ndmckinney|net

I was reading the back of my bag of edamame this morning when I noticed something very peculiar. Edamame, for those who don’t know, is simply blanched soybeans. At the bottom of the ingredients list (Ingredients: Soybeans) was an allergy disclaimer. This is what it said: WARNING: PRODUCT MAY CONTAIN SOY INGREDIENTS.

You can’t be serious, Whole Foods. Can you?

A classmate of mine sent me a link to this site during class today. It was a struggle to keep from laughing out loud.

Oddly enough, many of my classmates were supporting the same ideas as this firm, I suspect without ever having seen the site. Hmm…

The website This is Broken seems to suffer from one flaw: it, too, is broken.
The site is dedicated to those things that “just don’t seem right” and that are poorly designed. The problem is that most of the submissions on the website are not terribly broken; rather, the submissions are broken because somebody is nit-picky.

Take, for example, the post regarding a Belkin optical mouse. The site claims the packaging is “broken” because it contains a lead-contents warning label. This isn’t broken. This is mandated by statute, the same as anything else that contains lead.

Or, another example, where the buttons in an elevator were listed in a different order. This is not broken; it is an interface design decision.

The only thing broken at This is Broken is thisisbroken.com.

Why?

…especially in cryptography. Apparently, the sculpture Kryptos, which sits ominously in the center of the CIA complex, has a typo.

The Wikipedia article above gives a good summary of the sculpture. To summarize:

Kryptos consists of four sections of code. Three of these sections have been solved, but the fourth section has, to date, eluded the worlds greatest code breakers. However, given the revelation by the sculptor himself, there has been renewed energy by the Kryptos Group, anticipating that the fourth section may yet be solved.

Good luck, code breakers. I’m glad it’s you and not me.

On my walk home today, I passed by a restaurant I wanted to try out. I thought the building was neat, so I snapped a picture with my camera phone. When I got back home and looked at the photo, I noticed it looked like crap:

I’m not sure what I saw, but something caught my eye. I decided to play with the photo in Gimp. Here is the result:

Needless to say, I’m not too upset with it.

BBC NEWS | Health | Goths ‘more likely to self-harm’

Duh.