADB won’t work.  Does anyone know anything else I can do, or is this an unfixable bug?  I just want my phone back.  I would really appreciate any help anyone can give.  I’ll watch here for a little bit, then find something else to use as an alarm and see if there’s a solution in the morning.

Thank you in advance.

Edit: I’ve used the bug mentioned in #28 here (thanks, Julian!) to successfully get to the home screen.  I couldn’t believe it actually worked, but it does — you can unlock the phone by getting a call and flipping the screen open and shut repeatedly while tapping ‘home’.  Now I can get into the phone by opening the keyboard, but if I just try to touch ‘menu’ it’s still locked.  This is still annoying, but I can deal with it for now (I’ll let it finish syncing and try reboots and stuff).  Thank you so much, internet.  <3

Edit #2: Thanks to Dan Egnor over at Google, I’ve gotten the last piece.  The phone was tied to my Google Apps account rather than my Google account, which have the same email address as their name (and I had tried the passwords for both, of course).  By changing the password for the Google Apps account (not the Google account), I made the phone fail to sync, which prompted me for a new password — which was then saved properly.  When the lockout screen came up next, I entered that password, and my phone is back.  So, in summary, to fix this without wiping your phone, you:

1. Get someone to call you.
2. After answering, flip the screen open and shut repeatedly, tapping the “home” button every few flips.  Eventually you’ll drop through to your home screen.  This may take a few tries.
   
3. Go into your security settings and disable the unlock pattern.  You can now bypass the lockout just by opening the keyboard.
4. Change the password on your account, which may be your Google Apps account if you have one.
5. In a few moments, your phone will fail to sync with email and prompt you for a password.  Enter the new password.
6. You can now log in with the new password.  Lock your screen, press menu to try unlocking it, and enter your new information.  This should unlock your phone.
   

There’s an xkcd book!

xkcd: volume 0 will be released in the xkcd store next week, and I’m going to some events in New York and California next weekend to celebrate the release and also help out some nonprofits.

The book contains strips chosen by me from the first 600 xkcd comics, including many of my favorites plus some which were acted out by fans or otherwise had a weird real-world effect.  The project took a little longer than expected because I went back and redid the comic selection and page layout myself.  I also reconstructed a lot of the old comics from scans (many high-res versions of early comics were missing, and others were lost in my 2007 laptop theft).  Throughout the process, I added various marginal notes and doodles.  It will be initially available in the xkcd store (and possibly later in some bookstores).

The book is being published by BreadPig, an adorable company set up by reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.  A portion of the profits go toward build a school in Laos, via the charity Room to Read.  There’s a possibility we’ll get to name the school; I wanted to name it ‘the xkcd school’ because of how confused it would make the kids who are trying to learn English phonetics, but I think they’re vetoing that idea.

We’ll be in New York on September 19th, San Francisco on September 21st, and Silicon Valley on September 22nd.  For more information on the events, check out the BreadPig announcement.  I’ll be doing some events to raise money for Room to Read and the EFF, including a Q&A where the questions are selected by reddit users.  You can add questions and vote here (hey, Reddit admins — if I bribe you with free copies of the book, will you artificially vote down the terrifying Romanian question?).

I hope to see you at the events!

Just for the hell of it, we actually threw together the site in yesterday’s comic.

http://vkcouplestesting.com/

I hope no hearts out there are broken, but it’s important to know these things.  Bots can handle thousands of connections at once, so you don’t know who else your internet partner is chatting with.  There’s nothing worse than a Turing Test coming back positive for chlamydia.

When a guy goes into the bathroom, which urinal does he pick?  Most guys are familiar with the International Choice of Urinal Protocol.  It’s discussed at length elsewhere, but the basic premise is that the first guy picks an end urinal, and every subsequent guy chooses the urinal which puts him furthest from anyone else peeing.  At least one buffer urinal is required between any two guys or Awkwardness ensues.

Let’s take a look at the efficiency of this protocol at slotting everyone into acceptable urinals.  For some numbers of urinals, this protocol leads to efficient placement.  If there are five urinals, they fill up like this:

The first two guys take the end and the third guy takes the middle one.  At this point, the urinals are jammed — no further guys can pee without Awkwardness.  But it’s pretty efficient; over 50% of the urinals are used.

On the other hand, if there are seven urinals, they don’t fill up so efficiently:

There should be room for four guys to pee without Awkwardness, but because the third guy followed the protocol and chose the middle urinal, there are no options left for the fourth guy (he presumably pees in a stall or the sink).

