Monday Links from the Bench: Vol. VII

[NickFitz]

Another Monday, another poke around some of the more recondite corners of the web:

• 57 Varieties, Revealed - I'd always wondered what Heinz's 57 varieties were; this scan of an old poster reveals all. "Heinz Oven-Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce without Meat - Vegetarian" are at number three
  
  
  
• Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics - old but good and, as far as I am able to determine, very informative about the physics.
  
  
  
• Find My iPhone works, and it is awesome - this chap's iPhone went astray in a seedy Chicago bar. Using Apple's Find My iPhone service and a 3G modem/laptop combo, he tracked it down: "I refreshed the iPhone location and the circle moved, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet across. I waited a minute and refreshed again. The small circle had shifted southward down Washtenaw…"
  
  
  
• Mandelbrot Fractal Set Trip To e214 HD - video (hosted on Vimeo) of a zoom into the Mandelbrot Set to a magnification of 10 to the power of 214 (e.214): "a magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This zoom smashes all of them all away. If you were "actually" traveling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light." Full screen, dim lights, headphones on, and go
  
  
  
• How to Wield a Knife - a butcher speaks: "No matter how much care you take, if you spend lots of time cutting meat you will cut yourself severely at some time or another."
  
  
  
• This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post - wonderfully crafted meta-post: "This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous…" And so on for ten paragraphs.
  
  
  
• Ten IT Concepts That Non-IT People Don’t Get - "…don’t even get me started on the fact that folders like “My Documents” appear in TWO locations in the folder tree – the physical one that users can’t find or recognise, and the virtual one which isn’t supported by all applications."
  
  
  
• The Museum of Unworkable Devices - all your perpetual-motion-debunking needs catered for
  
  
  
• Locations of Ancient Woolworths Stores follow Precise Geometrical Pattern - Ben Goldacre (of Bad Science fame) reprints an email announcing startling evidence that Woolworths stores may have been precisely positioned, possibly with the help of an alien civilisation: "…I thought that if we analysed the sites we could learn more about what life was like in 2008 and how these people went about buying cheap kitchen accessories and discount CDs."
  
  
  
• PPT97: PowerPoint Centimeters Different from Actual Centimeters - "To improve its usability, PowerPoint slightly misdefines the size of a centimetre…" Of course it does. (They also misspell "centimeter" there.) The usual clumsy workarounds are provided
  
  

Happy invoicing

[AtW]

[thunderlizard]

57 Varieties, Revealed - I'd always wondered what Heinz's 57 varieties were; this scan of an old poster reveals all. "Heinz Oven-Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce without Meat - Vegetarian" are at number three

...though the 57 was a retrospective construct:
http://www.heinz.com/our-company/press-room/trivia.aspx

More sinister is that since Heinz acquired HP from Danone, there's an effective monopoly on brown sauce comprising HP, Daddies and Heinz Brown Sauce.

[NickFitz]

...though the 57 was a retrospective construct:
http://www.heinz.com/our-company/press-room/trivia.aspx

Note also that they cheated a bit on the poster to get the magic number 57: why else are such items as "Heinz Pepper Sauce - Red or Green", "Heinz Prepared Mustard - Brown or Yellow", or "Heinz Gherkins - Sweet or Sour" not counted as separate products?