Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Timeline of hazardous made-in-China products, 2007

Xeni Jardin: Who-Sucks.com has compiled a master timeline of incidents involving dangerous (sometimes lethal) "made in China" products banned or recalled by the US Consumer Products Safety Commission in 2007.

It's a big list. Well-known killers like Thomas the Tank Engine of Death and Antifreeze Toothpaste are in here, but so are less-known gems like "razor blades for kids," "lead bracelets," "toxic jackets," and "dangerously crappy hammocks."

Link (thanks, Fred Hall)

Reader comment: Dan says,

This reminded me of the great old SNL skit with Dan Akroyd portraying a purveyor of such "exciting" toys:

"Okay, Miss, I wanna correct you, alright. The full name of this product, as it appears in stores all over the county, is Johnny Switchblade: Adventure Punk. I mean, nothing goes wrong.. little girls buy 'em, you know, they play games, they make up stories, nobody gets hurt. I mean, so Barbie takes a knife once in a while, or Ken gets cut. You know, there's no harm in that. I mean, as far as I can see, you know?"

Link

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Wellcome Trust releases 2000 years of medical images under Creative Commons

Cory Doctorow: Ian sez, "The Wellcome Trust, one of the UK's largest medical charities, has released its image collection under Creative Commons licenses, with a new web site to search through it. I'm not sure how many thousand images there are, but for science teachers and anyone doing research into the history of medicine and biosciences, this will be a huge bonus." Link (Thanks, Ian!)

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NASA scientist: ban coal plants now!

Cory Doctorow: Alex from WorldChanging sez, "We just published a new letter from NASA's Jim Hansen, in which he essentially says the world can't afford to burn coal any more, and we should have a moratorium on coal-burning (except perhaps in a new generation of power plants with carbon capture and sequestration technologies)."
The resulting imperative is an immediate moratorium on additional coal-fired power plants without CCS. A surge in global coal use in the last few years has converted a potential slowdown of CO2 emissions into a more rapid increase. But the main reason for the proposed moratorium is that a CO2 molecule from coal, in effect, is more damaging than a CO2 molecule from oil. CO2 in readily available oil almost surely will end up in the atmosphere, it is only a question of when, and when does not matter much, given its long lifetime. CO2 in coal does not need to be released to the atmosphere, but if it is, it cannot be recovered and will make disastrous climate change a near certainty.
Link (Thanks, Alex!) (Image ganked from Jay Dugger's Flickr photostream: Unknown Coal Plant Near Saint Louis, Missouri)

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Mileage Runners hack air travel for maximum miles

Cory Doctorow: Wired News has a great story today about "Mileage Runners" who tweak the airline reservation system to plot insane (and insanely cheap), multi-hop air trips that accumulate bazillions of air miles. A hacker friend of mine recently came out to me as a mileage runner, and described a system he'd worked out for gaming the reservations computers to get $400, round the world business-class fares.

Mileage Running isn't good for the planet, but it makes a certain perverse sense as a response to the airlines' incomprehensible pricing schemes, capricious upgrades policy, and emphasis on mileage. It's probably not a coincidence that Southwest Airlines, who pioneered simple, transparent pricing schemes, is more profitable than all the other US airlines put together.

In my last job, I flew to 31 countries in three years, fighting copyright treaties and DRM standards, and made top-tier on three different airlines. I didn't get much sport out of it, but I can now locate a working electrical outlet in the meanest airport.

"I personally find airlines and airplanes to be really neat," explains Joshua Solomin, a 28-year-old mileage runner who works as a software manager in San Francisco. Solomin began running in 2006 after a year of business travel vaulted him into the Premier tier of United's Mileage Plus program, giving him his first taste of the first-class upgrades and other coveted perks that come with elite-level frequent flyer membership. "Mileage runs are a way to maintain that status," he says.

Of Solomin's five runs to date, one of the more impressive was a trip from San Francisco to Tampa via Los Angeles, San Diego and Washington, then back with connections in D.C., Seattle and Portland. Thanks to his Premier status, he earned double miles for the trip, more 16,000 of them, for just $232.

On Sunday, he completed his first international run: a $1,450 round trip between San Francisco and Singapore with stops in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Sure, he had only five hours in the middle of the night to explore Singapore, but with United's July triple mileage bonus he earned a whopping 78,000 miles. And he flew business class the entire way.

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Average box office per movie: total chaos

Cory Doctorow: This chart, showing the per film/per year box office for Hollywood movies from 2000-2006, is the biggest laugh I've had all day. We always hear about how entertainment execs earn their giant salaries by being incredibly shrewd selectors and marketers of motion pictures, but this chart shows that you could get the same result by throwing dice. Link (via Wonderland)

Update: Adam found this great chart, showing box office gross adjusted for inflation -- the field peaked in 1939, with Gone the With the Wind in top place, with an adjusted gross of $450.5 million. The only movie from later than 1990 in the top ten is Titanic.

Update 2: Adam sez, "The figure listed for Gone with the Wind is adjusted to 1977 dollars...when adjusted to 2007, it's the much more impressive $1,329,453,600."

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