Here's something you don't see every day:
I think it may be something that nobody has ever seen before.
It occurs to me that it actually might be a quite decent way to start training people to do fiddly work underwater, though.
Via. (Includes edifying comments!)
I do enjoy dousing the bubbly enthusiasm of a fresh-faced PR girl with a big smelly bucket of fish-water.
She said:
My name is Kristin, and I'm contacting you on behalf of Duracell to share some information about a new product, the Duracell Pre-Charged Rechargeable Battery. Knowing your interest in gadgets and technology, I'd love to send you a package to try out. Would you be interested in testing them yourself, and sharing your thoughts with your readers over the next week or so?
For more information, feel free to check out their new website, Museum of the Obvious. Museum of the Obvious is an interactive Web site which allows consumers to play games, watch videos and interact with displays and exhibits about obvious inventions, such as sliced bread, a football helmet, the oven mitt, and of course, a Duracell Pre-Charged Rechargeable Battery. Additionally, Duracell has created the following videos to raise awareness of the product:
If you are interested in receiving samples and more information, please let me know!
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Kristin
In response to which, I said:
> My name is Kristin, and I'm contacting you on behalf of
> Duracell to share some information about a new productNo you're not :-).
Low self-discharge NiMH cells have been on sale since late 2005. The Duracell-branded ones are made by Sanyo, right?
> Would you be interested in testing them yourself, and
> sharing your thoughts with your readers"Hey, readers! You can buy Eneloops with a Duracell label on them now! Hurrah!" :-)
Strangely enough, Kristin has not yet responded.
So I may have to pay for my next pack of AAs.
Not Always Right ("Funny & Stupid Customer Quotes") is one of those unaccountable hearsay blogs. Readers of, say, Photoshop Disasters, almost always have a good way to see that the mistake being claimed actually occurred. But there's no way at all for even the operators of Not Always Right to tell whether any of these events actually transpired. Let alone people who only read the blog.
If you just completely invent a terrible tale of customer craziness, then unless you insist that the customer was fifty feet tall and eradicated Cleveland with radioactive fire-breath, there's no way for Not Always Right to tell that you're lying.
Sometimes, though, the tales are so off-kilter that they're either definitely true, or the work of a seriously talented writer. Either way, they're worth reading.
Pretty much every time a new update appears in the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories RSS feed, I am reminded of my own hateful indolence and miserable lack of talent.
Windell and Lenore have really outdone themselves this time, though.
(I think the next kit I get around to building will actually be a ThingamaKIT. If, that is, you don't count the trapezoidal loudspeakers and giant box of medieval wood from Ron Toms that've been awaiting my attention for lo, these many months.)
The latest CrabFu robot-made-out-of-servos is...
...the robot fish out of water.
A reader brought my attention to Cracked's 6 Retarded Gas Saving Schemes (People Are Actually Trying). I've could make a couple of minor technical complaints about it, but overall it's great. The more people point out the idiocy of things like running your car on water and magic gasoline pills, the better.
I got a kick out of the Khaos Super Turbo Charger (KSTC), which apparently made as big a splash in the Philippines as Firepower did here in Australia. The KSTC has its very own page on fuelsaving.info; there's another page about air-bleed devices in general.
Fuel scammers often seem to take the thirty-something per cent thermodynamic efficiency of internal combustion engines to mean that sixty-something per cent of the fuel isn't being burned, when the actual amount of fuel that escapes the engine unburned or only partially combusted is a few per cent, at the very worst. For most vehicles today, it's well under one per cent, as I noted when Firepower tried the same line on me.
Cracked's number one Retarded Gas Saving Scheme is "Water4Gas" from one "Ozzie Freedom". It's a particularly elaborate kit of parts - including various aquarium components, and not one but two jam-jars - that's meant to let you run your car at least partially on, that's right, water.
I mention this in hopes of attracting some more of those hilarious Google ads from the several other water-fueled-car companies out there, all of which have mysteriously failed to make the trillions of dollars you'd expect.
(This is, of course, because of The Conspiracy. Which somehow doesn't stop these people from selling their ridiculous kits to soon-to-be-disappointed customers.)
