A player must be able to sprint like a 100 metres champion, catch a high-flying ball (as hard as a baseball) in his weak hand with no mitt to help him, twist and turn like a basketball player, avoid being shoulder-charged into the ground, and be able to swing his stick while running to hit the ball in mid-air with a forehanded or backhanded swing, and in both cases with pinpiont accuracy. He must be able to hit the ball on the ground like a field hockey player, scoop the ball up off the ground with his stick to get it into his hand, and if he wants to take more than three steps with the ball in his posession, he must balance it on the end of his stick. The solid wood sticks swing at head-height, padding is non-existent, helmets are optional.

Am I describing some strange version of a game of accelerated, suicidal, ariel field hockey? No. This is Hurling, Ireland's national game and the fastest game on grass, period.

It is a two thousand year-old sport that has been played in Ireland in one form or another since pre-christian times. It originated as a way of training warriors for battle, and this heritage is reflected in the almost militaristic pageantry of the All-Ireland championships and the severe intensity at which the sport is played. The speed is breathtaking, and the violence is a little too much for some, but the skills involved in controling the ball make it an absolute spectacle to watch.

For a visual description go Here.

For a more detailed history go Here.

The sleepy suburbs of the US are causing mayhem, death, and destruction around the world. Period.

Let's start with the causes of sprawl before we deal with the effects. As I said elsewhere in my journal (skip this and the next paragraph if you have already read it), in the post war period, it made a lot of sense to seperate industry from residential areas since production in those days was a dirty business in most cases. So industry was zoned off in its own corner of town and lo-and-behold, quality of life improved for the residents. Sensation.

Where it started to go horribly wrong was when the planners decided to zone everything from everything, and the spectre of single-use-zoning, aka the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) rules came into existence. Offices go here, factories go there, shops go somewhere else, and all the houses go in a residential area. Makes for neat and tidy diagrams on paper, but in practice it pushes common everyday uses out of walking distance of each other. We all have to sleep, work, shop and play at different times of the day. Put these things beyond walking distance of each other, and you effectively force everyone to drive just to get through the day.

Now, the single-use-zoning golden calf isn't the only thing that causes sprawl. There is in American society an inherent undercurrent of anti-urbanism. It's nothing new, it dates back as far as Jefferson. "I view large cities," he wrote, "as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man." This was a commonly held view at the time, and the trend in American cities was for the wealthy to move to big mansions on the outskirts, whereas in Europe the well-off people preferred to stay downtown right at the heart of things and it was the poor who were pushed to the outskirts. Anti-urbanism in the US has never gone away - as recently as last year I saw some people with a stall at Sunnyvale farmer's market complaining about some tall buildings that had been built towards the end of the dot-com boom in the centre of Sunnyvale. They didn't like the fact that they were so tall, that they prevented sunlight from getting in (which they didn't), that they were too close together (how close is too close?), all manner of subjective and half-baked complaints. There were no complaints about a low-rise sprawling development only a block away where about five identical, boring, two-story office buildings had been built in the traditional suburban manner, i.e. surrounded by acres of parking spaces and some landscaped footpaths where nobody walks and where the whole thing goes dead after five o'clock. Anecdotes aside, the majority of Americans still prefer to live in the suburbs - the image of the busy bustling city street is perceived in a negative light. It draws to mind images of the Bronx and slums of older cities, while the existence of successful, vibrant, and exciting downtown areas (like parts of San Francisco or Times Square in NYC) do not feature prominently in their thinking.

The main problem I have with life in the suburbs is that they are soulless. There are neither urban nor rural, they combine the worst of both worlds. I thought that the whole point of a city was that everything is close to hand, and as a trade-off you sacrifice a bit of space. Well in the suburbs you have less space than you would in the countryside (albeit a little more space than in an urban apartment), but your location in the middle of a sea of houses puts you so far away from amenities like shops, resturaunts and the like that you might as well be living away out in the sticks. If you have to get in your car and drive a mile just to buy a postage stamp, what benefit is there to living in a suburb?

So how does this affect the rest of the world? Simple. The dominance of suburbs forces increasing numbers of people to drive more than they would if they lived in a traditional, high-density urban environment where daily needs are close at hand and mass-transit offers an advantage over the private car. This in no small part contributes to America's ultra-high energy consumption.

