Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Hey, madbodger -- I'd love to get your reactions to this. :-)

"If the Bush Administration can't design an in-house communications system in which it is trivially obvious who leaked a memo from one guy to four guys to USA Today, what the hell makes anyone think they can design a security system to counter global terrorism?" -- holzman 2003-10-22

Was woken a little too early by the doorbell (didn't get downstairs quickly enough to find out who it was, but admittedly didn't try very hard). The sky is bright and fluffy, there's a fraction of an inch of snow on the rooftops, and I'm trying to convince myself I feel awake enough to deal with the world. I figure I'll start gradually, with email.

Of course, some email is pretty easy to decide how to deal with:

Dear PayPal.com Member,

We here at PayPal.com are pleased to announce that we have a special New Year offer for you! If you currently have an account with PayPal then you will be eligible to receive a terrific prize from PayPal.com for the New Year. For a limited time only PayPal is offering to add 10 percent of the total balance in your PayPal account to your account and all you have to do is register yourself within the next five business days with our application (see attachment)!

If at this time you do not have a PayPal account of your own you can also register yourself with our secure application and get this great New Year bonus! [...]

That's not all! If you resend this letter (with its attachment) to all of your friends you may be eligible to receive another New Year bonus [...]

Uh ... yeah. Sure. First, you want me to open and execute a program sent as an attachment. Second, you don't even know for sure whether I have a PayPal account. Third, you want me to spread this for you. (Fourth, for folks who do have a PayPal account and are thus familiar with actual mail from PayPal, the authentic messages greet users by name, not with, "Dear PayPal.com Member".) Gee, I don't even have to check the headers to see where it really came from, do I? The only important detail is that it certainly didn't come from PayPal.

It's a lot better than the last few of these I've seen (and gotten dozens of copies of each of), appealing to greed this time. The others appeal to fear-of-missing-deadlines instead, claiming that your account is about to expire if not renewed, or that additional verification is needed, or some such. But I wonder whether the second and third paragraphs will tip off more people than they lure in.

Sadly, somebody clueless or careless is going to make it worth this scammer's while. Feh.

I'm annoyed. I'm frustrated. I've got a Problem. But this is not a "the world is so unfair to me" complaint. This is my own mess, from my own carelessness, so I'm complaining about me. But I still feel a need to blow off steam, and it's my own journal, so...

I got some money for the last few gigs, and some money from my mom to deal with car stuff, and I deposited it in one of my two credit unions. Then I went to write checks and discovered that:

1. the pad of checks I was using stopped at xx80 instead of on a multiple of 25, which I'd forgotten because I hadn't used that account for a while,
2. the shelf with a box of checks on it only had checks for the other credit union, not this one (I'm still convinced that replacement checks are somewhere in the house, but I can't figure out where else I would've put them),
3. that's the account I don't have an ATM card for,
4. I have a couple of overdue bills that Really Must Get Paid Soon, and I have to pay MVA for car registration.

*grumble*

</whine>

I've been hearing weather reports on the radio (WTOP), and hearing them give overnight temperature like "10 above". Someone else complained that "above" is a reminder that we're so close to "below". My problem with it is different. And probably a bit idiosyncratic, so it doesn't count as a complaint against the radio station (but I'll still count it as a complaint against this particular scale -- PBBBBBT!).

I hear "ten above", and my first thought is not, "above zero"; it's "above freezing". Similarly for "five below" -- I think "below freezing". And that's a Hell of a lot warmer that what these people are actually saying. Or what I'm feeling when I hear it. So I've got this moment of cognitive dissonance (which is much more pleasant when it's about buttered-popcorn-flavoured jelly beans than when it's about interpreting a weather report) as I sort it out in my head and remind myself that they mean relative-to-zero, not relative-to-freezing.

Besides, from a human-comfort standpoint, above or below freezing is more significant than above or below "already cold as Hell".

I don't have this problem with "ten" (assumed positive), or "negative ten" (clearly zero-relative). And I get the impression most of the DC area doesn't have my problem with "above" and "below" by themselves.

Obviously, the Celsius scale is one way around this cognitive dissonance: "zero" and "freezing" are the same number. And my preferred scale, Kelvin, fixes this by not having any temperatures below zero, ever. So my brain-glitch is specific to the Fahrenheit scale.

Fahrenheit is ever so much more familiar to me, being the scale I grew up with, the only temperature scale I knew existed until the abortive attempt to gradually nudge the US to the metric system, and still the scale I see on every bank time-and-temperature sign or television broadcast and hear on every radio report. It's on nearly every weather web site (many allow a choice of F, C, or both; I've found none that display K for me *pout*). Many bank signs display both C and F, but some only display F -- I don't remember seeing any in Maryland that display Centigrade only. So despite my possibly-annoying habit of saying the temperature in Kelvins, I know at a gut level what 15 F, 20 F, 32 F, 40 F, 55 F, 68 F, 75 F, 80 F, 90 F, and 110 F all feel like, what they mean in terms of clothing choices and health issues and equipment failure, and what they imply for oncoming weather. (I also know immediately what 263 K, 273 K, 280 K, and 300 K mean, but have to think about other temperatures in Kelvins. I make a show of using Kelvins partly to make other people more familiar with the concept, partly as a bit of personal silliness, and mostly in the hope that if I use it enough, it'll eventually be as familiar to me as Fahrenheit. Since I like Kelvin so much better, it'd be nice to be able to use it on a "don't have to think about it" level the way I've been able to use Fahrenheit, which I don't like anywhere near as much, most of my life.)

So there's one of my complaints about the Fahrenheit scale, or rather about the way people say temperatures in it. My mind keeps going to the wrong reference point for "above" and "below".