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short takes
Ambiguous spam of the day: "Indulge your Java passion". Oh, they meant coffee.
Understaffed, but no budget for hiring? Try Primate Programming Inc. "Humans and higher primates share approximately 97% of their DNA in common. Recent research in primate programming suggests computing is a task that most higher primates can easily perform. Visual Basic 6.0 was the preferred IDE for the majority of experiment primate subjects."
I happened to notice the feeding instructions on a package of cat food recently. They started "For average adult cats (6-8 pounds)...". Since when is 6-8 pounds average? (Granted, they didn't say "healthy".) I know a lot more 10-pound adult cats than 4-pound ones. In fact, I don't think I've ever met an adult cat under 5 pounds. What do these guys think the standard deviation is?
Speaking of cat food, I found this prominently displayed on a package of cat treats: "tuna is the #1 ingredient!" Well sure, but ingredients order doesn't really tell you anything about absolute volume, only relative volume. To make tuna beat grain, all you have to do is separately list flour, corn meal, barley, etc etc. Makers of kids' breakfast cereal do this sort of thing to prevent sugar from being the first ingredient. (Sugar, corn syrup, succrose, marshmallows (consisting of...), etc.) So why stop with tuna? Throw in enough assorted junk and you can advertise caviar or filet mignon as your #1 ingredient!
I got a call from a surveyor a couple days ago. I enjoy trying to figure out who's sponsoring the survey based on the questions. This one asked about the types of charitable organizations I support, then zeroed in on animal-related charities (scripted, not prompted by what I said), then asked specific questions about two organizations (after claiming that those two had been randomly selected from a list). So I think either the ASPCA or HSUS was trying to see how they're doing and whether the public thinks they're interchangable. The decoy was that early on they asked for strength of reaction (positive or negative) to a bunch of organizations, ranging from these to PETA and WWF. They were completely uninterested in reasons for strong reactions, though, and their questions didn't capture them for me. (HSUS no longer gets my money because they persist in sending me trinkets, WWF doesn't get anything from me because they're spammers, and PETA is IMO wacko. ASPCA is ok.) Well, whoever they were, good luck interpreting the best data I could supply for the questions they actually asked...
Re: Cats & Orgs
Good point. They probably haven't updated their labels in ages.
PETA: The mink stunt was remarkably clueless. But I also have problems with their tendency toward vandalism; for example, you can object all you want to someone's fur coat, but if he legally bought it you do not have the right to destroy it with paint. You can educate, you can lobby for law changes, you can refuse to do business with certain parties, etc -- but if you commit crimes against other people, you don't deserve support; you deserve punative damages. (This is, obviously, a generic "you". :-) )
The generic "you"