Why do mexican toilets all have garbage cans?

I was in Mexico City for the last week or so and my stomach wasn't feeling all that well a fair amount of the time.  Because of this I frequented the bathrooms often and noticed that all of them contained a small garbage can.

This probably should have caused me to put my used toilet paper in the garbage (what else are you going to put in there) especially after seeing other used pieces in them (ewww).  However I happily kept flushing them down without seeming to cause the toilets to clog, though I was probably messing something else up further down.  Despite this the toilets seemed to function well overall and I can only imagine that at least a few of the other people from the many different countries were doing the same thing as me.

There were no signs indicating that I shouldn't flush the toilet paper because I guess it's just standard practice.  After reading a bit more about this it seems like some Mexican people when they first come to the US have the opposite problem and because of their habits put the dirty toilet paper on the ground in absence of a garbage can!

The colours of noise

Most people have probably heard the term "white noise" before, but apparently there are other colourful designations for different types of noise.  Joining white, but less commonly known, are pink, brown/red, blue, violet and grey.  The noise is classified by how the power changes as the frequency of the noise changes.


White noise, like white light, has a flat frequency spectrum.  So it has equal power at each frequency.  It can be used to mask background noise or even as a random number generator.  


Pink noise falls logarithmically with frequency.  So the amount of energy between 10 and 20 Hz is the same as between 1000 and 2000 Hz.  This is the same as how humans hear so it's often used to test speakers and other audio equipment.


Brown noise falls off more quickly and is the kind of noise produced by Brownian motion.  Blue and violet noise both increase in energy with increasing frequency.  Grey noise has more energy at the top and bottom parts of the spectrum.  The human ear hears each frequency equally loud so grey noise can be used to study hearing loss.


Not to be left out, black, green and orange noise are other unofficial colours.  Check out wikipedia to listen to samples of the different types of noise and read more about them.

Every keyboard tells a story

Nearly eight years ago I started using a program called WhatPulse to track the number of keyboard presses and mouse clicks I did.  Later on they added the ability to track how far you moved your mouse.  Over 102 months I currently have 47,101,737 key presses, 9,186,669 mouse clicks and have moved my mouse 1140.74 km!

You can also locally keep track of which keyboard keys you press the most.  Because of reinstallations I only have the last ~1.3 million presses.  It's still interesting though to look at the frequencies and think about why they are the way they are.  WhatPulse can generate a "heatmap" of your keyboard to get a quick overview of your keypresses.

The letters are probably what you would expect.  The order being eoatsinrlchmdupgwfybvkzjq.  Although it varies, according to some analysis English letter frequency is etaonrishdlfcmugypwbvkxjqz.  Apparently the top eight letters make up about 65% of total usage.  Although in a different order, my top eight letters are the same as on average, with differences starting to occur the farther down you go. The order for numbers is 0129365478.  Not sure what to make of that.

The order for the F keys is 9,5,2,4,6,10,7,8,12,1,11,3.  However looking at the numbers F9 is pressed 18.5 times more than F5, the second most frequent one!  F5 is pressed about 3 more times than the next highest, F2, with the remaining F keys, including 2, being about the same.  It turns out that in the BlackBerry simulators F9 selects things, so when I'm testing an app I'm pressing that key a lot.  I could probably rebind it to something easier to press, but over time I've just gotten used to it.  F5 is probably higher than the others because of the refresh shortcut.

You can see that I never touch my number pad which suggests I'm probably using a laptop.  You can also see something about the frequencies of the buttons that are on the right and left sides of the keyboard.  It looks like right shift, control and alt are pressed much more frequently than their left counterparts.  You might take this to suggest that I'm left handed, however it turns out that it is a combination of an error in the key detector and something a bit random.

According to the data I've pressed left shift a grand total of 7 times while pressing right shift 36,231 times!  I know for a fact this is not the case as I almost always use left shift.  So it appears the key detector has switched these two.  Similarly for right and left alt.  I rarely if ever use right alt and it seems the frequencies have been switched.  Control is actually a bit of a different story.  A little while ago I was having some problems with my left control key and in an attempt to remove the key cap I accidentally snapped it off!  I wasn't able to reattach it and over time I grew accustomed to using right control.  Unfortunately I often would use left control while programming, so now I either use right control or if I place my finger precisely in the middle of the phantom key I can use left control.  I'm not sure why these two keys were detected correctly!

If you try out WhatPulse your keyboard can have a story as well.

Your nose and the shower

Last time mentioning the 1000 awesome things website and this week having a somewhat stuffy nose reminded me of something.  Blowing my nose in the shower feels great!  Blowing your nose the "traditional" way using tissues takes forever and I never really feel 100% clear.  On the contrary, in the shower I can just go for it.