For eight urinals, the protocol works better:

So a row of eight urinals has a better packing efficiency than a row of seven, and a row of five is better than either.

This leads us to a question: what is the general formula for the number of guys who will fill in N urinals if they all come in one at a time and follow the urinal protocol? One could write a simple recursive program to solve it, placing one guy at a time, but there’s also a closed-form expression.  If f(n) is the number of guys who can use n urinals, f(n) for n>2 is given by:

The protocol is vulnerable to producing inefficient results for some urinal counts.  Some numbers of urinals encourage efficient packing, and others encourage sparse packing.  If you graph the packing efficiency (f(n)/n), you get this:

This means that some large numbers of urinals will pack efficiently (50%) and some inefficiently (33%).  The ‘best’ number of urinals, corresponding to the peaks of the graph, are of the form:

The worst, on the other hand, are given by:

So, if you want people to pack efficiently into your urinals, there should be 3, 5, 9, 17, or 33 of them, and if you want to take advantage of the protocol to maximize awkwardness, there should be 4, 7, 13, or 25 of them.

These calculations suggest a few other hacks.  Guys: if you enter a bathroom with an awkward number of vacant urinals in a row, rather than taking one of the end ones, you can take one a third of the way down the line.  This will break the awkward row into two optimal rows, turning a worst-case scenario into a best-case one. On the other hand, say you want to create awkwardness.  If the bathroom has an unawkward number of urinals, you can pick one a third of the way in, transforming an optimal row into two awkward rows.

And, of course, if you want to make things really awkward, I suggest printing out this article and trying to explain it to the guy peeing next to you.

Discussion question: This is obviously a male-specific issue.  Can you think of any female-specific experiences that could benefit from some mathematical analysis, experiences which — being a dude — I might be unfamiliar with?  Alignments of periods with sequences of holidays? The patterns to those playground clapping rhymes? Whatever it is that goes on at slumber parties? Post your suggestions in the comments!

Edit: The protocol may not be international, but I’m calling it that anyway for acronym reasons.

I’ll be at Connecticon in Hartford, CT this weekend!  There are some cool people there – I’ll be on a panel with the Cyanide and Happiness guys.  If you’re in the area, come say hi!  I should have mentioned Connecticon earlier, but I’ve been busy finishing up a project – more on that later!

Note: Some of the stuff in the article is no longer accurate – since then, I’ve gone back and redone the layout and comic selection myself.

This blag has been hacked.  Sorry.

As those reading by RSS may have noticed, there are ads being inserted periodically into the bottom of xkcd blag posts.  They’re hidden from the web view.  This is due to a security hole in Wordpress 2.7.x and 2.8 (and possibly others).  davean is watching packet flow and trying to figure out exactly how it happens, but in the meantime, sorry for the annoyance.  One way or another, it should be solved soon.

I just had extremely minor surgery this morning (removing a lipoma from my right arm).  I’m fine; it’s just a paranoid better-safe-than-sorry thing. But I’m writing this under the influence of the lingering anesthetics and my first-ever Vicodin.  No interesting side effects so far other than dizziness, a higher rate of typing errors, and the tendency to zoom images all the way in and stare at them for several minutes at a time.  Why *is* that cat in the ceiling, anyway?  Hello, internet.

I’ve been busy these past few weeks on a variety of things, but a quick note: I decided on a new laptop, concluding my February agonizing.  I’m replacing my Fujitsu Lifebook P1610 with a Lenovo Thinkpad x200s.  Thank you to everyone who suggested it.

My Lifebook isn’t quite dead yet (though this morning it was refusing to charge until I jabbed the power port with a mechanical pencil a few times), but three things motivated my choice.  First, I got a chance to play with a friend’s x200s and she gave a good general report of it.  Second they’re on a pretty steep sale right now (especially with the friends and family employee discount sent by a kind reader — thank you!).  And third, I finally got a G1 (my first smartphone!).  The G1 means that I have ssh and a browser in my pocket, so I don’t need my laptop to be quite so pocketable as I used to.  By the way — I’m very happy with the G1 so far.  I left Verizon to get a G1, and the T-Mobile ccoverage is actually a lot better than I was warned; so far it hasn’t been a problem at all, even on various road trips.

If you are still one of those crazy people who needs an optical drive, the x301 is basically a slightly larger x200 with an optical drive bay.  And the Toshiba R600 looks like another good option for high-end ultraportables, though I’ve never had a chance to see one in person.

P.S. The Lenovo site layout is pretty wonky — the tech spec sheets for the x200s and x301 are tricky to find.

