Thursday, October 10, 2013

Well, Duh

1.  Yahoo, I hate what you've done to my email.  It's now slow and clunky.  I can't have more than one email open at a time and flip back and forth between them any more.  I can't adjust the font size of what I'm writing.  And Every Single Time I open my email it asks me to choose a theme.  I don't want a theme.  But I finally caved, and picked a theme, just to make you happy.  And you can't remember it.  Every time I open my email it is PURPLE and it asks me to pick a theme.  I did not pick PURPLE.

Please get your act together.


2.  "Green" ≠ Scientifically Sound.  Mr. Grasshopper is an architect.  He gets an architecture magazine in the mail every month.  Normally I avoid reading it as there's nothing in it any sane human would want for a home.  (IOW, it's over the top pretentious and/or just plain weird.)  But I had three minutes to kill while my gourmet dinner (Cup O'Noodles!) reconstituted last night, so I flipped through the latest issue.

You know how packaged food has a nutrition label with the ingredients printed on it?  Yah.  Well the new green thing is to require building products to have a Health Product Declaration, so you know what's in your linoleum (flax oil), your glass (silica/sand), or your fancy-shmancy granite counter-top (granite!)

So this is what the scientific geniuses at the architecture magazine came up with, to explain the concept to their readers:

Health Product Declarations recognize that all building products are made of of basic ingredients which may include chemicals, elements, metals, gases, or liquids. etc.

Good heavens, lets break this down a little.

You're going to build a house.  The things you build it out of have ingredients which may include the listed items, or may not.

*  Chemicals - What is a chemical, anyway?  They seem to terrify the green folk, so they must be something nasty and scary.  Are you ready?  A chemical is a substance with a specific molecular composition.  In other words, a chemical is something made of matter.  So unless you're going to build your house out of pure energy or abstract concepts (and if you'd seen some of these architecture magazines you may wonder...) you're going to be using chemicals.

*  Elements - an element is the simplest form of matter that can't be broken down into anything else.  Elements are the ingredients of the ingredients.  Oxygen.  Calcium.  Nitrogen.  Carbon.  By all means, we must warn the folk that their building materials may be made of elements.

*  Metals - you know, those nails and screws that hold things together?

*  Gases or liquids - what?  What kind of insanity is this?  You mean, there might be liquids in my paint?  

And what the heck - gases or liquids, but no solids?  Maybe that's what they meant by "etc."


Wyatt, who is studying chemistry this year, wants to know if they'll be warning the public about the dangers of Dihiydrogen Monoxide (DHMO). ;D

It's a crazy world.

4 comments:

melanie said...

Hee hee ~ I thought surely they'd be talking about carbon footprint. Or maybe that's old news by now? :p Something for your boys to research if they didn't know already... all that methane gas/carbon/idk {ie, cow's belching etc} helps to grow tall corn!

What I really want to tell you is that little Asher had his pre-op yesterday for next Friday's implant. Grandma didn't know if they are doing one ear or both. But she did say the little guy was SO happy to have learned the sign for 'milk' lately.

Deanna said...

I don't know what is going on with yahoo mail but it feels like we've gone back 15 years. Ugh!

Felicity said...

Yahoo..... it's driving me crazy too. I can't find how to sort my mails by sender, and I chose a background and it seemed to have distorted my screen and I can't seem to change it back!

I had a good laugh at the bit about the 'green buildings'!

dlefler said...

Hey, di-hydrogen monoxide is a real killer! The number one killer of children under the age of 5 - it should be banned! :)

Did you hear about the two chemists who walked into a bar? The first one asked for H20. The second guy said, "I'll have H20, too." He didn't realize what he had ordered until he had sucked it down and was writhing on the floor (H2O2)! :P