xkcd’s Guide to the Metric System

xkcd today has a wonderful table of reference points in the units of the metric system. Having experienced the Americans living with me for a while, stumbling around in an environment which used the system showed me that something like that actually can be useful. And be it only for the sake of intercultural communication. After all (as obviously has to be pointed out) the USA is one of only three nations in the world which doesn’t use the metric system. And, all the humbug about how it is so much more complicated than the imperial system aside, about 5.7 Billion people use it every day without any problems. So it can’t be that complicated.

I don’t want to say: “come on, switch to metric now!”, because I like the idea of a nation clinging to a horribly outdated traditional system for no other reason than it’s history and their comfort with it (also I noticed that some Americans can get rather upset when confronted with the idea of converting), but at least this table might help understand the metric system a bit better. As is pointed out on the table, it is more important to make up new reference points for a new system than just convert it to the metrics one is used to.

No Brainstorm for you today, dear Pidgin community

A few days ago some of the Pidgin developers, after complaining about the lack of interaction with their users a few days earlier, announced there now was Brainstorm available, a way for users and the community to interact with each other and vote for the most important ideas to implement in the application. I actually didn’t pay too much attention until their blog told me the service was switched off again. Reasons were not given, only the link to the mailing list (which I don’t read very often) was given.

A few hours later we were told to “Disregard that last post…” as the service was switched on again, or at least we were supposed to be able to vote for something.

Another 58 minutes later there was a long post about how this kind of Feedback actually would hurt the community.

Basically I don’t have a clue what was going on here, but obviously something went a tad wrong. There seems to be a fight going on about it, but as I don’t read the mailing list I have no clue what the status now is. I mostly got interested in it because of the Monty Pythonesque way all those posts were cancelling each other out one after another. Which could mean that the developers have a healthy taste for the Pythons’ humor, or maybe not.

PKP Adventures

I think if I actually keep on travelling to other countries by train this little shout-out might become something more common in this still young and forming blog. And I actually like travelling by train in Poland. It beats bus, car and plane by far in terms of comfort and price.

But I had some, lets call them “experiences”,  with  employees of the Polish train company PKP the last few days. And I don’t even mean the one in Wroclaw who refused to believe that a station like Lodz Kaliska could exist for real [it, uhm,  is one of Poland’s most important stations in Poland’s second biggest city…]. But she was using a calculator as well to check if the numbers the computer gave her as the price to pay actually were correct. So I don’t really blame her.

I don’t mean the conductor who wanted to throw me off the train in the middle of nowhere because I had bought student tickets without a proper Polish student identity card. I think my very broken Polish rescued me here as she went to her superior to get me thrown off, and he/she told her off. Because as a citizen of the EU I am allowed to have reductions just as a Polish citizen would have them. Things like this actually are the thing which make me like the EU very much…

No, the weirdest, and the most mind-boggling of them, was the argument we had with the ticket vendors in Lodz Kaliszka. The train I wanted to take was a regional train which ended in Frankfurt an der Oder, just behind the Polish-German border. Which is actually pretty smart, because the station in Slubice, on the Polish side, is a small endpoint in the middle of nowhere, with no ticket vendors or whatsoever. Anyone who is going that far would normally want to cross the river towards Germany anyway.

But according to the salespersons (and at one point there were three of them arguing with us), this would make it an international train, and international train tickets are sold seperately. The office for international tickets on the other hand didn’t want to sell us the ticket as the train was a regional one, and they had no right or possibility to sell it. Oh the insanity…

This reminds of a book I really like. It’s called Catch 22.