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Yucks Digest V1 #16
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To: yucks
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Subject: Yucks Digest V1 #16
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From: spaf (Gene "Chief Yuckster" Spafford)
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Date: Wed, 6 Feb 91 19:08:18 EST
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Reply-To: Yucks-request
Yucks Digest Wed, 6 Feb 91 Volume 1 : Issue 16
Today's Topics:
"Yucks"
[brd@bigbrd: Joke of the day]
Apology to the world at large
For "Yucks"
PC help
re #14
shoplifting babies
Tape Recorder on a Chip
The "Yucks" digest is a moderated list of the bizarre, the unusual, the
possibly insane, and the (usually) humorous. It is issued on a
semi-regular basis, as the whim and time present themselves.
Back issues may be ftp'd from arthur.cs.purdue.edu from
the ~ftp/pub/spaf/yucks directory. Material in archives
Mail.1--Mail.4 is not in digest format.
Submissions should be sent to spaf@cs.purdue.edu
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Date: Wed, 6 Feb 91 14:16 EDT
From: "Robert M. Hamer" <HAMER@Ruby.VCU.EDU>
Subject: "Yucks"
To: spaf
I'm not sure how funny this is, but it is sort of interesting:
> WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, one of
>the nation's largest and most influential homosexual political groups,
>said Wednesday it opposes the war in the Persian Gulf as detrimental to
>the gay community.
Probably more detrimental to the Iraqi gay community, however.
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Date: Wed, 6 Feb 91 05:30:02 PST
From: brd@bigbrd (Bill Danielson)
To: joke-of-the-day@bigbrd
Subject: Joke of the day
Source: yaro@eng.sun.com
>> 1/18/91 - A judge admonished the Radnor, PA police for
>> pretending that a Xerox copy machine was a lie detector.
>> Officers had placed a metal colander on the head of
>> a suspect and attached the colander to the copier
>> with metal wires. In the copy machine was a typed
>> message which read "He's lying". According to UPI,
>> "Each time investigators received answers they did
>> not fancy, they pushed the copy button. Out came
>> the message, "He's lying"." Apparently convinced
>> the machine was accurate, the suspect confessed.
>
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Date: 1 Feb 91 00:08:47 GMT
From: scott@spectra.com (Tim Scott)
Subject: Apology to the world at large
Newsgroups: news.misc
A few days ago I posted an article which, due to my carelessness,
was way huge. I'm sorry. I am unworthy scum. Let me
abjectly beg your forgiveness, throwing dust upon my head and
throwing my sandal into the Ebon.
(Can you tell that I got some mildly nasty (and deserved) mail?)
As punishment I am going to prohibit myself from posting anything,
anywhere for 4 days. If, after that time, you deem me eligible
to post again, I will do so with a song in my heart and a spring
in my step.
Or something.
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Date: Wed, 6 Feb 91 14:13 EDT
From: "Robert M. Hamer" <HAMER@Ruby.VCU.EDU>
Subject: For "Yucks"
To: spaf
I don't know how funny this is, but I found it sort of ironic..
>From today's Washington Post:
>Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, in town to tape a television
>show, checked into the Embassy Suites Hotel in the Chevy Chase Pavillion
>at Friendship Heights hesterday. When he got to his room, there was a
>gift bottle of wine with the business card of Paul Leeper, the head of
>security at the hotel. Leeper was one of the officers who arrested
>Liddy in connection with the Watergate break-in. The two men reportedly
>are now friends...
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Date: Wed, 6 Feb 91 15:53:15 -0800
From: bostic@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: PC help
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU
New Official Politically Correct labels for 1991.
