From the top of a carton of microwaveable spaghetti hoops:
Microwave 850W
Peel back film.
30 sec (full power). Stir
30 sec (full power). Stir
CAUTION: WILL BE HOT
At last I understand the purpose of the microwave! All those years of confusion and unexplained burns over at last. Thank you, lawyers at Heinz and the whole Culture of Liability that made this advice necessary.
Bored with the usual hand soap we get, last week instead I purchased a carton of what I shall refer to for legal reasons as "X & Y" hand wash. The design is a clever piece of marketing in itself: the font used for "X & Y" harks back to the early years of the 20th century, underneath the manufacturers name it just says "England", and the top of the bottle is made to look metallic (though still plastic). All in all it seems to hearken back to a more elegant age, and looks like the sort of hand soap you find in a posh hotel.
Apart from this cunningly wrought aura of opulence, what caught my eye was its claim that it contains vitamins A, B and C. So what? Can the body really absorb vitamins through the skin? Lots of soaps and gels inform you of the vitamins and minerals that they contain, but I don't think any ever make health claims based on this, which you'd think they would if they were able. Rather than potentially ruin this blog post, I won't do any immediate research to find out. However, a thought experiment says that if I can lie in a bath full of bath salts for half an hour, without any risk of becoming salty, then chances are that my skin is also opaque to vitamins. Also, I've never had to worry about what I might absorb from sun block, and yet I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to be taken internally.
I may be doing Messrs X & Y a grave injustice here, but I'm starting to think that the real reason they mention these vitamins is to create a mental association between health-giving substances and their product.
They are not the only ones to use this technique. One popular brand makes a virtue of being pH neutral. But other soaps will point out that they contain zesty citrus fruits, while still others talk about their milkiness. So there we have three possibilities: acidic, alkaline, and neutral. Are they all good for the skin? Or is there maybe a range of values between highly acidic and highly alkaline in which the skin doesn't really care? Each one though conjures up a mental image of healthiness through its choice of ingredients.
So is adding these ingredients to soap completely pointless? (I'm now wondering how nicotine patches work.) I shall keep a lookout for soaps that have their nutritional value printed on the packaging. Or perhaps fruit-scented shower gel that counts as one of my "five a day".
[Should X & Y's lawyers be able to identify their clients from this post, I hasten to add that the soap feels and smells wonderful—well worth that little bit extra.]
I decided recently to make an effort to learn a bit of electronics, using a kindly donated Arduino Uno and a few electronics components that we had around the house. The choice of resistors this gave me was seriously limited, so I popped over to Maplins and bought a pack of twenty different resistor types. To my dismay, when I got them home, I realised that the only indications of their strength were the colour bar codes painted on their sides.
No doubt if I continue with my current interest I will grow to be able to read these codes as if they were English text. At the moment though it's rather harder to decipher them. A quick bit of googling found sites like this one that provide handy converters; however, to use these tools you have to be able to read the colours off the resistors in the first place, and there are a couple of issues here that I would like to raise.
Firstly, it is by no means obvious in which direction to read the bars. Supposedly there should be a bigger gap between the last bar and its immediate neighbour than between the first bar and the second. In my experience so far this difference is usually not noticeable, and possibly non-existent. Secondly, the choice of colours, while naturally restricted to what the limits of human eyesight have provided, does allow for an incy-wincy bit of ambiguity. Telling the difference between white, grey and silver, when only one of them is present on the resistor, is no laughing matter. Gold and orange are another two colours that some might think are rather similar.
These codes have been around for a long time, so I'm probably going to look back on this post with amusement at some point (oh, please, please be sooner rather than later), but for now I find the best way of decoding them is to measure the resistance roughly using my multimeter (had one for years, absolutely no recollection of why I needed it), and then matching that value with the colours (bright light and a magnifying glass very useful at this point).
It took a while, but this is my list of resistor strengths from Maplin's "Lucky Bag" of resistors:
5.62Ω, 24Ω, 43Ω, 78.9Ω, 113Ω, 287Ω, 309Ω, 422Ω, 1.18KΩ, 1.62KΩ, 3.6KΩ, 5.6KΩ, 10KΩ, 15.4KΩ, 33KΩ, 97.6KΩ, 115KΩ, 261KΩ, 619KΩ, and 2.4MΩ.
