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"That's the name of the game in metrology these days - finding a way of defining mass without just resorting embarrassingly, as we do now, to a lump of metal in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) outside Paris and saying "that's a kilogram". After all, periodic inspections of the lump have shown it's been changing its mass slowly over time. As laser physicist Bill Phillips from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) told delegates during one question-and-answer session on Monday, "It's a scandal that we've got this kilogram hanging around that's changing its mass"."
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"Dear VP of IS,
Let me get this straight. Did you really just send out an email to the entire University community with a 17KB Word Document attachment that contained 518 characters of information? Really?"
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I agree with the sentiments of the "Dear VP of IS" post, but these days a mere 17 kB is small potatoes. The most egregious attachment that has ever been inflicted on me was an 11.8 MB Christmas card/thank you note from the editor's assistant at one of the leading journals in my field, sent during the week that many (perhaps most) of the recipients were at a major conference and therefore had to wait for this hairball to download via the conference wireless network (where other people downloading the same message were competing for scarce bandwidth) in order to read e-mail that day.
Memos, letters, seminar announcements, and the like should always be plain text. Save the bandwidth for stuff that really needs the formatting. As a bonus, I'm much more likely to read it if it doesn't involve opening Word. I'm also more likely to pay attention if I'm not annoyed by having to wait several minutes for the message to trickle in over my home network (the hamsters are much slower off campus).
Ah, so Chad is another satisfied reader of College Misery!
Our college sends out a huge pdf flier that you sometimes have to view to discern the subject, not to mention the date and time, of some event. God help folks trying to look at it on a Blackberry screen.
My remark may be just too clever by half as "in front of our noses" smugness, but: since we can tell that "the official kilogram" has a changing "mass", that implies there is a better way to measure/define mass to apply to that official standard. This is partly snark since e.g. ways to compare changes aren't the same as ways to define the quantity itself, etc., but it's "one of those WTF moments" ;-)