Mysteries

This post is going to cover three different mysteries. These are things I have wondered about, and want to know the answers to, but that I have yet to understand.

Anyone who can help me with the answers to any of these things will earn my eternal gratitude, and a link here to their website if desired. Obviously that means I will update the post with new information as it arrives. As with all things, you can reach me if you try, despite comments being off here.

Oh, for all images here, click to see a larger version.

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MYSTERY 1 - Strange marks in highway pavement in the USA
SOLVED! SOLVED! SOLVED!

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Here's a picture taken on I-5 in Northern CA, on a trip to Vancouver:

Look at the road in front of the car. See those sets of 3 marks on each side, roughly where the wheels of the car go? Those are the mystery. Here's a closeup:

What are those things? Here's what I know so far:

• I have googled quite a bit and been unable to find a search that tells me anything.
• It appears that they happen on expansion joints (or some other linear crack in the road, perpendicular to the direction of travel).
• I have seen them in several states, mostly in I-80, but also (as above) in California on I-5.
• The spacing between groups (in the direction the cars travel on the road) can vary.
• Sometimes there are 2 groups of 4 marks instead of 2 groups of 3. No idea why. But that happens on very different roads. I have never seen groups of 4 & 3 on the same road.

This question has driven me crazy for years. I have no clue what those marks are for. The cannot be for traction (like rain grooves) and I can't see why you'd need them across expansion joints.

Mystery 1 has an answer! Readers K and P (possible links still coming) tell me these marks are made as part of a 'dowel bar retrofit', which is a mechanism used to reinforce cracks in highway concrete. Here's a Wikipedia article about the technique.

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MYSTERY 2 - Wood, round, antenna structures west of Richmond, BC

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On our regular dog walks along the dyke on the western edge of Richmond, BC, we see odd, round structures, apparently made of wood. There are several of them, well spaced out. Here's one, from afar, and zoomed in. (The zoom'd image is blurry... sorry.)

And here is a shot showing several of these things off to the south:

And finally, here is a captured image from Google Maps, where I have measured the distance between these things. The points on the white line show their locations.

And here's what I know (it's not much):

• They appear to be made of wood, and have no apparent electrical connections.
• They face South West. (Bring up google maps for Richmond, BC, switch to satellite mode, and zoom in to confirm that yourself. You can see them in some detail there.)
• The spacing between them isn't regular. (See map above.)
• They are in a straight line running very close to due North/South, as far as I can tell. (Again, see map above.) It is just possible that they do not run perfectly North/South, but from the level of detail I have, it's hard to know.
• And once more, Google has let me down on finding more details.

That's it. I know nothing more.

Mystery 2 has been solved. It prompted a lot of discussion on Facebook and in email, and many people participated in the conversation. K suggested these are navigation markers for ships, and looked at some nautical charts but didn't find them specifically. I found them in openseamap.org, but couldn't find the description of the actual things I found. J found the actual information about the chart annotation that resolved it, along with the formal description of the item type - "Daybeacons" - which says: "Generally, daybeacons are unlighted aids used primarily to assist the mariner during daylight hours" and goes on with other information that makes it clear that these things off the coast of Richmond are there to keep ships out of trouble. Thanks to the many people who looked into this and helped find the definitive answer! It was really fun to get it worked out.

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MYSTERY 3 - The scanner that stopped working in Ubuntu Linux 16.04
SOLVED! SOLVED! SOLVED!

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No pictures for this one, I'm afraid, but I wrote it all up in great detail in a post on the Ubuntu Forums here:

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2369422

In short, I updated my OS and everything works (as far as I know) except the scanner. And the failure mode of the scanner is really, really odd. It's as if the bus ID and device ID that were in use for the scanner in the previous version of the OS were saved somewhere, but after the OS update everything got renumbered. When software to find the scanner is run as a regular user, the scanner cannot be found. When the same software is run as root, it does find the scanner (apparently).

As with the other mysteries, Google has not revealed a solution so far.

Mystery 3 has been solved. Without going into too much detail, there was a permissions problem because of changes introduced in Ubuntu Linux between 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS. I, personally, got the problem about 95% solved, but thanks to confusing and inaccurate documentation, I missed a bit of syntax that kept it from working. A good friend (John M.) pointed that last issue out, and suddenly everything works again. I think someone at Ubuntu needs a kick in the head for this, but such is life. The scanner works, and that is all that matters for now. Anyone wanting all the details can read this thread: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2369422 wherein I document the entire mess.

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And that's it. Fame* and fortune** await the people who help me understand these things. Consider it a challenge, please!

Footnotes:
* "Fame" defined as a link to your website, if you want it.
** This is a lie. There will be no fortune for anyone who helps. Sorry.

It appears humans really are all the same

There's an old saying:

If it bleeds, it leads.

According to the internet (and specifically this site), that phrase was first used in an article in the New York Magazine in 1989. I guess it's not really that old then, but it sure feels that way.

