Wapsi Square Forum

There's another window sticker i see around town, but not often enough to get a picture - i'd seen the previous one at the girls' school, and i pulled up behind them when i was picking up the girls today - so i went looking online:]i went looking online[/url]:

shadowinthelight wrote:Old video I just stumbled across. Nerds proposing marriage through a video game is nothing new but this extremely well done one will get you in the feels.
I proposed by hacking Chrono Trigger

Still my fave. (the song gets me every time)

AnotherFairportfan wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:

I know those stickers are ubiquitous, but I can't imagine getting so annoyed at them that they'd need that sort of response.

If it were me, I'd have the human family being chased down by Treebeard and several other enraged Ents. Caption: "My stick family HOOMed your stick family."

Dave wrote:If it were me, I'd have the human family being chased down by Treebeard and several other enraged Ents. Caption: "My stick family HOOMed your stick family."

Would the issue then be moot?

Okay, so here is the top (a shaker top) of a bottle of spices Helen bought at Aldi:
 


And here is the label on the bottle:




And here are the contents of the bottle:

Rocket sits on the satellite box for warmth.  

The Prince sits next to the satellite box, as he surveys his domain from the highest practical point of vantage in the room.  
 
(Also Kate says he's too big to sit on the box.)
 

.


(That was weird. Pictures disappeared)

MerchManDan wrote:I know those stickers are ubiquitous, but I can't imagine getting so annoyed at them that they'd need that sort of response.

I once decided that if I had a van, I'd put a Jesus fish fairly low on the rear door and a UFO "fish" somewhat higher, and find a way to add a fishing pole and line.

AnotherFairportfan wrote:Okay, so here is the top (a shaker top) of a bottle of spices Helen bought at Aldi:

Heh... yeah, I've seen the like.

I imagine that the companies like to buy/stock just one type of bottle cap/seal/dispenser arrangement, and have one production line process "fill bottle, press-glue on the "safety seal", snap-fit the "shaker", screw on the lid). By giving you a useless shaker lid for the bay leaves (or cinnamon, or etc.) they avoid the need to modify their production line when they switch from one hopper of spices to a different one.

Dave wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:Okay, so here is the top (a shaker top) of a bottle of spices Helen bought at Aldi:

Heh... yeah, I've seen the like.

I imagine that the companies like to buy/stock just one type of bottle cap/seal/dispenser arrangement, and have one production line process "fill bottle, press-glue on the "safety seal", snap-fit the "shaker", screw on the lid). By giving you a useless shaker lid for the bay leaves (or cinnamon, or etc.) they avoid the need to modify their production line when they switch from one hopper of spices to a different one.

In this case, the shaker is integral to the lid.

It's actually easier to NOT fit a shaker to bottles where it's not an integral part of the top - take a look at one - you'll probably see a smaller (or larger, depending on the product) hole in the center of the shaker disk.

Look inside the screw-on top there'll be a little nub in the center.

If you pry the shaker disk off the bottle, you can snap it onto that ,little nub in the top.

Now screw the top firmly in place - you'll feel a "snap" as the disk transfers itself to the bottle.

Neat, and one hopes someone got a bonus for thinking of that.

So you just feed the proper cap and shaker/no shaker combo to the line.

AnotherFairportfan wrote:In this case, the shaker is integral to the lid.

It's actually easier to NOT fit a shaker to bottles where it's not an integral part of the top - take a look at one - you'll probably see a smaller (or larger, depending on the product) hole in the center of the shaker disk.

Look inside the screw-on top there'll be a little nub in the center.

If you pry the shaker disk off the bottle, you can snap it onto that ,little nub in the top.

Now screw the top firmly in place - you'll feel a "snap" as the disk transfers itself to the bottle.

Neat, and one hopes someone got a bonus for thinking of that.

So you just feed the proper cap and shaker/no shaker combo to the line.

that may be a viable thing, but you totally missed Dave's point...

most of today's companies don't want to spend more money keeping TWO DIFFERENT caps in stock, when ONE UNIVERSAL cap will do, so what if you get a shaker-cap on a bottle that you can't actually use to shake the product out of the bottle... it's easier on their inventory practices and paperwork, it's easier on the machines because they don't need to have all the extra parts to put the NON shaker cap on, but only for SOME product, with the ones that need a shaker, it would either need an entirely different machine, or a separate set of components that does the shaker parts, then goes back to that original machine to put the cap on etc... and most of all, it's CHEAPER to only need ONE thing instead of TWO (actually THREE, the two parts for the shaker cap and the third being the NON-Shaker cap)

Best fridge ever? I know.

scantrontb wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:In this case, the shaker is integral to the lid.

It's actually easier to NOT fit a shaker to bottles where it's not an integral part of the top - take a look at one - you'll probably see a smaller (or larger, depending on the product) hole in the center of the shaker disk.

Look inside the screw-on top there'll be a little nub in the center.

If you pry the shaker disk off the bottle, you can snap it onto that ,little nub in the top.

Now screw the top firmly in place - you'll feel a "snap" as the disk transfers itself to the bottle.

Neat, and one hopes someone got a bonus for thinking of that.