Oh, and meanwhile it's come to light that the list of people to whom Firepower promised money and never delivered includes the Liberal Party of Australia.
At this stage I'm surprised that Tim Johnston - who in the photo accompanying the article has a hairstyle that looks not unlike a Brylcreemed ballsack - didn't go door-to-door slipping IOUs into people's letter boxes.
Because I have a small element collection, I occasionally troll eBay for interesting metals.
Recently, I've noticed people selling "copper bullion".
This, for those of you not up on precious-metal terminology, is a contradiction in terms. Bullion ("No, not the little cubes you put in hot water to make soup.") is, by definition, precious metals. Gold, silver, platinum, palladium; a metal that's rare enough that it can be used as a reasonably portable means of exchange in its own right, not just struck into coins that can be used to purchase goods worth far more than the coins' intrinsic metal value.
Copper, on the other hand, is a "base metal". It's common enough that trading it by the ounce is ridiculous. As I write this, the spot price for copper is about $US3.85 per pound, not per ounce.
(It occurs to me that this may be the heart and soul of the copper bullion scam. Just charge as much per ounce as the metal is actually worth per pound, and wait for some Modern Jackass to take the bait.)
What people are trading for $3.85 a pound on the base metal markets may or may not be .999-purity "fine" copper, but it's actually quite easy to buy very pure copper from engineering suppliers, or indeed your local hardware store. You generally have to pay more to get copper that's been alloyed with something else.
Today, the price of copper has risen enough that many small-denomination copper coins are now worth more intrinsically than their face value. I've got a roll of fifty of the old, now withdrawn, Australian one-cent pieces here; it weighs about 132 grams, which at $US3.85 a pound makes this "fifty cent" roll worth about $AU1.15 right now.
That's still not a lot, though, and the notion of selling copper as bullion remains silly. There's no real market for it. If you go into one of those heavily-armoured shops that buys and sells gold and silver bullion and try to sell them a slab of copper, they'll laugh and send you on your way.
Precious-metal prices always rise whenever one or more of the world's great economies are in bad shape, so the USA's current enthusiastic attempt to commit economic suicide has created a big spike in gold and silver prices. As I write this, gold is worth around $US970 per troy ounce, and silver's around $US19. As recently as 2000, gold was worth less than $US290 per troy ounce, and silver was around five bucks an ounce.
One troy ounce of copper, at the moment, is worth about 26 US cents.
Even if you've got a tonne of copper, it'll still be worth less than $US8500 at the moment. $US8500 worth of gold currently weighs six-tenths of a pound.
And yet... there are people selling "copper bullion". EBay's rotten with 'em at the moment.
I just did a "completed items" search for "copper bullion" on eBay, and turned up one 1055-gram bar that went for $US34.05 ex delivery (value at $3.85 per pound: $US8.97), a one-pound bar that went for $US18.51 (and is now worth, that's right, $US3.85), and an overstruck US copper penny (you could still see the ghost of "ONE CENT" and the Lincoln Memorial through the crudely-restruck eagle and "1/10 TROY OUNCE .950 COPPER"...), which sold for $US3.25.
If that penny was genuinely a tenth of a troy ounce - which sounds near enough - then the 95% copper content in it might actually be worth as much as 2.5 cents now.
And on it went. Before I got too depressed to go on, I found at least one successfully-sold "MASSIVE!! 3 KILOS .999 Fine Copper Bullion Bar/ Ingot"... for $US140 plus delivery.
It's worth $US25.46.
I did like the little ingots (available in copper and silver!) stamped with an image of Martha Mitchell holding a telephone, though.
Even if you decide to get in on the ground floor by buying a hundred of the one-troy-ounce "Australian Copper Bullion" ingots currently on offer on ebay.com.au, what you've actually just bought is 6.86 pounds of copper, worth less than $US27.
As I write this, the eBay Buy It Now price for one of those packages of a hundred little ingots is $AU350 - about $US340 - plus delivery.
