Quotulatiousness

August 13, 2011

Colby Cosh digs up the story about the discarded contributions for Slave Lake

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

After an amusing look at the economics of Christmas (in short: it’s just a modern version of Potlatch), he finds out how those charitable contributions ended up in a landfill:

The containers were labelled with the name of energy company Total E&P, whose employees had gathered clothing and toys for the victims of the fire. “Employees had held a month-long drive to collect donations for Slave Lake victims,” notes the CBC. “They carefully packed up the collection and addressed it to the Red Cross, and called their internal courier to take it away. The Red Cross, though, does not accept items for donation, only cash…”.

So while the packing was “careful”, the research…? Not so much. Someone located another Calgarian with good intentions, Melissa Gunning, who was gathering material to be sent to Slave Lake fire victims. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the means to get all the nice things she accepted to the scene of the fire, and by that time, the brave people of Slave Lake hadn’t the slightest use for any of it.

[. . .]

I fear Paul Nielsen, the appalled discoverer of the items in the landfill, unwittingly saw straight to the heart of the matter. Someone went to a clothing store, bought a bunch of cute outfits for somebody’s else’s children, and “had the foresight to throw something in for the mother”, without the much less impressive foresight required to ask “Hey, will the Red Cross actually take this crap?” This is a “someone” who probably thought herself very clever in finding a absolutely bulletproof excuse for a shopping excursion, perhaps even on company time. The value of her “aid” turned out to be significantly less than zero, but that was surely beside the point to begin with. If it weren’t, the incessant entreaties of professional charitable organizations everywhere — “Please stop showing up with bundles of blankets and cans, and just give us cash already” — would actually have had some effect by now.

July 5, 2011

Miss Taliban beauty contest called off after all contestants turn out to be men

Filed under: Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:01

Okay, the real story:

AFGHAN police have arrested seven armed insurgents who disguised themselves as women by wearing burqas, officials said.

Interior ministry spokesman Siddiq Siddiqi said that the men, who carried light weapons with at least one in a suicide vest, were captured in Jalalabad, the capital of the eastern province of Nangarhar.

He said the men wore the all-enveloping veil as part of their disguise and were planning attacks on government targets, but gave no further details.

H/T to Roger Henry, who notes:

Have a look at these delectable Afghan stunners, Afghanistan’s best!
I do so like the look of coy modesty, what possibly could have given them away?
They could do with a little grooming.

June 14, 2011

Duke Nukem Forever: “Duke, you’re a relic from a different era”

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

After all that time in “gestation”, gamers have been eager to see the final result . . . and it’s an underwhelming experience:

In a game bursting with 1980s macho-movie quotes and in-jokes, one line resonates far beyond Duke Nukem Forever’s puerile script. Besieged by an alien invasion, the President of the United States ignores calls to beg the eponymous meathead to save the planet, lamenting, “Duke, you’re a relic from a different era.”

It’s not just The Duke himself who’s from a different era. His repertoire of foul-mouthed quips might be ripped from the VHS reels of Commando, Total Recall and Aliens, among many others, but it’s the painfully dated gameplay that ultimately proves some relics are best left buried.

Everywhere you look, DNF is a testament to its infamously protracted and traumatic development. Long loading times, low-res textures and polygon counts, poor facial animations and lip-syncing, screen tearing, juddering frame rates, basic lighting and reflections, pop-up, jaggies and disappearing assets — you name it, DNF suffers from it. Every gaming advancement of the past thirteen years is undone; every conceivable design flaw evident.

Rather than play the actual game, you might enjoy Yahtzee Croshaw’s “review” of the game from May, 2009:

Verdict
Duke Nukem Forever is the sum of all its flaws – a truly terrible game with almost no redeeming features. It’s as if Gearbox simply swept the scraps off 3D Realms’ development floor and glued them together into this mess. Graphics, gameplay, narrative, innovation, there’s simply nothing to recommend this mangled wreck. Put simply, as The Duke might say, “This game is one ugly motherfucker!”

June 9, 2011

Whistleblowers must take a number and wait to be served

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

Edward Siedle, foolish man, takes the Securities and Exchange Commission at their word:

Last Friday afternoon I got it into my head that I should try to contact the head of the SEC’s new whistleblower office and discuss a money manager scam I’d uncovered. Surely, I figured, in this post-Madoff era the SEC must be rolling out the red carpet for those looking to clue it in on financial shenanigans.

On the SEC’s home page, at www. sec.gov I found a new button that says “Questions, Tips and Complaints Whistleblower Provisions.” The bureaucrats behind this nifty new feature were so prescient that they even included a picture of a whistle for the convenience of illiterate snitches.

