Hot on the heels of my posting the goodness that is the UHaul truck with the ballistic ejecta equation on its side, comes the report of utter fail from a London Bus ad for the London South Bank University. I guess sometimes engineering isn’t exactly rocket science.
-
What happened to Bad Astronomy???
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
-
Death from the Skies!
Order a copy of Death from the Skies! from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?"
-- Adam Savage, Mythbusters"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising -
-
People who like me!
-
DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space - DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
July 12th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Heh.
July 12th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Strictly speaking, if LSBU is suggesting that receiving their degree results in immobility, their ad is perfect!
July 12th, 2008 at 10:10 am
As a Brit this just about sums up our education system. To think we used to lead the world in engineering (sigh)
July 12th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Since the top and bottom gears have different pitches, it is just possible that they do not engage each other. At least, it wouldn’t QUITE be as dumb as it looks at first glance!
July 12th, 2008 at 10:23 am
The £2 coin still has 19 gears in a ring … .
July 12th, 2008 at 11:09 am
I think you mean “a report of utter failure.” “Fail” is a verb unless you’re using some esoteric stock jargon, and most securities aren’t delivered via bus, so I’m guessing you’re just using it as a noun to revel in the incorrectness. I really expect better from you, Phil.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Andrew, it’s internet jargon. Ever heard of “epic fail”?
July 12th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Andrew, I quite intentionally wrote “fail”. You might want to do yourself a favor and brush up on your intertoobs lingo before casting aspersions.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:29 am
I wonder how they got Big Ben working, with engineering masterpieces like this?
July 12th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Go easy on Andrew guys, his grandkids just got him this magic box last week.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Its even worse than that. The same 3 locked gears motif was used months ago by manchester city council to promote its public transport system, and all as part of celebrating manchester’s history of engineering. It got roundly slagged off on the internet in the UK, including appearing on the BBC news site. Those responsible didn’t care at all.
So not only an epic fail of engineering knowledge, a meta fail of caring about reality. You’d think it was done by a journalist!
[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7241329.stm[/url]
July 12th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
The gears don’t have shafts to turn on. They’re just gears left on a table or workbench waiting to be mounted. I don’t see anything wrong there.
Unless you count the gear teeth overlapping on the two smaller gears… The resolution isn’t high enough to distinguish between a photoshop mistake and a broken tooth. A broken tooth would seem normal to me, especially in a student lab (students break stuff by mistake all the time, I know I have).
July 12th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
I’m not sure… I think if you look really hard the top and bottom gears just miss eachother.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Yeah Phil, Andrew seems to be a little behind on the times. But I guess you can’t fault someone for that, unless they’re the ones trying to call you out on something. In which case they deserve a good mocking.
I see stuff like this all the time. You can try to justify that they MEANT for the ad to be that way for all kinds of nonsense reasons, but let’s not make excuses here. Their graphic designer was told to just “make something that looks like something’s working or something”. It’s like the ten billion commercials that try to show someone playing videogames, and the “game” on the screen doesn’t even remotely look or play like any videogame that’s ever been conceived. It always looks like a CGI cartoon show from the 90’s. Companies just use shortcuts and assume that 99% of the audience won’t notice or just won’t care.
I wouldn’t have noticed this one unless I had been sitting on a train or something and had absolutely nothing else to do besides stare at the ad for a few seconds.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
It’s just basic graphic design. An odd number of objects in a focused, compact arrangement. Unfortunately too many designers (and I have known a few) adhere to the same “by the book” guidelines for everything they do and forget about relevance. You see this in advertising all the time, mostly on TV. It’s a technically effective design, but gears=engineering isn’t very original.
July 12th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I think they are offering a course in christian engineering.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Boy, I bet he feels dumb! Sure glad I didn’t ask that question here! That would be too embarrassing!
July 12th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
^-^ Ohhhh…. Utter EPIC fail…. (On my part)
July 12th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Enlarging the image shows that they do (just) engage. The difference in pitch just makes it worse.
July 12th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
mighty favog Says: “It’s a technically effective design, but gears=engineering isn’t very original.”
Yeah, they should be using T-Squares, triangles and rolled up blueprints in front of a skyscraper skeleton.
- Jack
July 12th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Andrew wrote: I think you mean “a report of utter failure.” “Fail” is a verb unless you’re using some esoteric stock jargon…I really expect better from you, Phil.
C Murdock replied: Andrew, it’s internet jargon. Ever heard of “epic fail”?
Phil Plait wrote in his defense: Andrew, I quite intentionally wrote “fail”. You might want to do yourself a favor and brush up on your intertoobs lingo before casting aspersions.
I totally agree with Andrew on both points: The poor grammar as well as expecting better from Phil. In answer to C Murdock: No I also have never heard of “epic fail” and i darn sure won’t take the time to do a Google search to discover that Phil is a sheep following such trendy excuses for “hawt” writing.
Phil generally writes really great stuff and is a master at usage of the English language. However, there are those all too often occasions when he feels the need to “dumb down” his writing and excuses it as simply being “intertoobs lingo.” I personally don’t like the switching between excellent expository writing and dumbed down jargon-filled posts. It neither enhances the writer’s position nor makes those posts filled with utter nonsense words any more interesting.
