Happy New Year!

שנה טובה!

Career Matchmaker meme

Meme from several people.

1. Go to http://www.careercruising.com/.
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post the top ten results

I got this:

1. Computer Engineer
2. Pilot
3. Helicopter Pilot
4. Computer Support Person
5. Mathematician
6. Power Plant Operator
7. Air Traffic Controller
8. Cartographer
9. Computer Network Specialist
10. Biomedical Engineer

"Database Developer" was #22, "Computer Programmer" was #28.

Now, can you play Tetris that fast?

Via an entry in Larry Osterman's blog:

The magic happens about 3 minutes into the video, when the game speed kicks up from Unbelievable to Utterly Insane.

And then, once the player's beat Utterly Insane mode, the blocks become invisible. And the player STILL manages to beat the game.

Wow.

One if by land, two if by sea

The FoxTrot page-a-day calendar has Jason/Quincy handing a box of glowsticks to Peter and saying:

Use these glowsticks if you see British troops approaching.

One if by land, two if by sea. [next frame] Three if by air. Four if by land and sea. Five if by air and sea. Six if by land and air. Seven if by land, sea and air. Eight if by underground tunnel. Nine if by teleporter. Ten if by other.

For some reason, I think it would have been more geeky if he had continued like this:

Three if by land and sea. Four if by air. Five if by land and air. Six if by air and sea. Seven if by land, sea and air.

That would have been equivalent to bit 0 = land, bit 1 = sea, bit 2 = air.

Four-dimensional barcodes

I've heard of one-dimensional and two-dimensional barcodes, but hadn't yet heard about four-dimensional ones.

This heise.de article (in German) talks about it, and has a clickable example.

The four dimensions are horizontal; vertical; colour; and time.

By adding colour and time, you can encode more information in a barcode than in a two-dimensional one such as DataMatrix, while still being able to decode them with, say, a mobile phone (as long as it has a camera that can capture not only still images but also short videos).

ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ, EESTI, FRANÇAIS: Languages of McDonald's

On the plastic bag around the Hello Kitty toy Amy got at McDonald's today, there was the obligatory warning (about plastic bags being dangerous on one side; about the contents not being suitable for children under three on the other), in several languages.

I wonder how they decided on the order. For the most part, it looks as if they took the languages in alphabetical order, but there are a couple of spots where I can't figure out why the languages do in that order.

The order is: ENGLISH, AZƏRICƏ, БЪЛГАРСКИ, CASTELLANO, CATALÀ, ČESKY, DANSK, DEUTSCH, ქართული, ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ, EESTI, FRANÇAIS, HRVATSKI, עברית, ÍSLENSKA, ITALIANO, LATVIEŠU, LIETUVA, MAGYAR, MALTI, МАКЕДОНСКИ, عربي, NEDERLANDS, NORSK, POLSKI, PORTUGUÊS, ROMÂNĂ, РУССКИЙ, SLOVENSKO, SLOVENIJA, SRPSKI, SUOMI, SVENSKA, TÜRKÇE, Українська.

I've no idea why Georgian is between German and Greek; neither its… hang on, perhaps it's because of the order "German, Georgian, Greek" by English name? But that doesn't make that much sense, since "Geo" comes before "Ger". Maybe they thought the ქ looked like a "d"? Also, "Ell" come after "Ees", so perhaps they treated ΕΛΛ as EAA?

I'm not sure why Hebrew is after Croatian, either, since neither "Ivrit" nor "Hebrew" comes after "Hrvatski". The language codes for Hebrew are "iw"/"he" (IIRC); the first would come after "is" and "it", while the second would come before "hr".

Then there's "Mal" sorting before "Mak"; Arabic in a completely(?) random place; Ukrainian in mixed case rather than all-caps; and a country name ("Slovenija") instead of a language name (and alphabetised wrongly since "Sloveni-" < "Slovens-"). Though perhaps the short form for Slovene would be "slovensko", too? Wikipedia says that Slovak is "slovenčina, slovenský jazyk" while Slovene is "slovenski jezik or slovenščina".

I'm also curious why the Georgian was entirely in "capitals" (the style where all letters are the same height and go from baseline to the top, with no descenders). Perhaps because they only had one font, and wanted the capital style for the language name and the "WARNING" and couldn't revert to another style for the message itself?

And finally, I'm a bit intrigued that there was Maltese on the bag; I don't think I've seen Maltese before on that sort of thing, even when the lists contained (as here) more than two dozen languages. And I (nearly) immediately wanted to change my journal title to "Biex tevita l-periklu ta' soffokazzjoni, żomm dan il-LiveJournal fejn ma jintlaħaqx mit-trabi u mit-tfal", but that was too long for the box.