Figures from eia.doe.gov about the USA:

Total Energy Consumption (2002E): 98.3 quadrillion Btu (2003E): 98.1 quadrillion Btu (25% of world total energy consumption)
Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions (2002E): 5,796 million metric tons of carbon (about 24% of world total carbon emissions)
Per Capita Energy Consumption (2003E): 338 million Btu

So the country with about 4% of the world's population consumes 25% of its energy. A bit of an imbalance.

Our dependence on oil is interwoven into our society as comprehensively as slavery was in the old south. The USA's dependence on oil is so desperate that it must be maintained at all costs. This leads to desperate measures to ensure that the oil flows. It leads to alleged CIA involvement in coup attempts like the one in Venezuala a few years aback. It leads to war with Iraq. It leads to our leaders cosying up to the Bin Laden family and repressive undemocratic regimes like the House of Saud. It leads to a military presence in the Middle East that draws resentment from a certain other member of the Bin Laden family with whom I'm sure we're all familiar. It leads to a foreign policy that creates enemies, and breeds mistrust and resentment around the world.

This is the price we are paying for our suburban utopia. We're not paying for it in our gas taxes (which only cover a third of the cost of motoring). We're not paying for it through our other taxes that are spent on urban renewal and road-building. We're paying for it in the lives of American servicemen. We're paying for it in the lives of whoever is going to die in the next terrorist atrocity. We as a people have got to wake up to the fact that our everyday choices have an effect on others not just at home, but abroad as well. We are not an independant untouchable island. We are part of a global system where our fates are intertwined no matter how much we want to believe that we can do what we like without affecting anyone else.

I am not suggesting that everyone should be forced to live downtown or that our suburbs should be bulldozed and replaced by traditional urban streets. I am suggesting that where demand for high-density living exists, it should be met. I am suggesting that mixed-use zoning should be allowed back into our lives and let the market decide. So far the evidence suggests that there is a place for mixed-use developments. Santana Row in San Jose is one example of how the ability to walk to the shops is one that people are willing to pay a premium for. Enough of this communistic parcelling off of land into neat, boring, dead blocks of mediocrity. It's time to let people live in vibrant streets if they want, and let them show to the rest of us that the urban street is not evil.

My last journal entry got a good response, so here's one in a similar vein.

Interesctions in the US, especially in California, are of the four-way type. You either have a four-way stop, or a four-way traffic-light junction. These are both inefficient and they are death-traps. Why?

Let's start with the inefficiency. At larger suburban intersections the cycles on the lights are very long. If you stop just as a light turns red and you're waiting for the left arrow, you can be sitting there for a good few minutes. Traffic is going to back up behind you. This can create problems further back at the previous junction, so to avoid it, what do we do? We build extra lanes, not to accomodate all that moving traffic, but to store stationery vehicles stuck at the lights. This contributes to the horrors of sprawl as well as being a monumental waste of resources.

From the motorist's point of view, it turns his journey into one big stop-and-go session. No wonder automatic gearboxes are so popular in America, the amount of stop-n-go driving is unreal! And regardless of whether your transmission is automatic or manual, stop-n-go driving is not good for your engine, fuel consumption, or the environment.

Now let's take the safety issue. How does a 4-way stop-light encourage you to drive? That's right, it gives you an incentive to speed through it at the most dangerous time, i.e. when the light has just turned amber. I read that a third of all crashes happen at intersections. This is not one bit surprising.

Then you have the four-way-stop. These are fine, but what happens when you come to a stop sign where the cross-traffic does not stop, but there's no sign saying so? Someone approaches the stop sign, stops, sees a car coming from the side, assumes that he has right of way, moves off, *BANG!*

So. What are the alternatives? One word. Roundabouts.

Anyone who has been to Europe will have seen them because they're everywhere. For the uninitiated, these are 'yield-at-entry' traffic circles. As you approach the roundabout, you slow down as it flairs off to the right (in a country where you drive on the right) and you approach a yield sign. If nothing is coming around the roundabout towards you, you drive on. If something is coming around the circle, you yield to him. In fact, you don't have to stop, it's better if you slow down and just fit yourself into any gap that comes around. Once on the circle, you drive anti-clockwise without stopping because everyone else approaching the roundabout now has to yield to you and you keep on going until you're off the roundabout and on your merry way.

