Month: October 2008

Two Times Two Equals Stupid

I recently prepared a box of Pasta Roni, which involved stirring together the pasta, 1½ cups water, ¾ cups milk, and 2 tablespoons “margarine, butter, or spread with no trans fat” in its preparation.  This is routine and uninteresting.

Then I noticed smaller lettering beneath the directions (verbatim and unabridged, but with my emphasis):

To Prepare Two Boxes:  Follow Range Top Directions, except prepare 2 boxes of PASTA RONI® Four Cheese Flavor with Corkscrew Pasta in a 3-quart saucepan with 3 cups water, 1½ cups milk and 4 tablespoons margarine, butter or spread with no trans fat.

Go ahead – go back and do the math.  Take your time.  You’ll discover, as I did, that the sole purpose of that sentence is to tell you to double the ingredients you use when making double the amount.  No.  Strike that.  The sole purpose of that sentence is to tell you that 2 × ¾ = 1½, that 2 × 2 = 4, and that 2 × 1½ = 3.

It has apparently fallen to the Quaker Oats Company (which makes Pasta Roni) to teach adults in the United States how to double fractions.  Even if you’re incapable of doing the math, couldn’t you just measure out 1½ cups, pour it into the pot, and then measure out another 1½ cups?

It’s Shakespeare After All

From the Associated Press:

Monkeys taught to play a computer game were able to overcome wrist paralysis with an experimental device that could lead to new treatments for patients with stroke and spinal cord injury.

The monkeys regained use of paralyzed muscles by learning to control the activity of a single brain cell.

…

[Study co-author Chet Moritz] stressed the approach is years, if not decades, away from use in people.

We can all agree that any progress on a new treatment for paralysis is excellent news, both for paralyzed people and for the scientific and medical communities.

Now, let’s focus for a moment on the fact that we can teach monkeys to play video games.  How long has this been going on?

Please, somebody confirm that we’ve also taught them to post YouTube comments.  It would explain so much…

Where’s My Button?

Dear Amazon.com,

For years you’ve had a button on the “Your Account” page labeled “Where’s my stuff?”

I miss this button.

I understand that I get all the same functionality through the “View Recent and Open Orders” button, but it’s much less fun to click.

I just thought you should know.

Sincerely,
Someone who doesn’t know where his stuff is

Thank You, Pandora!

Pandora often plays new music I end up enjoying. That’s its job.

Yesterday, asked to play music similar to Hayley Westenra, it completely floored me by introducing Vienna Teng’s Lullaby for a Storm Night. She describes the song this way in a YouTube video from a Dusseldorf performance:

It’s a relatively old song of mine. I wrote it when I was 17 years old, when I was taking an English class where I had to write a very long paper, and I didn’t want to write the paper, so I wrote the song instead.

This is a song about a rainy evening – a thunderstorm. The thunderstorm went on all night. It rained so hard that – because my school is a California school and we’re not used to weather – it actually flooded the whole school, so I had one more day to finish the paper for English class.

The songs on Teng’s MySpace page are even better. Topping it all off, she’s a computer scientist with a BS from Stanford.

I know where I’ll be on December 5th.

A Brief History of Time

At 4:49 am on 19 October 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user created a new page titled “Sarah Palin.” It read, in full:

Republican Party (United States) candidate for governor for the state of Alaska. Sarah is the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska

Sure, the first sentence is incomplete (which another editor corrected that day), the second is missing its period, and her last name doesn’t feature anywhere in the article, but she had her very own Wikipedia page.

As early as 2 November 2005 we got this telling sentence from user Tko ak:

Despite being considered a maverick by many for rebuking her own party, her conservative political credentials remain intact.

Huh! She really is a maverick!

The page grew into a full article on her governorship and beyond until 6:57 pm on 12 August, when Paul007ex added this paragraph:

Governor Sarah Palin has been mentioned as Vice President contendor (sic) by a number of different media outlets. Governor Sarah Palin has a strong online member support for her Vice Presidency appeal.

It had undergone 714 revisions in total before then. Between 12 August and 29 August (when McCain announced his running mate) another quick 187 revisions speculated on her place in the 2008 campaign, including the controversial Young Trigg edits.

And after the 29th? In just three days editors tacked on 2,364 new changes – about 2½ times the total volume of edits in the prior history of the page.

Over 6,200 more have gone through in September and October (to present).

At first I was considering creating a time lapse video of the page (as has been done before for other articles) but then I calculated that if done to scale there’d be three minutes of glacial nothingness followed by five to ten seconds of explosive change.

Make it Not Be So!

In the Simpsons episode “Homer the Great” (season 6, episode 12), the leader of the secret Stonecutters organization is called Number One.

Let’s review some key moments in my experience watching this show:

  • 7:38 – Lenny and Carl first mention Number One
  • 8:18 – Number One speaks for the first time.  I recognize the voice of Patrick Stewart immediately
  • 9:30 – I finally get the joke about Patrick Stewart being “Number One”

In previous commentaries for Simpsons episodes, David Mirkin has taken to explaining the jokes.  He’s made fun of himself for doing this, but I’d just like to say: evidently people like me can use the help.

