by Chris Barrus
YEAH! San Francisco’s Musee Mechanique, the collection of vintage turn-of-the-last-century coin-operated arcade machines has found a home at Fisherman’s Wharf.
Under a plan approved Tuesday night by the San Francisco Port Commission, port officials agreed to negotiate a lease to temporarily house both the Musee and the recently merged San Francisco Museum and Historical Society in the same building on Pier 45 near the Wharf’s crab stands.
[via Boing Boing]
You’re familiar with the phonetic alphabet, right? You know, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.
I’ve heard a couple of variations, but didn’t realize there were so many. As you might have guessed by now, there’s a web reference for them. My favorite is the WWII RAF one also: Apple, Beer, Charlie, Dog, Edward, Freddy, George, Harry, Ink, Jug/Johnny, King, Love, Mother, Nuts, Orange, Peter, Queen, Roger/Robert, Suga, Tommy, Uncle, Vic, William, X-ray, Yoke/Yorker, Zebra
[via Obtainium]
While it’s up there with the ineffectual International Star Registry, the Time Travel Mutual Fund is a fun way to burn ten bucks. The idea is that you pay in $10 and through the magic of compound interest that money will become billions of dollars after 500 or so years. Multiply that by the number of people who pay in, and you got a good chunk of capital to invent time travel and/or pay off the people who invented time travel to come back in time and bring forward the people who paid into the fund. Just watch out for the Morlocks.
Q: Will they still be using money in the future?
A: We don’t know, however, it is logical to assume there will still be some form of currency used, although it will probably be electronic and not physical. We expect the fund to be converted into whatever form of currency is in use, just as all those different European currencies were turned into the Euro.
Q: What if they outlaw time travel?
A: Good question. One provision built into the fund is that it must be not only technically feasible, it must be legal as well. A maintenance fund that part of your membership fee goes to can be used to pay whatever it is that passes as lawyers in the future to try and make it legal. Laws can be changed.
[via Boing Boing]
I just love this quote:
Most famously, he [Lutz] scorned towering, angular, plastic-clad vehicles as looking “like a whole family of angry kitchen appliances: demented toasters, furious bread machines and vengeful trash compactors.”
[via FARK]
The Bush II administration is using the Homeland Security reorganization as an opportunity to do some union busting.
On grounds of national security, Bush has iced a nascent union for federal prosecutors being aggressively organized at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami.
And he’s dissolved a handful of existing unions that represented about 500 Justice Department employees around the nation — including the 45-member Miami Local 512 of the American Federation of Government Employees. Local 512 had represented support personnel at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, including paralegals, clerks and secretaries, since the 1980s.
Bush based his actions on an exemption in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act which presupposes that unionized federal workers are an impediment to effective national security. That’s why labor leaders fear that what happened in Miami is the prelude to broader union busting by the White House once the homeland security reorganization of federal agencies is complete.
Their principal concern is that thousands of unionized workers transferred to the Department of Homeland Security will be stripped of their right to organize and collectively bargain. That includes 12,000 U.S. Customs Service employees now represented by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).
Some interesting background data on supermarket membership cards.
In the eyes of many consumers the pricing issues surrounding supermarket “loyalty” card programs can be summed up in one simple concept: those who don’t have a card pay more at the register. The stores portray it in a similar manner, but call it “rewarding loyal customers” with lower prices. But few things in life are truly simple, and supermarket cards are no different.
Pricing issues with card schemes fall into two categories: savings and segmentation. While the savings issue has the greatest impact on consumers today. segmentation will have implications for years to come.
The recent proliferation of card programs throughout the country makes it clear that participating stores think they are a wonderful marketing tool. But when consumers take off the rose-colored glasses that the supermarket hands out along with their cards, they find that the programs do little good for anyone but the stores themselves.
Merger-mania among Southern California area supermarkets has been in high-gear for the past several years. For years I always went to the Hughes market on Glendale Bl. or San Fernando Rd., but when Ralphs bought up the Hughes chain, Ralphs brought in inferior produce and baked goods and dedicated more aisle space to high-profit junk food.
Of course I voted with my wallet and went elsewhere, but the area markets are mostly dominated by the Axis Of Evil: Ralphs, Vons, and Albertsons. At least the Southern California Albertsons don’t have the friggin’ card.
Holy cow, the UCI Bookstore just called me – my Xserve just arrived. Details and photos to follow…
Like ’em or not, Doors drummer John Densmore’s commentary about trying to maintain cred under increasing pressure to sell classic songs to commercials is refreshingly idealistic in a world where everything has a price.
I am reminded of the sound of greed, trying to talk me into not vetoing a Doors song for a cigarette ad in Japan.
“It’s the only way to get a hit over there, John. They love commercials. It’s the new thing!”
“What about encouraging kids to smoke, Ray?”
“You always have to be PC, don’t you, John?” I stuck to my guns and vetoed the offer, thinking about the karma if we did it. Manzarek has recently been battling stomach ulcers. So muster up courage, you capitalists; hoarding hurts the system–inner as well as outer.
So it’s been a lonely road resisting the chants of the rising solicitations: “Everybody has a price, don’t they?” Every time we (or I) resist, they up the ante. An Internet company recently offered three mil for “Break on Through.” Jim’s “pal” (as he portrays himself in his bio) said yes, and Robby joined me in a resounding no! “We’ll give them another half mil, and throw in a computer!” the prez of Apple pleaded late one night.
Straight from the pages of Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress comes this…
“The Advantages and Limitations of Calmatives for Use as a Non-Lethal Technique”, a 49 page report obtained last week by the Sunshine Project under US information freedom law, has revealed a shocking Pentagon program that is researching psychopharmacological weapons. Based on “extensive review conducted on the medical literature and new developments in the pharmaceutical industry”, the report concludes that “the development and use of [psychopharmacological weapons] is achievable and desirable.” These mind-altering weapons violate international agreements on chemical and biological warfare as well as human rights. Some of the techniques discussed in the report have already been used by the US in the “War on Terrorism”.
The team, which is based at the Applied Research Laboratory of Pennsylvania State University, is assessing weaponization of a number of psychiatric and anesthetic pharmaceuticals as well as “club drugs” (such as the “date rape drug” GHB). According to the report, “the choice administration route, whether application to drinking water, topical administration to the skin, an aerosol spray inhalation route, or a drug filled rubber bullet, among others, will depend on the environment.” The environments identified are specific military and civil situations, including “hungry refugees that are excited over the distribution of food”, “a prison setting”, an “agitated population” and “hostage situations”. At times, the JNLWD team’s report veers very close to defining dissent as a psychological disorder.
Business 2.0 reports on the IT infrastructure of international cocaine-smuggling rings.
Henao’s cartel is a champion of decentralization, outsourcing, and pooled risk, along with technological innovations to enhance the secrecy of it all. For instance, to scrub his profits, he and fellow money launderers use a private, password-protected website that daily updates an inventory of U.S. currency available from cartel distributors across North America, says a veteran Treasury Department investigator. Kind of like a business-to-business exchange, the site allows black-market money brokers to bid on the dirty dollars, which cartel financial chiefs want to convert to Colombian pesos to use for their operations at home. “A trafficker can bid on different rates — ‘I’ll sell $1 million in cash in Miami,'” says the agent. “And he’ll take the equivalent of $800,000 in pesos for it in Colombia.” The investigator estimates the online bazaar’s annual turnover at as much as $3 billion.