The gas is a good deal if you happen to drive by the location regularly (or like me, drive infrequent enough to fill up only once a month). But I wonder how many of their customers drive a long ways to save a few cents per gallon, but consume the difference in gas getting there.
It is interesting that most of their money comes from membership fees, because there is a second level membership that costs twice as much, but offers 2% back at the end of the year. When I used to shop with a bunch of grad students, that actually could make quite a bit or money back, but even when I am at the point it is just two families using the two cards, it is enough to pay back the extra membership fee and some portion of the normal fee.
Yes, by defining Planck's constant as a fixed value, the kilogram can be defined in terms of the meter, second and Placnk's constant. There is a Wikipedia article that covers some of this, although doesn't seem to discuss much about exactly how such definitions would be used to calibrate mass measurements. Once upon a time, I had seen a magazine article discussing that aspect in much more detail, which included the discussing the use of electrical units which are easy to calibrate to determine a calibration for via something like the Watt balance.
Not so much dust, as they use it under pretty clean conditions and store it under a triple set of concentric bell jars. But it does adsorb gases from the air onto the surface, and there is a known rate at which this happens after cleaning. It means that the cleaning has to be done a consistently a certain number of days before it is used. Ask anyone who works with high ultra high vacuum stuff about how much junk from air, especially water, will stick to a metal surface (I think you can get 0.1-1 ug / cm^2 on a metal surface easily, and the kilogram prototype has a surface area of like 75 cm^2).
They don't assume which particular one is losing or gaining mass in the absolute sense, and acknowledge it is possible all of the prototypes are drifting in one direction. They can measure some drift directly by calibrating a scale, and the Wikipedia article goes into a little detail about the drift.
Explaining it resulted in some grumbling and not much else. Seemed like a situation of someone enforcing rules for the sake of enforcing rules, ignoring significance of impact.
In some sense, only the meter, second, and kelvin are defined in terms of fundamental properties. So those are the only three you can work out from scratch anywhere. The definition of the ampere, mole, candela (which is more than brightness of light measured in watts) all depend on the kilogram definition currently.
The CIPM is purposely slow with changing definitions though, as they make sure a lot of effort has been put into making sure not only are the new definitions constant and reproducible, but that the methods used to calibrate against such a definition can be done with better accuracy than previous methods.
I had to take a refresher shop class a couple years ago as a prereq to using a shop at my work place, and the teacher was your stereotypical shop teacher: missing a finger, there to scare you if the machines don't, highly critical, "You screw around too much." He would kick people out if their phone rang. I forgot to turn mine off one day and it rang, but I had the ringtone set to sound like an a mechanical bell on an older phone. It just made him laugh, "That sounds like an actual phone," and he went on without kicking me out. Your mileage may vary though.
One annoying thing about phone etiquette though, is for those that spend a lot of effort trying to be polite, the one time you screw up or have a good reason for breaking rules gets you branded as if you constantly do such things. When talking to people, I usually hit the button to send calls to voicemail, as 99% of the calls I get I can call back 5 minutes later, and usually the face-to-face conversation is a lot more important. But the one time I was waiting for an important call, someone started up some small talk while I was waiting only to get interrupted. He tried to chew me out, except I was waiting on a call to hear how my father did in surgery, and we were literally talking about the weather. Sometimes the phone call is actually more important.
With elevators, more often than not they are empty when I get on them in the building I work in, so I sometimes stand close to the door not expecting there to be someone getting off. I usually move out of the way pretty quickly assuming I'm alert.
With subways though, it seems to depend a lot on what time of the day you go. During rush hours, most people tend to be locals, know the patterns, and want to get some place. Tourists and those with more time probably know to avoid rush hour and will be around at more off-hours, or around for certain events. Although it can take only one person to block the way for a large number of people.
Apparently the same architect of this building also designed the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas that has a similar problem of concentrating sunlight on part of the hotel's pool deck.
An odd one I've heard several foreigners comment on American's commitment to family as being something they're friends back home don't believe. It is not that the commitment is exceptional, but that there are parts of the world with a strong rumor/myth that Americans have zero sense of family or connection to family. For example, their friends found it hard to believe that American's still talk to their parents after leaving for college or moving out of the house,or that Americans still return to see family on holidays.