You Must Comply
old new
conservative reactionary
The Establishment White Power Elite
hearing person temporarily aurally abled
sighted person temporarily visually abled
blind visually challenged
mute vocally challenged
dead metabolically different
alive temporarily metabolically abled
ugly aesthetically challenged
rude politically correct (tm)
psychopath socially misaligned
bald follicularly challenged
non-white, non-male oppressed
pregnancy parasitic oppression
janitor sanitation engineer
dish washer utensil sanitizer
dairy where cows are raped
ranch where cattle are murdered
egg ranch where hens are raped
biology department where animals are tortured and then murdered
to fulfill the sadistic fantasies of white
male scientist lackeys of the imperialistic
drug companies
fishing raping the oceans
farming exploiting mother earth
paper bag processed tree carcass
Many of the labels from the 80's are now passe. Here is a partial list
of the denotations that are now acceptable (all labels are subject to
change without notice).
old 80's 90's
- --- ---- ----
deaf hearing impaired aurally challenged
blind sight impaired visually challenged
retarded mentally handicapped mentally challenged
queer gay/homosexual queer [strange but true]
fat big boned alternative body image or
person of weight or
gravitationally challenged
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Date: Tue, 05 Feb 91 22:41:31 PST
From: lsc@Eng.Sun.COM
Subject: re #14
To: spaf
> Responding to a report that Saddam has executed his Air Defense and Air Force
> chiefs for incompetence, LTG Kelley stated: "He has a very dynamic
> zero-defects program."
...because he's been reading _The_One_Bullet_Manager_ by Pol Pot
(in _The_Book_of_Sequels_ by Cerf et al.)
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Date: Wed, 6 Feb 91 11:41:30 PST
From: a correspondant
Subject: shoplifting babies
To: spaf
Hospitals Sensor-Tag Babies
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)
Retailers use them to keep shoplifters from walking off with their
merchandise. Now hospitals are using electronic security devices to
protect a more precious commodity: newborns.
Amid growing concern about infant abductions, more and more babies
are wearing sensor bracelets until they go home. Some hospitals even
sew or tape the sensors inside diapers to prevent kidnappings,
hospital officials said Tuesday.
The security systems are almost identical to those in retail
stores, where merchandise is tagged with electronic sensors that
trigger an alarm when passed through a sensor system installed in
exit doors.
"You have something to protect, so you put a sensor on it," said
Sam Shirley of the Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based Sensormatic Electronic
Corp. "In this case, it's the babies you want to protect."
Shirley said his company, which makes electronic surveillance
devices for retailers, nuclear-power plants and corporations, began
marketing the systems to hospitals about two years ago.
St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford quietly
installed an electronic surveillance system after a woman kidnapped a
16-hour-old baby from a maternity ward two years ago. The girl was
found unharmed 12 hours later.
Abington Memorial Hospital in Abington, Pa., has one of the more
elaborate systems. There, the infant bracelets trigger an alarm and
automatically turn on a video camera that records an abduction.
"We thought it was better to be safe than sorry," said the
hospital's security director, Joseph Baccile. He said the system cost
$40,000.
St. Joseph's Medical Center in Wichita, Kan., normally uses the
sensitized wrist bracelets, but has experimented with sensitized tags
that are sewn into babies' clothing, and sometimes, their diapers.
"It seemed to us like (baby kidnapping) was just increasing all
the time and we wanted to make our maternity wards safer," said
Kenneth J. Huelsman, director of security.
The costs of the systems vary, depending on how sophisticated a
hospital wants to get. Some hospitals want a system that triggers an
alarm, turns on a video camera and even locks the doors and
elevators, Shirley said.
He charges about $1.50 for each bracelet, but $9,000 for every
door or security gate that is wired.
Ninety-three infants were kidnapped from American hospitals from
1983 through October 1990, according to statistics compiled by the
International Association for Health Care, Security and Safety, based
outside Chicago.
Association President Fredrick G. Roll said the figure may be
conservative because hospitals are reluctant to publicize kidnappings.
Roll said that although his group supports the use of electronic
surveillance, he worries that hospital staff will be lulled into
thinking the technology is all they need to prevent kidnappings.
