This is another collection of miscellany similar to One Shots. I spend much of the time wondering if anyone else has these thoughts, too. Maybe no one does, or maybe they do but simply forget them because they serve no particular purpose in their life. Or maybe people deem them just too bizarre to share with anyone else. Well, I say forget that. These are some of my random thoughts, and I’m not afraid of them.

Wobsites

One thing I do as part of my job is web design. I have a folder on my working drive where I keep all my website projects. It is, of course, named “wobsites”. This is due to the XKCD comic where the main character talks about how he likes to mispronounce vowels, and then mentions a “wobsite”. This is unbelievably funny to me.

“I have a folder where I keep all my website projects. It is, of course, named ‘wobsites’.”

When I decided to create a folder to put all my website projects into (previously they were scattered about), I never even considered naming it “websites”. I just typed in “wobsites”, giggling the entire time—and then I wondered how many other people in the world have a “wobsites” folder for exactly the same reason. I started considering how popular the webcomic is among geeks, who are the people most likely to have their own wobsite anyway. I had to conclude that probably a few hundred people have done this, which kind of scares me.

Lose

It bothers me that, in corporate-ese, a desired outcome is often described as a “win”. If you work in a corporate environment, the true absurdity of this may not be apparent unless you try it the opposite way. If you say, “Oh, man, it sucks that we didn’t get the Fooberman contract. That’s a major lose.” it makes you sound like a moron who can’t talk. As far as I’m concerned, saying “That’s a major win” is just as ridiculous.

Of course, given the state of internet speak at the moment, maybe the opposite of “win” will be “fail”. I don’t know how well it would catch on, but I can absolutely see myself saying, “Sucks we didn’t get the Fooberman contract. Epic fail.”

Oh, wait. I do say that. Never mind.

Curbs

I was walking on the sidewalk the other day when I started thinking about how high the curb was. How did it get that way? Who decided what the “normal” height of a sidewalk curb should be? For that matter, why is there a curb at all? If a car goes flying off out of control, that little three inch lip isn’t going to prevent folks on the sidewalk from being hit. And besides, the painted lines in the middle of the road aren’t raised. So if the sidewalk serves the same purpose of defining the boundaries of the drivable area, why does it need to be?

Why not just make the curb meet the road? You wouldn’t have to worry about building wheelchair access points since the entire sidewalk would be accessible anywhere. Finally, think of how much concrete it would save. It would have to be tons worth over the course of a year of repairing sidewalks. Major savings to a municipal government. Has anyone else thought about this?

Advancement

I sometimes wonder when we’ll reach the point where we actually won’t be able to advance a certain technology any further. So far, this hasn’t happened, at all, with anything. Every piece of technology we’ve ever developed has eventually been improved or replaced by superior technology. Some things—such as traveling at speeds of a significant fraction of C—are far off in the future, but we haven’t necessarily failed at reaching them because the research is still on-going. Maybe the real singularity everyone keeps talking about is when we hit the absolute limits of the laws of physics and can’t improve technology any more, regardless of how advanced our AI becomes. Will we ever hit that point?

If so, will scientists keep trying, or will we reach a dogmatic state where people say, “oh, scientists have shown we can’t do that” and just accept it? If we do keep trying, will we keep having breakthroughs? A few hundred years of progressive science has entrenched in our minds the idea that we’ll always be making new discoveries. If we do keep making new discoveries, how long until we can just do whatever we want? It seems that either we’ll have to hit a wall after which we can no longer advance technology and/or our understanding of the universe, or we continue advancing until we understand things so well that we can do anything, essentially becoming god-like. (If those choices are a false dilemma, what else could happen?) Both conclusions are plausible extensions of our current state of affairs, and both are unsettling to the scientific mind.

Tumb

I accidentally created a new word the other day. I don’t even remember what I was writing, but I ended up typing “tumb”. It made such an impression on my brain, I couldn’t help but wonder if it were a real word I saw somewhere else, so I looked it up. It’s not.

At that point, I thought about how potentially useful the word could be if I needed a nonsense word while writing a story. Now I’m curious as to whether any science fiction or fantasy authors make notes of nonsense words like these, with the intent to use them later in a book. It seems like that could really come in handy.

Notebook

Speaking of making notes, a few years ago I tried to carry a notebook with me where I would write down all these strange ideas that would come to me, in order to expand upon them later. There were two problems with this. One, when I remembered I had the notebook with me, I was often in some position where it was much too inconvenient to write down the thought. I would be driving, or in the middle of a conversation with someone, or carrying a 50 lb box—something making it not desirable to whip out the book and make a note. The second problem was more common, though: usually I just forgot I had one with me. I know some people use notes in notebooks as reminders, but then I would be writing a note in my notebook to remind myself that I had a notebook in which to write notes. That level of recursion seems dangerous.

Of course, you also have to consider the downside. If I did have a notebook that I used, there would be a lot more of these random-thought posts—the thought of which is not random, but somewhat disconcerting.

-Ted