Careful How You Say That

I appreciate the effort to make legalese comprehensible to non-lawyers, but sometimes colloquial language can go too far.

Yes, risks pretty much suck after events prove them real, but in this case more legalese would have been helpful.

On the other hand, maybe the City attorney should just get a better proofreader.

Prime Day Savings

I didn't know I needed a combined corkscrew and bottle opener until I saw it on Amazon's website during Prime Day. The same can be said of a stainless steel chips-and-dip bowl, a pet-hair cordless vacuum, and three--count 'em, three, no less--accordion files to file all the papers that I've been meaning to scan electronically.

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My bicycle cover has some holes in it, so I'll take one of those. Of course, one can use another pair of inexpensive earbuds.

They're always getting lost or broken. Sure, I don't "need" any of this stuff, but look at all the money I've saved.

Just Science Fiction

One of the unanswered mysteries in 2001: A Space Odyssey: Why did the HAL 9000 supercomputer malfunction and murder nearly the entire crew on the trip to Jupiter?

In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two it was explained that

HAL's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders.....required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security.

HAL's architecture was based on openness and transparency, but government higher-ups ordered HAL to conceal important information from the crew. HAL went through the computer equivalent of a psychotic break.

Forbes [bold added]:

In the case of Obamacare, the web site was made needlessly complex just in order to avoid this sort of transparency [as programmed into Medicare Part D]. There was probably fear in the White House that if consumers browsed plans and saw the list cost (without first knowing how much the government would subsidize their plan) many people would not return.

At the end of 2001 sole survivor David Bowman performs a "lobotomy" on HAL to save the ship. Bowman finishes the mission by operating everything manually. Human beings having such resourcefulness, however, is probably just science fiction. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Simple Things Right

I’m as prone to misspellings and grammatical mistakes as everyone else, but when you’re in big media and live by the word, you need to get the spelling right, especially for the leads (or “ledes,” a different word meaning nearly the same thing, and here I go getting distracted again) on the home page.

In another arena I remember when a column of numbers didn’t add up on a set of published financial statements. A partner from a Big-Four CPA firm sure was embarrassed when that was pointed out to him by a shareholder. Every mind in that room had a thought that began, if they can’t get that simple thing right….

Dear Chronicle: spell-check didn't know you meant "fiancé".

Huffpo - showing "hypocrisy" by accusing GWB of being an English dunce?

Putty in Their Hands

There is an apocryphal tale in which psychologists place a dummy button on a wall, and everyone who passes by feels compelled to push it. The contemporary version—at least for males--is the Internet link with a description such as social networking site for models (hat tip: Dan Schawbel).

I only resisted for a few seconds, then clicked to a story about the site. Because I like to research these matters thoroughly, I went to the actual site itself, modelfeed.com. Before I knew it, 15 minutes were gone. They sure know how to push my buttons.