Random Thoughts

[ZLoth]

Let me know when you spot the arrow in the FedEx logo.

[1995hoo]

Let me know when you spot the arrow in the FedEx logo.

Ummm......

[formulanone]

If there's a Mono County, why isn't there a Stereo County?

Because it refers to the disease, not audio.

Did we ever get to Dropsy County in the US county photo game?

[ZLoth]

If there's a Mono County, why isn't there a Stereo County?

Because it refers to the disease, not audio.

Actually, it is a reference to the Mono Native Americans who inhabit the area.

 

[Rothman]

If there's a Mono County, why isn't there a Stereo County?

Because it refers to the disease, not audio.

Actually, it is a reference to the Mono Native Americans who inhabit the area.

 

Why so serious?

[TheCatalyst31]

Speaking of logos, it was years before I noticed that the Amazon arrow "goes from A to Z", and it took someone else pointing it out to me.

Similar to the arrow in Fedex.



And the bear in the Toblerone logo (company is based in Bern):



And the 31 in Baskin Robbins' logo.

After they added Penn State and before the next round of conference realignment killed it, the Big Ten hid an 11 in their logo:

[kphoger]

[D-Dey65]

I just learned that the Chessie System logo was not a mutated goblin head.



I think they shouldn't have oversimplified that sleeping cat logo, or at least provided a clue.

It took a book called "Symbols of America" to make me realize this.
https://www.amazon.com/Symbols-America-Celebration-Trademarks-Symbolize/dp/0140080775

[formulanone]

After they added Penn State and before the next round of conference realignment killed it, the Big Ten hid an 11 in their logo:

Huh, I never noticed the first numeral one to the left until you pointed it out, but I always spotted the second one (figuring it meant Ten + One).

[kurumi]

Hartford Whalers logo: a stylized whale, with integrated "H" and "W":

[Rothman]

Hartford Whalers logo: a stylized whale, with integrated "H" and "W":

I miss the Whalers.  Their ugly sweaters were legendary.

[Big John]

And the Milwaukee Brewers glove consisting of a m and a b.

[PColumbus73]

Hartford Whalers logo: a stylized whale, with integrated "H" and "W":

I miss the Whalers.  Their ugly sweaters were legendary.

Flip the logo upside-down it's a 70s dude with a mustache

[hotdogPi]

I just updated my spreadsheet of the 500 most prolific posters, with the previous update being exactly eight months ago on 1/28/25.

• Rank #500 is 292 posts.
• Of all 1290822 posts, 10% are made by just six posters, half are made by the top 64 posters, 75% are made by the top 190 posters, 90% are made by the top 432 posters, and slightly under 92% are made by the top 500 posters. Banned users are not on the members list, except I made an exception to keep Darkchylde on the list because she is personally in good standing and the ban was due to a compromised account.
  
• The newest member to be on the top 500 list is PNWRoadgeek, joined 7/23/2023. There are four from 2023, six from 2022, and seven from 2021. We really need to allow registrations again, especially since PNWRoadgeek is well above just barely making the cut.
• kphoger is about to hit the 16-bit signed "limit". If kphoger hadn't come back from his most recent long break, Max Rockatansky would have passed him.
• Weighted by post count, the gender ratio has widened from 38.477 to 38.521, which is almost no change. For active members only, it has narrowed from 33.892 to 32.550, but most of that change is Hwy 61 Revisited changing status from inactive to active. vdeane has made the majority of the posts made by women both overall and in this 8-month period, despite LilianaUwU being quite active.
• Seven people have had a decrease in post count in the last eight months: longhorn (-31), JN Winkler (-14), Chris (-13), rt66man (-11), noelbotevera (-9), AsphaltPlanet (-9), and -- US 175 -- (-4). Does anyone know if these people have anything in common?
• The correlation between post count and posts per day is 0.94, between post count and join date is -0.12, and between join date and posts per day is 0.10.
  
• I have the state of residence of each user in my spreadsheet, but I don't automatically update that unless I see it change, so whatever I said several months ago still applies.

[Max Rockatansky]

Funny, I was telling Beltway yesterday that only a small amount of members contributed the vast majority of posts on this forum and hobby.  Interesting to see actual data to back up what is obvious to the eye on this forum. 

Regarding opening the ease of creating an account, I'm not sure how effective that would be.  A lot of us are the hobby mainstays and we often are frequent on other road media platforms.  I don't think the market for new blood is really all that large for mainstream road fandom/geekdom.

