Some Blog Site

I’ve seen the internet grow and change, almost from the beginning (read the whole post for context). And it continues to grow and change.

I’ve also seen my kids grow and change, from the beginning. And they continue to grow and change.

With humans, there is a known growth and development process. Imma gonna list the typical stages of growth of a person, and then compare it to the internet.

Human developmental stages, according to Erik Erikson

• Infancy : Birth to 18 months – A strong, positive and loving connection is established between a mother and her infant during this period.
• Early Childhood : 18 months to 3 years – Children learn to become more independent and develop a sense of personal control.
• Play Stage : 3 to 5 years – children become more observant of their environment and the people surrounding them.
• School Age : 5 to 12 years – Children begin to expand their world to include more people. Children at this stage have a need to be productive and experience a sense of accomplishment.
• Adolescence : 12 to 18 years – Adolescence is a complex stage as individuals search for a sense of identity. Acts of rebellion and withdrawal may occur.
• Young Adulthood : 18 to 35 years – Young adults actively seek out love and companionship in this socially active stage. Some young adults may wish to start a family, others may wish to embark on adventures.
• Middle Adulthood : 35 to 65 years – Significant importance is placed on work and family matters. Significant life changes can develop during this time.
• Maturity : 65 years to death – Individuals tend to reflect upon their lives at this stage. Some adults may look back with a sense of fulfillment and happiness. Others at this stage may feel regret, despair and a sense of failure.

Ok, that was for a human. Now let’s move to the internet, which is really just interactions of people remotely.

Internet developmental stages, according to Some Guy

• Infancy : 1965-1982. ARPA – Network users learn to interact remotely, proving out technical concepts
• Early Childhood : 1982-1993. BBS – Users learn to interact socially
• Play Stage : 1993-1998. WWW – Users experiment with presenting information to the world
• School Age : 1998-2008. Search Engines – Users find ways to organize information
• Adolescence : 2008-2014. Mobile – A new frontier opens up, with new freedoms and little responsibility.
• Young Adulthood : 2014-2020. Social media – Users present and are presented with round-the-clock updates, banding together sometimes, othertimes isolating themselves.
• Middle Adulthood : 2020-???. Whatever now is – People decide to focus on either real life or online life.
• Maturity : ???-x. Whatever the future is. Not sure how long it will be, but it’s the final stage, so whatever was birthed in the previous stage or two should be in adulthood by this time.

There, that’s my 5-minute delve into that topic. For more in-depth analysis, find someone who needs a thesis topic on societal development. Or read the Foundation series by Asimov.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• There is the phrase “standing water”. But to me it looks like the water is sitting. How can you tell if water is sitting or standing?
• All store-label chocolate milk around here seems to be made with skim milk, and it’s the cheapest chocolate milk, but you get what you pay for. If you want stuff that actually tastes good, check that’s it’s whole-milk chocolate milk. We buy the stuff from local dairy, which our grocery store is kind enough to stock on their shelves.
• What did Water do to get kicked out of the band Earth Wind and Fire?
• When I’m not drinking milk – or water, or orange juice – I like iced tea. But the flavors vary with the brands. For instance, I prefer Pure Leaf raspberry tea but their peach tea is not so good. And Snapple has good peach tea but not so good raspberry tea.
• With animal testing not so popular anymore, what is the modern equivalent of a guinea pig? Like what do kids these days call someone who is the test subject?

We try to keep our freezer stocked with enough ice cream so that we don’t run out. It would not be as big as tragedy as if we ran out of milk, but it’s close.

As part of that, we try various flavors of ice cream. One of the recent flavors was Waffle Cone, by Breyers. One of the things that helped put Breyers on the map was their commitment to quality ingredients.

So it came as no surprise that their waffle cone ice cream did not contain any fake waffle cone pieces.

At first, I thought Waffle Cone might be trademarked, but I could see no trademark indication.

Then I looked at the ingredients, and for the waffle cone pieces section it contained things you’d expect – flour and such.

Now I am curious as to how one makes a fake waffle cone.

Or maybe the 100% real part is supposed to apply to the fudge?

Also note: this was not actually ice cream. See how it says FROZEN DAIRY DESSERT near the bottom of the container? That is Breyers admitting it’s not real ice cream. Maybe that’s why they promote the REAL WAFFLE CONE PIECES, so as to distract you from the low-quality ice cream.

At first, all of their ice cream was real ice cream. Now it seems that most of their offerings are frozen dairy desserts and not many are actual ice cream anymore.

Thanks to a comic I saw on Dry Bar Comedy, I was inspired to find my actual skin color. If I remember correctly, he went to the store and got paint sample cards and figured out that he was the color “Chocolate Decadence”.

So of course I went to the store and grabbed some paint sample cards. It was a little awkward holding my arm up in front of the display case, but I grabbed some of the closest shades I saw and now I get to share the results with you.

One of the problems I encountered was that I did that in February, which in Michigan is the season of least melanin as it’s near the end of winter. I decided then to wait on the results until after I could redo this experiment after summer sun exposure.

Another problem I encountered was that my arms have two skin tones – the top side that gets more exposure to sunlight and the under side that stays lighter.

Another problem I encountered was that my skin is not an even tone. There are all sorts of variations and freckles and such, so this is kind of a subjective eyeballing result.

Final problem is that this was not a controlled experiment. For example, the winter paint samples were from Lowes but the summer paint samples were from Home Depot. And the winter photos were taken with an iPhone 5 but the summer photos were taken with an iPhone 7.