"It's just like a store security system. If you have the buzzer
that goes off when someone tries to steal something, but then you
don't have the staff who will react to that, what good will it do
you?" Roll said.
[I have this image of someone first getting the idea of tagging the
babies with exploding dye capsules. "Steal these babies, and you
won't be able to take them out into public." Maybe I need a rest. --spaf]
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Date: Wed, 6 Feb 91 10:39:33 -0800
From: bostic@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Tape Recorder on a Chip
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU
Thursday, February 5, 1991
San Francisco Chronicle
Business Section, Page C1
The Tape Recorder on a Chip
Local firm's breakthrough will let appliances talk back
By Don Clark
Chronicle Staff Writer
A San Jose-based startup company has developed an extraordinary
microchip that could make it possible for household appliances and other
common products to talk back to their users.
Information Storage Devices, Inc. this week is unveiling the
equivalent of a tape recorder on a chip, with the ability to record and
play back up to 20 seconds of speech. The chip's small size makes it
feasible to produce pagers that play voice messages, washing machines that
tell users exactly what's wrong with the appliance, and cellular
telephones with built in message machines.
``No one has done this before,'' said Will Strauss, president of
Forward Concepts, a market-research firm in Tempe, Ariz. ``It opens up
completely new possibilities.
Conventional memory chips have been used in place of tape recorders
before. But those chips can only store sounds after the the sounds have
been converted into bit of digital data from analog form. To do that
requires still other chips that cost a lot.
ISD's chip is the first to store data in analog form., which occupies
only one-eighth the space of digital data. The ISD chip can store sounds
up to 10 years, even if there is an interruption in electrical current
from a battery or other power source.
The advantages over a conventional tape recorder are clear: There is
no need for a tape -- which is susceptible to heat or other damage -- or
an electric motor or amplifier. ``It is just dirt simple to use,'' said
Richard Simko, ISD's chairman and the chip's inventor. ``You just hook
up a microphone and speakers to it and you are on the air.''
ISD is shipping samples of its chips, which cost $20 apiece at
wholesale and are built to its specifications by other companies that
maintain complete semiconductor factories. The 10-employee company was
founded in December 1987 and financed by $2 million from two venture
capital firms.
Simko, who holds two patents on the technology and has applied for
several others, worked at Santa Clara-based Intel in the mid-1970s and
was a founder in 1978 of Xicor, a Milpitas-based chipmaker. The
company's president is David Angel, who until this month was vice
president in charge of semiconductor research at Dataquest, a San Jose
research firm.
Though its chips now store 20 seconds of voice, multiple chips can be
linked together to increase storage capacity. The company is working on
future versions with greater capacity and versions that are tailored to
store analog data other than voice -- such as readings from some kinds of
measuring instruments.
Simko said that early users of the chip will include makers of
cellular telephones, who want to offer users or callers the ability to
record voice memos to themselves by talking into a device built into the
phone. The company also thinks that the chip in many cases will replace
cassette tapes used to record and play back greetings on answering
machines.
The chip is also expected to be used to alert aircraft pilots or
operators of industrial machinery to emergencies, Simko said. For
example, if an airplane falls to a dangerously low altitude, a
prerecorded warning would declare the fact.
Microwave ovens could announce the time and temperature settings -- a
function that would be of special benefit to the blind. Car radios might
store the last 20 seconds of a broadcast, in case the users want to play
back a news or traffic report.
The company believes that the chip will also be used in talking toys
and as a replacement for tape recorders now used in bulky
medical-monitoring devices that record patient's heartbeat.
[Can you imagine the market for exchangeable chips? For instance, get
one with an evil laugh or a scream on it and swap it with the chip in
your microwave oven. Mom thinks she's zapping the meatloaf, while
working off some aggression. Or swapping a recording of DeForest
Kelly doing "He's dead, Jim." for the medical monitor. Mind boggling.
--spaf]
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End of Yucks Digest
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