A very good article from New York Magazine on the future of product integration. And to wash that down, some of the classic 30 Rock Product Placement moments.

For those who have community-l dev/nulled, I wanted to throw up a quick post I wrote in response to the current thread about Mudd's hum requirement being hard to fill and/or whining about there not being enough spots in off-campus hum classes for Mudders.

( RIP Melvin Hendricksen )

I'm an adult and a trained scientist, and yet I'm still surprised sometimes by the notion of time zones. Some part of me assumes that everywhere it's the same time.

Also My San Jose Tech Webpage.

Nobody on my team knew this at lunch, but we all wondered if it's something we "ought to" have known. Then again, I'm asking a really biased sample of people, so this poll still won't answer anything.

Poll #1481336 Tupac
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 32

Tupac Shakur is a/an ______ rapper.

I am ___ % sure of my answer

I know the right answer, but just can't make it through the algebra to get from point A to point B. Time for a strategically placed ansatz if I were a physicist...

If you had a million dollars and nothing better to do with it, how much cheese (in volume) could you purchase?

Things to consider:
* Where in the distribution process do you purchase?
* Cornering the market on cheese
* Volume to price ratios of cheese commonly sold in the grocery store
* Big Block of Cheese Day from the West Wing

troglodyteking will already know about this, but I wanted to wish everyone else a happy Columbus Day with a little Jason Webley craziness. Note that Columbus does not usually have 4 syllables.

In Great Britain, a substitute teacher is called a "supply teacher". I figured it out from context in the book I'm reading, but it makes me wonder how many other terms I take totally for granted are American-isms.

Poll #1452979 Pizza Poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 23

You've just finished baking a delicious (round) frozen pizza. How many slices do you cut it into?

This evening's frozen pizza had nutritional information for cutting a pizza into 6 pieces, but I don't do that, and I wanted to know if there's a whole universe of 6 slice pizza cutters I'd just never thought about before.

Also, I'm thinking of people who always have titles attached to their names. Like on Top Chef, one of the judges is always called "Gail Simmons of Food & Wine Magazine". MTV always said "Michael Jackson, the King of Pop". I also remember "Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's". Are there obvious/interesting examples of this? What's it called?

When I came back from Germany, months ago at this point, I was carrying around a couple hundred dollar bills from my mom paying me back for her portion of the hotel room. All I had was these when I went to a pho place in the Tenderloin, and was not expecting them to take such large bills. They said that they would, and I was so glad that I took a torn $20 bill as part of my repayment. I always remember being told that any more than 50% of a bill (and this was obviously more than half, around 60% including the entire right serial number, Jackson's whole big head, and 3 digits of the left serial) is legal tender, so I figured it would be fine.

Unfortunately, that's not the case in practice. They wouldn't take it at my local market, at the parking lot of the A's game, at the tollbooth on the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. But they all had the same answer, just go to a bank.

Well, I was home sick from work today, and when the cleaning lady came, I needed to scram for a couple of hours. A couple of hours on a weekday afternoon when banks are open. I went to Bank of America to handle a check I'd had sitting around for ages, and they said that you need an entire serial number from one side and at least 4 digits on the serial number on the other side, but I should contact the Treasury Department. Bank of the West said that they need both serial numbers off the bill, but I should go to the local Federal Reserve building. Chase said that they need at least 3 corners of the bill, and that I should go to the Fed downtown.

Well, I know enough to know that the Fed isn't the right answer. (It's not like they have a teller desk out front to handle people trying to return a torn $20 bill.) And I did a bit of research at this point to figure out if the Treasury Department could actually handle it. They can, through the Mutilated Currency Division (can't find an official .gov site), but every website I went to seemed to suggest that it's a hell of a lot easier for the banks to handle this than for a private citizen.

So, I went downtown, figuring that at least this would be a story to tell if it didn't work (and there was a movie theater nearby which is the perfect place to hide out on a hot day). And I remembered that I was going through the financial district. I went to the sub-basement of the Bank of America, where the teller told me that they need the entire bill. And I got $20 worth of angry in her face because I realized that bank tellers were totally arbitrarily making up the standards that they needed. Wells Fargo needs both serial numbers. And finally, the guy at Chase, who seemed totally cavalier and just didn't care (probably because he wasn't handling his own drawer), stuffed it in an envelope and down a deposit tube and spit me out a fresh crisp $20. The irrational anger boiled off into irrational happiness.

But, let this be a lesson to all of you: don't take torn currency. It's legal tender, but that means that nobody will take it and people will send you to the Federal Reserve building to try and trade it in.