It works on the principle that it's unlikely that a large number of vehicles are going to be going to be going in the same direction, so you never have to wait very long for a gap to open up. If a car is coming around but shoots off the roundabout into the exit before yours, that buys enough time for you to drive on.

Advantages? Well for one thing the traffic overall flows a lot better. You seldom have to stop, so there's no need for big wide roads to store stationery vehicles. They are also safer than 4-ways believe it or not. Studies show a reduction in the number of accidents where 4-ways are replaced by roundabouts. Reason? Well instead of giving the motorist an incentive to speed through to make the light, one is forced to slow down because of the curvature of the thing. Also, there are fewer points where a collision can occur. On a 4-way there are over 30 potential collision points, twice as many as on a roundabout.

Disadvantages? Bigger roundabouts can be difficult for cyclists to navigate. Also, because traffic flows more or less continuously, they are not suitable for urban centres where large numbers of pedestrians need to be able to cross the street. Lack of familiarity when they are first introduced would be a problem, but one that is easily overcome with public education campaigns.

There's a section in the San Jose Mercury News called 'Roadshow' where readers can write in for answers to their questions about anything relating to the roads in Silicon Valley. A common question is "My commute along highway [blah] has gotten very slow lately. When is this road going to get widened?" More often than not, there is a plan to widen said road. Public policy in California seems to focus on adding extra lanes almost as if it's a requisite solution to congestion. But it's neither requisite nor is it a solution. Here's why.

In the 1980s they built a huge orbital motorway around London called the M25. At the time it was hailed by the British tabloid press as a 'traffic jam-buster' and 'the end of congestion in London at last.' Within a few years it became known as 'the world's longest car park (parking lot)' and a 'complete disaster' as well as an infinite number of other negative descriptions. It was this monstrosity that propelled the concept of 'induced traffic' into the collective consciousness of the average Brit.

With Induced Traffic, adding extra roadspace leads not to a reduction in congestion, but an increase in traffic which in turn leads to an increase in congestion right back up to the same levels as it was at before the new roads or extra lanes were built. No sooner do you build a road than it fills with vehicles.

Reasons? There are many. People who live close to their place of work (usually in a city) frequently have to pay more for their property. To take advantage of cheaper property, they move out of town. Growth further away from town leads to an increase in traffic, leading to extra demand for roadspace. So the road is given extra lanes supposedly to ease congestion from the outlying location. The commute temporarily gets a bit quicker. People living in town want to take advantage of cheap property further out as well as the quicker commute from there. So they move out in huge numbers, and hence the traffic to and from the remote location increases at peak time. A vicious circle.

Bay Area gridlock was supposed to result from the refusal to re-build the elevated freeways that had collapsed in San Francisco after the Loma Prieta earthquake. It didn't happen. The motorists who were supposed to clog up the city's streets ended up making other arrangements. They took alternative rooutes, rode their bikes, took the bus, took the tram, took the BART, took the cable car.

So it's obvious that roadspace has no correlation with good traffic flow. If it did, Los Angeles, where a full third of the city's surface area is dedicated to roads, highways and parking lots, would be the least congested city in the world. It isn't.

Solutions?

Well for one thing, roads are free at the point of use. In other words, this limited resource is rationed out by queueing as opposed to price, something that should have disappeared with the Soviet era. The congestion charge in London has been a huge success. Before it was brought in, traffic in London proceeded at the same average speed that it had done 100 years previously when it was propelled by horses. Charge people for the privilege of getting into central London and they start making sure that the journey is absolutely necessar or else they use more efficient mass transit.

However, mass transit only works efficiently when urban density is above a certain level. In low-density Silicon Valley, getting around by public transport will take you two to three times as long as driving. This sort of low-density sprawl is fairly typical of California. Why? Well it's kind of a long story, but to cut it short, after WWII it was decided that industry (which was pretty dirty in those days) should be moved from residential areas. The policy worked and was a gret success. But then the planners got a bit carried away with it. They decided to seperate everything from everything. Houses go here. Shops got here. Offices go over here. Industry goes back there. Single Use Zoning, aka the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) rules took hold and we were left with a situation in which the suburbs replaced the traditional urban environment. Now, when a suburbanite runs out of milk, he has to strap himself into a three-tonne vehicle and create a cloud of pollution to take himself to the nearest 'convenience' (sic) store. Whereas someone in an older city like San Francisco usually just steps out of his apartment and walks to the little grocery store across the street.

