FFITHW: A History of the Scheme

November 10, 2019 ~ Ross ~ Leave a comment

Pernicious plans devised by devious dastards? Not at all- the scheme we’re talking about is one you see every day. Behold!

URL_Example

The circled part is known as the scheme. This particular scheme stands for Hypertest Transfer Protocol Secure, a more secure way to send information than the plain old HTTP we knew and loved. Have you ever wondered why it appears at the forefront of all your web pages, even when the iconic ‘www’ is omitted? And what on earth is the deal with those slashes?

Those questions can be, and have been, answered by the literal creator of the internet. No, not Al Gore. That honor belongs to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and he was the one who decided the majority of the internet naming conventions we still use to this day.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee was the engineer who was first able to execute the creation of a worldwide file sharing system, and his long career could probably have its own post. While designing the syntax of web URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier), he copied the file structure used by a computer company called Apollo. They used a double slash to indicate a network path, which he then used to separate the web domain from the transfer protocol servers ask the client computer for (HTTP).

The colon is a modifier that specifies what server port your computer needs to talk to. It’s often left blank as the ‘HTTP’ part already has a default port which is what’s used. It shouldn’t really even need to be there. The use of the colon and file hierarchy is explained in much more technical terms in a paper Tim wrote on URI syntax.

Basically, the format of the scheme exists because it was cobbled together from old naming conventions and perhaps a lack of understanding of how well-used (and scrutinized) his system would become. Amusingly, Tim regrets his decision to structure the internet this way. He believes that it is unnecessarily complicated and given the chance to do it again, he would redesign URIs, remove the ‘www’, and yes, even take away the double slash we’ve known for so long. Alas, it’s too late for him to change his creation any longer.

Tim_Berners-Lee — “The internet was a mistake” – TimBL, probably

FFITHW: The Cobra Effect

March 18, 2018March 17, 2018 ~ Ross ~ 3 Comments

I have a passion for learning names of social phenomena that are fairly obscure and relatively unknown. Famous examples of this would be Murphy’s Law or the Streisand effect. However it’s the lesser known terms that I adore hearing about, because I love having that “Man, I never thought about that, but it makes sense!” moment.

The cobra effect sparked that reaction in me when I first heard of it. Stealing the definition from its Wikipedia page, it “occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse, as a type of unintended consequence.” Just like the time I sat down to write a FFITHW post because it would be quick, but then spent hours rewriting it to fit into the word limit, the cobra effect means your plans backfired horribly.

The term was coined by an economist named Horst Siebert, probably because he thought it sounded better than “perverse incentive” which means the same thing. He used it to describe the bad things that can happen when someone incentivizes groups or individuals to perform tasks for them. Case in point:

When the British Empire ruled India in the 1800’s, the country was overrun by deadly cobras. Deciding that the local population would handle this problem with efficiency, the government offered a bounty on each dead cobra that was brought to them. It seemed like a good plan. Unfortunately, some crafty individuals began breeding cobras in order to maximize their profits, causing a large upswing in the cobra population. Once the government caught on and reacted by ending the rewards, the breeders simply released the snakes, resulting in a cobra problem much worse than at the start.

The moral of that story? Don’t pay other people to do work for you – they’ll scam you.

FFITHW: How to English Good

September 14, 2016 ~ Ross ~ Leave a comment

How often do you think about adjectives? All the time? Every day? Do you love them? Do you dream about big red unusual German fluffy adjectives?

bigredfluffyadjective

Trick question: you can’t. However, you can dream about unusually big fluffy red German adjectives. I suppose. I don’t know how, but…

Anyway, an interesting thing I recently learned is that in the English language, word order matters. Okay, I didn’t just learn that, it’s fairly obvious and something we all know. But were you aware that when describing an object using two or more adjectives, those adjectives have a preordained order that you must use them in?

Well, you might have known that. I didn’t. It’s something that we probably all understand subconsciously; take the sentence in the first paragraph. Does it sound right when you say it out loud? Probably not. The second paragraph just flows so much better, and it’s easier to understand the properties of the adjective. If an adjective could be fluffy, or German.

So what is this all-important word order? Well, to quote the Cambridge Dictionary website, “Adjectives which describe opinions or attitudes usually come first, before more neutral, factual ones.” Specifically, the order goes like this:

Opinion (adorable, strange)
Size (small, massive)
Physical Quality (fluffy, squishy, rubbery)
Shape (square, boxy, oblong)
Age (young, youthful, elderly)
Color (red, blue, monochromatic)
Origin (German, Finnish)
Material (stone, brick, gelatin)
Type (three-cornered, general-purpose)
Purpose (cooking, building, washing)

Try it yourself, make up a sentence with lots of adjectives and then see if you instinctively got them in the right order. You probably did, without having to think too hard. This rule can be shaken up if you want to emphasize one particular adjective over another, in which case you’d put it right before the noun. Otherwise, this is how you’d put the descriptive sentence together.

Now you’re an adjective master! …Maybe.

FFITHW: Plastic Bottle Making!

June 16, 2015March 17, 2018 ~ Ross ~ Leave a comment

Welcome to a type of post I like to call Fun Fact In Three Hundred Words, where I don’t waste your time yet you learn something cool in the short amount of time you spend reading my article. Without further ado, let’s begin!

I just recently learned how plastic bottles are made, of all different sizes. I don’t know if it’s how every single one is formed, but it’s at least a majority of them. Every plastic bottle begins its existence as humble plastic shards, a mix of recycled and new. preform They are then melted and poured into molds. Makes sense – but the image you see to the right of this text depicts your average one liter bottle.

How? Well, those mini things are called preforms, and are softened up by heat so they can be instantly expand into full-sized bottles, ready to be filled with all manner of tasty beverages.

Now while it is pretty cool to find out that the plastic bottles we use begin as these tiny tubes, as soon as I discovered this fact I wondered: “Why don’t they just make the molds full-sized to begin with?”

And there is, in fact, an answer to that question. It lies within the molecular structure of the bottles themselves. The plastic they are made out of is called PET, otherwise known as PolyEthylene Terephthalate. When it’s expanded from a smaller size (think: preform), the molecules “undergo strain-hardening and strain-induced crystallization, which gives the properly-made PET bottle exceptional clarity, resistance to internal pressure, uniform wall thickness, and toughness.” (source: kenplas.com) Neat, right? That’s all there is to it!

lots and lots of preforms

Oh, and in case your eyes glazed over while trying to read the boring text, here’s a cool three-minute clip from How It’s Made showing everything I just told you!