Middle managers, telephone sanitisers, hairdressers and SEO Specialists

Here's an oddity that washed up in this morning's tide:

From: Montgomery, Luke <Luke.Montgomery@tektronix.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:18:47 -0700
Subject: Tektronix Site Resource

Dear Daniel Rutter,

I found your website, Dan's Data and wanted to thank you for providing such great information about PC Hardware and Gadgets. I was wondering if it would be possible to provide a link to our website (http://www.tek.com/products/digital-multimeter/) as a potential resource on Multimeters. We noticed you already reference the phrase on the following page: http://www.dansdata.com/io072.htm, so hopefully, it’d be an easy change on your end.

Link should look like this if possible:

I did some resistance measuring with my multimeter between the legs and got:

Once you've completed this task, if it's not too much trouble, would you mind just sending a quick confirmation email? That way, I can mark your website off my action and follow-up list.

Thank you in advance for your support. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Luke Montgomery
SEO Specialist, Worldwide Marketing
Phone: 503.627.4672
www.tektronix.com

On the face of it, this is a normal link-spam e-mail. Your standard form letter - "I found your site, $SITENAME and wanted to thank you for providing such great information about $SCRAPED_SUBJECT...", and then a request for a link from some random machine-detected page on the site - in this case, the question portion of this letter.

But this link-spam's an odd one, because tek.com really is the Web site for Tektronix, who really are a big name in test and measurement gear - they're possibly the biggest name in oscilloscopes, just as Fluke are the biggest name in multimeters.

(And now, thanks to Wikipedia, I know that Fluke and Tektronix are today both subsidiaries of the same corporation!)

Tektronix.com redirects to tek.com, and they're not even trying to get some Google juice for a new domain name; tek.com and tektronix.com are similarly antiquitous.

If a human had bothered to look at the page they were asking me to link from, they probably would have noticed that such a link would only be appropriate if the multimeter being mentioned was a Tektronix product. Which, since the meter in question belongs to one of my readers, not me, I do not know. But I doubt it, because Tektronix multimeters are really nice and really expensive. The entry-level model on the page they want me to link to lists for $US750, and the top-of-the-line model is $US1350.

That's too rich for my blood, so I couldn't even validly link to the tek.com page from some use of the words "my multimeter" that was actually me talking about my multimeter. My good multimeter for formal dinners and meeting heads of state is...

Stock voltage

...a Protek 506, here seen in the company of one of my random sub-$10 meters and my Micronta 22-195A, which was the very first multimeter I ever bought, when I was so young I still thought it was pretty cool to buy things at Tandy. (It still works. Might even still be accurate.)

So, to Luke Montgomery, SEO Specialist: Send me a Tektronix DMM4050 and I assure you that even though I'll never use at least half of its features, I will link to any page you like the next time I refer to using it, without the tiresome nofollows I've put on all the links to your site above.

And, to Tektronix: Don't do this. (Or pay an Experienced Organic Web Strategist like the windswept and interesting and possibly insomniac Luke Montgomery to do it for you.) It's stupid.

If Tektronix made a general site about what multimeters are and what they do, then links of this sort, to that site, would be valid. Links to particular products from general terms are the opposite of informative, though. This one would be worthless to readers who already know about multimeters, and would either annoy or actively misinform readers who don't already know about multimeters. It's like asking someone to link some random mention of "my car" to BMW's page for the current 5 Series.

Search engine optimisation can be perfectly valid - when, for instance, it makes it easier for people who want to buy the sort of thing you sell to find you.

Tell someone you're in the "SEO" business, though, and they'll probably assume you spend your days pursuing a higher Google PageRank by polluting the Web with misleading and useless information. And they will probably be right.

In conclusion, as regular readers will by now be expecting: Take it awaaaaay, Bill!

UPDATE: Luke Montgomery got back to me, with about the best response I think the laws of physics permit in this situation:

Okay I admit the email did seem a bit spammy. I realize you must receive a lot of spam/email/link-requests all the time so I just wanted to apologize. I send out emails all the time requesting links and I guess after I while I just get in a rut and start to sound like a robot. I am sorry for the spam, my intention was never to bother you. Your post made me realize how I was sounding and I'm sorry.

