Category: General

General rambling, ranting, raving etc.

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Why we need better math and science education for everyone

Listen to this excerpt from a customer service call to Verizon: ” .002 dollars = .002 cents” at VideoSift.com. It saddens me that these Verizon people don’t understand what I feel everyone should have learned before graduating 6th grade.

I’m amazed at how patient this customer is, by the time of this recording he had already been talking to them for quite a while, I would be going ballistic. Verizon and it’s representatives are making an extremely basic error, they change the units of measurement in a calculation without applying the conversion factor. The customer George Vaccaro has a blog of the whole experience here.

According to the California State Board of Education these concepts are part of the 3rd grade curriculum. I suspect that some of those Verizon people have college degrees. If they do, they should return the degrees and re-enroll in elementary school.

Thanks to Harold on the PICList for pointing me to this story.

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Baby gender prediction scam

Rebecca at the Memoirs of a Skepchick blog posted this great entry So you want to be a con artist!.

It refers to a new internet scam of baby gender prediction. Rebecca points out the clever first FAQ but I also noticed a very clever third question and answer.

“Question: How does the 100 % Money-Back-Guaranty work?
Answer: Should our results be not conform to the actual gender of your child, you will only need to send us the original birth certificate and the invoice and you will receive your money back immediately.”

They require “the original birth certificate” to get your refund. Assuming they are good to their word and don’t want a copy, then they can greatly enhance how much they keep. Normally the parents get one copy of the birth certificate when the child is born. Depending on where you live, getting an extra official birth certificate can cost more than the refund from the con artists. Even if you can get a cheap birth certificate where you live, it is likely more time consuming than the refund is worth. So, probably very few victims ever get their money back, letting the scammer’s keep closer to 100% of what they take in. Boy, con artists are so clever, it is really too bad that this kind of activity is legal in the U.S.A.

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A great laugh

Had a great laugh last night while catching up on blog reading. Rebecca of the Memoirs of a Skepchick blog started a little contest in response to A Correspondence she received. She challenges everyone to say what she has hidden in a lunch box in her apartment. The ensuing comments are entertaining but what made me nearly fall over laughing was a comment by Toolbox in Rebecca’s post So, what IS in my lunch box?.

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Free eBooks and audio books

Recently a blog was advertised on one of the technical mail lists that I read. The blog, Free Technical Books on the Net, pointed me to a great site XP Math – Math Games, Math eBooks, Math Careers. To try it out I downloaded “Hacking for Dummies” and to my surprise it is a complete PDF of the 2004 edition that is even printable.

Another new source of eBooks is Google Book Search use the “Full view books” option and then you can view or download PDF versions of the scanned book.

These new sources are nice but my favorite is still Project Gutenberg with 20,000 free books in the catalog. This includes many of the greatest books of all time.

There are also some free audio books at PG but my favorite free audio books site is LibriVox. While I’m on the subject of free public domain content I should mention The Internet Archive. It started out simply archiving web sites (for a good laugh check out these old site designs I was involved with). Currently they have 136,386 texts (includes a mirror of Project Gutenberg), 48,185 movies, 35,816 recoded live music concerts and, 108,411 other audio recordings.

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Clearwater Florida becomes the City of Scientology

Clearwater Florida was a wonderful city to visit back when my parents first moved to the gulf coast about 20 years ago. Sadly the city has now been almost completely taken over by the church of scientology. It started slowly but judging from this video, it seems they have finally taken over the city government enough now so that the police department is in their pockets. 😦

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New Hosting

I have not been posting for a couple months because I’ve been changing hosting providers. Switching to GoDaddy from AK Web Hosting gives me better up time, more space, more bandwidth, more features and better support all for half the price. Even though I still have over one year left of pre-paid hosting with AK Web Hosting their up time and support has been so bad the past year I’ve given up on them.

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Blog Alerts fixed

The Blog Alerts box at the bottom of the right side menu has been fixed. The Committee to Protect Bloggers had to change their URL’s so, if you need to fix your own site go to the “Add BlogAlert to Your Site” page to get the corrected URL’s.