I suppose that next Phil, in an attempt to gather more diggs and reddits from ethnic minorities, will stoop to writing blog posts in LA gangsta or Detroit rap lingo, filled with the usual assortment of vulgarities and misogynistic references.
However, since I still enjoy learning what Phil has to teach and those more serious articles are great, I’ll continue to stop by here daily.
Finally, I have donned my asbestos suit in anticipation of the usual flames in defense of sloppy writing (which I used to encounter daily while trying to teach English…).
-Tod
July 12th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Uh… it’s a picture of some gears by an artist for an ad. The fact that they aren’t connected to anything should excuse them from mechanical judgement. It’s just an eyegrabber. A picture. Like this Pac Man machine from 1880.
http://craphound.com/images/pacgentleman.jpg
Impossible, but a totally awesome in concept and execution.
Honestly, this is the sort of nitpicking that gives skeptics a bad name.
but gears=engineering isn’t very original.
It is, however, archetypical, which is of far more importance in advertising.
July 12th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
On the other hand, Tod needs to lighten up. That usage of fail, I think, might actually predate the WWW. You’re needlessly nitpicking, too. It’s just a joke.
If you want to attack something, attack people who use LOLCat speak in real life.
Now *that* crap is simply off the hook!
July 12th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Quiet D:
LOLCAT iz not amuzed!
July 12th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Yikes, the grammar police are out in force tonight! Which I find kind of funny considering the gregarious history of the English language.
But really, people, since when is an writer (of any kind) obligated to restrict himself to the Queen’s English(TM)? The beauty of english is its diversity, with all its various lingos and brogues and jargons. Phil has every right to choose among them and use any expression he wants to convey the message he wishes to the audience he targets. The only justifiable measure is understandability.
It’s like faulting Shaw because Eliza Doolittle spoke in cockney.
July 12th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Quiet Desperation Says: “It’s just an eyegrabber. Impossible, but a totally awesome in concept and execution.”
I dunno. Some people are awfully clever:
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gershon/EscherForReal/
- Jack
July 12th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
I recall reading a few decades ago that a similar composition was used as the logo for an engineering society. It’s probably happened more than once.
Anyone with the enormous amount of spare time on their hands required to conduct a Google search will find tons of results for the search terms ” ‘three gears’ logo”. For example:
http://www.dreamstime.com/three-gears-image4281957
Why did Phil’s use of the common phrase “casting aspersions” immediately make me think of an aspersion foundry?
July 12th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Ehhh, my last comment included a link, which is probably what landed it in the moderation queue. Here it is again, without the link:
I recall reading a few decades ago that a similar composition was used as the logo for an engineering society. It’s probably happened more than once.
Anyone with the enormous amount of spare time on their hands required to conduct a Google search will find tons of results for the search terms ” ‘three gears’ logo”.
Why did Phil’s use of the common phrase “casting aspersions” immediately make me think of an aspersion foundry?
July 12th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
LOLCAT iz not amuzed!
Oh, love the site. Had a couple of my captions get pretty good ratings. I’m must getting annoyed by people using Internet speak in real speech. LOL is fine in text because it’s expedient. Actually saying “Ell Oh Ell” makes one look like a tool. In many cases, when spoken, such things cease being shortcuts.
I’m a pragmatist. Whaddya want?
LOL! KTHX! BYE!
http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/skeptical-cat-is-fraught-with-skepticism.jpg
July 12th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
But really, people, since when is an writer (of any kind) obligated to restrict himself to the Queen’s English(TM)?
Especially with internet postings, or even fictional prose if the story is from a colorful character’s POV. None of this is technical writing. I think some people still haven’t come to terms with this new form of communication.
TH3Y NED 2 AKSEPT TAHT LANGUAEGS EVOLVERS AND ADAPT 2 NU EKOLOGIKAL NICHES.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
It’s his blog, he can post however he would like.
July 13th, 2008 at 1:49 am
Shorter Andrew:
Like vanderleun,
I am aware of all internet traditions.
July 13th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Oh, for cryin’ out loud. It’s an ad put together by marketing types. It has no bearing on the state of British engineering or the school it represents. It’s cool that U-haul put the eject equation on a truck. Even if it was missing a paranthesis. By this blogs standards it’s Uhaul 0, British bus 0, Phil 0, Andrew 0…there’s nitpicking and then there is this stuff. Sheesh.
July 13th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Yes Andrew, those who use such terms are merely sheep conforming to something making us feel “hip”. Oh wait… isn’t that why a bazillion words have been added to the English dictionary over the past few centuries? You know, because terms and “jargon” eventually catch on to attain everyday-use status? And oh my, hasn’t the internet become one of the most influential sources for new terms being introduced into our culture?
Hmm, actually I guess you’re just an idiot then. Oh well.
July 13th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Lungage nazies makz bunnys cry. *Epic fail*.
Admit it, it is a bit ironic to complain about internet language on the internet. The reverse of communication skill?
July 14th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Quiet Desperation, that makes it look like you waz homeskooled
TH3Y NED 2 AKSEPT TAHT LANGUAEGS EVOLVERS AND ADAPT 2 NU EKOLOGIKAL NICHES.