Now that the Duke Nukem Forever project is dead (until it’s sold off and picked up by someone else), there’s a lot of renewed interest in the hilarious list of things that took less time than the Duke Nukem Forever development process.  It lists things such as the Beatles’ entire music career and World War II plus the Manhattan Project.

What struck me was that the list itself has been around a long time.  I was laughing at it years ago, and though it was updated just today, most of the items on it still date back to the original list (circa late 2005/early 2006, I think).

So I present to you — and read this carefully; it’s not a mistake — a list of things that happened since the List of Things That Have Happened Since Duke Nukem Forever Was Announced was written.

• Barack Obama announced his candidacy, slogged through the longest Presidential campaign in American history, and was elected.
• Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and wiped out much of the Gulf Coast.
• Ehud Olmert came to power in Israel, pursued a war against Lebanon, and was succeeded by Netanyahu.
• Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito have had their entire Supreme Court careers since the list was written.
• The world panicked over bird flu, calmed down, panicked over swine flu, and apparently dodged a bullet.
• The iPhone was announced, released, and developed to the point where it could make fart noises.
• Windows Vista was released, sputtered a bit, and is now reaching the end of its life cycle.

Additionally, the List of Things That Took Less Time Than the Duke Nukem Forever Development has been circulating for longer than each of these things took:

• The release of all three Lord of the Rings movies
• The painting of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel (or, will be true in a few months)
• World War I (nearly; age of list is uncertain)
• The development of Windows 95 from Windows 3.1
• The construction of the Empire State Building
• The entire run of the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers show plus the first movie.
• The premier of Firefly, its cancellation, its growth into a geek classic, and the subsequent greenlighting, filming and release of Serenity.

I think I have a Bash problem.  What follows is an actual command from my history.

cat /usr/share/dict/words | fgrep -v "'" | perl -ne 'chomp($_); @b=split(//,$_); print join("", sort(@b))." ".$_."\n";' | tee lookup.txt | perl -pe 's/^([^ ]+) .*/\1/g' | awk '{ print length, $0 }' | sort -n | awk '{$1=""; print $0}' | uniq -c | sort -nr | egrep "^[^0-9]+2 " | awk '{ print length, $0 }' | sort -n | awk '{$1=""; print $0}' | perl -pe 's/[ 0-9]//g' | xargs -i grep {} lookup.txt | perl -pe 's/[^ ]+ //g' | tail -n2

It’s just so hard to bite the bullet, admit that the problem has grown in scope, and move it to its own Perl/Python script.  (P.S. The Guinness Book is wrong.  “Conservationalists” is not a real word.)

Edit: to those who are competing in the comments to improve (shorten) the above command: when pasting code, use the <code> tag to override Wordpress quote formatting.

Joey Comeau has a new book out based on Overqualified, which has long been one of my favorite things on the internet.  He writes cover letters to companies.  They each sound businesslike enough for the first paragraph or so, and then you gradually realize you are reading something that is in no way a normal cover letter.  An excerpt from one to Nintendo:

We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she’s “damaged goods”, a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom “do you still love me?” you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.

#2 (NeoPost), #28 (Phone surveys) and #58 (MySpace) are three of my favorites.

For quite a while I’ve done a bad job of managing my email. I’m finally getting my inbox back in order, but there are still tens of thousands of messages — spanning the last year or so — that will probably go unread and unanswered for the near future. I’m going to do some sifting through, but I’ll probably end up declaring email bankruptcy. To everyone who I was a jerk to by not seeing their email, or not replying, I’m sorry. I will do better in the future.

Speaking of things I found deep in my inbox, T. Campbell told me he and Gisèle Lagacé were doing a comic for me last year, and I said I’d pass around the result. So here it is!

Raptor Awareness Day is this weekend! 200,000 attendees! I will spend it hiding in my attic with a tire iron and my Jurassic Park collection.

And lastly, Daniel Cohen tipped me off that apparently Nathan Fillion owns an electric skateboard, too!  To be honest, up until I saw that, I couldn’t name a single other person I knew of who had one.  I wonder if he’s interested in installing Li-On batteries (he says he only gets 6 or 7 miles to a charge).  It’s nice to know I’m not alone.  Although his is 30% more powerful than mine, so the odds would be against me in a race (unless he’s put off replacing the catalyzer on his port compression coil …)

Since I was a kid, I’ve been looking for the perfect way to read in bed. The ideal position would involve no sustained muscle effort, so I could just let my eyes drift shut as I read, without the book falling shut or my hand slipping or anything.  One way is to sit up against something and hold the book on your lap, but that’s not great for falling asleep.  So I usually end up reading on my side.

