Arlen Ward dot com

I saw an interview with Cookie Monster from NPR on one of their blog sites. Other than insight into Cookie’s sordid tales of compulsive eating and the trials of stardom (no, not really), I was interested in the reference to the modified questionaire the interviewer used. It turns out to be the “Proust Questionnaire”, now often used as a personality questionnaire. So I thought I would run though it here just for fun.

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As a professed data presentation nerd, I have always liked the postings over at Strange Maps.

Recently there was a post with a map of the United States, shaded by leading church body in each county.. This one caught my eye, just with the clustered groups of various denominations. No conclusion, I just thought it was interesting.

Every once in a while, an e-mail comes through that reminds me that I work in a strange place.

_________________________________________________________________________________
From: LAB MANAGER
Sent: Yesterday
To: EVERYONE THAT WORKS WITH TISSUE

Subject: Missing Liver

If anyone is missing a liver, it’s in the RF Ablation lab with Tony’s name on it.

As my google homepage was kind enough to point out, the lego brick turns 50 today.

The 50 year anniversary is for the little plastic brick, not the company. The company itself was founded 76 years ago as a wooden toy company.

The LEGO history began in 1932 in Denmark, when Ole Kirk Christansen founded a small factory for wooden toys in the unknown town of Billund in the south of the country. To find a name for his company he organized a competition among his employees. As fate would have it however, he himself came up with the best name: LEGO – a fusion of the Danish words “LEg” and “GOdt” (“play well”).

LEGO has re-released one of their original sets, the Town Plan, in honor of the occasion.

One thing that has really amazed me about LEGO bricks (besides the whole best-toy-ever angle) is the level of control they have on the tolerances for each brick. They are made from ABS plastic, which has a shrinkage of around five thousandths of a millimeter for every millimeter of dimension of the part. According to LEGO, thier tolerance is one thousanth of a millimeter. Too small and the parts won’t come apart, too big and they won’t stick together. To get that across billions of bricks, and across 50 years of technology changes for tooling, and across all the hurdles of mold design and lifespan, that is pretty impressive.

For the last few years, The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has put up a website to track Santa’s progress overnight.

It looks like they teamed up with Google Earth for a few extra goodies this year.

So for your entertainment on Christmas Eve, I give you:

NORAD’s Santa Tracking Website

At this point, spending as little time as possible at the stores is my goal. I am going to hang out at home and enjoy the holidays.

Apparently some people have other ideas.

With 24 hour stores and food and everything all on one store, this really was bound to happen at some point.

Spending 72 hours in a Walmart sounds like one of Dante’s levels of hell.

Random thought for the day:

Carl’s Jr. needs to plan for success. A few years ago they came out with a new hamburger, called the Six Dollar Burger. The premise was that this burger was just like the ones you get at the sit-down (non-fast food) type restaurants, where they charged you six dollars for it. So you would get a six dollar burger for a lot less. When they launched it, I think it was around $3 dollars for the sandwich and like $4.50 to $5 for the combo.

Here’s where I don’t think they were thinking ahead. Fast forward a few years. Inflation starts to take an effect, and the prices rise. When I was at Carl’s Jr. a few days ago, I noticed that most of the combos with Six Dollar Burgers (now there are quite a few of them) are upwards of $7. The sandwiches alone are $5. At which point the Six Dollar Burger for $5+ doesnt seem like the most amazing deal ever.

What are they going to do when the Six Dollar Burger costs more than $6? Change the name? Like I said before, I don’t think they were planning for success. Hell, it was this kind of not thinking things through that gave us the Y2K issues.

But hey, it is fast food. And this was the same marketing department that used Hugh Hefner, Paris Hilton (link may be NSFW), and the infamous Flat Buns commercials to sell their product.