[formulanone]

It used to be the 90/10 Rule (or similar) applied to long-established forums: 10% of the users create 90% of the posts. There's always lots of "lurkers" or folks who are just in it for a question or two. But I think as there's other mediums for sharing information, they've started to take the curve like a wiki's user performance; something like 1-2% create/contribute 98-99% of the material.

There's lots of people who are part of the hobby which aren't a part of the forum, so I'd guess from similar Facebook groups, it's roughly 50-60% of the hobby in general. Maybe more? Hard to tell, because I still don't know all the names and faces with their actual names, but I'm also not active at meets and there's probably a bunch more who aren't "socially active" online (or just use different ways to keep in the hobby).

But there's probably a few people who have more of "an interest" and Facebook can certainly cater to that in some ways; for example, you don't have to create a new account. Downside, you've given that machine more of your information.

• Seven people have had a decrease in post count in the last eight months: longhorn (-31), JN Winkler (-14), Chris (-13), rt66man (-11), noelbotevera (-9), AsphaltPlanet (-9), and -- US 175 -- (-4). Does anyone know if these people have anything in common?

Anything related to the bot-forced shut down? Were any sub-forums merged? Odd...I could see a user deleting a rare unnecessary or duplicate post, but those are users who have been contributors, if not as much as in previous months/years.

[Max Rockatansky]

See that's the thing, I'm very active on Facebook road groups.  The vast majority of mainstays in said groups are active here or once were.  Yeah sure, you get random single use members all the time but isn't much different than what we see here. 

The really interesting thing is how few hobby mainstays are in historic highway groups.  I can only think of maybe two or three hobby regulars who are active on Old Highway 101 (not including myself).  You do see lots of people local to US 101 or have some of history inclinations.  It isn't dissimilar to US 66 fandom, just less fluff.

[formulanone]

The really interesting thing is how few hobby mainstays are in historic highway groups.  I can only think of maybe two or three hobby regulars who are active on Old Highway 101 (not including myself).

I know there's different types of roadgeeks; those fascinated with a city/local area, state-wide/regional, some with a nationwide focus (usually Interstate/US Routes), and then there's those who are more into the what-ifs, the fictional, et cetera. And of course, all sorts of overlapping (sub)genres like history, planning, politics, engineering, chemistry, manufacturing, statistics, design, geology/terrain, weather...which all tend to create a multi-petaled flower of a Venn Diagram.

Throw in the people who are just in it because they like travel, either for the sake of it, or because visiting places is a hobby or fascination unto itself, or they want to collect the towns/counties/routes/places or just have a place by themselves/loved ones to listen to music and chat and see new/old things. And there's other fascinations which I haven't even gotten into...either I don't get it or just shrug my shoulders at the thought. With probably even more interests to come in the future; maybe 10-20 years from now, some people will be looking to find the former homes and basements of once-popular streamers and YouTubers and connect them via ISP routes and call the connecting points Control Nodes.

So it's tough to lump us all together.

Personally, I don't usually care too much about the history minutiae. Sometimes I'm interested to know when something began and opened, but sometimes a "why" and "how" and whatever machinations were involved get a little dry unless there's a good story. After a while, a lot of the stories tend to sound alike, just substitute one town name for another and Senator A for Congressman B apportioned money...and the story usually writes itself. I guess I rarely have that same attachment because a lot of times, the road either goes there or it doesn't for the same reason water does not flow uphill, so I leave it at that.

[Max Rockatansky]

I think you misunderstand.  I'm saying that the phenomenon I'm seeing in these old highway groups is that road enthusiasts don't follow them.  Aside from being highway adjacent there isn't much that ties them into the core hobby.  Thing is, the code hobby is pretty small in the grand scheme of things.  I tend to think it is in decline, but some have disagreed with me on that assertion.

[Roadgeekteen]

I think that devoted roadgeeks who don't know anyone on this forum might only be interested in the roads board and not these threads in off-topic as these threads have mostly long time roadgeeks who know each other. But this is just a very niche hobby in general, so we may have reached our limit. Also, are new users not able to register anymore?

[Roadgeekteen]

I just updated my spreadsheet of the 500 most prolific posters, with the previous update being exactly eight months ago on 1/28/25.

