Habemus plus vis computatoris quam Deus

Things like this (also reported several other places) take a special kind of stupidity.  "Kyle Dubois and his parents claim teacher Thomas Kelley did not warn Dubois and other students of the dangers of the electrical demonstration cords in their electrical trades class"?  Uh ... HELLO???  Have you spent your entire life UNDER A ROCK?!?  I don't think any of my school teachers ever specifically warned me of the dangers of leaping off tall buildings, yet I somehow managed to make it through my teens without becoming a greasy red smear on a sidewalk somewhere.  (Neither did I try to test my superpowers against speeding locomotives.)

As a friend elsewhere observed, "I don't think he's going to be able to convince a jury that he only got brain damage after electrocuting himself."  Hell, my ten-year-old knows — from watching me — that any time you have no choice but to to work on live electrical components, especially anything with high voltage on it, you keep one hand behind your back whenever possible to minimize the risk of an electric shock across the chest.

It's not the teacher who totally blew his responsibilities on this one.  It's the parents, for raising a teenager lacking in even the most basic concepts of self-preservation in the presence of modern technology (where "modern" refers to "any time in the last hundred years or so").

(And yes, I totally, shamelessly front-loaded the music on this one.  Sometimes social commentary is required.  I frequently worry, in light of incidents like this, that we are raising a generation too stupid to survive in our own civilization.  The only question in my mind was the choice between this and Pink Floyd's Brain Damage.)

"Trying to recognize terrorists and other criminals through fingerprinting, facial-recognition technology, and scanning the retinas of the eye has limitations."  Which is why a scientist at Wright State Research Institute is proposing putting scanners all over the place to recognize terrorists, child molesters, and other criminals by their skeletons.  Because just everyone has a handy database of terrorists' and criminals' skeletons.  Right?

...What's that you say?  You don't have one?  Funny, neither do I.  In fact, neither does anyone else.

Depending on the selected technology, a skeletal scan would only expose a person to radiation that is the approximate equivalent of taking one cross-country airline flight.

Yeah ... every person, on the "list" or not, adult or child, old, young, pregnant, every time they pass a scanner.

What a STUPID idea.

It appears the FBI sent Wikipedia a cease-and-desist letter for displaying an image of the FBI seal on the Wikipedia main article page about the FBI, citing a law intended to prohibit use of the Seal for profit or for misrepresentation of identity.

It also appears that Wikipedia's response was appropriately snarky.

(Via rosencrantz23)

Howard Tayler writes as an aside in a mini-review of new spy thriller Salt,

[...] unlike The A-Team, this movie can’t afford to ask me to put on my industrial strength Suspenders of Disbelief.  It’s odd but completely accurate when I say that I can believe the A-Team flying a tank using the main gun, surviving a water landing, and then driving the tank out of the lake, [...]

...OK, Howard.  Thanks for the heads-up. That one sentence about flying tanks into lakes just completely eliminated any possible remaining shreds of temptation I might still have had lingering around to ever even CONSIDER watching the new A-Team movie.  Because when you get to that kind of complete bullshit, it's no longer even a Laughably Improbable Stupid Action Movie, it's crossed the line into a Warner Brothers cartoon with real humans ... except without the funny.

In a move planned to show its solidarity with other government bodies in findign time to fiddle while Rome burns, the EU has approved new regulations that will prohibit selling eggs by the dozen.

The new rules will mean that instead of packaging telling shoppers a box contains six eggs, it will show the weight in grams of the eggs inside, for example 372g.

[...]  The rules will not allow both the weight and the quantity to be displayed.

So you can't even mark the package "One half dozen large eggs, net weight 372g."  And I suppose the next refinement will require every carton of eggs to be individually weighed and marked with its actual weight, because, you know, you can't put 12.07 eggs in a package to make the weight come out to a nice round consistent number every time.  UK food industry experts described the new EU ruling as "bonkers" and "absolute madness", and it's hard to disagree.  There are products, like eggs, car tires etc, that it simply makes no sense to sell by weight.  Can you imagine walking into your local tire store and asking for 112kg of tires, or going to the bicycle store for 92g of replacement spokes?

Crises come and crises go, the world economy melts down, the Eurozone is facing potential collapse as bankrupt member-nation economies implode, Shari'a law is metastasizing into European nations, but never let it be said that the EU Parliament is too busy to find the time for stupid, pointless crap like saying that you can't sell a dozen eggs as a dozen eggs any more.

Via rosencrantz23:

"Wildlife documentaries infringe animals' privacy, says report."

Save the animals!  Save the animals!  (Just as long as you don't try to understand anything about how they live, or interest anyone in saving them, or do anything else that might actually help save them.  Because that might infringe their privacy.)

