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Saddened today, and feeling sorry for our embattled neighbours in the U.S.…
Nine-year-old Christina Taylor Greene is one of the victims of this weekend’s deadly rampage in Tucson, Arizona. She was born on 11 September 2001. She had gone to the Giffords event to learn more about the political process, her family members say. She loved baseball, horseback riding and swimming…
(on products… almost everywhere)
We each encounter them almost continually—so much so that I would suggest we have become numbed by them. These ugly, intrusive little zebra-contrast patches have been a part of buying and selling since the first bar-coded item, a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, was scanned in 1974… we’ve been hearing the ubiquitous bleep bleep ever since.
Bar codes were originally invented in 1952 by Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland in Philadelphia, USA, but it wasn’t until 1973 that Woodland created an entire bar-code system, the Universal Product Code (UPC), to help stores track inventory and make check-outs faster. The UPC barcode was the first bar code symbology widely adopted by the grocery industry, followed by the EAN code format (similar to UPC, used internationally) in 1976.
The black bars represent a sequence of numbers. The five digits on the left represent the product’s manufacturer, with the five digits on the right representing the specific product. Bar codes are configured the way they are to permit a laser scanner to read the varying widths of lines to determine the digits listed underneath. The information is transmitted to a store computer which matches the numbers to a product price—in the bleep of a second.
Images above: at top, the UPC-A, the universal product code seen on almost all retail products in the USA and Canada; below, a selection of creative bar code iterations from Japan… go figure.
(as seen in Good)
In the past ten years, the human population of the earth has grown by a billion—to a current total of 7 billion (it was a mere 2.7 billion when I was born). For the first time in the history of our planet, more of us now live in cities than outside of urban areas. Cellphone subscriptions have multiplied almost ten-fold, while internet users worldwide have multiplied more than five times during the same period (now 1.96 billion have online access).
In the meantime, the worldwide temperature has risen, 60% more fauna species are considered endangered… and 15-times as many people were killed by natural disasters in 2010 than a decade ago. Don’t say you didn’t know…
Above: a handsome chart (if somewhat skewed to U.S. statistics) by Stephanie Fox, here (or click on the image above for an enlarged view).
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You’ve no idea how hard I’ve looked for a gift to bring You. Nothing seemed right. What’s the point of bringing gold to the Gold Mine, or water to the Ocean. Everything I came up with was like taking spices to the Orient. It’s no good giving my heart and soul because you already have these. So—I’ve brought you a mirror. Look at yourself and remember me…
—Rumi
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I can’t help but agree…
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Thanks to climber friend Toni Wilson for the fitting quotable…
Thanks… but no thanks.
Quite the dinner party we participated in last night, lasting well into today. Good times were clearly had by all present—thinking back (with the benefit of sober hindsight), it now seems highly likely that it may indeed have been the muktuk and frozen Brennivín (aka “black death”) gleefully served in the wee hours of the new year that did the most damage…
Let’s just say it’s been a day of mostly abstinence… Na zdarovye!