• Rank #500 is 292 posts.
• Of all 1290822 posts, 10% are made by just six posters, half are made by the top 64 posters, 75% are made by the top 190 posters, 90% are made by the top 432 posters, and slightly under 92% are made by the top 500 posters. Banned users are not on the members list, except I made an exception to keep Darkchylde on the list because she is personally in good standing and the ban was due to a compromised account.
  
• The newest member to be on the top 500 list is PNWRoadgeek, joined 7/23/2023. There are four from 2023, six from 2022, and seven from 2021. We really need to allow registrations again, especially since PNWRoadgeek is well above just barely making the cut.
• kphoger is about to hit the 16-bit signed "limit". If kphoger hadn't come back from his most recent long break, Max Rockatansky would have passed him.
• Weighted by post count, the gender ratio has widened from 38.477 to 38.521, which is almost no change. For active members only, it has narrowed from 33.892 to 32.550, but most of that change is Hwy 61 Revisited changing status from inactive to active. vdeane has made the majority of the posts made by women both overall and in this 8-month period, despite LilianaUwU being quite active.
• Seven people have had a decrease in post count in the last eight months: longhorn (-31), JN Winkler (-14), Chris (-13), rt66man (-11), noelbotevera (-9), AsphaltPlanet (-9), and -- US 175 -- (-4). Does anyone know if these people have anything in common?
• The correlation between post count and posts per day is 0.94, between post count and join date is -0.12, and between join date and posts per day is 0.10.
  
• I have the state of residence of each user in my spreadsheet, but I don't automatically update that unless I see it change, so whatever I said several months ago still applies.

Noelbotevera joined at 11 so there's a chance he went and scrubbed some of his old, more embarrassing posts.

[Max Rockatansky]

I just updated my spreadsheet of the 500 most prolific posters, with the previous update being exactly eight months ago on 1/28/25.

• Rank #500 is 292 posts.
• Of all 1290822 posts, 10% are made by just six posters, half are made by the top 64 posters, 75% are made by the top 190 posters, 90% are made by the top 432 posters, and slightly under 92% are made by the top 500 posters. Banned users are not on the members list, except I made an exception to keep Darkchylde on the list because she is personally in good standing and the ban was due to a compromised account.
  
• The newest member to be on the top 500 list is PNWRoadgeek, joined 7/23/2023. There are four from 2023, six from 2022, and seven from 2021. We really need to allow registrations again, especially since PNWRoadgeek is well above just barely making the cut.
• kphoger is about to hit the 16-bit signed "limit". If kphoger hadn't come back from his most recent long break, Max Rockatansky would have passed him.
• Weighted by post count, the gender ratio has widened from 38.477 to 38.521, which is almost no change. For active members only, it has narrowed from 33.892 to 32.550, but most of that change is Hwy 61 Revisited changing status from inactive to active. vdeane has made the majority of the posts made by women both overall and in this 8-month period, despite LilianaUwU being quite active.
• Seven people have had a decrease in post count in the last eight months: longhorn (-31), JN Winkler (-14), Chris (-13), rt66man (-11), noelbotevera (-9), AsphaltPlanet (-9), and -- US 175 -- (-4). Does anyone know if these people have anything in common?
• The correlation between post count and posts per day is 0.94, between post count and join date is -0.12, and between join date and posts per day is 0.10.
  
• I have the state of residence of each user in my spreadsheet, but I don't automatically update that unless I see it change, so whatever I said several months ago still applies.

Noelbotevera joined at 11 so there's a chance he went and scrubbed some of his old, more embarrassing posts.

He hasn't been active since February.  Strikes me as he moved on along with several others on the list.  Even J N hasn't been on in almost six months.

[1995hoo]

...

• kphoger is about to hit the 16-bit signed "limit". If kphoger hadn't come back from his most recent long break, Max Rockatansky would have passed him.

Apologies if this is some basic question, but to what does this refer about a "limit"?

[Roadgeekteen]

...

• kphoger is about to hit the 16-bit signed "limit". If kphoger hadn't come back from his most recent long break, Max Rockatansky would have passed him.

Apologies if this is some basic question, but to what does this refer about a "limit"?

And so will the count no longer go up any area? Will it not display after a certain point? That's what I think, but not sure if the updated post count could still be found anywhere.

[hotdogPi]

It's not actually a limit on this forum. Elsewhere in computing, some numbers will "roll over" to negative after going above 32,767.