Luke

There may be hope for the boy yet!

A long walk to nowhere

OpenOffice (technically "OpenOffice.org") used to be clunky and slow and questionably compatible with Microsoft Office. But nowadays it's pretty darn good. I've recommended it to many people who need a proper office suite - or just a proper word processor or spreadsheet - but don't want to pay for MS Office, or rip it off.

(Which is not to say that I think you should pirate MS Office, but that does seem to be a pretty popular pastime, and it's silly to pretend that it's not at least an option for a lot of users.)

I just downloaded the current version of OpenOffice to install on this computer, though, and had one of those experiences that us computer suuu-per geniuses can deal with quite easily, but which would have been an utter disaster if I'd just sent some hapless Ordinary User off to openoffice.org to claim their free office suite.

I went to download.openoffice.org, and selected the friendly green option at the top of the list. That earned me a brief look at a "You are about to download OpenOffice.org..." page that redirected, long before any non-cyborg could have read its contents, to this PlanetMirror page.

I got sent to PlanetMirror because I'm in Australia, and so are they. As it turned out, this choice could have been better made.

I, like many of you faithful readers, have been on this particular fairground ride before. So I could quite easily figure out that the thing I wanted would be in the last of the listed directories - "contrib", "developer", "localized", "packages" and "stable". Never mind whether Great-Uncle Fred could figure this out, though; many perfectly competent computer users who know about backups and spyware and other such things would be taken aback by this.

Into "stable" I went, and then into "3.3.0", after briefly checking to make sure that 3.3.0 actually is the version number of the most recent stable release of OpenOffice.

(The "You are about to download..." page actually says "You'll find the OpenOffice.org downloads in the subdirectory stable/version", but only down at the bottom where you won't have time to read it. And I can just see a normal human being looking at these directories with numbers for names and saying "but there's isn't one called 'version'!")

Now PlanetMirror proudly presented an ordinary alphabetic view of all of the very-long-named OpenOffice 3.3.0 downloads, which thanks to alphabetic sorting put the Windows version right at the end, after the SPARC Solaris versions and the source-code archives.

Page down, page down... ah, there it is, "OOo_3.3.0_Win_x86_install-wJRE_en-US.exe". Obviously. So I click on it, and...

File not found.

After all that, the damn file is not actually there.

OK, no problem, how about "OOo_3.3.0_Win_x86_install_en-US.exe", the version that doesn't have the Java Runtime Environment bundled with it?

Nope, that's not there either.

Not a single damn file in that directory listing actually exists.

So I just said "oh, for pity's sake...", and headed off to ftp.iinet.net.au. IiNet is my ISP, and like many ISPs has a general-purpose FTP server dangling off its main domain like a vestigial organ (non-iiNet users probably can't access it).

OpenOffice is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to find on such an FTP server, and indeed I do find it, in "pub", then "openoffice", "stable", "3.3.0", and then the same big list of big-named files, except now they actually bleeding exist.

I'm sure this OpenOffice.org/PlanetMirror Australian-download... issue... will soon be fixed. I shudder to think how many potential Aussie OpenOffice users have given up in entirely justifiable disgust, though. Anybody who already knew about BitTorrent would probably find it easier to rip off Microsoft Office 2010 than go through all this.

And I know, I just know, there's some poor Aussie geek out there on the phone to his mum, trying to walk her through the process and rapidly losing the will to live. You'd rather just e-mail the installer to her, if it weren't 150Mb.

Most, if not all, of the other official OpenOffice mirrors actually work. If, once again, you know what you're doing, you'll be able to go back to the "You are about to download..." page and whack Escape before it redirects, then click the "select a mirror close to you" link, which leads to this page. I picked one of the Indiana University ones, which actually works.

