Okay, these should come standard with every house:

[jsbowden]

And I'm serious.

http://www.lifewisdom.com/gb.desc.html

I think when E is a little older maybe.

Also, it's fire alarm testing day. It seems it takes a fire marshall five fucking hours to verify that the strobe lights and alarm bells on a single floor that was just built out work. It's amazing; I can verify this for our entire floor in under 10 minutes. I've done it this morning, just to see how long it took. It's really fucking hard to get anything done when the fire alarm is going off at times for random lengths of time. And what happens if we actually have a fire? We've been instructed by building management to ignore the alarms, since they will be going off for testing. This shit should be required to be done when the building is fucking empty.

Comments

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

The fire marshall must be working his way down the road, we had the same routine a few days ago. But it was fast here.

What happens if you have a fire? Well, if it''s on a floor below you, the flames spread, the alarms go off, everyone ignores them, the flames gorw more, the stairs get blocked off, and about the time your lobby is burning up, someone outside the building notices smoke. Another twenty minutes or so after that people start to wonder why the fire department hasn't arrived, but at that point the flames will have worked through the door to your secure area, and you'll be charcoal. Or, was that a rhetorical question?

[robeli.livejournal.com]

Fire drill here today. Is it national fire drill day?

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I can't wait until it's fire alarm season here again.

Let me explain. There are several days to weeks between the stages below:

1. They test fire alarms. They do something to the altered sensitivity of smoke detectors in certain labs.

2. The laser lab down the hall either decides to demo how a CO2 laser can burn pencils, or uses the punch-holes-in-paper method for the alignment of a new experiment. We get fire alarms.

3. The undergraduates in the labs downstairs decide it's a good idea to reverse the polarity of that milifarad capacitor in the experiment, because they heard it was cool and stuff. We get fire alarms.

4. The some sort of semiconductor or another lab in the other downstairs has a graduate student forget a sample on the hot plate, or stick a post-it to the hot plate, or something. We get fire alarms.

5. The semester progresses; undergraduates get bored with sitting in classrooms/training labs, or Fourier forbid they have quizzes, exams. Fire alarm handles are in plain view. We get fire alarms.

Fire alarm procedure is, of course, full evacuation, which they don't even have to enforce because the sound is about as bearable as that in Chewie's torture cell in Empire Strikes Back.

[bloody-peasant.livejournal.com]

Part of the fun at a metal works is that Stuff Catches Fire. There's a firefighting corps that will when the horn sounds and their pagers go off run from whatever job they're doing to the on-site fire station. They have a stated goal of keeping the response time under five minutes, which has to be pretty impressive on a site large enough to have a building that's a full kilometre in length.

A running joke on my shift is "You have to air out", pronounced in exaggeratedly broad accent imitating a certain foreman.

So, imagine a company where there's a smoking ban, but nobody yet enforces it and takes it seriously, and the metal tappers, traditionally an anarchistic bunch, don't give a damn. In their break room, they're having a serious smog problem this evening, and the smoke detector goes off.

A whole team of smoke divers in full breathing equipment enter the break room. Inside is a single guy, smoking one of his huge cigars.

Quoth the foreman, in his smoke diver persona: "You have to air out!"

[montoya.livejournal.com]

As for the books, I instinctively think that uniform sets like that are super-cool, and totally want them in the same way that I want the many-volume full OED, and the Vance Integral Edition.

But in this case, I'm a little wary, because when it comes to classic books like that, there are important details beyond the works themselves. For instance, they have Homer -- but what translations? Some old public-domain thing, or are they springing for a good modern translation? Translation issues apply to all the non-English books, but even the English ones: Do they have useful footnotes? Are they carefully produced from accurate texts, or are they just slap-dash copies of some random edition? I'd rather read this edition of Thucydides than a random public-domain one, even if it would look cool on my shelf.

Given how much Brittania emphasizes the breadth and scope of the collection, and how little they talk about the quality of the particular editions (beside their admittedly attractive appearance), I'm inclined to believe that this is meant to look impressive on the shelf, rather than be actually read.

But I'd still take a set if somebody gave it to me.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

And kinda confirming my suspicions: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/excat/ideas5.html

Reaction to the Great Books of the Western World upon publication was, in the main, politely respectful. But one voice loudly cried foul. In a New Yorker review that Adler called a "hatchet job," Dwight Macdonald referred to the set as a "fetish of The Great" and accused its producers of being "a typical expression of the American advertising psyche." "The way to put over a two-million-dollar cultural project," he lamented, "is, it seems, to make it appear as pompous as possible." To Hutchins' claim that the set of books represented a liberal education upon which the fate of the country and the world depended, Macdonald responded: "Madison Avenue cant" and "poppycock." He concluded, "the problem is not placing these already available books in people's hands but getting people to read them, and the hundred pounds of densely printed, poorly edited reading matter assembled by Drs. Adler and Hutchins is scarcely likely to do that."

Macdonald was reacting to the physical format (with two columns of dense, encyclopedia-sized type the set earned the reputation for being virtually unreadable), but he was also reacting to the inferior translations selected. The editorial board saved money by selecting only texts in the public domain, even purposefully overlooking excellent recent translations of Greek texts by University of Chicago faculty members. Homer is presented in prose form, and most of the translations date from the nineteenth century. In a telling sign of the times, no one seriously questioned the texts selected--even Macdonald had no real complaint. Years later, when the second edition appeared, it was greeted with scorn for its lack of inclusiveness.

Initially the Great Books of the Western World sold poorly. In the first year it sold 1,863 copies (500 to the original subscribers), then a mere 138 sets in 1953. It looked as though the $2,000,000 expended would never be recouped, but in 1956 Encyclopaedia Britannica hired Kenneth M. Harden to manage sales. A long-time encyclopedia salesman who knew the value of a "foot in the door," Harden understood the hard sell. He marketed the set door-to-door with a simple installment plan ($10 down and $10 a month) and used premiums such as a free Bible and bookshelf to entice would-be buyers. Backed by colorful brochures, posters, and magazine advertisements, he reached the mass market to sell over 50,000 copies in 1961. In 1964, William Benton reminded his staff that, "for 196 years, the man with the foot in the door has been the great source of our company's strength," then effortlessly blending culture with commerce, he applauded his staff for their role as educational leaders "in a world hungering above all else" for "an education of which the Great Books is a supreme symbol." The Great Books of the Western World was a financial disaster until it was sold as Hutchins feared it would be--by door-to-door salesmen touting "culture" to an insecure American middle class.