Running Hills

One of the activities cross-country coaches assign their runners is called “hills.” The runners are instructed to run up and down hills in order to develop muscle strength and build endurance.

The hills near my apartment add a whole new dimension to this. Today I ran up one of the hill for the first time. If you are overweight I suggest you try something else. It may kill you. I’m not kidding…at least a minor heart attack.

This is the smallest of three hills surrounding us. I imagine coaches around here tell their runners, “Today we are running hill.”

Advertising to Fail

I received an interesting ad in the mail yesterday. I didn’t even need to open as it had one of those plastic view windows. Normally they just show the address, but in this case they showed a message from All State Insurance.
“7 out of 10 people who switched to All State saved money”
My question is, what about the other 30% of the people? Apparently they switched insurance and paid more?
The only way All State could make this worse is by changing the line to read,
“3 out of 10 people who switched to All State paid more for their insurance.”
Now I am aware there are other reasons to switch; the motorist who gets into a car accident every month and needs strong customer service support to continue to support their driving habits.
This brings up a question. Is there any requirement that after you have caused multiple accidents your license is revoked?
Furthermore does license revocation actually accomplish anything, or does the motorist simply continues to drive without the permission of the state?
Maybe like house arrest the offender should be required to wear an RFID ankle bracelet that prevents the car from starting when within a certain distance of the gas pedal.
Notice how on almost all crime shows they eventually find the bad guy through a database of known criminals?
If this is not discrimination I don’t know what is. I think banks should be required to hire a certain number of felons so as to combat this type of discrimination.
The government already employs this option — isn’t it time everyone else did too?

Amish Friendship Bread

Once again I have come in contact with the famous Amish Friendship Bread. For those of you who are unfamiliar, I will include details of the transaction.

Bread Perpetrator: I was “given” some friendship bread I would like to share with you.

Unsuspecting Person: (Thinking, I can’t refuse an offer of friendship, and fresh bread is always nice) Sure, that would be nice.

Bread Perpetrator: Here it is (producing a 1 gallon zip lock bag of white liquid).

Unsuspecting Person: Oh, thanks. (Thinking, Ok this is a bag of goo, not bread).

Bread Perpetrator: All you need to do is follow the directions on this sheet of paper

Now that contact has been made, in order to make the “friendship” bread you need to continue to add sugar and flour over the course of ten days. At the end of the ten days you divide it into four bags to give to other people, while keeping one for yourself. Thus not only are you endlessly propagating the scam, but you are also forced to make the bread for yourself.

According to the recipe if you don’t send it along, the recipe will be lost as the “starter bag” recipe is only known to the Amish.

I bet it contains a leavening agent, flour, and sugar. Otherwise eventually the mixture would become diluted and never work.

I propose the name be changed to Enemy Bread. If you are looking to make enemies pass this bread bag along. A chain letter at least you don’t resend to yourself. This Friendship Bread is taking chain letters to the next step.

Blame It on the Weather

I’ve noticed a more and more common excuse being applied to all variety of things.

“…because of the weather”

Due to the weather a week ago the moving truck is no longer able to meet their obligations to come on the day agreed upon. Obviously this weather also affected phone lines and the entire U.S. communication infrastructure because I was only informed two hours after he was scheduled to arrive. The moving company must not even have been contacted as the packers still arrived on schedule. It was only by some random coincidence that the wires happened to make a connection to my phone.

I expect this excuse to gain more and more popularity.

Politician: I am calling for a recount.
Reporter: But you lost by 70 points.
Politician: The weather conditions made the vote completely unreliable.
Reported: You mean the clear skies and unseasonably warm weather?
Politician: No, the freak snow storm.
Reporter: Ahh, the one last month.
Politician: Exactly. Everyone was still scared to leave their homes.

One weak later…
Reporter: It turns out that a liberal majority have maintained control of Congress as recounts in 15 states revealed error of up to 35%. The majority leader blames the large discrepancy on weather, saying “People just can’t see to count correctly in the middle of a snow storm”

Misplaced Efficiency

For those of you who have never gone to subway, the ordering processing consists of choosing a bread, loaf size (6″ or 12″), sandwich type, toasted or not, cheese, and final condiments. For a long time the subway near campus has epitomized the word slow. It can take as long as 10-15 minutes to finally get a sandwich and pay for an average line of between 5 and 10 people. One would be tempted to divide 10 minutes by 10 people and arrive at a minute per sandwich and conclude that this is a reasonable amount of time for a sandwich of this complexity.

