Random Stuff XX: Smörgasbörd Edition
Remember when frequent-flyer miles almost became a second U.S. currency? The offers became so ubiquitous that once the frequent-flyer miles became more or less freely exchangeable among airlines, the name was shortened to “miles” (with the optional modifier “bonus”). Sign up for a new credit card and receive 5,000 bonus miles! Your starting pay is $8.50 an hour, plus six miles. I’m sure that hundreds of thousands of business droids completely forgot that the mile was originally, and still is, a unit of length.
I complained about that stupid trend so I could complain about this one. It’s topical, far stupider and no less omnipresent. It goes without saying that I’m talking about ringtones. If I hadn’t already boycotted Pepsi for other reasons, I’d have done so today, when I saw a coworker’s 20-ounce Pepsi bottle emblazoned with “Look Under the Cap To Win a Free Ringtone!” My opinion of investing significant time and effort into choosing a ringtone is on record.
If my work weren’t a Pepsi house, I’d boycott Dr. Pepper, as well. Why would I turn my back on my second-favorite beverage of all time?-I hear you gasp. Well, Dr. Pepper’s 20-oz.-bottle look-under-the-cap contest is for a free Hummer H3. Do the Dr. Pepper people really expect this to sell more of their product? A gigantic, ugly, wasteful symbol of American hubris and sexual insecurity? Gheezus Pleezus.
Protons and neutrons, and a number of more esoteric subatomic particles, are composed of more fundamental entities called "quarks." However, individual quarks have never been observed independently of the particles they make up.
In the same vein, that little American Dental Association blurb on the back of a toothpaste box always contains the word dentrifice, but dentrifice is never seen independently of the blurb of which it is an essential component.
I postulate that isolating the word dentrifice from the ADA statement of approval is equivalent to observing free quarks. If you use this hypothesis in Nobel Prize-winning research in nuclear physics, please acknowledge me during your speech.
The dew point reached 25 °C (77 °F) earlier this week. Lately, at work, I've had to set towels under my big-ass Dr. Pepper on the rocks, so I wouldn't get inundated by a veritable tsunami of condensation. We saw fog forming around us on our way out of the theater Monday night. The temperature: 21 °C (70 °F).
When we moved here last September, we caught the tail end of an Ohio summer. I felt like I would die of heat stroke whenever our thermostat read above 21.5 °C (71 °F). And I couldn't even think of sleeping, as our bedroom upstairs is always a couple degrees C (several degrees F) warmer. Fortunately, I've acclimated: now I'm just fine anywhere under 24 °C (75 °F). I never would have imagined I'd get used to this humidity: I was dreading the arrival of summer, but I took solace in the fact that no matter how hellish the heat and stifling the humidity, it couldn't possibly be as unpleasant as last winter. My boss just recently complained to me about the warm weather in Seattle. You heard me-Seattle! Somehow I just couldn't muster up any sympathy.
And now for something completely different.
A MOVIE REVIEW IN THE STYLE OF cutiepi314:
Cars: 3.9
Have you ever seen a day owl? Me neither. So why do we bother to make the qualification? Why not just call someone with a really late schedule an "owl"?
I use The Caffeine Database fairly often as a reference. It reports that a Starbucks 16-oz. "Grande" coffee contains five hundred milligrams of caffeine. Is that much caffeine even legal?
Elsewhere on the same site, you can find out how many servings of your favorite caffeinated beverage you need to drink to die of caffeine overdose. The author notes that the Death-by-Caffeine calculator is based on the "LD50 for oral ingestion of caffeine [the amount needed to kill half of a sample of mice fed huge quantities of caffeine], and a lot of studies report different numbers. The one I’m using is about 150mg/kg."
Based on that value, if I took 11 grams of caffeine over a short period of time, there's a fifty-fifty chance I'd be pushing up the daisies. That's equivalent to 315 cans of Coke, or only twenty-two Starbucks Grandes. I knew a few people in the medical biz who routinely drank twelve cups of strong coffee a day (or more). At about 140 mg caffeine a cup, assuming it's brewed, we're talking about one-seventh of a 50% lethal dose for someone my weight. Think about that next time you're in the hospital and being treated by a resident who looks like s/he's in the last hour of a 36-hour on-call shift. (Still, the LD50 quoted assumes fairly rapid ingestion, so it might not be as bad as I've suggested.)
