Seen in a .sig file: "What did cured ham actually have?"
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...
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