why can't helen keller drive?

...because she's a woman.
We've all known this fact since childhood, but here's the science behind it.

Males have faster reaction time than females:

"in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003; Der and Deary, 2006). The last study is remarkable because it included over 7400 subjects. Bellis (1933) reported that mean time to press a key in response to a light was 220 msec for males and 260 msec for females; for sound the difference was 190 msec (males) to 200 msec (females)."

Reaction times dictate how quickly you hit the brakes:

"Traditionally, mental processing time, or reaction time, time for a normal driver under good conditions is considered to be about 0.75 seconds....A car traveling at 65 mph will travel over 70 feet during the estimated 0.75 seconds of processing time. It takes about 0.3 seconds to apply the brake, during which time the car will travel another 28 feet, and actually stopping the car requires another 188 feet with good tires on dry roads. This means that under the best conditions, an alert driver can avoid hitting any obstacle that he perceives when it is at less than 300 feet away. With a brain reaction time of one and a half seconds, the stopping distance increases to over 350 feet. And if reaction time lengthens to two seconds, what some believe is a reasonable estimate of how long it takes for someone to interpret brake lights or turn signals when distracted, the stopping distance increases to over 400 feet. This means that a distracted driver can cause an accident even if following at a responsible 2-second distance (about 200 feet at 65 mph)."

Therefore females are bad drivers.


By the way, "Navy Top Gun fighter pilots typically score between 200 and 225 milliseconds".

on a side note, why i hate my life:
my average reaction time found from one of the sites below is 278ms. that site had collected millions of samples (other visitors to the site), and my reaction time was very far below the mean. my dreams of being a fighter pilot, race car driver, riding a motorcycle, driving in the fast lane, all basically go down the drain. the more i fight against my fate, the faster i try to drive, the more accidents i get into. most things that seem interesting, exciting, exhilarating, all involve fast reaction times - snowboarding (avoiding trees), racing in track and field (taking off at the sound of the gun), to even basketball (catching fast passes), and frisbee (closing your hands quickly enough to catch the disc). those things were and are still my passions. and for 10 years of my childhood, and i actually did want to become a fighter pilot.

i'm constantly amazed at this video




sources:
http://www.chaikinandsherman.com/brain-reaction-time-traffic-accidents.html
http://biology.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reaction.htm
http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/1999/sepreleases/reaction.html
very cool site about reaction times, with alot of stats:
http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/stats.php

resume present tense

i got confused about how to deal with tense when writing a resume. especially when trying to describe one's current job. from hours of googling, here's what i found about using present tense in resumes

usage of past or present tense:

...the tense of verbs in your bullet lists should be past tense for previous jobs: Ran point of sales register. Verbs should be present tense for jobs you currently hold: Run point of sales register. An exception to this is using a verb for something that happened in the past at your current job (from the example above: Won “Employee of the Month” May 2006, April 2008).

avoid gerunds (a gerund is a verbal that ends in -ing and functions as a noun) :

Gerunds are words that you want to avoid when writing a job description on your résumé. Having quite a few gerunds on a your résumé can make it seem like a boring and long list of duties. That’s not what your résumé is supposed to be. Make your résumé come to life by LIMITING the usage of gerunds.

I found several sites saying don't start off a bullet point with an "ing" verb, but they didn't explain why. If it's to describe a current project, it makes more sense to me to write "developing unix shell script to reduce data collection time" rather than "develop unix shell script to...", and i certainly can't use "developed" in this situation because it hasn't been developed yet.

I found additional information about using "ing" verbs, but it's not very conclusive:

Many people advise keeping verbs in the continuous present tense, using "ing" verbs such as "saying," "leading," "developing," "motivating," and "coordinating." Although "ing" verbs may sound more dynamic, other resume professionals argue that it is clearer to imagine an "I" in front of each verb, writing, for instance, "(I) lead," "(I) develop," "(I) motivate," or "(I) coordinate," if the job is current. If the job was held in the past, as most will have been, they suggest putting the verbs in simple past tense, as in "(I) led," "(I) developed," "(I) motivated," or "(I) coordinated." Either way, always remember to keep verb tense consistent throughout your entire resume.

Use action words to describe your job skills and make each job description specific and efficient. Especially if you favor the present tense in your descriptions, you might prefer using the “-ing” form of active verbs (“performing” rather than “perform”).

so in conclusion, who cares.

sources:

-http://vppa.tumblr.com/post/7111116906/job-description-gerunds-better-resume
-http://owl.english.purdue.edu/engagement/index.php?category_id=34&sub_category_id=40&article_id=117
-http://www.pongoresume.com/blogPosts/425/should-i-write-my-resume-in-past-or-present-tense-.cfm?CFID=13419746&CFTOKEN=2639a1708dc7a091-DCA45F9C-5056-8D3D-6629A7D136331F7F&jsessionid=ec302552aed2429e6b8a356164d55b1735b1
-http://www.lawcrossing.com/article/2081/Words-Words-Words/#
-https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/c8_p2.html

note to self: imap and pop3 don't send email

only smtp does.
imap and pop3 are ways of reading email. the difference being pop3 deletes the email from the server after downloading it from the server to your computer, while imap doesn't.

neither pop3 nor imap is used to send email. for that you use smtp.
here are 2 articles:
http://2.0webtutorials.com/web-tutorials/pop-vs-imap-vs-smtp-vs-forwarding-emails/
http://luxsci.com/blog/sending-outbound-email-via-imap.html