All these different uses, shopping, living, working, playing, are something that we all do at different times of the day. Put them out of walking distance of each other, and you give the people a huge amount of driving to do just to meet basic daily needs. Widening roads to accomodate them just spreads everything out further, another vicious circle.

So let's get back to basics and build our cities in the tried and tested way they have been built since time began, i.e. put everything close at hand. That's kinda the whole point of cities anyway.

Let's have a fairer tax on fuel so that the full cost of motoring is included in the price of petrol. US motorists only pay a third of the cost of road-building through their gas taxes, the rest comes from federal income tax. Cut income tax, increase petrol tax. Furthermore, use that tax to invest more in efficient mass-transit and less in inefficient roads.

Currently Amtrak is expected to pay for both rolling-stock AND railway infrastructure. It is not a level playing-field with the federally-subsidised interstate freeways. Let's level it. Let's have proper subsidies for railway infrastructure and open up the railway operations to privatisation and competition. With the tracks and signalling paid for by Uncle Sam, the privatised railway operators might actually be able to make a profit whilst improving services.

As well as roads, the airline industry is also unfairly subsidised. Time to tighten the purse-strings and let the market go to work for the benefit of the consumer. Time to provide a bit more choice as to how people want to live and get around.

Back when I didn't have a job, I could spend a lot of time on Slashdot, looking through all of the sections and reading a good deal of the comments and even writing a few. I even meta-modded every day. I never got mod points.

Now that I'm employed, I have about 4 hours between when I get home and I go to sleep. I only have time to browse the front page and maybe look at the highly-rated comments on one or two of the more interesting topics. Meta-modding? Forget about it.

I have gotten mod points three times in as many weeks.

One of the factors Slashcode uses to hand out mod points is how often you visit. Those who visit the site as often as the average member of the slashdot population are more likely to moderate, with those who visit a lot and those who visit rarely being less likely.

The side effect of this is that people who actually have enough time to moderate can't, and those who don't have enough time have to anyway. Is it any wonder that we get misleading and incorrect comments modded up? The mods simply don't have the time to check, they're just modding stuff up that looks informative so they can get rid of their points! What I usually do is look through the comments history of my friends (I usually mark someone a friend if they say something I like) and fans and mod up anything interesting they've said lately.

So what I'm saying is this: Points should be given to people who have enough time to really dig through the posts. Sure, give 'em to the obsessive reloaders. If they're just looking for fr157 p075!!!1 they won't be able to mod that article anyway.

Slashdotters hate Flash. Period. Try posting anything in favour of Flash anytime the subject comes up and you'll see what I mean. I even saw one guy go as far as to say that 'Flash can only be used for evil.' Gawd! Tell us how you really feel!

Here are the criticisms that they come up with:

1. Flash is bad because it is used for annoying animations that get in the way of website usability
2. Flash is bad because it is used to spring music on people without warning
3. Flash is bad because it hogs the processor

Let's take criticism 1.

The web is full of websites that have annoying popup and popunder ads. I find popunders to be the most annoying thing in all creation. What happens is an ad pops up and blocks my view of what I'm reading. I go Ctrl+w or Apple+w to close the popup. Just before my command makes it, javascript kicks in and puts the popup under the window I'm reading from, and I lose the window I was reading only to be left with an ad for Netflix that I don't need to read because I already subscribe to them!

I'm sorry, but that is the most annoying thing on the web today, not Flash. So where is the chorus of anti-javascript hatred? Where are the claims that javascript 'can only be used for evil?' Nowhere.

Why?

Because javascript is something that slashdotters feel more comfortable with. It fits in with their way of doing things. It's a programmer's language. Programming-types use it, therefore it must be good, regardless of how much it is abused and badly-used. But Flash is a whole different matter. Flash was initially used by graphic-design type people. And of course those bozos don't know what they're doing, not like us geniuses, eh?