In related news, the IUCN Red List currently lists 3566 critically endangered species — 1859 in the animal kingdom, 1701 plants, four protists, and two fungal species.  The identify of the threatened species is being withheld lest well-meaning environmentalists should seek to infringe their privacy by mounting conservation efforts on their behalf.

...Well, OK, no.  I made up the part about withholding their identities.  (But you knew that, right?  Please tell me you knew that.)  But not the 3566 critically endangered species, or the report.  You can't save a species that nobody cares about, and to get people to care about something, you need to get them interested in it.

The BBC's Natural History unit in Bristol said:  "Constantly developing filming technology gives wildlife film-makers the ability to film animal behaviour with minimal disruption to the animal.  Film-makers work very closely with scientists whose work studying the complexity of animal lives is vital for wildlife conservation.

"Natural history films play a major role in spreading knowledge of their work.  And understanding the world around is vital in the continuing endeavour to preserve our ecosystem."

Exactly.  But god forbid reason and sense should interfere with some nitwit going on a hare-brained crusade.

"Join Twitter now for free!  [...] This message was sent by a Twitter user who entered your email address."

Yeah, right.  Who the *%&$%@#@!(&( is Emma? I don't know anyone named Emma.  To the best of my knowledge, nobody named Emma has my email address that didn't harvest it off a mailing list somewhere or other or out of somebody's address book.  And whoever this fictional Emma is, "she" entered the same email address twice.

So now Twitter have become spammers...  great business model, guys.  Let me know how that works out for you.

Former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, writing in the LA Times, compares Obama's foreign-policy blundering and dithering to Ethelred the Unready.

I will never understand the reasoning that drives the local elementary school to send home field trip permission forms that not only require me to fill out anew for each field trip medical information that the school nurse's office already has on file, but also require me to fill out destination, date, time, and trip cost information from the front of the form TO ELSEWHERE ON THE FORM before returning the form to the school.  WTF is the POINT of the school requiring me to inform the school of data that the school has just proven to me that it already has?

The medical information, I can almost understand; some of it (the insurance, say) could have changed, and we could have forgotten to notify the school.  But even that section could be marked "Fill out this information if there has been a change" — then the teacher could just glance at that section and, if any of it is filled out, know the nurse's office needs to be informed of the change, and otherwise just go with what's on file.

But making me fill out the back of the form to tell the school information it just told me on the front of the form?  That's a ludicrous waste of everyone's time.  What are they going to do, accidentally send my kid on a field trip to a Titan missile silo in North Dakota by mistake instead of the Seacoast Science Center if I don't copy the information from the front to the back?

"Gilford, NH 03249" does not exist in Googlespace.

If I ask Google Maps for a route from our street address to someplace else, and I specify our street address as a complete address, like any rational person would, number streetname, Gilford, NH 03249, it asks me whether I meant number streetname, NH 03249, and presents me with a marker pointing exactly where I told it IN THE FIRST PLACE, here in Gilford.

Now, if I try to circumvent this by feeding it the address in the form it apparently believes to be correct, number streetname, NH 03249, one might reasonably expect it to go directly to it without asking me whether that's actually what I meant.

But no.  If I do that, it offers me a choice of number streetname, Belknap; number streetname, Merrimack; number streetname, Rockingham; number streetname, Lebanon; or number streetname, Carroll.

Carroll County, that is.  All of those are counties, not towns.  Oddly, all but the first have the wrong zip code.  (WHo'da thunk it?)  The first one, oddly enough, is the original location I wanted in the first place.  Minus, you know, the actual town, which I TOLD it.  If it was paying attention it should already know that was the right one.

But it doesn't stop there.  Oh no.  It also goes on to offer me a different-but-similar street name, in three different counties, all wrong.  SO now we have wrong street name AND wrong zip code.  And then, just for completeness, a DIFFERENT different-but-similar street name, in another — new — wrong county.  The first candidate offered in this great list is still the only one that's in the correct zip code.  And it's not as though there's another Gilford in New Hampshire.  (Or in the entire US, as far as I can tell.  In fact the only other Gilford, with that spelling, I can find any reference to anywhere is in County Down, Ireland, between Portadown and Banbridge on the Upper River Bann.)

Would it be so hard to just use all the CORRECT information that I provided in the first place?  There's only ONE address that fully matches what I originally typed, oddly enough.  It's really not in the least bit ambiguous.  The only way to introduce ambiguity into it is to throw away the name of the town ... which is exactly what Google is doing.  It unerringly homes in on the one possible way to shoot itself in the foot, and its marksmanship is superlative.  (Its common sense, not so much.)

The whacked-out thing is, if you ask it just for "Gilford, New Hampshire" (see the Posting From link below), it finds Gilford perfectly well on the first try with no hesitation.  But add the zip code — add unambiguous additional data consistent with what you've already given it — and it goes totally bugnuts.  HELLO?!?

Come on, GOOG, get your finger out.  This is getting tiresome.