NeverLost Room for Improvement
Another trip, another day's experience with the Hertz NeverLost GPS system. This system may be a lot better than what Avis has to offer, but it's not that good.
The GPS is not military-grade or survey-grade and so the location accuracy could be better. Occasionally this is a slight problem when determining when to turn (which is really the fundamental thing that you need the GPS to tell you). However, GPS accuracy is really the least of the problems.
Sometimes the maps don't show minor roads, and they never have any information on roads-that-aren't-roads, like shopping center parking lots or long hotel driveways.
In one egregious example on this trip, the map database knew about a highway but not about the on-ramp to the highway. As a result the feminine voice was telling me to make a
left turn when it should have been telling me to make a
right turn (onto an on-ramp which would loop around 180 degrees).
In another egregious example, when I was trying to reach a small company, located in a little industrial park, the GPS kept telling me that my destination was on the other side of the street from the little industrial park. I can't even explain why this would be except to say that the address database sucks.
On previous trips I've had a hard time finding exactly where a restaurant was located inside a hotel/shopping complex.
The "Yellow Pages" database contains few businesses other than restaurants.
There are separate databases, e.g. "Yellow Pages" and "AAA Tourbook", and they are not integrated. Your hotel might be listed in one database but not in the other. Good luck.
The task of finding destinations by name is horrible. Destinations with long names don't fit on the screen and are truncated. You may not be able to find your hotel if you're looking for the "Marriott" when your reservation is actually with the "Courtyard by Marriott". A pen-based system would be better than the keypad system.
Without delicate volume management, it's hard to listen to the GPS and the radio at the same time. The GPS and the radio should be integrated.
The "forward-looking" view which illustrates an upcoming turn is useless. The 2D overhead view conveys all the information that the forward-looking one does, and more, especially the location of the car relative to the turn, which is perhaps the most important piece of information.
Bottom Line: The product has major flaws which mostly have little to do with fundamental limits of the technology. If personal GPS were a personal computer, we would still be somewhere at the TRS-80 level. There is a giant opportunity for someone to make the GPS Macintosh.
Google Narcissism
Great. Now I have to worry not only about my
Google ranking but also about my
Google Scholar ranking.
Signed, Depends on Google for Sense of Self-Worth
Remembrance of Avocado Lust
Julie reminds me of the days of Avocado Lust.
Caltech has a student-run food joint called the Coffeehouse. At one point in the middle-nineties I was hooked on a milkshake they had called Avocado Lust.(*) It was green, thanks to food coloring, and featured chocolate and maraschino cherries. It was very tasty.
A year or two goes by, undergraduates graduate (while I with true-fix'd and resting quality remain as constant as the Northern Star), and get this:
They lost the recipe! They forgot how to make it!
A cautionary tale for us all. Things that are known can become unknown.
(*) contains no avocado
Polytheism in Los Angeles
On the radio this morning they spoke with a man whose house is in imminent danger of being buried under mud. Over past weeks of rain the hillside behind the house has slid day by day, inch by inch into his back yard. His house has been "yellow tagged" and he can no longer be in it except during daylight hours. His neighbor's house has been "red tagged" and cannot be occupied at all.
He said, For months I prayed to God that the house would be saved. But then I realized, you know, it's not up to God. Mother Nature's just going to do what she's going to do. You can't fight Mother Nature.
4-Wheel & Off-Road
We took Golems 1 and 2 to see the friendly editors at
4-Wheel & Off-Road Magazine. They spoke of skid plates and run-flats and other accessories to get the babies ready for Baja.
Riding in Golem 2 continues to be a jolting experience as it bounces like a kangaroo on the highway. Possibly it will be better once we get some weight in the bed.
Bloody Cod and Potatoes
We made Emma's Cod and Potatoes tonight, and it was good (we used black cod, also known as sablefish) but when I was slicing up the potatoes with the mandolin, with my usual dexterity I cut my thumb and proceeded to bleed over everything. There was blood in the sink, blood in the bowl, blood on my sweater, blood on the floor, blood on the walls.
I'm really not sure how blood got on the walls. Maybe I have high blood pressure.
The kitchen looked like a crime scene. I'm glad we didn't have any violent crimes tonight or I might have created some confusing physical evidence.
Golem 2
We took Golem 2 (a 2005 Dodge Ram 2500) out to the desert for the first time yesterday.
I can report that the ride in the backseat was pretty rough and annoying. Maybe the ride in Golem 1's backseat would be equally bad, if Golem 1 had a backseat. But Jim (in Golem 1 front seat) actually commented on how relatively smooth the ride was, down a rough dirt road.
So, based on one day's experience, I'm not sure I would buy or recommend buying a Dodge Ram, if you are concerned about human passengers, which I guess is a secondary issue in my particular case.
Campus Police
I got pulled over in the robot truck by the UCLA police yesterday.
If there's one thing that I'm gradually coming to realize, it's that
cops hate robots.
Pencil-neck geek, grit-eating freak
Today's question:
What is a geek?
More on Who Scores First
Although the team who scores first has won 26 out of 39 Superbowls, the team who scores
second has won 29 out of 39 Superbowls.
So watching for the team who scores second is a better "key marker" than watching who scores first. And that was true even before this year's game.
Take that you
Wall Street Journal dunderheads.
Superbowl Summary
So much for that "one key marker."
If it fails to hold up next year, then it will slip past the magic two-sigma mark into statistical insignificance.
Adwise, not a great year. I liked the Diet Pepsi truck ads the best, followed by the somewhat-similarly-themed Anheuser-Busch designated-driver spot. The cheesecake GoDaddy and Tabasco ads were okay.
Car ads extremely dull. Ford Mustang ads might have been okay if they hadn't shown them three times.
Absolute worst ad: MBNA. What do rugby and Gladys Knight have in common? They are appearing in a horrible commercial.
Who Scores First Wins
The Wall Street Journal reports that "one key marker" to watch in the Superbowl is who scores first, since the team that scores first has won 26 of 38 Superbowls.
That is, just barely, statistically significant at the two-sigma level.
So this may not be a very powerful predictor (although it would be very surprising if it had no predictive power at all).
Mathematical Readership
Stephen Hawking's editor advised him that every equation he put in
A Brief History of Time would reduce his readership by half. (Hawking decided to sacrifice half his audience by putting in "E=mc^2.")
If that relationship holds up, then it follows that no one in the world ever reads anything with more than 32 equations in it. Seems about right.