Even if the auto-redirection takes you to a working mirror, though, it could work a lot better. Obviously there should be a brightly-lit and cheerfully-signposted path directly to the Windows, Mac and Linux installers, not just a page-flip to an FTP directory that expects ordinary users to find their way down through "stable", et cetera, by either trial and error or mental telepathy.

I could have avoided this whole rigmarole by downloading LibreOffice instead. It's a recent fork of OpenOffice and thus far pretty much identical, and has exactly the sort of sane download page that I wish OpenOffice.org had. So I'm doing my best to search-and-replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice in my mental tech-support database. If I hadn't been writing this whinge-y blog post, though, I probably wouldn't even have remembered that LibreOffice existed.

I hereby throw the floor open for your own similar tales of woe. Bonus points will be awarded for each hour over the first two which you spent on the phone to a family member on any "five-minute" computing project.

July 4th handicrafts

'Tis the season for my ancient sparkler-bombs page to suddenly get a lot more traffic, as the great American combination of patriotism, capitalism and pyromania reaches its annual peak.

If you're wondering what sort of bomb we're talking about here, this video should fill you in. It was grabbed from elderly videotape by my friend Mark. Note the commentary and a brief ceiling-scorching appearance from a person who somewhat resembles me, but is much younger and thinner and has an annoying reedy voice.

(WD-40 cans don't do that any more. They probably still do if you put a little pile of thermite on top of them, though. This concludes the Extremely Dangerous Suggestions portion of this blog post.)

So, on the subject of Sparkler "Bombs" That Do Not Actually Go Bang, here's a letter I got a while ago:

I am considering building a sparkler "bomb" for the upcoming July 4th holiday here in the US. In the course of my research on how to safely construct one, I came across some other pages stating that sparklers without magnesium were substandard and would not produce the desired effect. These pages were directions for actual enclosed bombs but I was wondering if you had tried the magnesium-less sparklers in the course of your experimentation for the "fwoosh" version and whether there was a noticeable difference if you had.

The reason why I am asking is because the only sparklers I can find around here that are made with wire do not have magnesium and the ones that do are on wooden sticks.

MAV

My answer:

I think most of the combustion energy of a sparkler comes from the oxidiser-fuel combination - generally something like potassium nitrate plus dextrin, with optional extra carbon, sulfur, sawdust or whatever. The stuff that makes the actual sparks contributes relatively little to the combustion.

The spark composition obviously does contribute a lot to the great vertical whoosh of sparks you get from the standard, safe sparkler "bomb", though, so it's possible that less-sparky sparklers will make much the same noise, and much the same amount of heat, but be rather less exciting to watch.

(I've never tried wood-stick sparklers for this job either. They might work OK, if bound together with coat-hanger wire or something, but I don't know.)

It's tempting to spice up the combustion with, say, a dollop of aluminium powder such as you can buy from some paint suppliers. This might actually work well, but note that flammable metal powders can "self-confine", in which the metal chaotically melts even as it burns, causing small-to-medium explosions. That sort of thing could make a sparkler bomb significantly less safe.

Honestly, I think any sparkler that sparks reasonably well, even if it's a bit less impressive than the classic bright-white-sparks aluminium/magnesium type, should work. It's easy enough to do a small-scale test, though; make a mini-bomb of only 100-odd sparklers, and see what it does. It'll burn much slower than a bigger bomb (a full-sized sparkler bomb has a burn time of only about one second), but should still demonstrate the principle.

Mythos-ed it by a mile

The Spiraling Worm, a collection of connected Cthulhu-mythos short stories by David Conyers and John Sunseri, has a rating of 4.5 stars on amazon.com.

For the life of me, I don't know why. I bought it, and I did actually read the whole thing, but I'm now kind of wishing I'd just given up, for two reasons.

The book made a good first impression.

The Spiraling Worm

That cover looks like a role-playing game box from 1982. Brilliant. To me, it said "don't expect Great Literature, but this'll be a lot of fun".

But then I started reading, and started seeing the mistakes. Oh, God, the mistakes.

The whole of The Spiraling Worm reads as if the authors took their first speedy drafts, ran spellcheck over them taking the first recommendation every time, and sent the result off to be printed.

