a mystery

Consider a lane-closing on a highway. You have, say, two lanes of traffic going 60mph that have to merge into one lane. Why is the resulting speed near the merge point not close to 30mph? It's usually around 5mph. "Friction" (that is, wiggle-room from imperfect communication) should slow it down from 30mph, but not that much.

For extended construction projects (like the one I drove through on the way to Pennsic), wouldn't be worth the hassle of installing a traffic signal in order to improve flow? I wonder why they never do this. (They obviously have electricity available to power all the message-board signs.)

Mozilla

At a coworker's suggestion, I just installed Mozilla on my machine here at work. (Until now my primary browser has been Netscape, though I sometimes use IE too.) I was pleasantly surprised to see that Mozilla found my Netscape preferences, bookmarks, etc and adopted them. I do hope, however, that it is not silently using the same files as Netscape. Yes, I am aware that Netscape is descended from Mozilla originally; I'd been under the impression that they had diverged and are not incompatable.

I had some initial problems with Mozilla first not seeing and then not loading my home page. Netscape was running at the time, but exiting both browsers and then firing up Mozilla didn't fix it. Flushing the disk cache fixed it -- but there shouldn't have been a Mozilla disk cache yet, except for its default home page.

One thing that bugs me about Netscape -- new in version 6.2 -- is that entry into forms (specifically textbuffers) is sometimes wonky. My only Mozilla experiment thus far is this journal entry, but so far it seems to be better in that regard. I haven't noticed any other differences in behavior yet.