In general I like to keep my hands clean.  If I eat several chicken wings with my hands I prefer to wash them; the napkins never feel like quite enough.  The exception then for the shower is that the water is constantly cleansing, so it's as if my hands are being continually washed.  This fact allows my mind to put up with and even enjoy the temporary messiness that unfolds.


If my nose is stuffed up when I'm taking a shower I make sure to wash myself AFTER blowing my nose.  Don't want any snot accidentally hanging around (yuck).  It's somewhat liberating being able to just blow and blow and then just wash the mess off my hands.  Hmm, maybe don't take the last sentence out of context...


It's amazing how much mucus in in your nose when it's really plugged up.  Sometimes it feels like you're attempting to expel a small creature and it doesn't want to let go.  The quote I really like that exemplifies this somewhat is from 1000 awesome things and says "If you did the job right, your hand should now look like you just squeezed the life out of a baby jellyfish."  Not for the faint of heart.

The smell of oranges

I like the smell of oranges.  Like say a citrusy smell in the air or the smell of an orange itself.  However I don't particularly enjoy the smell and feel on my fingers after peeling and eating an orange.  I wash my hands but it's futile; the smell persists.  

When I mentioned this to someone they asked why I even smell my fingers at all!?  Well, actually I don't know why.  I think it might be to see if the smell has come off so I won't feel like I'm tainting everything that I touch.  If I type on my computer now it has an orange smelling residue.

Now I wasn't sure if I was alone in feeling this way.  I actually had direct evidence that some people not only don't mind but also enjoy it!  Recently when I was at a student leadership conference the closing speaker was Neil Pasricha, author and known for his website http://1000awesomethings.com/.  He had a little part in his speech where he asked everyone to write down something they thought was awesome and then exchange the note with someone else.  I wrote down something like "sleeping until you wake up naturally with no alarm clock".  (Unfortunately the conference had been on Saturday at 8am and I had stayed out a bit too late Friday night...)  Anyways, to my surprise, the girl that I exchanged with had written "the smell on my fingers after peeling an orange"!  To each their own I suppose.

There was one minor success however, so that I didn't feel too alone.  I discovered a Facebook group entitled "When I eat an orange, my fingers smell like it forever.  I hate it".  I feel a bit better knowing that 30 other people agree with me.

Airplanes and Ears

When I fly on a plane and it's ascending or descending I'll always notice the pressure change by the annoying feeling in my ears.  Yawning has always seemed to work for me and apparently chewing gum isn't bad either.  For the first time that I can remember though, I was unable to "pop" one of my ears and had an annoying little ice pick pain in my head as we descended.  Apparently babies and young children have more sensitive ears so this is actually more common for them (and why they're crying).

What was even more weird was that even after we had landed I still wasn't able to pop my ear.  All the forced yawning in the world wasn't helping.  It's a strange feeling not really being able to tell how loud you're speaking.

After a few hours the feeling had relented somewhat but I could tell my hearing in that ear wasn't at 100%.  To the internet!  I read a few things and decided to wait it out a couple days and see if it improved.

Waking up today it was about the same and I've been trying to yawn to improve it.  Funnily enough as I've been typing this (and yawning some more) the ear finally popped!  Fortunately no drastic measures with hydrogen peroxide or doctor's visits for the time being.

One thing I did learn was that the ear is actually connected to the back of the throat by the Eustachian tube, which is why yawning and chewing gum can have an effect and equalize the pressure.  Yay learning!

The Supermoon

This weekend there was a "Super" Moon.  Basically since the Moon's orbit around the Earth is elliptical (not perfectly circular) it will be closer and farther at different parts of its orbit.  On Saturday the Moon was full and it was also at perigee (its closest distance to the Earth) so it appeared slightly bigger.

But how much bigger was it actually?  The biggest difference would be between when the Moon is at apogee (farthest from Earth) and perigee.  According to Wikipedia the Moon has a mean diameter of 3474 km, distance at apogee: 405,410 km, distance at perigee: 362,570 km.  We can use the small angle approximation to say that tanθ ≈ θ and so θ ≈ s/d where d would be the distance to the Moon and s the diameter of the Moon.  θ is angular diameter in radians.

So at perigee: θ = 3474 / 362570 = 0.009582 radians

At apogee: θ = 3474 / 405410 = 0.008569 radians

This makes sense because the angular diameter should be bigger when the Moon is at perigee.  Their ratio is: 0.009582 / 0.008569 = 1.1182 so about 11.8 % bigger.  This is not insubstantial but it's actually very difficult to notice by eye.