But he’s in a hurry, and doesn’t want to just fax or email the information — he wants to talk to a human being. That’s where it gets amusing/alarming depending on your view of government:

I got the number of the SEC’s media office from the folks at Forbes and called it. I asked the person who answered for the number of the SEC’s new office of the whistleblower.

“There is no new office of the whistleblower,” I was told.

“Can l please have the number of the head of the office then,” I asked.

“There is no new head of the office and there is no office,” the woman told me in a tone that she appeared to have honed while humoring morons.

“Now wait a minute,” I said, “I read an article about the new guy who is running it. He’s a former tobacco lawyer or something. I know his name … it’s McKessy or something like that.”

My handler laughed and said, “So you believe everything you read?”

H/T to Tim Harford, who linked to this article saying “Adapt emphasises whistleblowing as a way of uncovering hidden problems in fragile systems. Therefore: HEADDESK”.

Adapt, of course, is Harford’s latest book, which I quite enjoyed reading and recommend to your attention.

May 27, 2011

Powerpoint: it’s not presentation software, it’s visual assault software

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

I’ve attended lots of meetings where the Powerpoint slides have been really bad, but I’m happy not to have encountered anything quite as bad as this:

One of this year’s winners in the InFocus Worst Powerpoint Slide Contest.

Our “What Not to Present” contest was epic! Many thanks to all of you kind folks that submitted entries and spread the word about it. Many amazingly horrendous slides were sent in from all around the world. We laughed. We cried. We cringed.

[. . .]

We randomly chose our top 3 winners, but then quickly realized that we had to do more. So we are giving away ANOTHER projector to the slide we thought was the most horrendous. We passed the ugliness around the InFocus offices and to many of our partners pandering for votes — and we have a winner!

Update: While I’m busy poking fun at PowerPoint, here’s the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation. H/T to Paul “Inkless” Wells for the link.

May 22, 2011

Apocalypse not-now: “I don’t understand it. Obviously I haven’t understood it correctly because we are still here”

Filed under: Media, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:01

The disappointed followers of Harold Camping are (as far as the media have been able to determine) still around, and there are no explanations yet from the prophet of doom:

The California radio evangelist attracted the worldwide following proclaiming that the apocalypse would come Saturday.

Some of Camping’s followers gave away all their worldly possessions in anticipation of the biblical rapture.

In Oakland, California a group of onlookers poking fun at the predictions gathered outside Camping’s radio station to countdown to the deadline.

Camping predicted an apocalypse once before in 1994 and said it was a “miscalculation.”

In New York City, 60-year-old retiree Robert Fitzpatrick was also a believer of Camping’s prediction.

Fitzpatrick said he was expecting a natural disaster. “We’ll I expected the earth quake to begin, right around 6:00.”

“I don’t understand it. Obviously I haven’t understood it correctly because we are still here,” Fitzpatrick said to the Associated Press.

Fitzpatrick is the author of, “The Doomsday Code,” and spent more than $140,000 of his retirement savings on ads about the end of the world.

Still, you have to feel a bit sorry for them: who among us hasn’t had the disappointment of a cancelled Camping trip on the May Two-Four weekend?

May 21, 2011

President of TEPCO falls on his sword a few months late

Filed under: Environment, Health, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

The president of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has resigned:

In a business practice that recalled the ritual seppuku suicides of samurai warriors, the president of Japan’s largest power company resigned Friday to assume responsibility for the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

At a nationally televised news conference, Masataka Shimizu bowed deeply in an exhibition of remorse and declared, “I am resigning for having shattered public trust about nuclear power and for having caused so many problems and fears for the people.

“I want to take managerial responsibility and bring a symbolic close.”

Whether it’s a hearkening-back to Samurai ethos or not, he should have resigned long ago, as soon as it became clear that the company he headed was doing everything it could to conceal the extent of the actual damage both from the media and from the government.

There is a widespread feeling the government and TEPCO officials did not disclose all they knew during the early days of the crisis and have been less than forthcoming since.

In the first weeks after the earthquake, TEPCO officials received 40,000 complaints a day about the lack of information. Police had to be assigned to guard the company’s offices from anti-nuclear protesters.

This week, TEPCO released documents showing it was dealing with three simultaneous nuclear meltdowns, while reassuring people the fuel rods were safely intact in all the reactors.

“Why did it take two months to get to this point?” demanded a Wednesday editorial in the Nikkei business newspaper.

“Even a rough calculation of conditions inside the reactors would have helped in choosing the best response.”

Public confidence was shaken further when it emerged engineers at Fukushima were so unprepared for the disaster, they had to scavenge flashlights from nearby homes and used car batteries to try to reactivate damaged reactor gauges.

