At work we just purchased a new SEM. It is made in Japan.
The installer from the company told us an interesting story today.
For this line of SEM, the manufacturer painted the entire top part of the SEM in black. Labs in Europe who purchased this SEM called it the “Ninja SEM.” They even made labels for it, and affixed it to the instrument.
This did not amuse the manufacturer. (They noticed it during periodic PM.) They were offended. They stopped selling it with the black paint. It’s now only available in white paint.
I was once working for a company that had made a deal to sell their software to a company in Japan. One part of our software was script called NUKE that would remove all volatile data from the system and bring it back to a clean state. We decided that it would be insensitive for a US company to send a script called NUKE to a Japanese company, so before we shipped it we changed the name of the script.
Tabasco sauce is not available in every restauant in the United States. Aside from snack bars and fast food places, I thought Tabasco was as much a standard condiment as salt or pepper. But not necessarily so in Charleston SC.
I worked in a film processing factory laboratory 40 years ago, and
their darkroom had cylindrical doors (like this).
The workers were all seated (breaking open the film canisters and taping the
films together onto spools) and when they needed to exit, they’d call out
“Coming through !” as they walked to the door.
(Also … don’t forget to knock loudly before you enter a cylindrical door !!)
Colonel Sanders of KFC fame has a wing of a suburban Toronto hospital named after him. He lived in the area for some time and made substantial cash donations to thr hospital.
You must mean Tapatío. It’s ubiquitous in local dining here is California, while Tabasco is mostly associated with chains like Chipotle. Personally, I’m most happy when I see Cholula on the table.
John Mauchly, who helped developed ENIAC, wanted to call it a computor so that the machine would not be confused with computers, a group of mostly women who used electromechanical machines to laboriously crack out answers.
I wish it had stuck. The computers of the era are largely forgotten.
They’re a lot more remembered lately, thanks to [i]Hidden Figures] (the electronic machine in the movie is just “the IBM”, or the “data processing system”).
Folks sometimes speculate about who the first non-Christian president of the US will be. They need to look back, not forward: John Adams was a Unitarian.
Wait, since when are Unitarians non-Christian? Their entire name comes from the fact that they are Unitarian, not Trinitarian, Christians, i.e. how Jesus fits with their conception of the Abrahamic deity. Contemporary Unitarianism is very open and there are plenty of non-Christian Unitarians now, but I don’t think the fact that John Adams was a Unitarian means that he wasn’t a Christian, just that he didn’t think that Jesus and God were separate the way most Christians do.
Edit: I’ll cite this random M.A. thesis I found online (https://encompass.eku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1254&context=etd) which argues that Adams’s religion should be understood as Unitarian rather than anything else, but that that religion should still be understood as a liberal Christian religion.
