The World's Most Annoying Website is aptly named: you're advised to know how to kill a process on your computer before you visit it.

But even diversions like these can teach us something. Without giving too much away, what makes this really annoying is the combination of small bits of hope with endless amounts of fruitlessness. If it were simply and utterly futile, you'd quickly kill it and ask "what's the point?" The author's foresight in providing diversions along the way gives it just enough interest to keep you walking further down the path to ultimate annoyance.

Lotteries work the same way. If you never won anything whatsoever, you'd soon stop squandering your spare bills. But an occasional $20 winner (no, i don't actually speak from experience) keeps the hope alive and keeps you plunking down money. So gambling is more than just a tax on bad math skills: it's a tax on bad teleology because you can't see past the small amounts of immediate payoff to understand that there is no ultimate payoff.

The principle of variable reinforcement is well-established in behavioral psychology. Once you've learned some behavior, if the positive consequence only occurs sometimes (rather than never, or always), it's much harder to unlearn the behavior. It requires a triumph of understanding over nature for us to come to realize that, as they say in AA, "doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results, is insanity." But we act like this all the time, pursuing behaviors that we'd realize lead nowhere, if we took a long view and just stopped to reflect.

Wisdom comes from seeing the end from the beginning (Psalm 90), that we might not be annoyed, or worse, lost altogether.

I continue to be intrigued how many things i find on Tim Bray's blog that intersect with things i'm thinking about. One of his latest is a javascript technique for dynamic display of content when the mouse is over a target using CSS. I cooked up something similar, and quite independently, with some technical help from a colleague a few weeks ago, where i wanted to visualize a large number of things with unique (and in my case, dynamically generated) IDs. Tweaking the class property hides/shows them, reducing the visual clutter of highlighting them all. Unfortunately it wouldn't be wise to illustrate directly what i'm talking about because it borders on proprietary issues from work: but the fact that i find this approach useful too underscores his point that it's a widely useful technique.

One thing he's done that i like: a specific piece of screen real estate is dedicated to the dynamic content (in his case, picture captions). Predictability is an important aspect of user-friendly interface design, and having dynamic things go one place rather than all over adds this dimension.