Magnetblog

Ftrain Googlewhack

I know the whole Googlewhacking thing is so six months ago, but I came up with an amusing one tonight whose solitary result is a page from Ftrain: tuskophile smile.

Incidentally, my favorite piece ever from Ftrain is this one: Looking at the Numbers. Now c'mon, Paul, let's see the code for the Sitekit already.

The Physics of Baseball

Last week when I was watching the Cubs game with some friends, someone mentioned that it was nearly a physical impossibility for batters actually to hit a baseball, given how fast pitchers throw and how little time the batter has to decide whether or not to swing. I did some searching tonight, and it's true: hitting a major league fastball is nearly impossible.

I found a lot of other interesting facts, including a graphical timeline of the path the ball takes from the pitcher's hand to the bat. (I found that image from a page full of great links, most of which I haven't had time to look at.) Quantifying everything makes the feat of hitting the ball seem especially impressive:

The batter has about 0.5 seconds to gauge the path of a pitch, and the bat must be at the right place [within about 1 cm] at the right time [within 0.01 seconds] to make solid contact.  The bat-ball collision lasts typically for 0.001 seconds, and the average force on this ball is of order 10,000 Newtons, corresponding to a mass of about 1000 kg [or a ton].

Some of the facts I found really do seem unbelievable, such as this description of how the bat and ball distort on contact:

The batter exerts some 6000-8000 pounds of force on the ball. This force is required to change a 5 1/8th ounce ball from a speed of 90 mph to a speed of 110 mph. This distorts the baseball to half its original diameter and the bat is compressed one fiftieth of it's size.

Half its original diameter? I don't know if I buy that, but at least reading statistics like this makes me feel marginally better about the obscene salaries that top-notch players get.

I <3 XML/XSL and CSS

I am falling in love with various markup languages today, thanks to the W3C's CSS reference and the XSL reference I posted about a few days ago. I'm working on a bunch of reports for work, and the raw report data gets spit out in XML format. Right now I'm using CSS and XSL transformations to spit out a bunch of different report formats, and, let me tell you, I never really *got* why these technologies were so wonderful until now. I mean, I got it - separation of style from content, yadda yadda yadda - but actually using the stuff on such a large scale instead of just on some personal project really drives the point home. So wonderful!

Color Scheme Chooser

Wow, this is a great tool for helping people like me pick color schemes for websites. By "people like me", I mean people who are programmers first and formost, but who like to pretend like they're designers from time to time. Don't forget to play with the brightness / saturation sliders on the right. [via kottke]

Nice XML/XSL Reference Site

Zvon.org looks like a pretty useful reference site for XML/XSL. I haven't looked through the whole site yet, but definitely found the XSL Reference to be really good.

SUV's

This link is too funny: Blingin' It With Your New SUV. I hate people who own SUV's and only use them to drive back and forth to work and the grocery store. I just don't understand - do they really have so much money that they like throwing an extra $100 a week into the gas tank? Does it make them feel better to know that if they get in an accident with me, they'll definitely kill me, as opposed to just maybe killing me? Do they really find that they need the ability to scale an 8" wall during the course of their everyday driving? And, seriously, I have seen H2's at work parked in the compact spaces. Please.

iTunes for Windows

Just some random thoughts on iTunes for Windows:

1. Why does everyone think that just because there are already some legitimate music services for Windows, iTunes is too late to suceed? Sure, there's buymusic.com and the MusicMatch music store, but those services have yet to develop a following at all. The iTunes store has been selling 600,000 songs/week up to this point (10 million songs since late April), which is a number none of the current Windows services have been able to touch. Too late? Bah, I say!
2. Of all the complaints you could have about iTunes for Windows, an unintuitive user interface is not one of them. Maybe the redraw rate is sluggish, and it's too bad that the AAC format songs don't work with your Nomad, but if you can't figure out how to navigate the iTunes UI, then you've got much bigger problems. iTunes has to be the best app I've ever used in terms of having a UI that's solid and easy to understand.

Up With AIDS!

I think it is absolutley unbelievable that the Catholic Church can seriously claim that condoms don't help protect against HIV. I also can't believe that some people can argue that, because condoms aren't 100% effective in blocking the transmission of HIV, the Catholic Church's statement is defensible.

The bottom line is that AIDS has become a global epidemic, threatening to eliminate almost 2 billion lives over the next 50 years. Though condons aren't 100% effective, they're definitely more effective than not using any protection - over 90% effective by the most conservative studies. The fact that the Catholic Church is issuing any statements that might make people doubt condoms' effectiveness is completely indefensible. For the Vatican, a body with such power to influence the decisions people make in so many countries, to encourage behavior that would put millions of lives at risk is completely mind-boggling to me. I don't care if God is against pre-marital sex (or casual sex, or sex solely for pleasure, or whatever); I'd like to think that He would do whatever was necessary to save the lives of millions of His followers.

The Catholic Church is really on a roll lately - condemning gay marriage, protecting pedophiles, encouraging the spread of AIDS... If the Church is supposed to be such a beacon of morality, I'd hate to see what the heathens are preaching right now.

Color Blender

Eric Meyer created a really useful tool for blending colors and getting the resulting hex codes. It's great when you have a color you'd like to use, but you need something a little lighter or darker - just take that color and blend it with white or black, respectively.

Go nuts, kids. The web-safe color palette is dead, anyways.

iTunes AppleScripts

And iTunes AppleScripts!

I've just started looking through the site, but it looks to have tons of cool ideas, from searching Google for album art to automatically deleting the currently-playing track from your library and your hard drive.