Update: I’ve now listened to the commentary for this episode, where they didn’t mention the joke at all.  I now feel slightly less bad about it.

This Blog is Titled 2008-10-07 Mailing List Anecdote

The Huntington Theatre Company keeps sending me e-mail to announce that Carrie Fisher is coming to town on Friday.  After six messages on the subject I got annoyed enough to unsubscribe from the Huntington’s mailing list.  (I have nothing against Carrie Fisher, but six announcements about anything is plenty).  This is what I got:

Your request has been processed and the email address has been removed from the list 20081006_CFBeginsFri_nonsubs.

Let’s decode.  I just subscribed from a mailing list titled “2008-10-06 Carrie Fisher Begins Friday, non-subscribers.”

I love a mailing list that’s so specifically titled it’s virtually inconceivable it will ever be used again, whether I’m subscribed or not.  Now let’s see what happens when I unsubscribe from the “2008-10-09 Carrie Fisher Still Begins Friday, non-subscribers” list when it comes out!

Pope Fixes Financial Crisis; Details at Eleven

From The Age:

Pope Benedict XVI says the financial crisis sweeping the world proves the futility of craving success and money and he urges instead that people base their lives on the word of God.

“We are seeing now in the collapse of the big banks that this money is disappearing, is nothing,” Benedict told a synod of bishops on Monday on the theme of “The Word of God”.

Let’s review.  Our government believes if it just throws $700 billion at anything that moves this crisis will go away.  The Pope just shrugs his shoulders and pontificates (literally), “I guess we’re not supposed to have money or homes.”

Who do we have to take Jerry Falwell’s role of reminding us that if only we were less tolerant toward homosexuality and feminism (and the ACLU, don’t forget), we wouldn’t have these crises in the first place?

(via BBC Newshour)

And the Award for Most Annoying Goes To…

The Dexter Park website easily qualifies to compete for the title of Worst Possible Website Design in the History of Websites.

It’s honestly so bad I lost interest in living there partway through, and only kept browsing so that I could compile the following list of horrifying problems:

  1. It plays music in the background!  I was already listening to my own music when I got there.  Whatever Muzak you’ve chosen clashes with the upbeat music of Mr. Leroy Anderson I was enjoying before you so rudely interrupted.
  2. There’s no way to turn off the music!  On my first visit I closed the site because I couldn’t figure out how to mute it.  On closer inspection, I realized it can’t be done.  Again, I was already perfectly happy with my own personal music selection.
  3. Flash should never – never – be used for navigation.  I cannot bookmark any page of your site.  If I want to share a great floorplan with my friends and relatives, I have to call them up on the telephone and describe how to use the site.
  4. Clicking the “Neighborhood” button does not reveal the building’s address.  It does not even reveal a map.  It reveals a very, very low information-density graphic with a star where the apartments are and various other symbols for area landmarks.  It is not even possible to identify from this graphic the building’s neighborhood, ironically.
  5. The symbols on this graphic blink incessantly, which is evidently supposed to encourage visitors to click them.  Clicking one does give more information on the landmark, but…
  6. Here’s the description given for Boston University: “Boston University began as a Methodist seminary in 1839 in Vermont.  The school was transferred to New Hampshire in 1847 and to Boston in 1867.  It is now internationally recognized as a top institution of learning and research. …”  What can this possibly have to do with selling me an apartment?
  7. The emphasis on area universities is unusually strong for a building that (according to other, offline sources) does not accept undergraduates.
  8. There’s a “View T Map” button which just shows the T schematic diagram (still not a real map) and puts a star incorrectly at about the St. Paul Street stop on the B line.  In reality, the building is halfway between the B and C lines.
  9. Under “Floorplans,” site visitors can see thumbnails of various floorplans across the bottom of the screen.  Only three are visible at a time.  Arrows to either side will scroll through the thumbnails, but clicking an arrow doesn’t just advance to the next image.  It advances a few pixels.  Moving to the next image requires holding the mouse button for three or four seconds.  This is just grossly inefficient.
  10. After selecting a floorplan to enlarge, there’s a “Furniture Arranger” feature that lets visitors drag bits of furniture onto the graphic.  These example pieces of furniture come in various shapes, but only one size – every dining table in the world is about seven feet long, apparently.
  11. The homepage features a “Virtual Tour” button that is not accessible once the visitor has selected any other page of the site.  It’s not possible, as far as I can tell, to return to the homepage.  (The video itself looks pretty good, excluding the shot of a Peapod billboard as the narrator describes the building as ‘close to professional services’)

As a web developer, I’m appalled.  I’ve built plenty of sites that didn’t age well, and I’ve built plenty of sites that had design problems.  This is not an example of either.  It’s a flashy site that’s meant to sell a product (an apartment) that in reality drove me away almost immediately.