In dashed-off e-mails or, I must say preemptively, a blog post, one may be forgiven for dropping a few clangers. Doing it all the bleeding time in something printed and bound is less forgivable.

I can't say I wasn't warned, in the first few pages. It's not a good sign when, in the introduction to a book, someone who's supposed to be a professional writer misuses the word "literally" (apparently Lovecraft "literally blew the doors off..." a genre). Perhaps I'm being excessively peevish about the inexorably shifting meaning of "literally", but the book also contains more than one use of the words "discreet" and "discreetly", and every damn time they spell it "discrete". These guys also do not miss a chance to say something "teamed with life" when they mean "teemed".

I've spent too long proofreading my own and other peoples' writing to be able to ignore these sorts of silly errors, but I can entirely forgive them when the story is good. Take the excellent comic series Powers, for instance. It has marvellously real-sounding dialogue that manages to avoid covering the whole page with speech balloons, so it's no big deal that that dialogue has spelling and punctuation errors well beyond those you can charitably ascribe to deliberate realism, as when someone refers to a "mulantov cocktail".

On page 16 of the first Powers annual, a District Attorney in court says "Objection, heresy!", which would be fine if it were that kind of court, but it isn't. On page 19 a witness in the trial refers to thwarting a "convenient store" robbery. On page 38, "counsel" is spelled "council". (Perhaps that court just needs to hire a better stenographer.)

Returning to books with no pictures, Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim is a fantastic yarn, but the hardcover edition I've got has a lot more errors than I'm used to seeing in a professionally-produced book. It's usually single-character mistakes - there's an "old school king fu fight" on page 100, for instance. But more unsettlingly, on page 191 a major character leaves to go and get lunch, then 40 seconds of dialogue later rematerialises to deliver one line. This is the sort of thing that could actually happen in the Sandman Slim universe, but it wasn't meant to.

Getting back to The Spiraling Worm, the whole damn book's full of grammatical messes which, like dangling modifiers, bring your reading to a halt while you attempt to determine what the authors were trying to say.

The authors at one point mean to say "under the metal roof" or "under the tin roof" or maybe even "inside the tin shed". They get a bit confused and it comes out "under the metal tin".

And how about "...the assassin slipped back into the spaces between the old walls from where he came, pulled back the painting which covered his exit hole he had cut to gain entry, and disappeared"?

I've got a better one. "If anyone can find a loophole that's even more than extremely obvious to why we shouldn't keep this thing alive, it's going to be you."

In a story in which two human bodies have turned to liquid at a touch, which is the sort of thing you can jolly well expect to happen if you start hanging around Lovecraftian beasties, we encounter "the crumbled body of a sentry". Except that body's only meant to be "crumpled". It don't half knock you out of the plot while you figure that out.

Oh, and someone else in that story is neither crumpled nor crumbled, but does suffer a dislocated nose. I'm pretty sure that's not a real thing.

And the authors apparently think the C-130 Hercules is a helicopter, which given that there's another helicopter in the same story is very confusing. They successfully describe the aircraft as a "C-130 Hercules transport" early on, but then it mutates into a "bomber helicopter".

My main complaint about the actual stories in The Spiraling Worm is that they're far too upbeat. Humans, without superpowers or the protection of a deity, keep somehow having a chance against unnamable Lovecraftian abominations. The series of stories has more than one protagonist who survives more or less undamaged from beginning to end.

This is, to some extent, a refreshing change from the classic Lovecraftian protagonist who, at the end of the story, goes out still scribbling down his impressions of the sound being made by the Thing coming up the stairs to do something much, much worse than eat him alive. But I still can't get behind the notion of the military organisations in The Spiraling Worm ever achieving any noteworthy success against Mythos entities, let alone any individual personnel surviving multiple encounters without, at the very least, ending up straitjacketed in a sanatorium.