Nobody with an ounce of sense is criticizing the workers at the plant for their reaction to an earthquake that was far in excess of the design for the reactors, or a tsunami that was much higher than anything the designers had foreseen. Shit happens, and it was the daily double of fantastically unlikely natural disasters that struck the plant.

The company, however, deserves more than just a light dusting of shame for the way they appear to have been actively preventing the real state of the plant becoming known to the international nuclear community and the national government. A nuclear disaster is everyone’s business, and there were resources available to TEPCO that they signally failed to draw upon. Saving face is not an acceptable reaction to this kind of catastrophe.

May 13, 2011

Iatrogenic gullibility?

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Bruce Schneier summarizes a report that is either a very late April Fool story or proof that the sight of a white coat and stethescope induces compliant behaviour:

This is a pretty scary criminal tactic from Turkey. Burglars dress up as doctors, and ring doorbells handing out pills under some pretense or another. They’re actually powerful sedatives, and when people take them they pass out, and the burglars can ransack the house.

According to the article, when the police tried the same trick with placebos, they got an 86% compliance rate.

The linked report shows that people are nearly as likely to open the door when the caller claims to be a robber.

May 9, 2011

The crushing defeat of the Alternative Vote in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:58

Angela Harbutt recounts the scale of defeat for the pro-AV side in the recent referendum:

In any two horse political race, it is damned near impossible to poll less than 40% of the vote. You have to be spectacularly inept or obscenely unpopular to drop below this figure. For example, no Republican or Democrat Presidential candidate in recent US history has fallen this far. Even Barry Goldwater, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis — all famous for being electorally destroyed — managed to outscore the woeful YES percentage handsomely.

Yet somehow, the YES campaign managed to exceed even these extreme depths of campaigning ineptitude. It didn’t just lose. It was thrashed out of sight. It was humiliated. So appallingly bad has the YES vote been that any prospect of electoral reform has probably been obliterated for a generation.

The scale of incompetence by the YES campaign simply cannot be overstated. It is so vast and so staggering that it won’t merely fill column inches for days, if not weeks to come, it will be the subject of PhD theses for decades to come. It is unlikely that a wilful infiltration of the YES campaign by the NO side — at the most senior levels — could have resulted in a more calamitous result. The enormity of this professional political campaigning disaster is without parallel in modern British history.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

April 14, 2011

Scott Feschuk is one of those “ethnic voters” for the Harper photo-op

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Scott Feschuk is delighted to have the opportunity to have his photo taken with the prime minister. He’s overjoyed:

What a moment.

I never thought that I — a regular, ordinary Canadian — would get the chance to have my photo taken with the Prime Minister of Canada.

But as luck and crass political calculation would have it, he’s eager to be seen with me! All I have to do is attire myself in such a manner as to flamboyantly display my heritage, thereby rendering me a subhuman prop that Stephen Harper can exploit to woo more of my kind.

Needless to say, I’m in.

As is true of much national folklore garb, it can take quite a while to get into my ethnic costume. Each item has been carefully selected to represent a historic and sacred element relating to my suitably exotic but non-threatening culture.

Join me, won’t you, as I get dressed.

I think I can speak for all of us about our deep gratitude that this blog post is not illustrated.

It’s also nice to see that the Conservatives have not yet figured out how to avoid handing their opponents such wonderful opportunities for mockery.

Original tempest-in-an-ethnic-teapot here. 680News reported yesterday that the staffer who wrote the letter is no longer working for the candidate.

April 6, 2011

A good example of what not to crowdsource

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

The Guardian tried to enlist the brainpower of the crowd to solve the problems at Fukushima. As innovative as some of these solutions might be, it does demonstrate that there are things that cannot be crowdsourced:

Todd: “Build the worlds biggest tank over the whole site with pre-fab tilt slab concrete. […] I have done similar projects on a smaller scale but not with nuclear waste.”

Weston, Nuclear Radiologist: “repair the reacters befor any thing else bad happiens”

Andrew, Inventor: “water problem is un-fixable. Stop trying. Let it run off into the Pacific.”

Hugh, Geology Student: “I would use explosive materials to detach the Fukushima plant from the main land, use air-bags to float it 50km out into the pacific and then sink the whole lot 7000m down to the bottom of the Japan Trench.”

Max: “I suggest removing radioactive contamination there by using a small controlled explosion of a specially engineered nuclear device at the site of the stricken Fukushima plant”

OmegaSector: “IN FUTURE, ALL NEW NUCLEAR REACTOR MUST BE BUILT OVER A 1.2 km hole. Any out of control reactor, one press of a buttom and boom, the reactor will fail down 1.2 km and then seal up with soil.”

Denny, Assistant to Dr Strangelove: “Small scale nuclear strike.”

