short takes

[cellio]

This line from a restaurant review made me laugh: "I fear that waiting for them to hunt and trap the duck entree may be coloring my review." (tangerinpenguin)

CNN reported that a court had accidentally subpoenaed a dog to testify in court. (The inmate wrote a letter to said dog, which is where the lead came from. Look, I don't make this stuff up.) A court official, upon learning of the error (by having the dog show up and be barred from the building), reported that the dog seemed very friendly and probably "would have been a cooperative witness".

Today at work we were given a t-shirt for the new product launch. It includes some code snippets in the background. My first reaction was to wonder if the code went through code review and intellectual-property review. :-) (Personally, I think that if a t-shirt's worth of code gives away your trade secrets, they probably weren't secrets worth protecting anyway. But this code was in no danger of doing that.)

We had a party to celebrate said release this afternoon. The venue had several pool tables (pool? billiards? is there a difference, or is that just a US-versus-UK thing?). Sadly, theoretical knowledge of how objects move (in a frictionless universe, natch) does little to impart actual skill in propelling a cue stick in the desired way. So I stink at the game, but I still enjoy trying.

Conversation with a 911 dispatcher yesterday:
Me: I'm calling to report a disabled vehicle blocking traffic.
Him: Where?
Me: [street] at [street], eastbound.
Him: (pause) You're calling from Pittsburgh, right?
Me: Um, yeah. In [neighborhood].
Him: Ok. It's just that you said "eastbound".

(People around here seem to have a lot of trouble with compass directions. Sure, part of it is that the roads aren't exactly straight, but still, if you describe a place as being, e.g., on the north side of the street, likely as not someone will ask which side that is.)

Comments

[madfilkentist]

You remember the "This shirt is a munition" T-shirt, don't you? It had a couple of lines of Perl code (I think) which implemented an encryption algorithm that the US government had classified at the time as a munition for export purposes.

[cellio]

Oh, good point. Ok, if your domain boils down to a key mathematical algorithm or recipe or something, I guess it would fit on a t-shirt. (Just like the recipe for Coke, which they guard rather strongly, would probably fit just fine.)

[goljerp]

I once met a food chemist (who didn't work for Coca Cola), who told me that not only does Coca Cola guard the recipe for Coke strongly, they guard the ingredients: apparently there's a variety of vanilla bean whose entire crop is bought up by Coca Cola. So even if you knew the ingredient list... well, it would still taste different, unless you were able to get your own supply somehow of that species of vanilla.

[cellio]

I don't know if this is actually true, but I once heard a description of what happened when Coke initially sought a hechsher (kosher certification). It boiled down to something like this:

Rabbi: What's in Coke?
Coke: We can't tell you.
Rabbi: How can I say your ingredients are kosher if I don't know what they are?
Coke: You can ask us specific questions, like y'know, "does it contain pig?".

They did, of course, get the hechsher, but I believe they did it without sharing the ingredients list (let alone the recipe). I heard that OU's rabbis had to run down a list of every possible ingredient that could render it non-kosher.

As I said, I don't know if it's true -- but it's a good story.

[goljerp]

Hm... I remember hearing story that there was one person outside of the company who knew the secret formula: a Rabbi who was responsible for the heksher. Of course, this was more on the order of a tale or rumor than something I'd really believe...

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that the recipe for Coke is rather well-known within the company: you mix Coke sub-item A, Coke sub-item B, and Coke sub-item C in a specified ratio. The sub-items each have their own mashgiach.

As for the story about the special vanilla beans: I've heard that when Coke Classic was reintroduced after the New Coke fiasco, it had been subtly reformulated to eliminate the most costly ingredients, like real vanilla beans. I suspect that the special source of vanilla beans was seen as too expensive and vulnerable a link in the chain.