So what happens is we have two technologies, both of them used well and abused in roughly equal amounts. One is used by programmes, the other is (supposedly) used by artists. Well programmers are better than artists, therefore 'our' technology is okay but 'their' technology sucks. Stands to reason doesn't it? Never mind the fact that it's not the technology's fault that it gets abused, let's blame the technology anyway while saying nothing about the people on our own side of the fence who abuse javascript.

Moreover, Flash has moved on from the days of animations. In fact, go to any Macromedia user group and confess to creating animations and the response will be 'shame on you!' Flash is nowadays used for querying databases and displaying data without refreshing a whole page of HTML. For example, e-Trade used to have a little Flash app on their website that let you query prices of a particular stock. You type in the ticker symbol, press the button, and after a second or two the price would appear in the swf without having reloaded a single byte of HTML. A bit more efficient than redisplaying the whole page for the sake of updating one little string of characters. This is a whole different approach to web-based applications. The metaphor of the 'page' is inefficient for complex interactive sites like Travelocity or Netflix etc.

Oh, and Flash is also the most sophisticated web-based video-playback platform yet developed.

Criticism 2: "Flash is bad because it springs music on people without warning."

Well Flash isn't the only technology capable of doing that. I seem to remember java applets doing that to me in years gone by. Once again, I didn't hear any complaints from slashdotters about the evils of Java. The fallacy behind this criticism is the same as that behind criticism 1 above. It's not the technology's fault that it gets abused from time to time.

Criticism 3: "It hogs the processor."

Okay, I'll give you that. But for Joe Consumer surfing the net in his living-room, I don't think he's gonna be aware of any problem unless he's doing a bit of finite element analysis in the background.

Bottom line: Don't blame the technology. Flash has moved on from creating animations. In fact a lot of Flash stuff is now being done without making any use of the timeline. I've seen some people create apps in which they never show the stage. The developer tools are getting more powerful with each release, it has evolved into a fully-fledged software development environment. If you're a programming type and you had doubts about Flash before, I invite you to look again and get into it. You might actually like it if you opened your mind and gave it a chance!

Government of the people, by the people, for the people is a great idea. However it starts to fall down a bit if the people are as thick as two short planks. Take California's voters micromanaging the budget for example. Who are the voters to tell legislators how to handle the complex financial issues of the day? What's the point in electing people to the assembly on the one hand, if we just turn around and tie their hands and prevent them from doing their job on the other?

Voters yesterday voted down Proposition 56. This would have reduced the required majority to raise taxes from 67% to 55%. In effect, one of the worst effects of Prop 13 is still in force: an anti-tax minority effectively has the final say over whether or not taxes should be raised. What's so democratic about that?

I hate when you know someone for a while and give them a certain standing in your mind, and then all of a sudden they say something which sends your high view of them free-falling. such as when you find out someone is a racist :-(

At 1110 UT this morning, the third largest solar flare on record erupted from the Sun, sending a coronal mass ejection directly towards Earth at 5 Million MPH (picture, animation), and starting a solar radiation storm. We may see bright auroral activity tonight. Passengers on high-altitude airplane flights may receive chest-x-ray-level dosages of radiation.

The Democratic and Republican parties have 158 and 165 Million voters in their databases, "DataMart" and "Voter Vault", respectively. They track how you vote, what issues you're concerned about, demographics about your home and family, and who you associate with. From it they mount door-to-door, telemarketing, spam, and junk mail campaigns offering customized versions of the political party to appeal to your passions, while avoiding issues that might offend you.

Ok im sitting right now in a net caffe in the loft of a shopping center and its actually FULL (about 50 machines) there are about 10 people waiting to use machines. WTF?
Im trying to kill time before i go and see 'Goodbye lennin' for the second time :)

My freind ben has just baught his first car and has been driving it around for the last few weeks.
Its very comfortable and he got it ostensibly beacuse he disliked public transport.His points ranged from it being too crowded to feeling unsafe using it sometimes.True, it is nice to be able to get places at (compared to the bus) lightning speed but what are you missing when your in a car?
Yesterday i was returning home from helping at our sixth form's open day on the bus i started talking to a man called james who had recently moved to birmingham from telford. He was complaining about birmingham city centre's lack of toilets, at one point so desperate he was about to take a wizz at the back of the bus but i managed to persuade him to get off and find a tree.A month or so back i had just left the cinema after watching bowling for columbine on the big screen - again. I started chatting to a guy who had just gotten off his shift working for central trains, a thouroughly interesting guy and after the bus arrived we chatted until i got off the bus near my house.
I don't chat with many people on the bus, usually people who first say something to me or who make a broadcast comment (My phrase for something said for everyone to hear but not neccesarily requiring a response - such as someone uttering "Typical" when a bus zooomes past and doesent stop.) but i still like occasional banter between the bus riding public.
Car users miss these kind of things, they speak with the people they know at work and go directly home and speak to the same people they know there, sure they meet other people but usually at set locations and people who are similar to them. On the bus it's all random today you may meet a teacher tomorow a drunk 22 year old comming home from clubbing,