So you just feed the proper cap and shaker/no shaker combo to the line.

that may be a viable thing, but you totally missed Dave's point...

most of today's companies don't want to spend more money keeping TWO DIFFERENT caps in stock, when ONE UNIVERSAL cap will do, so what if you get a shaker-cap on a bottle that you can't actually use to shake the product out of the bottle... it's easier on their inventory practices and paperwork, it's easier on the machines because they don't need to have all the extra parts to put the NON shaker cap on, but only for SOME product, with the ones that need a shaker, it would either need an entirely different machine, or a separate set of components that does the shaker parts, then goes back to that original machine to put the cap on etc... and most of all, it's CHEAPER to only need ONE thing instead of TWO (actually THREE, the two parts for the shaker cap and the third being the NON-Shaker cap)

My point is that that only applies to bottles like the one i photographed, where the shaker is integral to the top.

More spices that i buy come in bottles with screw-off lids than come in bottles with the integral-shaker tops, and those were the ones i was talking about.

AnotherFairportfan wrote:My point is that that only applies to bottles like the one i photographed, where the shaker is integral to the top.

More spices that i buy come in bottles with screw-off lids than come in bottles with the integral-shaker tops, and those were the ones i was talking about.

Actually, I believe my point applies to both types.

Even with the type you refer to, in your approach the company has to stock two cap varieties (one with the shaker snapped in, and one without) and (as you said) "feed the proper cap and shaker/no shaker combo to the line." This still means having to stock (or make up) two different combinations in the factory and keep track of which one is being used on which production line at any instant.

It still requires shutting down the capping machine, emptying its feed, and reloading it with a different cap type when they want to switch cap types (and these aren't just rolls of thin paper labels, they're probably big boxes or cartons). Or, they'd have to use a capping machine with two separate feeds, and switch between feeds on the fly... which means you have to have manual or computerized control of the capper.

It's significantly simpler for them to just have one capping configuration for each size of bottle. That way there are no decisions to be made about capping when switching the production line from one spice to another... and thus less opportunity for a screwup.

They might save a bit in materials cost buying caps-without-shakers for the handful of spices which are too big to utilize shakers (bay, lime leaf, cinnamon... what else is there?). But, I suspect that the overhead of stocking two types, plus the cost of having to stop the production line to switch out caps periodically, and the risk of accidentally using the wrong cap type and not installing a shaker on spices which require one, shift the balance in favor of "always install a shaker and let the customer remove it if they don't like it".

This discussion went a lot further than I thought it would.

Dave wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:My point is that that only applies to bottles like the one i photographed, where the shaker is integral to the top.

More spices that i buy come in bottles with screw-off lids than come in bottles with the integral-shaker tops, and those were the ones i was talking about.

Actually, I believe my point applies to both types.

Even with the type you refer to, in your approach the company has to stock two cap varieties (one with the shaker snapped in, and one without) and (as you said) "feed the proper cap and shaker/no shaker combo to the line." This still means having to stock (or make up) two different combinations in the factory and keep track of which one is being used on which production line at any instant.

Actually, more than that - even in the integral-shaker ones - because you need different shaker sizes for different products.

And the majority of the budget=priced spices i see come with the snap-on shakers or none; it's the more expensive ones that come with the integral tops.

shadowinthelight wrote:Best fridge ever? I know.

My old supervisor got a great deal on a fridge for the break room. It was shiny black.

I asked her if anybody else was hearing the first movement of Also Sprach Zarathustra every time they went in there.

Super Planet Crash!  Create your own solar system!  Will it last five hundred years?
 
Screenshots of two games.  The upper is one i got bored with after it looked as if the eccentricity of Planet Four's orbit had pretty much reached a maximum.  The lower is one i designed to see how quickly it would result in a planet being expelled from the system at the right) - which is one of the two end conditions of the game (you lose, insofar as "win/lose" applies), the other being that the system has survived five hundred years (you win).
 
The white bounding circle is 2 AU; the expelled planet in the lower image is at 2 AU at the right side of the system.
 

Funny I keep thinking about crashing mostly-ice asteroids and such into Mars...

The price at Kroger has dropped twenty cents in the last week-and-a-half, in ten-cent jumps.
 

 
$1.80 in 2015 dollars, adjusting for inflation, is allegedly equal to $1.11 in 1990 dollars, according to this calculator, or 74¢ in 1980 dollars...

Which means i can buy gas for less (in real purchasing power) than i could thirty-four years ago.

Bomb squad detonates WWII grenade discovered by war veteran’s son

Live explosive had been stored in Oklahoma man’s garage for more than a decade


 

Dylan Stablefore/Yahoo News wrote: Talk about an explosive find!

A bomb squad was called into action in Oklahoma this week after the son of a WWII veteran found a live hand grenade in a box he inherited from his father.

Rick Young of Eastern Oklahoma County discovered the grenade along with other souvenirs from WWII — including a samurai sword and a rifle — in a box that had been stored in his garage for more than a decade.

“He told me he was the luckiest marine on Saipan, because during combat he had a hand grenade land right next to him, and it didn’t explode,” Young told KOCO-TV. “We just assumed it was a souvenir, that it was diffused and things like that, but turns out it wasn’t."

Young said that after doing some online research he concluded that the device — believed to be a Type 97 hand grenade, first used by the Imperial Japanese Army — was active and called the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office.

“All the different elements of the grenade were still together,” Young said. “It had the fuse in it. It had the TNT in it, and the pin was out.”

Bomb technicians using C4 safely detonated the grenade in a nearby field on Monday.

Luckiest, maybe - apparently the dumbest, too, because he smuggled home a live grenade with its pin out.