So even if the price of copper rises by a factor of ten, you won't have made your money back, unless you manage to find yourself a greater fool on whom to unload your zillions of little copper bookmarks.
I have a nice 25 by 15 by 250mm offcut of copper bar - I bought it from this seller, now on OZtion instead of eBay. It's great for demonstrating eddy-current magnetic braking, with a rare-earth magnet. But it weighs 827.5g, which is 26.6 troy ounces - ninety-three dollars and ten cents, at the $3.50-an-ounce "bullion" price!
I also bought a bunch of 3.5-inch copper boat nails a while ago. (Copper's used for boat nails because it won't corrode, and you can drive work-hardened copper nails through wood with no trouble; when I annealed one of the nails, though, I could bend it with ease.) I've given a few of the nails away, but have about 950 grams of 'em left, and I think they're quite pure copper.
The copper in the nails is worth only about eight bucks at the current spot price, and they cost me about forty Australian bucks delivered - but if I melted them down into fancy little ingots and sold them for $3.50 a troy ounce, they'd bring me well over a hundred dollars!
Heck, I've got a whole box of old CPU coolers, many of which have solid copper heat sinks! I'm a MILLIONAIRE!
(Oh, and I wrote the title for this page before I discovered that at least one eBay seller actually is selling "lead bullion". Oy.)
This scam's a weird one, though it's apparently been around for a while; Google for "copper bullion" and you'll find quite a lot of exceedingly dodgy Web sites trying to get you to buy the stuff. (One of the sites I found also linked to one of those "run your car on water" sites that always show up in the Google ads whenever I write about how you can't run your car on water.)
The scam would also appear to be quite well-known among people who spend a lot of time trading metals on eBay.
With any luck, this blog post will save at least one person from blowing their kids' university fund on vastly overpriced copper door-stops.
The other day I was reading, as you do, the Wikipedia entry for "entomophagy". Which means, of course, the eating of insects, on purpose or... otherwise.
The "unintentional entomophagy" section of that article is all about that schoolyard gross-out favourite: The allowable levels of insects, insect eggs and "insect filth" in common foodstuffs.
As the US FDA says, "it is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects." Like bits of bugs. So certain levels of bug-bits are OK with the FDA.
They have determined, for instance, that no health hazard is presented by fewer than five fruit-or-other-fly eggs per 250 millilitres of canned citrus juice. And they also prohibit, I'm happy to say, any maggots at all in that juice.
You're allowed to have an average of no more than 60 insect fragments per hundred grams of chocolate; no more than 30 per hundred grams of peanut butter.
And on it goes, until the entry for hops - the bitter green flowers used in beer brewing.
The Wikipedia article said that ten grams of hops can have two thousand five hundred aphids, and still be considered acceptable.
This struck me as a clear example of subtle Wikipedia vandalism, so I had a little look around. But I'll be darned if the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Food Defect Action Levels list did not say exactly that.
The hop aphid, Phorodon humuli, is fortunately a tiny little creature that probably weighs about the same as a similarly sized ant - about 0.1 milligrams.
(It may mean something that the question of what an ant weighs has previously commanded my attention.)
So even if there are 2500 such aphids in ten grams of hops, that's still only a quarter of a gram of aphids. Hops outweigh aphids by a factor of forty to one.
But this blogger's estimate of 528 aphids being permitted to go into a single sixteen-fluid-ounce (0.47-litre, 0.83-Imperial-pint) can of not-especially-hoppy beer, however, remains valid.
It's not really that bad, of course. As the Action Levels document also says, typical contamination levels are generally far lower than the maximum permitted level.
I think the "2500 aphids" figure might actually be pretty much picked out of the air, since I think it's likely that even if you just stirred buckets of aphids into your beer-wort instead of buckets of hops, the resultant beverage would probably still present no danger to human health whatsoever.
(And, given some previous evidence, a certain segment of the market would probably demand more aphids.)
But this sort of sensible disclaimer has no place in the schoolyard gross-out arms race, or indeed in similarly themed conversations during the big game's ad breaks. 2500 aphids per ten grams of hops are, indeed, allowed.
Drink up!