There aren't many values there that I would have expected. Whether there's a reason for such obscure numbers, or whether that's why it's called a 'lucky' bag is currently an open issue as far as I'm concerned, and clearly further research is called for.
Working out the last few values was considerably simpler than the first ones I did, as I started to remember which colour matches which digit. There are acronyms to help, and googling "resistor colour code acronyms" throws up several. I was appalled to see how many (including the top result) involve sexual violence towards women, with a couple of people mentioning that that was the acronym they were taught at school!
A few decades ago, in a male-dominated field, this might have been acceptable (though still very wrong), but surely in the 21st century people would think twice before posting this crap onto the web as a learning aid?
For the record, the one I picked to learn is
Bad Beer Rots Our Young Guts But Vodka Goes Wellwhich also incorporates some health advice. Not sure about the vodka message though.
I came in just now to have a go at my ISP and noticed that I've reached exactly 7000 page views, only 10 months since I reached 4000. It took me over two years to get to there, and half of those hits came in a single fortnight after the assassin incident. I temper my satisfaction with the reflection that there are bloggers who get more page views than that for a single post.
Anyway, getting back to TalkTalk, who have rung me up three times in the last 24 hours, allegedly to check that I'm not paying too much, although I'm pretty sure that this will somehow involve me paying them more.
Cold calls from TalkTalk trying to get me to give them my phone line rental have been coming ever since I signed up for their broadband, but three calls in a day seems excessive. I can only assume that they're phoning all their customers, and because I end the conversation shortly after they mention who they are, my name isn't being ticked off the list of customers contacted. Ironically I am now very ticked off, and if the calls don't stop I might have to transfer my business elsewhere.
For all the knowledge that I might get a better deal (or fewer cold calls) from changing ISP, it remains a risky strategy. The last time we did it we lost all telecommunications for a week: broadband and telephone. Apparently about a tenth of customers switching ISP experience this level of service. For me the grief was compounded by my previous ISP then not accepting that I no longer had to pay them every month.
(In fairness to TalkTalk I should mention that this happened when I was transferring to Tiscali, which TalkTalk later acquired. Maybe TalkTalk would have done a better job; they certainly couldn't have done a worse one.)
But now it occurs to me that when we swapped broadband provider last time our only fallback was a £20 Nokia mobile phone. If we did it again today we'd still have three internet-enabled smartphones to provide access to the outside world. Hmm, maybe it's time to look again at what deals are available from the broadband providers. Not from TalkTalk though.
I recently started reading The Bodhisattva's Brain
by Owen Flanagan, published by the MIT Press. This isn't about the contents of the book, interesting though they look. Instead it's about the feel of a really nice book.
Everything about this book is appealing: the simplicity of the front cover design, the superb quality of the typography and printing, the texture of the high quality paper, and above all, the delicious smell of a new book.
I have a Kindle, and I read a lot on it, and I'm happy with it in its way. I'm sure that e-readers are the way the book industry is going. And yet...the experience of reading a book on a Kindle (I cannot speak for Nooks or other devices, but I doubt they're very different) lacks the magic of holding and smelling a really well produced, physical, paper book.
No doubt it will get better. In the meantime, someone has tried to close the gap by bottling the scent of a book. At nearly £70 a bottle I won't be rushing out to buy it any time soon, but I'm pleased to find that people are working on the problem already. Perhaps Kindles will one day come with this smell impregnated in their casing.
And perhaps one day the resolution of its screen will match the skills of the MIT Press and its printers.
Today on the bus a teenage boy offered me his seat. This has never happened before, and honestly I wasn't expecting it for another twenty years or so.
Top marks for his manners, but I'm left consoling myself with the hope that he does this for every adult, not just the ones that he thinks look old.
I just watched this video about the new EU cookie law. I run two small websites, which don't use cookies, but I was intrigued by the claim that 90% of EU web sites violate the law. How could it be so high? A worrying idea occurred to me. I googled "does google analytics violate eu cookie law", and the very first hit confirmed my fears. I had become a criminal!
To be honest, I don't look at the Google Analytics data very often, so rather than pay £50 for someone's jQuery plugin to get me back on the straight and narrow, I just commented out the offending JavaScript.
What a relief! And what a relief too for my few visitors, knowing that I will no longer be able to know that they've visited me, even though I had no way of knowing who they were.
My only lingering worry is that leaving the commented out code in my HTML files could count as conspiracy.