I wouldn't call what they did a sign of (obvious) contempt, as their tone was professional and polite. I just made the mistake of assuming it would be quicker to ask for a general section in a small-ish library than fiddling with a search on a computer, but instead get a lecture on why a classification scheme exists or even once a very general description of a how a library works (in case I forgot it was a place with books that can sometimes be checked-out). Usually something along the lines of: "Could you point me to the non-fiction science section?" "Are you familiar with Dewey?" "Well, I'm used to LoC and but remember Dewey had a top level category for science, just not which number." "You see, we classify books by topic so that... there is fiction and non-fiction..."
It reminds me of calling for ISP tech support, and giving a detailed description of the modem status, and then being asked several questions that amount to, "Is the modem getting power and turned on?" While I appreciate that such a question is relevant to many people, the one to two sentence description of the problem I gave should have made it clear I was staring at a modem that was at least powered on.
Maybe I'm just stuck on old habits, since the library I went to as a kid had a giant poster near the front with the high level DDC classification and lots of signage for where different numbers were, which was faster than trying to look up a specific book in the cards. Maybe I am fortunate to not have slipped and asked the front desk where the card catalog was in recent years.
(Edit: I didn't mean to write so much about such a trivial problem... this is what happens when I am stuck at work on a Sunday supervising something really boring. Maybe to be more on topic, we can say this was a librarian RPG equivalent of dealing with a simple question like it was a gazebo)
I only use a public library maybe once every other year, so while I know a half-dozen LoC subclasses off the top of my head and some of the rough number ranges, I don't remember Dewey decimal numbers at all. Yet this really confuses the librarians in the public library the few times I go there, who either act like I am illiterate or never heard of Dewey before when I ask to just be pointed in the general direction of some subject. I guess they (or me...) failed the saving throw.
This may be the result of a problem that showed up on Amazon not too long ago with various books: they gave sellers the ability to set the price with an equation or algorithm based on the price of other items on Amazon. The problem was it sometimes would get stuck, with the prices two items referring to each other and each trying to be a little more expensive. The result is the price skyrockets without any person involved in actually setting that price. This particular magnet seems to be listed elsewhere for less than $5.
And you joke about shipping problems with magnets... knowing both plenty of people in a field that uses strong magnets and family connected to air cargo business, that has happened more often than you would expect.
While the location of IceCube is quite cold (along with a lot of other research that goes on at the Amundsen–Scott station at the South Pole, it isn't the only project here), one of the main groups contributing at the U. of Wisconsin celebrates when roughly once a year it is colder in Wisconsin than at the South Pole. It helps that it is summer in the south when it is winter in the north though.
The CIPM is purposely slow with changing definitions though, as they make sure a lot of effort has been put into making sure not only are the new definitions constant and reproducible, but that the methods used to calibrate against such a definition can be done with better accuracy than previous methods.
One annoying thing about phone etiquette though, is for those that spend a lot of effort trying to be polite, the one time you screw up or have a good reason for breaking rules gets you branded as if you constantly do such things. When talking to people, I usually hit the button to send calls to voicemail, as 99% of the calls I get I can call back 5 minutes later, and usually the face-to-face conversation is a lot more important. But the one time I was waiting for an important call, someone started up some small talk while I was waiting only to get interrupted. He tried to chew me out, except I was waiting on a call to hear how my father did in surgery, and we were literally talking about the weather. Sometimes the phone call is actually more important.
With subways though, it seems to depend a lot on what time of the day you go. During rush hours, most people tend to be locals, know the patterns, and want to get some place. Tourists and those with more time probably know to avoid rush hour and will be around at more off-hours, or around for certain events. Although it can take only one person to block the way for a large number of people.
It reminds me of calling for ISP tech support, and giving a detailed description of the modem status, and then being asked several questions that amount to, "Is the modem getting power and turned on?" While I appreciate that such a question is relevant to many people, the one to two sentence description of the problem I gave should have made it clear I was staring at a modem that was at least powered on.
Maybe I'm just stuck on old habits, since the library I went to as a kid had a giant poster near the front with the high level DDC classification and lots of signage for where different numbers were, which was faster than trying to look up a specific book in the cards. Maybe I am fortunate to not have slipped and asked the front desk where the card catalog was in recent years.
(Edit: I didn't mean to write so much about such a trivial problem... this is what happens when I am stuck at work on a Sunday supervising something really boring. Maybe to be more on topic, we can say this was a librarian RPG equivalent of dealing with a simple question like it was a gazebo)
And you joke about shipping problems with magnets... knowing both plenty of people in a field that uses strong magnets and family connected to air cargo business, that has happened more often than you would expect.