You Must Be From Away

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The nice lady on the kiddies’ program on the German equivalent of National Public Radio plays it and translates it as

“Mein Leben ohne Dich ist nicht so schön – Life isn’t that nice without you “.

This place is a real hoot.

They’ll play Frank Zappa’s “Bobby Brown” without the blink of an eyelid and Gompie had a massive hit with a reworked (NSFW) version of Smokie’s “Living next door to Alice”.

Just don’t ask them to play the Horst Wessel Lied….

Oh.

It was “My life sucks without you“, which is fairly mild, I guess.

But they would have STILL played it if it really was “My life is fucked without you.”

Which I think sounds better anyway.

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This would be good for a slapstick comedy if it wasn’t so serious.

Germany’s police forces have been hunting down someone who murdered a policewoman in Heilbronn and tried to murder her partner.

They picked up some DNA from the crime scene and it turns out that the same DNA traces have been found at other crime scenes (murder, break-ins, assaults) dating back 15 years and spread across Germany, Austria and France.

A woman’s DNA

It all started sounding a bit implausible when the same DNA was found on the burnt body of an asylum seeker in France.

A man’s DNA.

Turns out that the cotton swabs they’d been using were somehow contaminated during the production process by the same (female) worker.

Now, I would have thought that – if you were into QA – you’d take samples of the swabs to assure that they were free of foreign DNA.

Fit for purpose, as they say.

The obvious culprit was the manufacturer – cries of “Let’s sue the bastards” – until it turned out that the police

a)  had never specified the purpose of the swabs

and

b) hadn’t read the information leaflet which clearly stated that the swabs weren’t suitable for harvesting DNA samples.

Oops.

Back to square one.

Or zero

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we have to go to the toilet…

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 James Crook, an American computer scientist has come up with a foolproof algorithm that’ll let you solve a Sudoku problem without straining your brain.

Only takes an hour, he reckons.

Now, I’m no Einstein, but I can do one in about 5 minutes. If that.

Enter Boring Old Fart mode

I once did a project in the early 90’s with a bunch of brainy buggers from a private university. They reckoned that they could help us optimise the whole cargo business, so off they went.

A month or so later, they came back with a formula that would help us choose the best combination of boxes to maximise the volume utilisation of a 10 cubic metre cargo container.

The presentation was a classic.

Utterly clueless about the business, never even thought of looking at a cargo terminal or even a cargo container, let alone the sort of stuff that gets shipped as cargo.

“We’ve taken a typical cross section of cargo boxes” said the brain “That would be 7 standard sized boxes”

We give each other a WTF look.

On she drones.

“So there’ll be an equal number of these 7 standard sized boxes available for shipping and we’ve worked out the absolutely optimal selection of boxes to fill the container” she proudly proclaimed.

“And it’ll only take 3.7 x 10 to the power of 16 minutes” she said. (Something like that, anyway)

Very impressive.

We later worked out that it was around 2 years…..

This is what the real world is like:

The warehouse foreman will look at all the cargo lined up for the flight (and there sure as hell aren’t any “standard sized containers”), walk around it and say ” OK, this goes at the bottom at the back, this one’ll slot in next to it, put this at the front and the rest of it’ll fit in on top. Use the small stuff to fill in the gaps.”

0.5 x 10 to the power of 2 seconds.

Just under a minute.

Exit Boring Old Fart mode