Tony Yarusso's Blog

So I had a thought recently, which seems like it may actually be useful. You may have heard the stories about ISPs inserting ads into every page their users load, as a (quite despicable) way of making extra revenue. (If you haven't, read about it here and here.) While that has no place whatsoever, the same process could potentially be used for more productive things, such as Amber Alerts. Those are already covered by radio, television, and highway signs, but imagine the response level of the Digg and Slashdot effect for that sort of thing. Simply put, the internet has a lot of users. Of course, it would be silly to get an alert for a missing child in Florida if you're in Alaska or something, so the system would need to be configured to specify it's behavior based on IP geolocation, which should be trivial to implement. So, if someone went missing in Ames, Iowa, and the timing of reports filed with police indicated that it could have happened as much as 8 hours ago, then every internet user within an 8-hour driving radius could immediately begin seeing an Amber Alert notice on pages they load. The affected IP range would increase as the time "in the wild" increased. Additionally, to minimize the annoyance factor, the alert could load only on the first couple of pages for any given computer, then go away, reappear once after one hour, three hours, six hours, and twelve hours briefly as a reminder, becoming less frequent. The same sort of thing could be used for high-profile criminals who have gotten loose.

Brilliant or useless/impractical - what do you think?

So I was driving behind a cement truck the other day, and noticed something. Now most people understand that the drum rotates in order to agitate the cement mixture and keep it liquid during transport to a construction site; what I'm talking about is how that is accomplished. The mechanically easiest way to make something on the back end of a truck turn presumably would be to just hook it up to the drive axle (or whatever that piece is called), since that's exactly what it does for the rear wheels. That would make the drum turn at a rate directly related to ground speed. This clearly is a problem, as stoplights would give the mixture chances to solidify. You might think the solution would be to get away from such complications by just having a separate engine or motor running the drum, not related to that of the truck. However, my observations while following it showed this is apparently not the case. This may be due to the problems that could arise in terms of a power supply or fuel source for that, being in some ways redundant. It seems the rotation of the drum is directly related to the engine speed of the truck, keeping it moving at idle and changing as the truck accelerates from a stop and goes through its gears. That's all quite well and good while on the road, and solves a number of other problems, but leaves one more that I have to ask about: Can cement trucks park, with the engine off ever other than at the end of the day after being cleaned out?

So I was thinking, fingernails are much easier to cut when they've been wet, right? While I know they're not exactly the same, I figured in some ways bones are pretty similar to nails. Now, considering our bodies are mostly water, that could potentially be important. Thankfully it's not often that we're subjected to cutting-type forces like nail clippers, but more often bones are subject to impacts and misconfiguration. Given the increased pliability of a wet nail, I wonder if that sort of effect actually makes our skeletal structure hold up to those kinds of things better than it would otherwise. If that's true, it's a pretty cool adaptation, imo. Now, given that water content in organisms came before skeletons, how do you suppose something like that would evolve? Just by chance that it happens to work well, various types of materials and keeping the one that held up, or something else? Anybody know more about bone makeup to know if they are in fact affected by water saturation? I know a fully dry bone will crack easily, but that could be from other factors as well, or a similar, but ultimately unrelated process.

Okay, fine - mild pun intended. Perhaps you've heard about the recent rapid decline in honeybee populations, first in the USA and now being reported in parts of Europe as well. If you haven't, see stories via Google. In short, farmers are checking on their bee hives, and finding that the workers are simply disappearing, leaving the queen and larvae behind, and no bodies are being found to show that they died. The reason it's a big deal is that we rely on the bees to pollinate crops, which of course become our food, so no bees means not enough food.

So, now the pondering: Has this happened before? Not necessarily bees, but any small portion of the food chain that humans rely on without thinking heavily about it. Obvious things like the potato blight don't count - I'm looking for disruptions that weren't really acknowledged directly, but had or were potentially capable of having a fairly significant impact. Must be during recorded human history. Anyone know?