A Call for More Scientific Truth in Product Warning Labels
Okay, this is really not new, but still funny. For those of you who don’t know it yet a personal selection out of the best “scientific product warnings”:
A Call for More Scientific Truth in Product Warning Labels
by Susan Hewitt and Edward Subitzky
As scientists and concerned citizens, we applaud the recent trend towards legislation that requires the prominent placing of warnings on products that present hazards to the general public. Yet we must also offer the cautionary thought that such warnings, however well-intentioned, merely scratch the surface of what is really necessary in this important area. This is especially true in light of the findings of 20th century physics.
We are therefore proposing that, as responsible scientists, we join together in an intensive push for new laws that will mandate the conspicuous placement of suitably informative warnings on the packaging of every product offered for sale in the United States of America. Our suggested list of warnings appears below.
WARNING: This Product Warps Space and Time in Its Vicinity.
PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any Use of This Product, in Any Manner Whatsoever, Will Increase the Amount of Disorder in the Universe. Although No Liability Is Implied Herein, the Consumer Is Warned That This Process Will Ultimately Lead to the Heat Death of the Universe.
NOTE: The Most Fundamental Particles in This Product Are Held Together by a “Gluing” Force About Which Little is Currently Known and Whose Adhesive Power Can Therefore Not Be Permanently Guaranteed.
ATTENTION: Despite Any Other Listing of Product Contents Found Hereon, the Consumer is Advised That, in Actuality, This Product Consists Of 99.9999999999% Empty Space.
NEW GRAND UNIFIED THEORY DISCLAIMER: The Manufacturer May Technically Be Entitled to Claim That This Product Is Ten-Dimensional. However, the Consumer Is Reminded That This Confers No Legal Rights Above and Beyond Those Applicable to Three-Dimensional Objects, Since the Seven New Dimensions Are “Rolled Up” into Such a Small “Area” That They Cannot Be Detected.
PLEASE NOTE: Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That When the Consumer Is Not Directly Observing This Product, It May Cease to Exist or Will Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State.
IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The Entire Physical Universe, Including This Product, May One Day Collapse Back into an Infinitesimally Small Space. Should Another Universe Subsequently Reemerge, the Existence of This Product in That Universe Cannot Be Guaranteed.
(The above is from Volume 36, Number 1 of The Journal of Irreproducible Results. Copyright 1991 Blackwell Scientific Publications, Inc., 3 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02141. Individual US Subscriptions $12.00. Reproduced with permission.)
Read the full version at, e.g., http://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/netsam/warning_labels.html. Talking about nonsense, you might also want to check out the journal this article is from, The Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Barr. Thomas Mbeki needs your help!
In another typcial “Nigeria connection” e-mail I received one today that read
Attn Sir,
I am Thomas Mbeki, the personal attorney
to Michael Burton , On the 16Th of July 2006, my client and his family were involved in a car accident along Accra / Benin express road where they all died .Since then, I have made several enquiries to locate his
relatives and this has been with no result I decided to use the Internet hence I contacted you to help in repatriating the properties left behind .I have been issued a notice to provide the next of kin or have the account confiscated, so I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin so that the proceeds can be paid to you . I have every legal documents needed to back-up the claim.
Please contact me via :thomasmbeki1000@yahoo.com
for further details.
Thanks for your co-operation.Regards,
Barr.Thomas Mbeki.
Just for the fun of it I just replied to that message (using a disposable e-mail address):
Dear Mr Mbeki,
I am honoured by your request and would gladly like to help. How shall we proceed?
Yours,
Derek Meyer.
Let’s see how this continues.
Mobile Internet with a Mac and a SonyEricsson K750i
Nowadays prices for mobile internet are getting reasonable. With e.g. Simyo you get your mobile Megabyte for 24 Euro-Cent. This is okay for e-mail messaging and even for some moderate web-browsing. Of course all this makes more fun if done from a decent computer, say a MacBook, and not using some tiny mobile phone’s keypad. So I was looking for a way to go online using my MacBook running MacOS X 10.4.10 and a SonyEricsson K750i mobile phone (which is a great mobile phone except for two things: The keypad is almost unresponsive after two years of moderate use and the general key response is a bit tardy for my opinion). Unfortunately Apple does not supply the necessary Modem Scripts for this phone but a nice fella, Ross Barkman, has created them and offers them for free download from his website. He provides several scripts: For me, the first one, GPRS CID 1, already worked fine. All the settings you need to care about are described in detail in his ReadMe file and some provider specific data for Germany can be found at teltarif.de. Happy mobile surfing!
Update (Feb 3 2008): In Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) appropriate scripts are bundled with the OS.
The iPhone
Now it’s coming (in the U.S….)