First up: winter arm top:

Photos aren’t clear, so it’s hard to read the names. But in this case it looks like the closest to my skin tone is Quaint Peche. Or maybe Mellow Coral.

Next up: winter arm bottom:

I’d say my palm is Indulgent Peach and my forearm is either Coral Perfection or Pink Glamour. I like the sound of Coral Perfection better, but if I had to narrow down the colors to the one best option, it would be Pink Glamour.

Next up: summer arm top:

My vote on this one is Terra Cotta Clay.

Next up: summer arm bottom:

I liked the color of Sunset Drive but it was too bright. I thought Nairobi Dusk had the right feel to it but was too dark. So what I’d like to do is mix 50/50 Nairobi Dusk and Sunset Drive.

I’m not sure how to conclude this blog post, other than maybe since there are so many colors I am, I think I can just pick the one I like best, or make one up, or just say “it depends”.

What color am I? I self-identify as Coral Peach Salmon.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• I imagine that in the future, the phrase “in a crowded theater” won’t make sense to a lot of people.
• An “adverb” is a word that modifies a verb. Why isn’t a word that modifies a noun called an “adnoun”? The “jective” part of adjective makes no sense.
• To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher: being a Christian is like being a lady – if you have to tell someone you are, you aren’t.
• It’s a bad idea to give magazine subscriptions as gifts. Sure, it’s nice at first, but when renewal time comes around it never goes well.
• They should go ahead already and change the official name of Myanmar to Myanmar Formerly Burma. It’s always written as such in any articles these days anyway.

Fun fact: I remember writing a report back in elementary school on a country, and I chose Burma for some reason. Got most of my information out of the World Book Encyclopedia we had.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• When your wife asks “What do you think I am?” – it’s a rhetorical question.
• Since my wife is usually the one I text, after I text someone who is not my wife, I must remember to get out of that text thread and get back to the list of contacts. Otherwise I start typing and hit send before realizing it’s not to her. Last time I did that, I asked my brother if I needed to stop at the grocery store after work. He didn’t know.
• I asked my wife to reserve an item for me at the library. She did, and told me “Ok, you’re queued.” To which I replied (in my best Rudolph voice) “I’m queued! I’m queued! She said I’m queued!” She then rolled her eyes.
• Customer service is trying various methods of being contacted. I usually opt for the voice call, but Some Wife tried the customer service via text messaging. I forget what the problem was, but the customer service rep’s response was a corporate script and not very helpful. So Some Wife sent her reply, which ended in an eye-roll emoji. I wonder if being able to receive emojis from customers now helps the reps to do their job.
• The Bible verse where Paul says he doesn’t do what he wants to do and does do what he doesn’t want to do makes a lot of sense if you frame it in the context of marriage. Do you think he really wanted to paint the front door? No, but he did it anyway.

For a long time now, I’ve wondered about the effectiveness of the Mystery Machine’s headlights. It seems to me they are not aimed very well. Let’s get to the bottom of this. Here is my analysis of the van’s headlight distance.

Exhibit A: the old-school show.

You can see how far (or not) the headlights project down the road. Let’s zoom in and take some measurements.

From this image, I count the wheelbase as 83 pixels and the headlights distance as 185 pixels for the right side and 161 pixels for the left side, an average of 173 pixels.

The actual make and model of the Mystery Machine are not known, but it turns out it doesn’t matter. The top 2 options (Chevy G10 van (first or second gen) or Dodge A100) both have a wheelbase of 90 inches (or 108 for the long wheelbase version, but looking at that screenshot of the cartoon, I say it is the short wheelbase version).

So 83 pixels = 90 inches -> 171 pixels = 185 inches of headlight distance (AKA 15.4 feet).

I found this table of recommended sight distance for various speeds (look for Table 4.2) and the ratio of speed per headlight distance is about 0.205 mph/foot.

Based on that, 15.4 feet * 0.205 mph/ft = 3.16 mph. So the maximum speed the Mystery Machine can safely travel is 3.16 mph.

I have not gone through the cartoons and calculated the maximum speed the Mystery Machine is seen to have attained, but I will say it is at least an order of magnitude more than that.

Perhaps the more modern Mystery Machine will fare better?

Exhibit B: the new-school show. Definitely not the old cel-based animation

You can see how far (or not) the headlights project down the road. Let’s zoom in and take some measurements.

From this image, I count the wheelbase as 92 pixels and the headlights distance as 147 pixels for the right side and 137 pixels for the left side, an average of 142 pixels.

I’m assuming the make and model of the Mystery Machine hasn’t changed, so it’s still 90 inches.

So 92 pixels = 90 inches -> 142 pixels = 139 inches of headlight distance (AKA 11.6 feet).

Hmm… the vehicle in the more modern show has worse headlights. My guess is that the show illustrators took into account the degradation of headlight lenses for the years elapsed (yet somehow not aging any of the characters), and the output is thus lower. Or perhaps they’re thinking the front suspension got a lot of wear and tear over the years so the front is sagging more than it used to. The rear suspension doesn’t get beat up as much because the back of the van is usually empty, so a lower front and unchanging rear suspension height would result in a worse headlight angle.

Anyway, the new show has a recommended max speed of 11.6 * 0.205 = 2.38 mph.

But since I saw them driving much faster than that, I can say they are driving very unsafely. I’m surprised the were able to even make that turn since they would have had to turn the steering wheel before they could even see the curve in the road.

In conclusion: make sure your car’s headlights are aimed better than the Mystery Machine’s headlights.