Miscellaneous Data

Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) Finder List-View Folder Collapse Bug

In the Finder in Mac OS version 10.3 ("Panther"), you can view the contents of a folder (directory) in three different ways: "Icon View", "List View", and "Column View".

In "List View", you can open a sub-folder (subdirectory) by clicking on a little "triangle" (called the disclosure tab) next to the directory's name. When you do this, the folder's contents appear below it, indented; you can do this to several folders and the effect is like looking at an outline or bullet-list with subheadings.

The "bug" is that, after expanding or collapsing a folder, when you close and re-open the window, the Finder sometimes forgets your changes.

The fix is to use the mouse to collapse or open the sobfolder. If you use the keyboard (right and left arrow keys to open and close, respectively) then the change is regarded as "temporary" and will be forgotten the next time the window is opened.

ASCII art from "My Neighbor Totoro"

These are by an unknown artist and Duke Lee

! ! ! ! ! ! ! . ! ! . ! ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^ ^ ^ (0) (0) ^ ^ "" ^ ^ *************** ^ ^ * * ^ ^ * /\ /\ /\ * ^ ^ * * ^ ^ * /\ /\ /\ /\ * ^ ^ * * ^ ^ * * ^ ^ * * ^ ^ * * ^ ^ * * ^ ^ * * ^ ^ * * ^ ^ * ) ( * ^ ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ _____ / \ vvvvvvv /|__/| I /O,O | I /_____ | /|/| J|/^ ^ ^ \ | /00 | _//| |^ ^ ^ ^ |W| |/^^\ | /oo | \m___m__|_| \m_m_| \mm_|

Old Homepage Quotes

These old quotes were on my main page, they date from my extropianism initiative in 1999:

The daily New York Times contains more information than the average person encountered in a lifetime in 17th-century England. — Blue Man Group, 1991 (paraphrased)

[The amount of] scientific knowledge doubles every five years. — Univ. of Virginia, May 1998-)

The number of people using the Internet is doubling every year. — Matrix Information and Directory Services, October 1994

The amount of Internet traffic doubles every 100 days. — U.S. Dept. of Commerce, April 1998-)

At age 35, my diary is now longer than the Christian bible or the works of Shakespeare. But unlike them, most of my journal does not concern physical things or events. — Robert Munafo, April 2000

Measuring the Force of Gravity

One day I ran across Narciso Guzman's Cavendish experiment, which was based on John Walker's more thorough 1997 article Bending Spacetime in the Basement. Both pages show home-made replication of the gravity experiment origially performed in the late 18^th century by Henry Cavendish, to determine the density of the Earth (since its size and the strength of its gravity were already known) by measuring the strength of the gravity of objects of known size and density. This can also be thought of as measuring the value of the Gravitational constant G in Newton's law of universal gravitation. The relative sizes of the planets and their orbits was already known, but this experiment provided the missing piece necessary to determine the mass and density of the superior planets (Mercury and Venus, not having moons, remained a mystery for longer. I have written more about how this fits into the history of measuring various things from the size of the Earth to the mass of the Universe, on my miscellaneous science page.)

Disabling Google+ Birthday Reminders

In August 2012, Google added a "feature" to the main Google search site for anybody who has a Gmail or Google+ account and is currently logged in, that adds a little popup notice in the upper-right of any Google search results page, telling you it is somebody's birthday.

By January 2013 enough people in my circles had set up their birthdays that I was starting to get seriously annoyed by this "feature". I looked around for ways to turn it off. You may set your G+ birthday privacy here, preventing others from getting a notice about your birthday, but Google conveniently left out any way of turning off the popup notices (so I don't see other people's birthdays).

Max Handelsman Oct 20, 2012 +4

By the way, although I'm sure if you're using AdBlock you can just right-click the birthday pop-up, if you don't feel like waiting for the next one just add:

www.google.com##SPAN[id="ntf"]

to your block list. Should work for most ad-blocking browser extensions. (I'm using AdBlock for Chrome.)

On Jan 29 2013 I tried the above and it did not work, however noting that the element contains a

element, I successfully blocked the birthday popup by adding the following as well:

www.google.com##DIV[class="ntfc"]

s.27