The Spiraling Worm stories are set in the present day, but if you reckon the King in Yellow is in any way impressed by nukes, chainguns and aircraft carriers, I would venture that you are mistaken. Alien races able to travel through time and/or between stars casually, on a whim, without even using a spaceship, couldn't defeat Elder Gods. But apparently a race that's only had aeroplanes for 100 years, and does not have a BPRD, has a real fighting chance.

Oh, and don't read the blurb on the back of the The Spiraling Worm, because it gives away the climax of the main story.

Right then, Negative Nelly. Book bad, do not buy. Got it. Buy what book instead?

Well, at the end of The Spiraling Worm those strangely durable humans are all "yaaay, we're making an anti-Cthulhu Squad!" But Charles Stross already did modern-human-government-employees-versus-Cthulhu, much better, in his Laundry stories. The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue and The Fuller Memorandum are the books; you can also read the stories Down on the Farm and Overtime for free online.

Stross can do Cthulhu Mythos better than The Spiraling Worm when he's joking - see A Boy and his God. See also Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald, PDF here; Stross and Gaiman do a similar sort of gleeful dance through Lovecraft mash-ups that knock The Spiraling Worm into a cocked hat.

(To be fair, that Web version of A Boy and his God contains three uses of the word "orifices", and spells it "orofices" every time. I think you'll forgive it. And while I'm parenthesising, Peter Watts' The Things is very well worth reading, too, provided you've seen John Carpenter's The Thing.)

The Spiraling Worm would have been so much better if all the stories had just been uploaded in their printed form to something like the SCP wiki, where Ideas Men can sketch in v1.0 Alpha of a story and others can tidy up the execution. (It'd be great, actually, if random-access text collections like the SCP wiki started to eat into the market for "normal" books. There's a lot of very entertaining reading to be had there.)

Without an intrepid editor to bleach, slice and burn the bad bits out of The Spiraling Worm, though, it gets two stars out of five from me.

One and a half, if you don't count the picture on the cover.

Lego anti-inspiration

There are many clever Lego things on the Web that might encourage grown-ups to drag those dusty boxes out of the attic and make their own tiny Sydney Opera House, PC case, or even alarmingly realistc dissected frog.

You could just about manage a small orrery, or explore the interesting mechanical possibilities of some new non-Technic pieces, or make a zombie diorama or Moonbase module. Or, conceivably, even make a dual-rotor helicopter. It'd even be within the bounds of human belief that you could make a Lego ukelele, which is both easier to build and better-sounding (MP3) than the Lego harpsichord.

And, of course, just building a packaged set isn't very difficult, even if it's one of the Star Wars giants or the upcoming monster Technic Unimog.

But then, there's the stuff people build that clearly makes anything you could possibly create look like the Lego models small children make, of which you have to say "wow, that's a really great, um..." to prompt the child to tell you whether you're looking at a spaceship or a giraffe.

Look at this model of the Jeep Hurricane concept car, for instance. It doesn't have as many features as the actual car, but it has about as many as are physically possible.

Or this StarCraft Siege Tank with working deploy function.

Or this Pilatus PC-21, which would probably actually fly if Buzz Lightyear asked it to.

Or this little roadster, which contains some remarkably compact mechanisms.

Lego Sand Crawler

Or this minifig-scale Sand Crawler.

Or this working Super 8 movie projector.

Lego sports car

Or this outrageous sports car.

Or this gigantic Porsche.

Or this quad-delta-robot brick-sorting workcell.

(As you may have noticed, many of the above links lean very hard on the excellent TechnicBricks blog.)

But perhaps these models are like Raven from Snow Crash. They just relieve you of the vague dissatisfied uncertainty that you might, given the right set of circumstances, become the world's greatest Lego badass, if you tried really really hard.

Now, you can be happy as one of the crowd, with the heights of Lego achievement as safely out of reach as a three-minute fifty-second mile, climbing all of the eight-thousanders without oxygen, or memorising a shuffled deck of cards in 22 seconds.

And then you can get on with making something fun. Possibly out of only two pieces.

Posted in Hacks, Toys. 2 Comments »

Primordial mouse-mats

Eleven years, ten months and 25 days ago, I reviewed the original Everglide mouse mats.