The problem is, you have to hold the book to see both pages, and in either case, you’re using some muscles to hold it where it is.

This has worked for most of my life, but it’s still not that ultimate relaxation.

However, I recently got a Kindle.  I was intending to use it mainly as a mobile web browser, but I’ve surprised myself by using it to read an awful lot.  And, with apologies to all the bibliophiles out there, I find the ergonomics better than a paperback.  When snacking and reading, I can lay it flat on a table without the use of a book weight to hold it opened, and when lying in bed, I don’t have to keep moving it to read.

But it’s not perfect.  There’s no way to hold it with a finger on the ‘next page’ buttons that doesn’t require a few muscles to hold it upright:

Either I work to hold my hand off the bed, or I awkwardly curl my fingers around it.  Either way, it tips over if I relax my arm, even if it’s leaning against a pillow, and I’m startled awake by this:

I started to wonder if I could do even better.  I got out of bed one night, went to the closet, and got a steel coat hanger and some pliers.  After a few minutes of twisting, I created this:

First of all, it holds the Kindle upright …

And second, it lets me lie there motionless, and turn the pages with just a tiny twitch of my thumb:

Finally, after decades of reading in bed, I have reached that stage of perfect relaxation.

I don’t do conventions very often, but I recently went to ConBust out in Northampton, MA, while visiting some friends.  While I was there, I had a guy propose something fascinating to me.  I can’t remember the guy’s name, so if he or one of his friends sees this, post your info in the comments. (Edit: it was a dude by name of Thom Howe.)

The guy Thom had an idea for a date.  He wanted to rent a cherry picker, drive it to her door, and pick her up in it.

Then, he’d drive to the beach, and get there at just the right time to watch the sun set.

Once the sun had set, he’d activate the cherry picker, they’d be lifted up above the beach …

… and they’d watch the sun set again.

Clearly, this is an excellent idea, and any girl would be lucky to see this guy Thom at her door.  But is it plausible?  How fast and how high does the cherry picker have to go?

I tried to work out the answer for him there at the table, but there was a line of people and there wasn’t time.  But when I got home, I remembered it again, and I’ve worked out the solution.

Here’s the situation:

By the time the earth has rotated through angle theta, the cherry picker will have to have climbed to height h.

After t seconds, theta in radians is:

The height of the lift above the center of the earth is:

So the height above the surface (sea level) is:

Substituting everything so far we get this expression for the height the lift needs to reach t seconds after sunset to stay even with the sun.

Now, an actual cherry picker has a maximum lift rate (I Googled some random cherry picker specs, and 0.3 m/s is a normal enough top lift rate.)  We’ll call that rate v, so the actual height of the lift will be this:

Substituting that in and solving for v, we get this:

(That’s arcsecant, not arcsecond). This equation tells us how fast the lift has to go to get from the ground to height h in time for the sunset¹.

But we can also get the answer by just trying a few different heights.  We plug it in to Google Calculator²:

2*pi*6 meters/(day*arcsec(6 meters/(radius of earth)+1))

and find that h=6 meters gives about the right speed.  So, given a standard cherry picker, he’ll get his second sunset when they’re about six meters up, 20 seconds later.

You might notice that I’m ignoring the fact that he’s not starting at sea level — he’s a couple meters above it.  This is actually pretty significant, since the sunset line accelerates upward, and it brings down his second-sunset height quite a bit.  If he got a faster lift, or used an elevator, the correction would become less necessary.  Extra credit³ for anyone who wants to derive the expression for the height of the second sunset given the lift speed and height of first sunset. For now, I recommend he dig a hole in the sand and park the lift in it, so their eyes are about at sea level⁴.

¹ Ideally, we’d solve for h, but it’s inside the arcsec and that looks like it’s probably hard. Do one of you wizards with Maple or Mathematica wanna find the result?

² If you work in one of the physical sciences and don’t use Google Calculator for all your evaluatin’, you’re missing out.  I wish there were a command-line version so I could more easily look/scroll through my history.  I know Google Calculator is largely a frontend to the unix tool units, but it’s better than units and available everywhere.

³ Redeemable for regular credit, which is not redeemable for anything.

⁴ I suggest a day when there aren’t many waves.

Since last night I’ve been obsessively connecting to Omegle.

It’s a simple site that just connects you to a random person, anonymously, for a conversation.

It feels like that scene in Fight Club where the narrator sits down next to Tyler on the plane.  Two strangers meeting, laying out their personality and sizing each other up in just a few words, with no expectations, and — thanks to anonymity — no consequences.

