Fake Linus Torvalds, a Rap, and a Response

The Linux Foundation is doing some kind of special promo for LinuxCon where they’ve had some “fake” Linus Torvalds tweeting and denting (the verb describing “tweeting” on Identica). There’s a bit of a contest going on to see if people can guess the real identity of these pretenders.

The whole thing sounds rather fun and ridiculous, and the group even made a rap video to go along with the project that you can see on the Fake Linus Torvalds page above. Unfortunately the rapper in the video flubbed the recitation of the first 6 digits of Pi.

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

It’s possible that the flub might have been intentional, but I couldn’t just sit idly by while the future geeky rappers out there are potentially being mislead. I mean, think of the children!

Manufacturers: Please label all plastic with resin identification codes

As I’ve mentioned before, Dartmouth College recycles plastics marked #1-7. Coca-Cola of Northern New England (CCNE) is the recycler of Dartmouth’s plastic and aluminum, and they can’t recycle plastics unless they are marked with a number. Although most plastics can be recycled, there’s a significant class of not numbered plastic bags, lids, tubs, and other items that CCNE cannot identify, and so must go into the trash.

The plastic resin identification codes and icons were set up by the Society of the Plastics Industry in the 1980s. As far as I can tell these codes and icons, like the universal recycling symbol itself, are in the public domain. There’s no organization that polices use of these logos. So any given plastic manufacturing company could easily, and without royalty or compliance fees, change their manufacturing process to stamp, mold, paint, or otherwise include the appropriate resin id code on their plastic products. Sure, a bottle marked #1 could turn out to be half Polyethylene (#1) and half Polystyrene (#6), but in such a case a company could probably be sued for false labeling.

Because there are still un-numbered plastic products out there, I have devised a plan: Whenever I come across a plastic container or container component that isn’t numbered, I’ve been putting them aside in a separate bin. My thinking is that once I have a pile of these items I can sit down and contact the product vendors or container manufacturers and ask them to properly label their containers with resin id codes.

If enough people ask for properly-labeled packaging, I think that businesses will definitely start to pay attention. Even if only some of the container manufacturers start to label all their products, we can use those manufacturers as leverage and get companies to switch or threaten to switch to a new container supplier if all of the plastic parts on a given container are not properly marked.

–Q

Watch for Cyclests [sic]

Yeah, I don’t know what they are, either, but some of my bike-commuting friends suggested that they might be a mythical type of biker, an uber-cyclist, if you will.

I took a couple of quick photos on my way home at night. The atmosphere was foggy, so I couldn’t use a flash, and when I came back the next day the road crew had unhelpfully corrected the sign. Bother!

Consider the medium when using URLs

I was shopping at the local food coop last week and saw a sign that said “Take an online sustainability survey and be entered into a raffle to win a free green home makeover!”

Well sure, why not? I guess I could use a little greening of my home, or I could hand the prize off to a friend. So I picked up one of the paper slips containing the information, shoved it into my wallet, and continued with my regularly scheduled shopping trip.

As I was cleaning receipts out of my wallet this morning, I rediscovered the piece of paper. It had a short, well-written message asking people to “[T]ake a moment to fill out this survey to benefit sustainability research,” and listed a url on surveymonkey.com. Simple enough.

A little problem: the url is 68 characters long and includes a 30-digit uid containing the chars [a-zA-Z0-9_]:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xfGOwGwNz9CKRjd2_2fjBKUg_3d_3d