https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manti_(food)#/media/File:Ouzb%...

vs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumai#/media/File:%E7%83%A7%E...

But that's also where I noticed both guotie and wonton were on the list, although guotie is basically a generic term for "potsticker." It's usually a fried jiaozi although sometimes a fried wonton is also called a guotie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

Even the London tube does pretty well by this measure.

Tiny city-states are not known for being particularly recognizable unless you've been there.

1) Take out life insurance policy.

2) Pay with credit card at McDonald's and the bar.

3) Get a bunch of speeding tickets.

4) Sell policy to a data mining firm that hopes I die soon.

5) Profit!

People like to think that cycling is popular here naturally because the country is flat and densely populated. However, it's easy to forget that during the postwar boom years, a major shift toward cars happened and it took a concerted effort of willful resistance and politically non-expedient measures to bring back the bike paths (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o). Clearly, 1897 was not the last chance the Dutch had to fix their transit system, and with the groundwork they've laid over the years, it now costs only €30 per person in funding annually! (http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2010/05/487-million-eur...)

Yet I see very little chance of this happening in California, not because cyclists lack a voice, but because we need to create more disincentives to driving. This obviously is a political no-go considering that motorists are by far the majority demographic. It's saddening, though, that there is so much willful ignorance (or apathy) with regard to how we've externalized the true cost of driving, whether it's in the form of:

- damage to the environment

- subsidy to cheap gas prices by the DoD budget (and body count) for controlling the world's oil flow

- casualties from motor vehicle accidents

- health problems resulting from sedentary lifestyles

- zoning rules that require abundant free parking to be available in communities.

We'd probably have to see gas hit $10/gallon and parking lots charge $50/day before Americans start to reconsider. (These prices are actually quite typical in European cities.)

Oddly enough, I think it's good that the Great Recession has caused a lot of Americans to reconsider their car expenses and choose to scale back their lifestyles in ways that are more healthy, safe, and environmentally friendly. I hope this trend (not the recession, of course) continues and if America can set an example of moving away from a car culture, it will do far more good around the world to discourage the growing middle class in China, India, and other developing countries from adopting the same wasteful practices.

In the meantime, though, I'll piggyback on the 40-year head start on bicycle infrastructure in the Netherlands. If I sound bitter, it's my sore legs from yesterday's 70km ride talking ;)

This was a study done by Seligman et al and is known as a psychological phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

Scarily, even mentioning this brings flashbacks of when I was part of an entire team that was ruined by it. The pattern that emerged was that a particular senior architect who had the ear of management was perceived as the 10X contributor, even though the misdirection and hostility from him reduced the rest of the team to 1/10 productivity. Most of the other developers were entirely capable but realized the complete futility of their efforts in the face of this kind of management.

http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen.html

Granted, affordable housing is in short supply in the Netherlands, while there's plenty of shipping containers considering that Rotterdam is the biggest port in Europe.

宋末，南徐州從事史祖沖之，更開密法，以圓徑一億為一丈，圓周盈數三丈一尺四寸一分五厘九毫二秒七忽，朒數三丈一尺四寸一分五厘九毫二秒六忽，正數在盈朒二限之間。密率，圓徑一百一十三，圓周三百五十五。約率，圓徑七，週二十二。 [1]

While it suggests that the value was calculated around the end of the Liu Song Dynasty (~479 CE) by Zu Chongzhi to have an upper bound of 3.1415927 and lower bound of 3.1415926, the 密法 method is not explained.

It has been thought that Zu may have used a "method of averaging days" to calculate an intermediate value between two prior known approximations of 22/7 and 157/50 [2]. Not a very satisfying result for anyone who wants to find something special in the numbers 355 and 113.

[1] https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E9%9A%8B%E6%9B%B8/%E5%8D%B71...

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=QlbzjN_5pDoC&lpg=PA34&#...

Perhaps the Metaverse will be upon us soon. Will Google take over Second Life?

In the short term, this will probably cause some breakage in certain sites that try to use Flash "transparently" and "unobtrusively" for things like LSOs, drag-and-drop, clipboard access, or cross-domain XHR. These are already problematic with Flashblock installed though -- Pandora, for instance, refuses to load and there is nothing available to click-to-play since that particular Flash object is hidden.

Hopefully this will light a fire under those sites and get them to update to the appropriate HTML5 methods of doing these things (local storage, WebSockets, etc.), just like how Java applets that were used for such things have been largely phased out. Until then, however, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them simply inform you not to use Firefox to visit.

This is a difficult problem to escape because it's one that I behaved myself into, and that it's self-reinforcing for a variety of reasons:

- When you're already on a fixed salary, the opportunity cost of spending time on being cheap is not obvious. You're not taking time away from that $500/hr side consulting gig that you don't have. Instead, you're at a situation where the marginal rate of return on clipping coupons (say, $10/hr) is significantly better than spending the next hour working on that iPhone app that is months from release and has no interested buyers (how long is it going to take to recoup the Apple developer fee?).

- Some people get a rush out of saving money, a feeling of "Ha! I beat the system." To them, saving money is a form of entertainment [1], and there's certainly far worse hobbies to have from a well-being perspective. Unfortunately, there are people who take this too far and end up as total misers or compulsive hoarders. I'm not a pathological case, but I've done things that would make some people cringe.

- Seeing people successfully live frugally can be a motivator to follow in their path. My parents are immigrants who worked hard and saved for 20 years before they were finally able to afford a house in an expensive neighborhood (and nearly paid for it all in cash). They drive Toyotas, shop at Costco, and cook at home. They are basically the epitome of the "millionaire next door" [2].

- There's also a moral justification for this. "Why do I have to keep up with my spendthrift neighbors? So what if I don't drive a Maserati or carry a Hermès bag? No thanks, I shall be comfortable in my own skin, since envy and greed are evil." This is now an identity statement [3], and while it's a good position to take from a financial perspective, it can be crippling in the way it makes some people closed-minded. Of course, this doesn't necessarily stop them from pontificating about retirement at 30.

I do still think that my years of being cheap are starting to pay off, mostly because I'm finally getting comfortable with the sort of "discretionary" expenses you mentioned in your post. The difference is that it probably took a much larger bank balance for me to consider them "affordable." I just flew across the continent purely on a whim to visit some friends that I hadn't seen in years, I no longer cringe at expensive bar tabs if they were time well spent with buddies, I can afford to make an impulse electronics purchase just to see what it's like, and I'm preparing for that self-funded sabbatical [4] to reboot my life.

Was it worth it? Well, it was really, really hard to re-orient myself this way, and it took much more sacrifice than necessary, but the good news is that aside from lost time, most of the rest hopefully can be recovered.

[1] http://www.budgetsaresexy.com/2009/08/saving-money-trumps-se...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/d...

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

[4] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000076.html

All too often I've come across code that started out by assuming a spherical Earth (wrong!) or trying to compensate by multiplying by a factor to adjust for the oblation (still wrong!). Doing this calculation accurately is very much non-trivial and still a topic of active research in geodesy.

Fortunately, there's libraries to do the hard work for you:

http://earth-info.nga.mil/GandG/geotrans/

http://geographiclib.sourceforge.net/