Everglide mouse mats

Everglide's "Attack Pads" were the first hard-plastic mouse "pads" to achieve any commercial success. The concept of a mouse mat that you actually paid money for was a bit ridiculous at the time, but since most people were still using opto-mechanical mice then, a hard mat with a textured surface actually did help accuracy a bit, and reduced gunking-up of the little rollers a lot.

All-surface optical mice have been the standard for years now, but a lot of gamers are still picky about their mouse-mat, to get exactly the right amount of friction. Or just to get something that doesn't wear out after a year of StarCraft/Team Fortress. The original polypropylene polyethylene Attack Pads lasted bloody forever; five years of frequent use will smooth 'em out a fair bit, but they're still not what you'd call fragile.

Black Everglide mouse mats

The black Everglide mats still work fine with optical mice. Actually, modern opticals may be fine on the translucent-white Everglide mats as well, but don't quote me on that.

The Everglide mats spawned many descendants, and even some mildly hilarious drama. And now, the other day, I got an e-mail from a nice lady who worked for the company that actually manufactured the Everglide mats back in 1998.

(Well, she says that's who she is. If this is some sort of scam, it's targeting a pretty darn narrow niche.)

She's got "about 200" original black mats, of the type Everglide themselves haven't sold for ages, and she's selling them cheap on eBay.

Apparently these mats are all slightly irregular, but perfectly usable. The problems are restricted to "a few uneven edges here and there along with some misprints". (Any small imperfections in these products really are evidence of their hand-crafted nature; the bevelled edges of the early Everglides were routed by hand.)

They're only $US10.95 delivered within the USA, which strikes me as a perfectly acceptable price for a shiny new piece of gaming history that'll last for years of heavy use, even if you do have to pare off a rough bit on the edge somewhere.

(No international shipping, unfortunately. You could try contacting the seller via their eBay store if you're outside the USA and desperate to buy.)

Common sense versus reality

From Modern Mechanix:

Improbable gliders

Yes, these things are exactly what they look like. And when the design was tested, no, it didn't work. You can't power an aeroplane with a sail.

"Common sense", whatever that is, says it's impossible to make a sail-powered aeroplane. And common sense is right.

But if your vehicle has a connection of some sort to the ground, or water, it is eminently possible to sail faster than the wind. Tacking sailing ships do this routinely. Common sense doesn't say that's impossible, unless it's the common sense of someone who's never seen a boat race.

But common sense most definitely says that sailing dead downwind, with the wind exactly at your back, cannot be done faster than that wind is blowing. Obviously, whether you're in a boat or in a land yacht (meaning a wheeled vehicle propelled by the wind, not a '71 Impala), when your speed and heading relative to the ground or water are the same as the wind speed and heading relative to the ground or water, there's no more energy to be harvested and you can't go any faster.

In this, common sense is absolutely wrong. A land yacht certainly can sail downwind faster than the wind.

The fastest one to do so thus far is called Blackbird, but there are others:

What all of these yachts have in common is a large propeller instead of a sail, and the prop has a drive connection to the wheels. Common sense says this won't make a blind bit of difference to anything, but it does.

There have been some rather nasty arguments between people who know that this cannot be done and people who, as per the old saying, should not be interrupted because they're busy doing it. Enjoy the comments here, for instance, if you'd like to consume rather more than the recommended daily intake of flame-war.

At this stage, anyone who still objects is in the position of a person in 1910 who still insists that aeroplanes are impossible on the grounds that he, personally, hasn't yet seen one flying.

(Although, to be fair, some of the land-yacht runs are alleged to have been made on the dry bed of Ivanpah Lake. I've been there in Fallout: New Vegas and it's clearly not nearly big enough for any such activities.)

Common sense is, in general, immensely useful. It's what tells you that, when you want to cross the street and see a car coming, you shouldn't just step out in front of the car, even if you've never subjected this belief to empirical testing by walking out and seeing what happens.