This conclusion fails to take into account the four people standing in line behind the counter hired specifically so that you do not end up standing in line your entire lunch break. This past semester someone in the Subway management team (for those of you who are not in the know, subway does not operate in the normal fashion, all sandwich makers are equally involved in the “management” of the restaurant) became aware of the problem.

Taking in to account the genius of minimum wage employees everywhere this employee attempted to employ the time saving technique of block processing. Applied to subway this means that the first person will start 5 sandwiches at a time before they are allowed to move onto the condiment step. Unfortunately for those of those of us who get to experience this first hand this now means that those 10-15 minutes of waiting are now experienced by our sandwiches. What this employee forgot to take into account is that working in blocks only works if there are lots of repeated motions. For example if everyone has the same cheese, one block can be picked up and the slices can be laid on all the sandwiches. At Subway everyone has a custom sandwich; this means the number of repeated motions is at a minimum, i.e. a different cheese for every sandwich.

To further add insult to injury, the person standing 5th in line does not expect to give his order until he at least reaches the counter, thus the conversation is generally of the form:

Subway: What kind of bread?
Customer: Looking around blankly.
Subway: What kind of bread?
Customer: Huh? Me?
Subway: Yeah
Customer: Ummm, ummm, just a second
…Several minutes later…
Customer: I guess I’ll have white.
Subway: 6 inch?
Customer: What are the option?
Subway:6 inch or footlong?
Customer: Oh….I guess I’ll have a footlong.
Subway: What kind of sandwich?
Customer: What? Are there more than one…..

And where in the world is the Swiss cheese?

A Question of Ethics

I recently had to undergo an online ethics training program.  The question that always gets me is the if it is okay to accept a gift of over $100 in value. 

The one question as a door prize you win a Nintendo Wii?  Can you go keep or at the very least give it to a family member as a gift? 

According to the ethics class neither is acceptable.  So where is the line?  If the retail value of an item is over $100 can you not accept it?  What about if you received an item such that there was a store that charged over $100 for the item, but was available on sale at another store for $99 is this okay?

I am reminded of time working at Burger King.  According to company policy we were not allowed to accept gratuity.  First off, there are not that many people who would ever tip you to begin with, however the 16 year old girl drive through workers managed to make out quite well.  But how do you stop someone from accepting gratuity who is making minimum wage.  You fire them?  Big deal its not like they had any benefits anyways. 

So the same situation applies to me, I have no athority in my position as a TA to affect University in any way.  So if Dell wanted to give me a brand new laptop, I am expected to turn in down.  I don’t why Dell would do so, but as I can’t give any University business to Dell anyways I don’t see how this is unethical in anyway. 

Its another case of legalism, its hard to define a small region that is bad, so we just put everything in a larger category as “illegal”. 

Please understand, if a student wanted to give me a gift with the hope of gaining favor in terms of grading, I would happily accept the gift and then grade normally.  Some would ask, “How can you be sure you aren’t biased?”  The answer is simple, I don’t know the names of any of my students so when I am grading exams I have no idea who they belong to.

TNT: How to Spot a Terrorist

According to a newsweek article (http://www.newsweek.com/id/216401?GT1=43002) terrorists share 3 common traits:

1. Testosterone
2. a Narrative fantasy
3. desire to make Theater

Notice that they made a fun acronym that doesnn’t completely work in order to spell TNT?  What I find interesting is that there is a 4th characteristic that most suicide bombers seem to share.  (At this point if you haven’t read the article please read it now and see if you can identify the characterist)

Hint: Every example bomber in the article possesses it

 

Answer:  They’re are Muslim.

Now before everyone gets upset with me I want to play a little logic game.  If all birds are blue, and all birds are mammels.  Then are all blue mammels birds?

