185 karma · joined March 11, 2008
Nor do I understand why you'd say "ouch, that hurt" while dribbling...
Permit me to plug a pet project of mine:
It's basically an online version of Hans Wehr, the de facto standard dictionary for students of Arabic. You can search by root or by word and provides form I vowelling, masadir (infinitives), broken plurals, and other useful information organized by form. I know there exist other good dictionaries out there, but I never found one I quite liked as a reference as much as I enjoyed Hans Wehr. I hope someone else finds it useful! (I've been neglecting it a bit recently, so I apologize for any bugs and for the lack of an SSL cert).
For me one of the largest (if not THE largest) factor* in bike safety is route choice, and the main factor in that for me is density and speed of car traffic. As comfortable as I feel "vehicular" cycling (e.g. cutting across lanes to take a true left turn, taking the lane to avoid the "dooring zone" along parked cars), those are the moments when I am most exposed and at risk. Likewise the safest intersections are those that do not have cars passing through!
As an example, a colleague of mine commutes from near my house to our office, and we take very different routes - him along a major artery with (mostly) protected bike lanes, me along back streets with sharrows or no bike markings at all. Even in a protected line, he has to contend with fast and constant traffic alongside him, frequent intersections where he has no protection and is even harder to see (since he's popping out from behind a line of parked cars); the intersections are constantly in use and drivers turn and accelerate faster to make smaller windows in the faster traffic. My commute along back streets is leisurely; I can ride in the middle of the street without fear of getting doored or getting overtaken at speed unexpectedly, and intersections are calm. Of course the major artery is more direct (and so perhaps slightly faster), but it's also a major designated bike route and for that reason sees a lot of bike traffic even though I think it's less safe.
Of course in denser neighborhoods and cities it may be difficult to find "back streets" with minimal car traffic and which still get to where you're going. Still, I think that should be a goal of new bike infrastructure development - I'm happy to act like a car, make turns from the correct lane, stop at red lights, signal, etc., and I don't need a protected bike lane either - a normal road with light, slow car traffic is fine. A set of these which connects the major neighborhoods in a community (e.g. running parallel to arteries but not quite in the central areas) makes for a very nice bike experience (c.f. Berkeley's bike boulevards which is naturally my inspiration here!).
So, when this article mentions the requirement of protected bike lanes on all streets, while I think that's great and I love seeing bicycling given more consideration in urban planning, I also think that it seems a little coarse. Some roads don't need to have any bike traffic at all, some roads can be wonderful for biking without any modification at all, and some roads ought to be made better for biking but in more nuanced ways (primarily traffic easing - roundabouts, narrower roadways, removing through-access, etc - that discourages car traffic without impeding bike traffic). Of course if you want to build independent bike trails (or non-grade lanes, or other more significant changes) that's wonderful too!
Other important factors IMO:
Cyclist density - everyone should bike! Probably preaching to the choir here but there's safety in numbers, drivers get used to seeing cyclists and how they behave, and it makes it easier to advocate for better infrastructure. Also relevant on a micro-level for route choice * Cycling experience/behavior - including "vehicular" maneuvers, general awareness of dangerous/risky situations and driver behavior * Lights
* Terrible MMS/group chat support (and bugs, e.g. messages showing up in previews but not in the actual channel)
* Inconsistent notifications
* Un-removable built in apps (that auto-install on first open)
I still use it but based on this thread I'm going to be following the Punkt MP02 (although $350 seems ridiculous). Or maybe at some point I'll get around to building that custom dumb phone I've always wanted...
I previously used the samsung A727 which I actually thought was great but is hard to find any more.
Along those lines, I might be able to provide some useful json (the basis for http://www.arabicreference.com) in case you are interested. I've been meaning to do some fun investigations using this data (e.g. predicting broken plurals, masadir, form I internal vowelling) but haven't yet had time.
I've always wanted a good Arabic root-based dictionary with vowelling, plurals, etc (basically Hans Wehr online). I also wanted the structured dataset for some linguistic "research".
It was a fun project - I built out a web interface for reviewing and updating entries and put in a lot of hours of manual correction (just to get all the entries to validate - I still have a lot more corrections/fixes to make...). I'm a little burnt out on it at the moment, but I plan on:
- fixing those mistakes and a few other bugs
- cleaning up the UI/display
- moving onto a "real" server framework
- writing up some blog posts about those short linguistic investigations I'd like to do now that I have the structured data
- making an API?
Notably lacking is any plan to promote it... I posted it on reddit and I'd love it if people stumble upon it and find it useful, but I did it mostly as a labor of love and something that I personally find useful!
It is annoying that support for these non-standard zips has become de-facto standard (you don't want your tool to fail where others succeed)...
Terrible modern sci-fi about easter egg MMO quest for game creator’s fortune. Childish plot/dialog, cliches everywhere (e.g. ‘L337 Hax0r Warezhouse’), absolutely atrocious, really simple puzzles. The only positive thing I can say about it is that I didn’t give up on it immediately - although I was tempted, the main plot line was at least interesting enough that I wanted to hear the end. Unfortunately the ending itself was disappointing - the final puzzle was just a rehash of the first two. My main takeaways were: I hope the ‘MMO-scifi’ subgenre is finally dead, I should wait at least 10 years for more recent sci-fi to go through quality assurance, and that it seems like based on this, anyone with a half-baked idea and enough pop-culture-nerd knowledge to sprinkle throughout 300 or so pages should be able to write a best-seller. Meanwhile, the politics/worldview it espouses is basically boingboing distilled - big corporation bad, internet is free, knowledge is free, american culture and society is dead, cyber-elite should run world, pop-media is simultaneously in control of world and source of inspiration and true creativity.
There are many patterns and forms in the broken plurals themselves which you can pick up on and learn so that you often can correctly predict new ones without memorization. For example, you give:
-liss => lusuus
And likewise, most doubled nouns of this form take the same plural:
-jadd => juduud
-hass => husuus
-hamm => humuum
Still... this is far from a hard and fast rule, and it also takes a lot of time to build familiarity and notice these patterns. It's also something that al-Kitaab (for example) doesn't ever mention.
(just explaining... not implying that you aren't aware of this)
pull your knee to your chest, quad pulls, lunges, high knees, butt kicks, shuffles, drinking birds, toe touches, karaokes, leg swings, others...
takes a little time, and sometimes looks a little funny... but is great for getting you warmed up.
Not that there isn't newsworthy stuff posted to the arXiv, and not that it isn't worthwhile, thought-provoking and fun to read these papers and these ideas - you should just have an idea of where it's coming from, and where it's likely headed...