Except in this case, a lot of the time Tyler just screams “COCKS”, punches the narrator, and jumps out of the window.

Still, it’s fun!

For the people who wanted to know the chain of events causing the laptop problems in the last post:

1. Safe search won’t disable, and login for regular Google services is broken.  I decide it’s a cookie conflict between Google services and file a bug report with Google.
2. Google says “can’t reproduce”.  I discover that clearing private data doesn’t actually work right, and after some testing, go to file a bug with Firefox.  They ask for my version number.
3. I notice my Firefox is out-of-date, and decide that it might be a quirk of this version of Firefox+Ubuntu.  I go to upgrade Firefox in Synaptic before filing the bug.  I don’t have the notifier running and haven’t updated in a while.
4. I upgrade a package in Synaptic, but it turns out I just upgraded the meta package and not the actual package (or something.)  A more seasoned Synaptic user says “why not just run regular upgrades like a normal person?  It’ll fold Firefox into it.”  On any other day, this would have been good advice.
5. I start the upgrade.  It’s churning along nicely, and I locate my cookies file and start examining it.
6. My battery monitor disappears.  This is normal enough, actually.  I try to start it back up and get a notice about a broken configuration file.  Uh-oh.
7. My nm-applet disappears.  That’s a little stranger, but neither applet is very reliable in my ion3 setup.
8. At this point I find that my cookies file is malformed in some way, and that if I move it manually (rather than using the in-browser ‘delete cookies’) the original bug disappears.  Don’t know how that happened, but it’s solved, so I cancel the bug report with Mozilla.
9. I go to edit the cookies file in emacs, and get a message that emacs can’t start.  Uh-oh.
10. The upgrade fails with a bunch of package incompatibility messages.
11. I start to feel alarmed.  I link an apt-guru friend a screenshot of a relevant part of my Synaptic window.  He says, “one of those version numbers looks wrong.  You’re running Hardy, right?”  I am.
12. I open my sources.list (using nano, since emacs is broken.)  After a bunch of spaces at the bottom, I see something bad: A Debian repository.  I’m running Ubuntu.
13. I don’t know how I added it.  Maybe I was on the wrong system and didn’t notice the prompt.  Maybe I was trying to install one specific package from Debian (via apt, for some reason) and forgot to take it out.  I honestly don’t remember.  But since I hadn’t updated in a while, it hadn’t come up.  But now I’m in trouble.
14. I remove it, update my lists, and do a grep to see how many of my packages have upgraded to Debian versions.  750-1000 or so.  I paste the results back to some friends.  One of them looks, shakes her head, and says my system is like that guy in Star Trek after the transporter accident.
15. Over the next few days, we try pinning packages back to the Hardy version and downgrading.  There are conflicts all over and lots of ninjinuity is required.  Sometimes the system won’t boot properly, claiming kernel module problems, which turns out to be because somewhere in this process my initramfs got misconfigured.  But eventually, everything is put back in working order (except, for some strange reason, gnuplot, which refuses to install the main binary file.  I compile it from source.)
16. Watching the system boot successfully, I go to pour some milk and cereal in celebration.  I shake up the milk jug a little.  The lid is loose.  It spills all over the keyboard.  The system stops booting and the cycle of horror starts again.  (And yes, if I’d gotten a Lenovo when you all suggested it, I’d have a spill-proof keyboard with drains.  That’s my plan for the next time something horrible happens to my laptop, which should be any day now.)

1) Dvorak typists: I’m sorry if the paper I relied on has some potential flaws.  If you want to share your extensive rants on the merits of various keyboard layouts, send them to me at doctorow@boingboing.net and I’ll be sure to read them over carefully.

2) You know how sometimes trying to fix one problem causes a worse problem, which in turn causes a worse one, and so forth?  This week, I was trying to turn off SafeSearch in Google Image Search (sometimes necessary to find things¹).  In trying to turn off SafeSearch, a setting on a web form, I rendered my system unbootable². (The worst part was, everyone kept saying “oh yeah — there’s a comic about that; have you read it?”)

Any guesses as to how that happened?  I have to go for now, but I’ll include the actual chain of events in my next blog post.

¹ Like the Nate Silver Playgirl centerfold.
² I’ve finally recovered it³ via a USB boot disk and some work, but it took several days and the help of a number of wonderful hackers. Thanks you, Decklin and sneakums.
³ And then promptly spilled milk on it, so the keyboard’s been through the dishwasher and is now drying⁴ in front of the fan. This is not a happy laptop.
⁴ Nested footnotes!