The answer of course is no?  The same applies to Muslims, while Muslims are terrorists there certainly seems to be a large sub-category of this group is so.  So in the logical world, how to find terrorists

1. Do they possess the TNT characteristics?  Yes, then check 2.
2. Are they Muslim?

If both 2 and 3 are true, what do you?  Well almost nothing because in this country everyone enjoys equal protection under the law, so until they actually do something illegal you can only pay closer attention to them.  If you are like most people and mostly mind your own this means that your suspensions will be confirmed after a bomb goes off.

Regular Business Hours

This semester a new trend has developed, scheduling required class times and meetings at exactly the same time.  Normally I try to prevent this by voicing my input in the process of choosing the time and day.  For obvious reasons the only person who knows my schedule is me.

This year I missed the first week of classes, but informed all affected parties not a week before but 2 months ahead of time so as to guarantee my opinions could be heard sooner rather than later.  Unfortunately, this warning was largely ignored, the result “make-up” classes for my one class have been scheduled for Mondays at 6pm.  (For those of you who don’t know a “make-up” class occurs when the professor can not make a class and therefore schedules an additional period of riveting interaction.)  The class I TA for also set their meeting time to Mondays starting at 5:30pm.

Its important to get the material from the make-up classes as it is covered in the homework.  This shouldn’t be a big deal as most classes the TA meetings rarely have much to cover and should be done in a half hour.  Yet somehow what should happen doesn’t occur as even after I informed the Professor of these conflicts he has no problem continuing to start length and then proceeding to spend 15 minutes joking around.

Every so often we have  a “long meeting” by long I mean from 5:30 to 8:00.  Some people reading this are thinking, “I have meetings that long all the time”.  Well sure, hopefully those at least are during business hours and you get paid for your pain.

My question remains, why does everyone in Academia consider regular business hours to be 10 to 2:00 AM?

Overstating the Obvious

This week the college students are moving back in to town.  The local paper wrote an article to convince all of us how old we are.  This year’s college freshmen were born in 1991.  The list of things these student experience all their lives…

1. Never used a card catalog
2. Always had available-Cookie Dough Ice Cream
3. Never had a President who did snuff…(Just except for the man currently occupying the White House)

I took the liberty of adding a few to the list

1. Never had a President who did snuff
2. Never had slaves
3. Never bothered to use the card catalog (Instead asked a librarian to do it for you)
4. Never fought the British
5. Never fought the French
6. Always had guns available
7. Weren’t allowed in the Garden of Eden

Now looking at the updated list everything seems to apply to everyone born after 1930.  For those of you who just made it to college, if you don’t know the items on the list it means you don’t belong in college.

Just a Little Confused

I was recently swimming in a “unnamed” motel’s pool.  It was a very nice motel in most respects — nice rooms, air conditioner, bathroom.  The room and all the furniture were in nice, new condition.  The only problem was that the managers seem to have a little misconception about what is involved in running a motel.

Case 1:  The pool area had an outside door connecting it.  At most motels this door is either left open to reduce the humidity and make it a more pleasurable swimming experience.  In this case the door was damaged in some way, and thus did not work.  In order to combat the negative effects of this, a screen and been placed over the door.  Unfortunately, this is a case of good intentions, poorly executed.  This was because the screen did not completely cover the doorway nor did it in any way seal the opening.  The result: bugs had absolutely no problem navigating around the screen and promptly drowning in the pool (at least with us in it).

This reminds by a story told by my Oma (Grandmother in German).  After World War II the Russians were able to take whatever they wanted in Eastern Germany.  A particular group of Russians discovered the joy of running water.  By turning on a handle, water comes out of the faucet.  In awe of this device they were determined to procure one of these marvelous inventions for their own residences.  Forcibly removing the faucet from the wall, they mounted it to the walls of their own homes.

Back to topic.

Case 2:  As a new motel certain furniture items are required.  In  the bedroom: beds, bed sheets, bedroom nightstands…  For the pool: the pool itself, pool chairs, and of course a pool table.  Next to the table was a nice stand holding the various pool sticks.  Needless to say “hot tub” doesn’t fit the necessary requirements for the “pool” area.

I’m just glad the decided against putting in the car pool.