but people you never meet are car people and they never meet you....

Someone was interested in this, so I decided to post it here instead of clogging up the article with too many OT posts. Enjoy, or something.

The point of copywriting is to make it as easy on the reader as possible, because they have to keep track of a lot of stuff.

The most important thing to know when you're writing is: You are writing something that will be spoken aloud! Things that work written will not work when you say them! PM should be in the afternoon or at night. Numbers should be rounded as far as practical, 4,827,243 becomes almost five (m) million. Et cetera. Speak it aloud as you write it. If it sounds good, use it. If it sounds awkward, even if it looks good on paper, rephrase it. Punctuation is important. Woman, without her man, is nothing. Woman, without her, man is nothing! So put your commas and periods in the right places to make sure the meaning you intend gets across.

Broadcast copy IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, even though I personally find proper English capitalization easier to read. It is double-spaced on the page. In television, video notes (such as what camera is live, always a good thing to know) are indicated on the left half of the page, and audio on the right.

Hyphenation: When each letter of an abbreviation is pronounced, you put hyphens between each letter to indicate that. Example, R-I-A-A, K-D-E. This also includes sequences of numbers, such as phone numbers. 5-5-5-4-3-2-1. Abbreviations pronounced phoenetically are put down verbatim, GNOME, SCO.

Numbers: No more than three digits consecutively, and all single digit numbers spelled out. All ?illions have the first letter in parentheses before the word to make doubly sure. Five (b) billion 482 (m) million 326 thousand 384. Dollars is written out after the number, never ever use a dollar sign, the reader might forget there was a dollar sign on it by the time (s)he hits the end of the number. It happens!

Shorthand in general: Don't use it. 9:00 becomes nine o'clock. PM becomes in the afternoon or at night. Inc. becomes Incorporated, unless it's actually pronounced "Inc".

Tricky words: Avoid them, but if you've gotta put them in, write out a phoenetic pronounciation afterward. Kazaa (kuh-ZAH). I hate these, 'cause unless you go over the copy beforehand, it'll make you pause a little bit anyway. But it's better than a couple seconds of dead air while you stare blankly at the paper/prompter. =D

Well, there you go. What I paid a couple hundred dollars to learn. Man, I just realized I've been ripped off.

The first of the problems that eventually cascaded into the blackout began at 1 p.m on August 14th. "The inability of critical control data to be exchanged quickly across the grid could have hampered the operators' ability to prevent the cascading effect of the blackout," said Gary Seifert, of DOE's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. "It didn't affect the [control] systems internally, but it most certainly affected the timeliness of the data they were receiving from other networks. A former Bush administration adviser who has consulted with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the power grid issue said the Blaster worm also hampered the ability of utilities in the New York region to restore power in a more timely manner because some of those companies were running Windows-based control systems with Port 135 open. The control systems ... are often based on Windows 2000 or XP operating systems and rely on commercial data links, including the Internet and wireless systems, for exchanging information.

Lately, I've been noticing a disturbing trend: When people write an acronym, they will write what it stands for right next to it, so they will say "IANAP (I am not a physicist)"

The net result of this is that the person ends up writing a piece of text that is LONGER than what they would have written if they had just written out "I am not a physicist," thus defeating the whole point of using an acronym in the first place.

Does anyone have any insight into this disturbing trend? I realize that this is not going to cause the eventual bloating death of the slashdot comment database (we can thank trolls who post 12-chapter-long narratives for that), it just strikes me as extremely stupid.

PISCBWAOMPAATWWIMNTT (Perhaps I shuld compensate by writing all of my posts as acronyms then writing what I meant next to them.)