English dinat.bst
If for some reason you would like to use the BibTeX style dinat for your English LaTeX document you have to change some abbreviations which are defined in dinat.bst if you want to cite like “Jones et al.” or “Jones and Coppi” instead of the respective German abbreviations.
The lines you should be looking for and some possible replacements are
%%——————————————————————————
%% push standard text items on top of the stack
%%——————————————————————————
FUNCTION {push.bd} { “Volume” }
FUNCTION {push.diplom} { “Master thesis” }
FUNCTION {push.disser} { “Ph.D. thesis” }
FUNCTION {push.forschung} { “Research Report” }
FUNCTION {push.hrsg} { “Editor” }
FUNCTION {push.in} { “In:” }
FUNCTION {push.isbn} { “ISBN” }
FUNCTION {push.issn} { “ISSN” }
FUNCTION {push.kap} { “Chap.” }
FUNCTION {push.nr} { “Nr.” }
FUNCTION {push.sn} { “p” }
FUNCTION {push.s} { “p.” }
FUNCTION {push.siehe} { “see” }
FUNCTION {push.ua} { “et\,al” }
FUNCTION {push.und} { “and” }
FUNCTION {push.url.name} { “URL” }
FUNCTION {push.veranst} { “event” }
FUNCTION {push.von} { “by” }
FUNCTION {push.zugriff} { “date visited” }FUNCTION {push.cite} { “\citep” }
You might also want to change
%%——————————————————————————
%% required macros for abbr. names of month
%%——————————————————————————
MACRO {jan} {“january”}MACRO {feb} {“february”}
MACRO {mar} {“march”}
MACRO {apr} {“april”}
MACRO {may} {“may”}
MACRO {jun} {“june”}
MACRO {jul} {“july”}
MACRO {aug} {“august”}
MACRO {sep} {“september”}
MACRO {oct} {“october”}
MACRO {nov} {“november”}
MACRO {dec} {“december”}
If you find any further passages in dinat.bst that need to be changed please leave a comment.
If you are using the MacTeX distribution for MacOS X dinat.bst is in
/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/dinat
Kundenservice
Also gut, dass Deutschland kein Service-Land ist, wissen wir ja, auch wenn man das Wort “Service” seit einigen Jahren immer häufiger hört und liest. Aber wenn man es denn mal liest, äußert sich darin mitunter eine eher kuriose Vorstellung von Service. So zum Beispiel in einer Mail der Würzburger Versorgungs- und Verkehrs-GmbH, in der wir auf die jährliche Erfassung der Stromzähler hingewiesen worden sind:
Sie können mit Erhalt der E-Mail die Zählerstände selbst ablesen und uns diese im Online-Kundenservice unter http://www.wvv.de/kundenservice mitteilen.
Da fragt man sich dann doch, ob “Kundenservice” Service für oder vielleicht doch eher vom Kunden ist…
Congress Votes to Outsource US Presidency
Congress today announced that the office of President of the United States of America will be outsourced to India as of July 1, 2007. The move is being made in order to save the President’s $500,000 yearly salary, and also a record $521 Billion in deficit expenditures and related overhead the office has incurred during the last 5 years. “We believe this is a wise financial move. The cost savings are huge” stated Congressman Thomas Reynolds (R-WA).
Novellierung des Gesetzes über die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Manchmal fragt man sich ja, was die diversen Politiker den lieben langen Tag so machen. In den nächsten Tagen werden sie zunächst damit beschäftigt sein, sich für etwa 100 Millionen Euro zu tagen — auf die handfesten Ergebnisse, die bald Umsetzung finden, darf man gespannt sein.
Aber, wenn sie das grad mal nicht machen, kommen sie noch auf andere lustige Ideen: Zum Beispiel wurde ja mit der Novellierung des Gesetzes über die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek eingeführt, dass alle deutschen Internetseiten in ebendieser Bibliothek gespeichert werden sollen. Das ist nun aber eigentlich nichts, wozu man ein Gesetz erlassen, Strafen (bis 10.000 Euro Ordnungswidrigkeit!) hinterlegen und bürokratische Formulierungen schaffen müsste. Man könnte es einfach so machen wie archive.org. Aber nein! Hoch lebe die Regulierung und mindestens ebenso hoch lebe die Unsicherheit und Unklarheit. Muss ich jetzt als privater Freizeit-Website-Macher meine Website abliefern? Soll tatsächlich jedes Internetforum jeden Beitrag bei der Nationalbibliothek abliefern?
Update (31.10.2008): Es geht ja doch anders! Die Nationalbibliothek hat ein Einsehen und verwendet (wie von mir vorgeschlagen ;-)) automatische Crawler, um Blogs und andere unregelmäßige Netzpublikationen für die Ewigkeit zu konservieren.
Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz faster than Core Cuo 2 GHz
The Superdrive (DVD burner for those who don’t speak Apple) of my Core Duo 2GHz MacBook (MacBook 1,1) never worked correctly: It didn’t read DVD-Rs I have burned with any other DVD burner and it also was not able to burn DVDs! But I didn’t find a time where I didn’t need my MacBook so I could bring it to the Apple service and get the problem fixed. So I now bought a new MacBook Core 2 Duo (unfortunately just a few weeks before they got their speed-bump) to replace my Core Duo and be able to fix the latter one within the warranty period. The upgrade did not make any troubles: I just replaced my MacBook Core 2 Duo’s internal harddrive by the MacBook Core Duo’s one and (to quote Steve Jobs) “Boom!”. That means: No problem, everything works. The Apple service (notably the guys at Comacs, Würzburg) replace not only the DVD drive but also the complete topcase (I just told them that the Ä key didn’t work properly but they told me it was dirty anyway so they replaced the whole… Nice!).
So now to the benchmark I ran on both MacBooks. The hardware configuration was practically the same, except for the processor: Both had 2 GB of RAM and both had the same 120 GB Fujitsu MHV2120BH hard drive, the only hardware difference is the processor: An Intel Core Duo 2 GHZ (“Yonah”) in the old, an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHZ (“Merom”) in the new MacBook. Unfortunately there was also a software difference: I had run the test on the Yonah MacBook in August 2008, therefore it had 10.4.7, the test on the Merom MacBook was done at the end of April, so it had 10.4.9. The rest of the software configuration was practically the same.
This is what XBench said (an excerpt of only the differing or otherwise interesting results), more points means faster computer:
- Overall result: 52.59 points (Yonah), 96.17 (Merom)
- CPU Test: 74.25 vs. 90.42
- Memory test: 112.38 vs. 106.72 (the Merom was *slower* although it had physically the same RAM built in as the Yonah…)
- Quartz Graphics Test: 53.37 vs. 108.78
- OpenGL Graphics Test: 221.89 vs. 172.44
- User Interface Test: 204.10 vs. 19.38 (!!)
I also did a Mathematica 4 benchmark on both systems using Karl Unterkofler’s MMA 4.0 test notebook. At that time I still used Mathematica 4 because it did all that I needed. The result from the Mathematica test was: Yonah: Total Kernel Time: 35.76, Benchmark: 2.89; Merom: Total Kernel Time: 33.16, Benchmark: 3.06.
Mathematica 6 has a built-in benchmarking tool. For the Merom notebook it calculated a benchmark result of 1.26 from a total test time of 68.3 seconds.
Neue Fahrradtour Würzburg – Volkach (Mainschleife)
Hier ist meine neueste Fahrradtour: Von Würzburg nach Volkach zur Mainschleife, etwa 80 km mit gut 760m Gesamtanstieg, die sich aber auf einige Kilometer hinziehen, so dass es gar nicht so sehr auffällt. Den GPS-Track kann man sich auf gpsies.com herunterladen. Hier ist eine Karte von der Tour und die detaillierte Beschreibung, die ich auf gpsies.com hinterlassen habe:
<br />
Wir starten auf dem Main-Werra-Radweg in Würzburg und fahren über Versbach nach Rimpar (kurzer Abstecher zum Schloss Grumbach). Weiter geht’s nach Maidbronn (kurzer Abstecher zum Riemenschneider-Altar St. Afral). Anschließend überqueren wir die A7, weitere Orte sind Mühlhausen, Unter- und Oberpleichfeld. Nach Dipbach geht’s nochmal ein paar Meter hinauf, um es dann dafür durch den Wald nach Untereisenheim hinunter rollen zu lassen. Bei Fahr benutzen wir die Autofähre, um auf die andere Mainseite zu kommen (50 Cent pro Fahrrad, Stand: Mai 2007). An der Wallfahrtskirche Maria im Weingarten vorbei geht es dann nach Volkach. Von Volkach aus fahren wir die Mainschleife ab und überqueren dazu den Main-Kanal, bei Sommerach geht es aber wieder auf die linke Seite des Mainkanals. Bei Stadtschwarzach überqueren wir den Main ein letztes Mal und fahren entlang der B22 nach Dettelbach. Von dort aus geht es über Bibergau, Effelsdorf, Rottendorf, Gerbrunn zurück nach Würzburg.
Die meiste Zeit geht es auf Fahrradwegen durch die Landschaft, wenn der Fahrradweg auf der Straße verläuft, so ist es immer eine kleine, wenig befahrene Straße. Die Beschaffenheit der Fahrradwege ist bis auf wenige Ausnahmen sehr gut.