Keys Corner

The British government is not amused. Linguistics student Tom Scott has set up a parody of their web site with instructions to the public on how to prepare for a terrorist attack.

Business Week has just published its assessment of the world’s most valuable 100 brands (pdf file). The top ten are:

1. Coca-Cola
2. Microsoft
3. IBM
4. GE
5. Intel
6. Disney
7. McDonald’s
8. Nokia
9. Toyota
10. Marlboro

Making only two non-Amercian corporations in the first ten positions and in fact, only 9 German firms in the top 100. New entries in the list this year include E-Bay, UBS, Porsche, ING and Audi. The highest new entrant is Siemens at place 39.

We had an invitation to visit Ingrid, an old friend of ours, who came back from a 9 year stint in London last year. She was holding a housewarming party in Korschenbroich, which is where she grew up and where her family still lives. It gave us an opportunity to try out our latest toy, a Garmin iQue 3600 navigation unit, when we drove up to visit her.

We bought it, because we are going to change my car soon, and rather than have a built-in unit, which we have in the current vehicle, I thought it would be better to have a portable unit, which we can both use and which we can also use in rental cars on holiday. The delivery time for the navigation unit is a lot shorter than for the car, so we already have the new unit, but are still waiting for the car, which won’t be available for another 3 months. Recent tests in magazines claim that portable units are almost as good as the fixed installations. After considering the new TomTom (not currently possible to load or buy detailed maps for more than one country) and Magellan (expensive) offerings, I decided to go for the Garmin unit, which can also double as a normal PDA. There are lots of reviews on the web for all three products, so I’ll just say that considering that the Garmin device costs half of what the cheapest nagivation system costs in the new car, it provides an excellent system for the money although a permanent installation still just has the edge over the portable unit.

The main differences that we noticed are that the Garmin, with its more limited memory for spoken commands does not give the place name to look for when turning off, whereas the built in system from Toyota says “turn right to Dortmund”, for example. And being mounted on the dashboard directly under the windscreen, the Garmin screen tends to suffer more from reflections. However, we hope to cure that with a non-reflecting plastic screen protector. We were a bit concerned that the volume of the spoken commands might not be loud enough, but the car-kit for the Garmin includes an external loudspeaker in the power plug and we had no problems, even on the Autobahn with the radio on. Both units get confused on winding roads and sometimes tell you to turn left or right if a minor road joins the road that you are on in a corner, rather than keeping quiet – the Garmin is more prone to do that than the built-in Toyota unit.

Here by the way, is an unsual shot – both Ruth and I are on it – taken in the evening at Ingrid’s housewarming:

It’s an interesting comparision, that the Guardian makes today:

After putting a price tag on all our buildings, equipment and other assets, the Office for National Statistics said the country was worth £5.3 trillion at the end of 2003. Or to be more precise: £5,344bn or £5,344,000m. Of course the mind boggles. For that sort of money we could build 534 Crossrail projects or run the expanded NHS for more than half a century. In still starker terms, £5.3 trillion would also be enough for 16 US invasions of Iraq (including reconstruction).

Or, as they point out, this is equivalent to 211 times the wealth of Bill Gates. Which is a pretty effective way of showing just how rich he is, when you realise that the UK population is 59,2 million. Some 57% of the UK’s wealth is represented by the value of the country’s homes.

On a completely different note, I could never remember when to put an apostrophe in the first word of this posting, until I found this tip in dictionary.com.

You may find it strange that a practice so famous for pushing CAD technology to its limits has not developed its own website – James Avery in the UK certainly did and has set up his own site paying homage to Gehry. It is not regularly updated but there are a lot of good photos of Gehry’s work on the site, plus a Gehry project timeline.

Via Things Magazine.

DRUNKEN David Walker has been jailed after downing 15 pints and accidentally blasting himself in the testicles with a sawn-off shotgun.

reports Sheffield Today. The 28 year-old has to undergo tests to determine whether he has become infertile due to the damage.

During the hearing, Judge Robert Moore said: “The gun could have gone off anywhere, anytime, at anyone. It is only good fortune that it hit him”. He added that he hoped the sentence would act as a deterrent. As far as Walker is concerned, I would guess the collateral damage might be the bigger deterrent…

Found at German for beginners.

The Trading Standards Institute highlights an increasing problem in the UK (and it wouldn’t surprise me, if the practice is common in other countries too): Supermarkets are injecting raw pork with water and additives to ensure the water is retained by the meat.

Tesco, who has already been fined for the practice, but only because they didn’t label the meat accordingly, sells such meat for £6.99 a kilo, nearly twice the price of unadulterated meat from an independent butcher. Asda’s pork is only 74% meat, the Co-op and Sainsburys also sell “premium” meat which contains less than 90% meat. The practice has been going on for at least three years, but has not been outlawed by the British government because the meat treated with water and additives is not unsafe for consumption.

So the Germans don’t have a sense of humour? Think again – this report was filed yesterday in the news-feed of our local police force based in Bad Homburg. Sorry, I’ve no time to translate it into English at the moment, but maybe tonight…

Eine Objektschutzstreife bemerkte zur o.a. Zeit einen über die Fahrbahn laufenden „McFlury-Becher“ (Papp-Eisbecher von McDonalds).
Da man sich diesen Umstand zunächst nicht erklären konnte und die Aufforderung: „Halt Polizei – stehen bleiben“ schlichtweg ignoriert wurde, sollte der Becher – natürlich unter Berücksichtigung aller Grundsätze der Eigensicherung – in kontrolliert genommen werden. Aus Gründen der Verhältnismäßigkeit war jedoch auf die Androhung von Zwangsmitteln verzichtet worden.
Nachdem man den Becher dann vorsichtig hochgehoben hatte, wurde festgestellt, dass sich darin ein Igel und zwei Nacktschnecken befanden. Der Igel hatte offensichtlich bei einem Jagdausflug zwei Schnecken gesichtet, die sich in dem achtlos weggeworfenen Pappbecher aufhielten. In seinem Jagdeifer dürfte der Igel aber wohl seinen eigenen Körperumfang unterschätzt haben, denn als er sich kopfüber in den Becher stürzte, blieb stecken und lediglich seine kurzen Beine schauten noch heraus. So lernte der Becher dann das Laufen – wie soll ein Igel auch rückwärts aus einem Becher krabbeln, wenn sich dabei sofort die Stacheln hochstellen und verhaken. Die beiden Beamten befreiten den Igel aus seiner misslichen Lage und setzten ihn im „rechten“ Straßengraben wieder aus, die beiden Schnecken wurden ebenfalls aus dem Becher befreit und im „linken“ Straßengraben ausgesetzt. Anschließend wurde der Pappbecher ordnungsgemäß entsorgt und die Streifenbesatzung konnte mit dem Gefühl „eine gute Tat vollbracht zu haben“ die Objektschutzstreife fortsetzen.

Update: Translation follows. Read the rest of this entry »

The New Scientist reports, quoting a new study in Progress in Retinal and Eye Research, that myopia is often caused by too much reading and looking at computer screens. There has been quite a bit of theorising about the causes of myopia in the past, with both diet and genetic defects being seen as being additional factors.

Well, we have finally got round to posting some photos we took last month in Spain. You can see them here.

(As usual, clicking on the thumbnails does not work in Safari under Mac OS X and also has some problems under Microsoft Internet Explorer on Macs. The culprit is justsowindows, which is an add-on I use in Dreamweaver – I live in hope that some day the problem will be fixed…)