Ben’s Weblog

Came across a great article on identity theft over at c|net. Here’s a snippet:

Financial institutions need to be liable for fraudulent transactions.

They need to be liable for sending erroneous information to credit bureaus based on fraudulent transactions. They can’t say that the user must keep his password secure or his machine virus-free. They can’t require the user to monitor his accounts for fraudulent activity, or his credit reports for fraudulently obtained credit cards.

Those aren’t reasonable requirements for most users. The bank must be made responsible, regardless of what the user does.

If you think this won’t work, look at credit cards. Credit card companies are liable for all but the first $50 of fraudulent transactions. They’re not hurting for business; and they’re not drowning in fraud, either. They’ve developed and fielded an array of security technologies designed to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions. And they’ve pushed most of the actual costs onto the merchants.

I agree completely. Discover caught a transaction on my account last year – in the middle of a bunch of typical transactions, they saw a $500 purchase at an Old Navy in Buffalo, NY or someplace nearby. $500 isn’t an unusual amount for me on the credit card…insurance, etc. And, they’ve even called a couple times when they saw something suspicious (like the day I had breakfast in Chicago, lunch in Memphis, and checked into a hotel in New Orleans that night). Never had the bank call about a charge.

I still like the idea of having two-factor authentication for banking / financial transactions, though.

A rather humorous bit I came across in the last edition of Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the NFL’s column that talks football and occcasionally diverges, as seen here:

Last week, the column noted Taco Bell’s “grilled carne asada steak” means “grilled roasted meat steak.” Eric Lund of Anaheim, Calif., home of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim — which translates as “the the Angels Angels of Anaheim” — reports the city boasts a King Pollo Chicken restaurant. As pollo is chicken in Spanish, the name translates as King Chicken Chicken. Jonathan Clough adds that Starbucks offers “chai tea latte.” In India, chai means “tea served with milk,” while latte means “milk” in Italian. So the translation of “chai tea latte” would be “tea with milk with tea with milk.”

Will marketing wonders ever cease? Of course, I work for a company that makes a fat-free cream cheese, which is an oxymoron permitted by US food labeling regulations. Fat-free? Self-explanatory, and defined in 21 CFR 120.10. Cream cheese? Legally required to contain a minimum of 33% fat (21 CFR 133.133). Cream by itself? Legally required to contain at least 18% fat (21 CFR something-or-other)

Then there’s something like a reduced-fat butter, which we can translate as “reduced fat fat”.

The age old question – is it soda or is it pop? Finally, an answer.

I’m originally from soda country (Madison County, IL), am currently (for 2 more days) living in soda country (Lewis County, NY), and then moving into pop countrry (Cook County, IL). Fortunately, the Chicago area has enough transplants that it’s not firmly pop.

It is kind of weird how there’s a huge pocket of “soda” centered around St. Louis, MO and Milwaukee, WI. Wonder why that is?

…doing research around Guinness. Researchers have shown that the bubbles actually can fall down the sides of the glass without violating laws of physics.

Using a super-slow-motion video camera — able to record 750 frames a second — Stanford University scientists with a penchant for some cold Guinness have confirmed that beer bubbles do fall.

But careful analysis of the tape has revealed that, while bubbles are lighter than beer and should rise, the laws of physics need not be rewritten after all.

“The answer turns out to be really very simple,” said Richard Zare, a professor of natural sciences at Stanford.

He said the old axiom, “What goes up, must come down,” actually holds true.

“In this case, the bubbles go up more easily in the center of the beer glass than on the sides because of the drag from the walls. As they go up, they raise the beer, and the beer has to spill back, and it does.

“It runs down the sides of the glass carrying the bubbles — particularly little bubbles — with it, downward,” Zare said.

Of course, this does involve a lot of hard work…

But Zare and postdoctoral student Andrew Alexander were skeptical, so they set out to test the theory by “analyzing” beer at both the pub and in the lab.

“Andy and I first disbelieved this and wondered if people had maybe too much Guinness to drink,” Zare said.

Oddly disturbing:

Ohio salad arrives with piece of thumb

As someone who works around food all the time, and deals a lot with ensuring food processes are safe, it’s just a bit disturbing that this sort of thing could happen.

I came across this rather funny article about California’s perception of the rest of the U.S.

Of course, other places in the US have the same problem. When I went to college at UIUC, I think a few people in my dorm freshman year didn’t realize there’s a lot of Illinois which is south of I-80. Glen Carbon is not next to Naperville, folks. Get on I-55 and drive 4 hours. Then you have the conversation that goes like this:

Me: Where’re you from?
Them: Chicago.
Me: Cool, what neighborhood?
Them: Aurora.

(For those unfamiliar with Chicago, Aurora is one of the far western suburbs…call it 30 miles out. In terms a Californian would understand, it would be a resident of somewhere like Mountain View saying they lived in San Francisco.)