Safety Fork, the

I saw Juno with a few friends tonight; I liked it. After we had left the theater, it was pointed out that every character spoke a witty line at some point. I hadn’t noticed. I replied that those of us who appreciate good wit secretly believe that everyone is witty. Or at least, that’s true of me.

From Ars Technica:

Balancing national security with the public’s fundamental right to know what the government is doing in its name is a difficult challenge, but no challenge should necessitate abdication of essential checks and balances.

Ryan Paul (the author of the article) is wrong. Balancing national security with the public’s right to know what the government is doing is easy. There is no legitimate business of the republic that cannot be conducted in full view of the public. For example, if the FBI needs to use quiet, possibly questionable methods so as not to spook a suspect before he can be arrested, fine. But once he’s arrested, all the methods and all the reasons for their use must be published. It’s the only way we can ensure that positions of personal power are also positions of personal responsibility. If actions made in the people’s name can be kept secret at will, then “national security” is just a clever euphemism for job security.

I took my brother out for breakfast this morning. The parking lot is shaded, so when we got back to my car, we had to wait for the insides of the windows to defrost. After a few minutes, I wished aloud that the window would finish defrosting at eye level.

John replied, “You need to not be so high.”

I eat lunch at work each day, and sometimes that lunch includes french fries. I like to eat my french fries with ketchup. Normally, I get my ketchup from a pump dispenser. Sometimes, however, the pump dispenser is empty—or worse, the ketchup it dispenses is runny. (At first I thought they were watering the ketchup when they ran low, but then I found out the dispenser takes sealed bags of ketchup. Why is there such a quality variation between one sealed bag of ketchup and the next, presumably from the same supplier?) When one of these conditions is true, I grab a handful of ketchup packets instead.

I need a handful of ketchup packets to substitute for two or three pumps from the dispenser because the packets are so small. Obviously someone at Heinz, having decided that customers wanted a less-messy way to grab a handful of ketchup, had to decide at what volume to quantize it. But why is an individual ketchup so small? Ketchup is not so expensive that I (or anyone else of whom I can think) shepherd it by the milliliter. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever asked for or been given quantized ketchup by any measurement more precise than the aforementioned handful. I certainly have never eaten a meal for which I wanted more than zero ketchup, but fewer than three.

So is there a market I’m missing for small amounts of ketchup? A ketchup underground? I’m baffled because increasing the size of one packet by even fifty percent would reduce the number of packets by a third, which would lower packaging overhead for producers (but not the price; I’m paying for the ketchup, not the little plastic envelopes), and be less annoying for me since I’d be able to spend less time opening my food and more time enjoying it.

I mailed a package today. It was fun; I should mail things more often.

Their smallest box, eight inches on a side, was about twice as tall as I needed, so I took out the tiny knife I keep on my keychain, hacked the box in half, and taped it back together. I’ve done this a couple of times before, but I still get a nagging feeling that I’m about to be told off by the staff for chopping up the merchandise before I’ve paid for it. If I just gave up and walked, they’d be five or six dollars short—they can hardly expect someone else to buy half a cardboard box and a partly-used roll of tape.

But the guy at the counter complimented my ingenuity, once he figured out why I was trying to pay for a box he didn’t recognize as something they sell, and he gave me a break: since I was sending priority mail, I could apparently have used their tape for free.

Minneapolis Institute of Arts I’d traveled about a whole block of my drive home tonight when I pulled over to take this picture. This is the kind of shot I never got in college, when I hardly ever carried my camera because I couldn’t have afforded a replacement if I’d broken it—faulty logic.

I started playing Bioshock yesterday. The computer I keep mostly for games meets only the minimum requirements. There aren’t half as many new games I want to play as there were six years ago, so upgrading isn’t as much a value proposition as it used to be for me.

I was surprised to find a prominent (above the title) “Only on XBox 360 and Windows” logo on the game box. I sympathize with the decision to limit the target platform—it’s strongly favored by the technical and economic realities of commercial software—but I don’t understand bragging about it. We’ve made the same decision where I work, and while I believe it’s a sound business decision, it’s certainly not a feature. In fact, every time I make an engineering decision that will force users of the software I write to fulfill a precondition, I feel vaguely embarrassed.

I hope they’re getting kickbacks or something from Microsoft for badging their packaging, because it’s otherwise a waste of ink. Even the least intelligent, most impulsive consumer I can imagine isn’t going to change his mind and buy a game because he finds out it won’t run on a computer he doesn’t own.

A massive infestation of school-age children appeared in Eden Prairie last night, popping into existence on sidewalks and streetcorners. By the time I was on my way to work, a vast armada of yellow busses had already been deployed to vacuum up the kids and their bags of brand-new pencils and cartoon-theme binders and four-function calculators.

The City of Eden Prairie (so far as I can deduce) spends its entire treasury on three things: police cars, school busses, and roads. Perpetrators and pupils are consumed daily by patrol cars and school busses, respectively, although in numbers the latter far eclipse the former. All are carted off to city-owned facilities into which entry by the general public is prohibited. Some time later, laborers appear and begin to construct roads. Conservation of mass and the sheer scale on which these activities occur dictate that somewhere, an unappetizing process—like the fusion of those by which are made the proverbial laws and sausages—must be converting the collected persons directly into paving materials, No. 2 pencils and all.

This image brought to you by the society for putting me on top of other things.