It happens that I don't get the New York Magazine. It also happens that I only get one dead tree edition of anything, and that's Science News, a publication where that journalistic philosophy doesn't apply.

But I do read the news online, using Google News as my aggregator. When we moved to Vancouver I adjusted my feed. Google News tracks what you read and click on to build things, but it also lets you pick places you are interested in, and I am pretty sure it also taps your physical location as well.

The current political situation in the US is such a disaster that I can't stop clicking on articles about the latest idiocy committed by the orange menace and his rabid followers, so my feed still has a lot of US based news in it. With luck that will drop over time, possibly because of an impeachment. If that happens, the feed should naturally shift towards more Canadian news.

However, tying this post back to the introduction, Canada suffers from "If it bleeds, it leads" syndrome just as much as the US does. There is a difference, though: Canada has a lot less violence overall, and only about 10% of the population of the US. As a result, the news media here has to go farther afield to find blood, but they do it.

Every morning in the local sections about Vancouver and Richmond, I scan headlines about bodies found, gun shots, accidents, and so on. These are local news sources, and there probably isn't that much local news every day, so they fill their pages with whatever they can get. Blood first, though.

Sadly the national news does the same thing. I read about violence in Victoria, murders in Manitoba, and serial killers in Saskatoon. (Yes, some - ok, a lot of - liberties were taken with the truth in that sentence, but I like it.)

It's actually rather depressing, but reality is a bit different from what you might think (and in particular from what the idiotic minion in charge of the US Justice Department wants you to believe):

• In 2015, the murder rate in the US was 4.88 per 100,000 people. Wikipedia puts that at 94 out of 219 countries. There are 93 countries with higher murder rates.
• In 2014, the murder rate in Canada as 1.68 per 100,000 people, and the same article puts that at position 158 out of 219.
• Due to the population difference, the actual numbers are starkly different: there were 15,696 murders in the US in 2015, and 604 in Canada in 2014.
• Violent crime rates in the US - and, indeed, just about all crime there - have been steadily declining for 20+ years now.
• Similarly, crime rates in Canada are mostly dropping as well.

Despite all of that - actual information! - people in both the US and Canada believe they are always in danger, and worry about highly unlikely events for no reason at all. And in both countries it plays into the hands of politicians wanting power to exaggerate those fears.

I'm tired of that.

In the US the deluge of crime and bad news - due simply to population size - means that if you live in Florida you probably don't read about murders in Oregon unless something really awful happened. And in big cities you don't read about every murder that happens just for lack of space in publications to document them. (Again that is due to population size, not overall crime rates.) So while"if it bleeds, it leads" is still true, there is other news on the front page, at least some of the time.

Here in Canada, though, we read about every murder, shooting, major accidents, and so on all over the country. The simple act of listing them all out in headlines can make you think that crime and death are rampant. It's actually a bit depressing.

I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this. I mean, the political headlines from the US are depressing enough, but add in the major crimes in cities 3000 miles away, and suddenly the news is just an awful read. I don't have any answers yet, but I am open to suggestions.

And yes, it really is safe here. It's lovely, and safe. Just avoid the news.

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Note: This is a secret post. That is, I am not emailing an announcement about this one because I've written a lot of posts lately, and sent email about them. I don't want to drive people getting those emails nuts. This will get announced on FB, and on G+. And I need to think about twitter too, I guess... hmmm. But I won't email the announcement list. If you find this post you are thus a member of a very select club. Congratulations. Being a member gets you absolutely nothing, but you're in. Yay! You can join the club by getting in touch - email, DM on FB, telegram, phone call(!), whatever - and giving me an email address where you'd like to receive notices of new posts. Once school starts I'll almost certainly post less often, so you shouldn't get flooded with email. Thanks!

For those that follow this blog... I post on G+ too

Just a quick note...

I generally use this blog for posting longer thoughts and more complicated things.  Stuff where reading - and space - are required.

I've had a few exchanges lately that tell me at least a few readers here appreciate what I do.  Thank you!

If you want to see more from me - shorter stuff, mostly links to news articles and other blogs I find interesting, sometimes with comments, you can find me on Google+.  Specifically here:

https://plus.google.com/104648792622184339761/posts

Just about everything I post over there is public, so no G+ account is required.  You go take a peek and see whether I am equally interesting (or offensive) over there.

If you like it, I encourage you to consider joining the G+ community.  I have found it to be a lot more issue (and/or interest) oriented that other social media platforms.  I get a lot of good news about politics and science over there, and a lot less of the mundane stuff that shows up other social media platforms.  For me, that's a good thing.  Of course, your mileage may vary.

Also note that the quality of the G+ experience is completely determined by the quality of those you follow (the G+ term is "circle") over there.  You need to circle people with interests similar to yours, or who post articles you find interesting or useful in some way.  In all likelihood these will be people you don't personally know.  That's OK.  In fact it's good. It's the way G+ works.  Give it a shot if you are interested.  I hope you like it.  And feel free to circle me if you like.  No worries if you do or don't - just trying to share what I do if you're interested.

