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.