Rants Posts 6–10 of 12

The Reality of Wealth Distribution in America is Not What You Think

Watch this video and decide for yourself if the current reality of wealth (not income) distribution in the U.S. is healthy and/or fair.

Delete anyone's eBay listing

I was just the victim of an eBay fraud attack which resulted not only in my eBay listing being canceled but also of the entire listing being deleted with no way for eBay to recover it.

I had listed my old iPhone and was happy to see people bid over $200 for it. The listing was eventually won by a certain shahid.quraishi. However, within 45 minutes of the auction ending, I received an email from eBay saying,

Unfortunately, we had to cancel bids and purchases for the following buyer because they're no longer registered on eBay: shahid.quraishi

What eBay didn’t mention is that they completely deleted my listing. It no longer shows up in the Selling section of My eBay and when I called eBay Support they said it was completely removed from the system with no way to get it back.

Let's Teach Kids to Code

When kids first enter primary school, they spend their time doing creative things like drawing, painting, building, and experimenting. But after those first years, the creativity stops. Dr. Resnick is working to change that. He and his team have developed new ways to help older students engage with technology in order to encourage them to create and experiment the way they did in kindergarten.

Researchers Identify the Cause of Stop-and-Go Traffic

When I commuted to Tysons from DC, I would have lots of time stuck in stop-and-go traffic to consider the reasons and causes for traffic slowdowns. It seemed that often, we’d all be slowing down and then speeding up again for no reason. I always speculated that sudden braking could cause a wave of slowdowns that would propagate backwards for hours/miles, leading to the annoying slow-down-speed-up cycle.

A team of Japanese researchers recently created an experiment to show that the effect of breaking can easily create traffic jams. It’s all just physics. Their experiment shows that when the density of cars on the road passes a certain threshold, traffic jams will be caused simply by the multi-particle interactions of the system. In layman’s terms, drivers inconsistently hitting their breaks will cause a wave of stop-and-go backups behind them.

Assume Cars Won't Stop

Our kids love going for walks in the neighborhood. We live in a nice, safe neighborhood with lots of streets but also lots of sidewalks. The kids will ride their trikes or we will push them in the stroller. It’s fun for the whole family. However there’s one thing that’s really starting to bug me, and it’s not what I would have expected: overly polite drivers.

I’ve been trying to teach Eli about looking both ways before crossing the street. When we get to an intersection, we stop and I ask Eli to look both ways for cars. If there are any cars coming, he knows to wait because he “doesn’t want to get squished.” But more and more we run into the situation where the oncoming driver, in some misguided attempt to be polite, stops to let us cross and refuses to go until we cross.

Just stopping, in itself, can be forgiven. But almost every time this happens, the scene quickly gets ridiculous: I motion them to drive on by waving them past, and they wave at me to cross, and I wave at them to say “No really, you go on”, and they stubbornly refuse, so on and so on. It would be comical if it wasn’t so ridiculous.