Initial Experience with Google's Chrome Browser for Linux

Yesterday I installed the first generally available beta release of the Chrome browser for Linux. Initially it seemed OK, and a friend asked for a review, so here it is. Sadly, however, I am back to using FireFox. Chrome isn't ready to displace FireFox yet. At least not for me. Maybe someday.

The issues I encountered include:

• There is no "Open All in Tabs" option in the bookmark menus. This may just be something I do, but every morning I use:
        Bookmarks | morning links | open all in tabs
  to bring up at least a dozen web sites that I read while I wake up and get ready to face the day.  I find it handy to have that ability, but that feature is not present on Chrome.  For me, while this isn't a deal breaker, it does make it less likely I'll stay with the browser.
  
  
• Java didn't work for me at installation.  Javascript is fine, I think, but Java is dead. Chrome attempted to pull all of the configuration information from my FireFox installation, but apparently there is something about the Java config on my Linux machine (running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and FireFox 3.0.15) that it didn't understand or like.  I posted this problem to the Google Chrome Help forum and so far the only response has been several other people saying they have the same issue.  Maybe there is a fix for this, but if so I don't yet know it.  For now, this is a serious issue.
  
  
• This isn't a big deal, but there isn't as much control over fonts with Chrome as there is with FireFox.  That's a blessing and a curse, of course.  It's easy to screw up someone's CSS based website by telling FireFox that sites cannot override your font choices and/or selecting font sizes different from those the site expects, but I live with it and make use of it regularly.  I could live with what Chrome offers, but it's an irritant.
  
  
• I cannot yet tell if Chrome is actually faster or more stable than FireFox.  My network connection isn't stellar, so delays are often the result of that rather than anything going on in the browser.  Plus, one of the major speed ups is supposed to be the way it runs local scripts, but Java isn't working, so...
  
  
• I cannot get Chrome to display PDF files in the browser.  This is a significant problem, and once again FireFox handles it just fine.  If a link points to a PDF file FireFox opens it up in Acrobat (which I installed myself a long time ago, and whose configuration Chrome should have imported).  When this happens I get the Acrobat tool bar inside the browser window and can look at the document.  Sadly, however, Chrome just downloads the PDF file and then stares at me.  I was able to right click and save a copy of the PDF, but that's not as useful as viewing the document in the browser in many cases.  For me, Chrome for Linux strikes out there.  That said it's still a beta, and there might be something odd about my Linux install that keeps it from working out of the box.  Still, this is a problem I cannot work around.
  
  
• At least one site doesn't work with Chrome that I know of, and my testing is pretty limited in that regard so far.  Now, I admit the site - a registration site for a non-profit I am affiliated with - is not setup to deal with FireFox all that well either, but it generates PDF files in some cases, and that breaks down as mentioned above.  Beyond that, however, after encountering the PDF load failure I was unable to get Chrome to download the PDF for external viewing.  It might have been user error, but it bugged me.  I had to switch back to FireFox to check on something because of it.
  
  
• Finally, they've done some odd things with a menu and the way new tabs are opened up.  I think they've missed the UI boat as a result.  First, the menu issue: in FireFox if I put the cursor over a link and right click the top two menu choices are "Open in a New Window" followed by "Open in a New Tab" in that order.  Chrome reverses those menu options, so I was perpetually opening new windows with it when I meant to open new tabs.  That's an irritation that I could get over, though.  Yes, it's different, but yes, the most common option should be first.  And I suspect most of us actually open more things in tabs than windows these days.  With time I am sure it would become natural.
  
  It's what happens when I actually manage to get a new tab to open, though, that bugs me.  Say you're in FireFox and have 3 pages open, in tab1, tab2, and tab3.  You're currently viewing tab2 and you open two more pages (in tab4 & tab5) via the right click, "open in new tab" menu option.  When you're done you wind up with tabs arranged like this:
  
  tab1  tab2*  tab3  tab4  tab5
  
  (Tab2 is starred because it is the current tab.)  And that arrangement makes logical sense.  New tabs open on the rightmost end of the list, and they open in the order I make it happen.  If you do the exact same thing in Chrome for Linux, though, you get this arrangement:
  
  tab1  tab2*  tab5  tab4  tab3
  
  In Chrome new tabs open immediately to the right of the tab containing the current page, and they shift all other tabs to the right in the process.  That's just wrong, at least for me.  My brain is (more or less) wired to think of things linearly.  if I open tabs I expect them to appear in the order I open them, not the reverse of that order, and I expect to find them on the end of the list for easy access.
  
  I'm afraid Google just got this one wrong.  The FireFox behavior here is actually the right one.  As with some of these other issues, though, it is something I could probably live with given time.

That's the list of issues so far, and it's enough to have moved me back to FireFox for the forseeable future.  I'll look at later betas of Chrome and see if it improves, but for now I have to say there are a couple of serious issues and a number of nits that bug me.  It's not worth changing.

Google gets a lot of things right in my view, but not with Chrome for Linux.  At least not yet.