Kevin: “Japan has over 30,000 suicides per year — that’s over 80 per day. Since these people are planning to kill themselves anyway, how about the government asking for volunteers to go in, fix piping, visually inspect the damage, etc..?”

Not Einstein: “friendly radiation… to probably cancel out its effects. Its more like injecting good cholesterols to fight off bad ones in your body. I am not versed in these nuclear technicalities but I do understand philosophy of things, and sometimes you just need to fight fire with fire.”

Oscar. Mike. Golf.

March 30, 2011

At least they got his name right, maybe

Filed under: Britain, Media, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:00

A very detailed apology from Britain’s The Sun newspaper:

IN an article published on The Sun website on January 27 under the headline ‘Gollum joker killed in live rail horror’ we incorrectly stated that Julian Brooker, 23, of Brighton, was blown 15ft into the air after accidentally touching a live railway line.

His parents have asked us to make clear he was not turned into a fireball, was not obsessed with the number 23 and didn’t go drinking on that date every month.

Julian’s mother did not say, during or after the inquest, her son often got on all fours creeping around their house pretending to be Gollum.

Also, quotes from a witness should have been attributed to Gemma Costin not Eva Natasha. We apologise for the distress this has caused Julian’s family and friends.

Bold in the original post.

The author’s guide to dealing with criticism

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

In short, watch how author Jacqueline Howett responds to a review with (pretty mild) critical comments, then don’t do this:

Jacqueline Howett said…

You obviously didn’t read the second clean copy I requested you download that was also reformatted, so this is a very unfair review. My Amazon readers/reviewers give it 5 stars and 4 stars and they say they really enjoyed The Greek Seaman and thought it was well written. Maybe its just my style and being English is what you don’t get. Sorry it wasn’t your cup of tea, but I think I will stick to my five star and four star reviews thanks.

She then reposts three Amazon reviews in the comment thread.

BooksAndPals said…

In response to the many comments from Ms Howett:

I received the email on 2/7 asking that I download the a new copy of the book, which I did. I verified in my library software (Calibre) that this was the version I had and read. However her note above as well as the email mentioned formatting. At least when I talk about formatting I’m referring to issues of conversion from the source (a Word .doc file or whatever) into an eBook so the text flows correctly on the Kindle and so on. I say no issues I would attribute to formatting.

I have doubts that Ms. Howett being English is the reason for my reaction to her writing although I can’t discount it entirely. I can say that in the last year I’ve read and in many cases reviewed on this blog books by natives of England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and multiple European countries where English is not the primary language. Some have been full of country specific slang. In none of these cases has this been an issue for me. I do mention these things in the FYI section of my reviews because it is an issue for some people.

I’ll also point out that in the first two chapters alone I found in excess of twenty errors that ideally would have been caught in editing and proofing. Some were minor, but all have the potential of disrupting an enjoyable reading experience, depending on the specific reader and their sensitivity to such things.

Here are a couple sample sentences from the first two chapters that gave me pause and are representative of what I found difficult while reading.

“She carried her stocky build carefully back down the stairs.”

“Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”

I understand what both are probably saying. I do question the sentence construction.

However, I should point out that the review does say the story, which is the most important part of a book, is good. The effort of extracting the story through the errors and, at least to me, sometimes convoluted sounding language, made doing so much too difficult, IMO.

I would encourage anyone who thinks the story sounds interesting to sample the book. Read the first few chapters and decide for yourself.

Jacqueline Howett said…

My writing is just fine!

You did not download the fresh copy…. you did not. No way!

As to annoymous

Al was given the option of a free copy from smashwords the following day to download in any format he preffered.

Look AL, I’m not in the mood for playing snake with you, what I read above has no flaws. My writing is fine. You were told to download a new copy for format problems the very next day while they were free at Smashwords, so you could choose any format you wanted to read it in and if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected. Simply remove this review as it is in error with you not downloading the fresh copy i insisted. Why review my book after being told to do this, and more annoying why have you never ever responded to any of my e-mails?

And please follow up now from e-mail.

This is not only discusting and unprofessional on your part, but you really don’t fool me AL.

Who are you any way? Really who are you?

What do we know about you?

You never downloaded another copy you liar!

You never ever returned to me an e-mail

Besides if you want to throw crap at authors you should first ask their permission if they want it stuck up on the internet via e-mail. That debate is high among authors.

Your the target not me!

Now get this review off here!

And it gets much, much worse . . .

February 12, 2011

A bad day at the wine store

Filed under: Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:08

H/T to Elizabeth, who sent me the link with the subject line “Don’t cry”.

January 26, 2011

Kids, don’t do this at home. In fact, just don’t do this

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:32

This would be a pretty good safety video, to show just how not to handle firearms. H/T to Robert Farago for the link.

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