The Old New Thing

$501 for 510g of peanut butter

You can buy 510 grams of peanut butter for only $501. Of course, this is special peanut butter. It must be kept at -20°C. And it is not intended for human consumption. This is peanut butter from the National Institute of Standards and Technology intended for use by food analysis laboratories to calibrate their equipment. For ...

What, going to Sweden *again*?

It appears that I will have an opportunity to visit Sweden during the first week of June. I'll have three days in Uppsala and three days in Lund, with a travel day in between. Now, I've already spent a week and a half in Uppsala, so perhaps I could spend the Uppsala days taking a ferry to Helsinki and back. (And I could visit Denmark ...

Nobody said it was a democracy

It's proxy season, which means I've been reading through proxy statement after proxy statement. The proxy voting rules for Allstate aren't very democratic. Scroll down to "How votes are counted and discretionary voting authority": The thirteen nominees who receive the most votes will be elected to the open directorships even if they...

Musings on formal and informal address

My entry about Good-Bye, Lenin! appears to have turned into a discussion of formal and informal terms of address in various languages and cultures. Sweden effectively abolished the "du"/"ni" distinction in the 1970's during the so-called "du-reform", getting rid of the formal "ni" and having everybody address each other as "du" - even...

News flash: People are fooled by the Onion

Fact-checking? What's fact-checking? I found it on the Internet! Wired News has a story on various people and news agencies being fooled by Onion articles. This used to be news, but now it's so common it may end up relegated to just a counter. "Number of people fooled by Onion articles: n+1...

NFL cracks down on grandstanding

The National (US) Football League adopted a 15-yard penalty for pre-planned celebrations, such as last year's "phone call from the end zone" or 2002's "autographed football". Apparently, the existing monetary fines weren't having much of an effect on players with multi-million-dollar contracts. (Surprised?) So now the league is ...

Good-Bye, Lenin!

This weekend I saw Good-Bye, Lenin!, a German movie about a young man who must pretend that East Germany still exists, for the sake of his mother who was in a coma during the fall of the Berlin Wall and therefore remains unaware of the earth-shattering changes the took place while she was unconscious. There is, of course, the comedy of...

Beethoven as ambient music

Who knew that Beethoven wrote ambient music? The people at NOTAM took Beethoven's 9th Symphony and slowed it down so that the entire performance takes 24 hours. It's actually quite nice to listen to. (I like 2.1 myself.) [Rats, scooped by MetaFilter. Honest, it was in my queue! Nobody will believe me; they'll think I swiped it ...

A $2 billion bridge to one person

The New York Times reported on two enormous construction projects of dubious merit: [The first bridge] would connect [Ketchikan, population 7845] to an island that has about 50 residents and the area's airport, which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer). It could cost about $200 million. The other bridge would span ...