But common sense, like memory and even perception itself, is unreliable. Common sense only works on things that it's worked on before, and the only way to expand your common sense to deal with new concepts is by making those new concepts fit into some part of the existing framework. Expanding your common-sense framework to accept genuinely new ideas is possible, but it doesn't happen automatically.

If you're trying to figure out whether to step out in front of a type of oncoming car you've never seen before, the common-sense shortcut will work. But if you're trying to understand some new, counter-intuitive physical oddity like these land yachts, common sense will fail you miserably, just as it so often does when people try to think about tax brackets or daylight saving, and on the rather fewer occasions when people try to think about aeroplanes on conveyor belts.

I don't think all of the people who got into shouting matches over the downwind-faster-than-the-wind idea were just emotionally invested in a position they'd not thought about at all, as is so often the case in, say, political arguments. The physics involved is decidedly non-obvious; that, plus Sayre's Law, could account for the whole kerfuffle. And this new development doesn't seem likely to revolutionise land transportation, or anything else.

The next time you're inclined to take a common-sense view of some new idea that actually matters, though, try to bear in mind that common sense also says that the world is flat and the sun goes around it.

Shopping-trolley game theory

Shopping trolleys, or carts, are quite expensive. So supermarkets, and other shops that provide carts, prefer their customers to refrain from taking the carts home.

But if you're a shopper who doesn't have a car, or money for a taxi, then you either have to buy few enough groceries that you can tote them home in some bag or backpack or old-lady-trolley you bring with you, or you just take the bleeding cart home.

Only if you're angling for some sort of Kindness to Corporations Award would you then return the cart to the supermarket, of course. So forlorn stray shopping carts can be found by the side of the road in many nations. Supermarkets have to hire cart-collectors, and create hotlines you can call to report abandoned carts and enter the draw for some sort of prize.

Some shopping trolleys have security devices that, one way or another, lock a wheel if you attempt to abscond with the trolley. Now the trolleys cost more and the supermarket still has to hire people to go and unlock and return immobilised carts, but at least the trolley-wranglers won't have to go very far.

I think a more common attack on the wandering-carts problem is carts that require a deposit. They're commonplace in Europe and at airports and are slowly becoming more popular elsewhere, like Australia, where I live.

Each cart has a very solid coin-activated lock...

Shopping-cart lock

...with a short chain danging from it. There's a doodad on the end of the chain that's a cross between a key and a seat-belt latch, which clicks into the lock of the next cart in line.

Numerous shopping trolleys
(source: Flickr user Polycart)

To unlock a cart from the next one's chain, you have to insert a coin in the lock. The lock captures the coin when it releases the chain, and the coin is of sufficient value (here in Australia, a one- or two-dollar coin) that you'll probably want it back. Unless you've got some pretty heavy-duty tools handy, the only way to recover your coin is by plugging the key thingy on the end of another cart's chain into the lock of your cart.

You can, of course, use any metal object the size and shape of the appropriate coin to operate one of these locks. The supermarkets themselves often sell metal discs with a key-ring attachment that make sure you can always get a trolley, even if you haven't got any change. But the coin-lock system seems to work quite well, overall. It greatly reduces the number of completely escaped trolleys, and also reduces the number of trolleys abandoned in the rain out in the supermarket parking lot.

Aldi opened a store here in Katoomba about a year ago, and they have coin-lock carts, which I almost never see abandoned.

Except one time, I did.

First there was one cart sitting in the undergrowth by the side of the road, intact, with a coin (or a washer) in its lock. Then, as the days passed, there was another. And another. Connected together, just as they would be back at Aldi.

This taught me a bit of shopping-trolley game theory. If you're taking a coin-lock supermarket trolley home, you indeed do lose your coin (or washer), that first time. But subsequent trolleys taken to the same place can be connected to the first one, and those ones will give you back your money.

All the supermarket can do to stop this is count their trolleys frequently and send out a patrol whenever even a few of them have gone astray, and thereby lose one of the reasons why they opted for the more expensive, lockable trolleys in the first place.

And they clearly can't stop these dudes at all.