I complained about that stupid trend so I could complain about this one. It’s topical, far stupider and no less omnipresent. It goes without saying that I’m talking about ringtones. If I hadn’t already boycotted Pepsi for other reasons, I’d have done so today, when I saw a coworker’s 20-ounce Pepsi bottle emblazoned with “Look Under the Cap To Win a Free Ringtone!” My opinion of investing significant time and effort into choosing a ringtone is on record.
If my work weren’t a Pepsi house, I’d boycott Dr. Pepper, as well. Why would I turn my back on my second-favorite beverage of all time?-I hear you gasp. Well, Dr. Pepper’s 20-oz.-bottle look-under-the-cap contest is for a free Hummer H3. Do the Dr. Pepper people really expect this to sell more of their product? A gigantic, ugly, wasteful symbol of American hubris and sexual insecurity? Gheezus Pleezus.
Protons and neutrons, and a number of more esoteric subatomic particles, are composed of more fundamental entities called "quarks." However, individual quarks have never been observed independently of the particles they make up.
In the same vein, that little American Dental Association blurb on the back of a toothpaste box always contains the word dentrifice, but dentrifice is never seen independently of the blurb of which it is an essential component.
I postulate that isolating the word dentrifice from the ADA statement of approval is equivalent to observing free quarks. If you use this hypothesis in Nobel Prize-winning research in nuclear physics, please acknowledge me during your speech.
The dew point reached 25 °C (77 °F) earlier this week. Lately, at work, I've had to set towels under my big-ass Dr. Pepper on the rocks, so I wouldn't get inundated by a veritable tsunami of condensation. We saw fog forming around us on our way out of the theater Monday night. The temperature: 21 °C (70 °F).
When we moved here last September, we caught the tail end of an Ohio summer. I felt like I would die of heat stroke whenever our thermostat read above 21.5 °C (71 °F). And I couldn't even think of sleeping, as our bedroom upstairs is always a couple degrees C (several degrees F) warmer. Fortunately, I've acclimated: now I'm just fine anywhere under 24 °C (75 °F). I never would have imagined I'd get used to this humidity: I was dreading the arrival of summer, but I took solace in the fact that no matter how hellish the heat and stifling the humidity, it couldn't possibly be as unpleasant as last winter. My boss just recently complained to me about the warm weather in Seattle. You heard me-Seattle! Somehow I just couldn't muster up any sympathy.
And now for something completely different.
A MOVIE REVIEW IN THE STYLE OF cutiepi314:
Cars: 3.9
Have you ever seen a day owl? Me neither. So why do we bother to make the qualification? Why not just call someone with a really late schedule an "owl"?
I use The Caffeine Database fairly often as a reference. It reports that a Starbucks 16-oz. "Grande" coffee contains five hundred milligrams of caffeine. Is that much caffeine even legal?
Elsewhere on the same site, you can find out how many servings of your favorite caffeinated beverage you need to drink to die of caffeine overdose. The author notes that the Death-by-Caffeine calculator is based on the "LD50 for oral ingestion of caffeine [the amount needed to kill half of a sample of mice fed huge quantities of caffeine], and a lot of studies report different numbers. The one I’m using is about 150mg/kg."
Based on that value, if I took 11 grams of caffeine over a short period of time, there's a fifty-fifty chance I'd be pushing up the daisies. That's equivalent to 315 cans of Coke, or only twenty-two Starbucks Grandes. I knew a few people in the medical biz who routinely drank twelve cups of strong coffee a day (or more). At about 140 mg caffeine a cup, assuming it's brewed, we're talking about one-seventh of a 50% lethal dose for someone my weight. Think about that next time you're in the hospital and being treated by a resident who looks like s/he's in the last hour of a 36-hour on-call shift. (Still, the LD50 quoted assumes fairly rapid ingestion, so it might not be as bad as I've suggested.)