Category: Strange World

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After last weekend’s trip to storage, I was planning to re-read Greg Keyes’ Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series, until I remembered that the new Wheel of Time novel, The Gathering Storm (why, oh why did they have to pick such a generic title?), comes out next week. Not the best time to start a four-book epic.

So I rummaged through the to-read box this morning, looking for something to bring along and read at lunch, and settled on The True Stella Awards. I picked it up when it was new, four years ago, but somehow never got around to reading it.

The nonfiction book is by Randy Cassingham, author of the long-running This is True newsletter, and is a collection of write-ups of frivolous lawsuits. It’s named after an email forward that used to go around with the title “The Stella Awards” (only that used made-up lawsuits like the one about the guy who supposedly put his Winnebago on cruise control and went into the back to make a sandwich). That list was named after Stella Liebeck, the woman famous for suing McDonalds after spilling scalding hot coffee on herself. Cassingham decided that using fake examples to illustrate a real problem was counterproductive, and started a newsletter featuring real cases of legal abuse, eventually making it into a book.

It’s been interesting to see which cases have been included. One of the first examples was a 2003 lawsuit against Nabisco for using trans-fats in Oreos (they’ve since been reformulated, IIRC)…which was dropped as soon as the filer had racked up enough publicity.

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Why do people get take-out fast food, then sit and eat it in their car in the parking lot, idling with the AC on?

Update: It’s weird how this became normal for me during the 2020 Covid shutdown. I always figured, if you’re going to eat right there anyway, why not just eat at the restaurant? (Assuming the tables aren’t full, of course.)

But in 2020? First you couldn’t eat at the restaurant at all. Then you couldn’t eat inside the restaurant, but could eat outside. Though depending on the weather, you might not want to. Eventually you could eat inside, but had to make a risk calculation as to whether it was a good idea or not. Drive-through and park became an easy way to keep separate airspaces.

At least by the time that hit I was driving a plug-in hybrid, so I didn’t need to idle the gas motor.

Of course there are also plenty of other reasons I just hadn’t thought of at the time: private conversations, for instance, or a sleeping baby in the car seat who you don’t want to wake up early.

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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of disks on the freeway. Or a pigeon with a datacard.

[A] company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a “data card” strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data.

2024 (well, 2023) update: Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet (via)

Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers. With the proliferation of super-fast home connectivity like gigabit fiber, one might expect the carrier pigeon to be blown away in 2023. Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin. However, as you will learn later, the pigeon gets outpaced at distances over about 600 miles.

I’d been wondering whether bandwidth or SD card density had changed faster since then!

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How an outdoor mall dealt with a lunchtime power outage. And some Apple observations.

Power’s out at the mall. No teriyaki bowl for me. Subway it is! (Hmm, and no iced coffee either. *sigh*)

Near as I can tell, the Apple store is just completely shut down. Hazards of making checkout depend on computer network, I guess. For contrast, Subway just dug out a pad of paper credit card slips and did texture rubbings w/ a pen.

Odd: muzak is so omnipresent I didn’t notice it was still playing. Speakers must be on another circuit from the stores.

Turns out only some buildings have lost power. Including all the coffee except Starbucks. But Jamba Juice has power!

Was weird walking through mall at lunch seeing lighted stores on right and dark on left. Some stayed open, some closed, some adapted.

Coffee Bean was mostly closed during the power outage, but they set an employee out front with two urns of coffee. No ice, though.

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