Keys Corner

What does a chainsaw manufacturer do, to demonstrate the power of his product?

He builds a bike powered by 24 of them.

The BBC reports:

Akira Haraguchi, 59, managed to recite the number’s first 83,431 decimal places, almost doubling the previous record held by another Japanese.

He had to stop three hours into his recital after losing his place, and had to start from the beginning…

Hats off to Mr. Haraguchi – I am ashamed to admit that I couldn’t even remember to take my company ID card to work with me twice last week, which meant I had to get my boss to sign a correction sheet for the time-keeping system, which works using the card.

If you live outside the UK, your mental picture of the country is likely to include the view that it rains a lot and it’s not exactly the place to go for a hot dry summer.

Actually, that view seems to be wrong – London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, told Londoners yesterday “if all you have done is take a pee, you don’t need to flush the toilet every time.“. The reason isn’t so much the hot dry summers, however. It is more a case of dry winters, which if they continue, will lead to standpipes being used in London as early as next year. Livingstone wants an immediate ban on using hosepipes and sprinklers, and is also recommending that the Londoners switch from taking baths to having showers to reduce water usage.

The British museum has been unknowingly exhibiting work by Banksy, better known as a graffiti artist. The “prehistoric cave-painting” was described as follows:

“This finely preserved example of primitive art dates from the Post-Catatonic era.
The artist responsible is known to have created a substantial body of work across South East of England under the moniker Banksymus Maximus but little else is known about him.
Most art of this type has unfortunately not survived. The majority is destroyed by zealous municipal officials who fail to recognise the artistic merit and historical value of daubing on walls.”

At home we sort our rubbish into the recyclables (go into a yellow sack for collection every other week), paper (into a green bin, collected every two weeks) and the rest (grey bin, every two weeks). We also store our used batteries to drop off at the local supermarket, glass goes into the bottle bank at the end of our road (sorted by colour – clear, brown and green) where there is also a metal container for bottle tops or other small metal items, and nasty remains of chemicals such as paint and thinners get taken to the local dump for proper disposal.

The Japanese have raised home-based rubbish sorting to a new level however, as the New York Times reports:

YOKOHAMA, Japan – When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items.

Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, “after the contents have been used up,” into “small metals” or plastics. Take out your tape measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but over that it goes into bulky refuse.

Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks “are not torn, and the left and right sock match.” Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have been “washed and dried.”...

Not surprisingly, some can’t cope with these instructions:

In Yokohama, after a few neighborhoods started sorting last year, some residents stopped throwing away their trash at home. Garbage bins at parks and convenience stores began filling up mysteriously with unsorted trash.

“So we stopped putting garbage bins in the parks,” said Masaki Fujihira, who oversees the promotion of trash sorting at Yokohama City’s family garbage division.

The article doesn’t say whether the incidence of littering has gone up since the park bins were removed…

Sometimes it pays not to be on the cutting edge of technology. According to several reports, large numbers of vehicles in the USA having Bluetooth phone kits connected to their navigation systems have had their onboard electronic systems infected by a computer virus. How long until Symantec brings out Norton Anti-Virus for BMWs?

I have to wonder how accurate this report is, which names Al Jazeera as being the global brand with the fifth most impact, when the position number three is given as “German furniture company Ikea” (Actually IKEA – written in capitals by the company itself – is a Swedish company and the agency has now (2005-01-31, 21:00 hrs) partially corrected their news item). The first five companies are:

• Apple
• Google
• IKEA
• Starbucks, and
• Al Jazeera

Coca-Cola has vanished from the top five, and in Europe, the number one company is IKEA.

This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It’s what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve.

—George W. Bush in a speech to students on Perseverance Month, 2000-01-28

Cats suffering from stress often suffer from bladder infections.

What should you give such a cat? Read the rest of this entry »

I missed this article a couple of weeks ago in Wired. So just for the record, expert opinion is that web, internet and its abbreviation net should no longer be capitalized, unless used in a headline.

And in case you missed it, back in October 2000, Wired decided that e-mail should be written with a hyphen.