• Loren Pechtel (unregistered) in reply to Garp
    Garp:
    For me the real wtf is a drive through pharmacy? Given how many times I have to repeat my order at a drive-thru restaurant and how loud you have to get, that's got a load of potential to be embarrassing..

    "Sorry, could you repeat your order again please?"

    "YES, I SAID I'M HERE TO PICK UP SOMETHING TO DEAL WITH MY CRABS"

    But you don't need to talk much about it, you are picking up a prescription. All they need is your name.

    I seem to have gotten your captcha, though: ewww

  • mikko (unregistered) in reply to Shinobu
    Shinobu:
    The real WTF is that Americans still use Fahrenheit.

    The US got to be the 800 lb. (yes, lb., not Kg.) gorilla of the manufacturing world by using feet and inches, pounds and degrees Fahrenheit, miles and yards, etc. Why would we want to change to something inferior?

  • (cs)

    Here, every single Walgreen's in town also displays -196 F, so there's got to be some reason that specific number is showing up when it's not getting a valid reading.

    I think a bigger WTF is that every single Walgreen's in town can't bother to fix their temperature sensors.

    But then again, this is AZ so they could just put "F***ING HOT" and it would be accurate enough.

  • xybre (unregistered)

    There's a bank in the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago that often displays "-0". I'm guessing the software doesn't flip the signed bit to positive until hitting 1 degree. (this is additionally amusing to me being as -0 (or Negutyv Xeiro) is my band's name)

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to newfweiler
    newfweiler:
    david:
    Even "sensible" heuristics like that can lead to some spectacular WTF's.

    "Sensible" like the automated gas pump that won't let you charge more than $50 on your credit card for gas.

    That's because of the way those gas station things work. When you charge a credit card, you basically have to say how much you're charging to the card. Doesn't work so well with pre-pay stations since you don't know how much gas to fill up. (Restaurants do something similar when you pay by credit - they enter in the amount of your bill, plus extra for tip. This way, when you write down how much you really tip, it still goes through even though the final figure is higher than originally swiped).

    Now, stupid gas pumps only ask for $50 authorization, which means they can only dispense $50 before needing to re-authorize. Modern gas pumps are supposed to pre-authorize $100 or so. Of course, the problem with pre-authorization is that it locks your available credit - so if you were $99 away from your credit limit, guess what? You can't put in gas (pre=authorization failed).

    As for sensible temperature values... well, you know the expected range of temperatures you're supposed to read, so you have use that. I mean, -40C to maybe 60C is a perfectly sensible range for most of North America. If you start getting readings outside of that, well, treat it as a sensor failure. If it's a critical sensor, well, sound an alarm.

  • EdHP3 (unregistered)

    A Columbus Walgreen store (the one where the Kahiki ought to be) also had a wildly high temperature displayed, which I calculated to be the correct temperature in the Rankine scale. Next time I saw the sign, it was correct.

    I'd say it's a configuration error, rather than a hardware failure.

  • meow (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    weee... just enough to fill my civic!

  • Steve Bush (unregistered)

    Based on the previous comments about other Walgreens showing -196, I think we can infer that Walgreens is seeking to reduce costs by centralizing their temperature measurements to one location. Having a single thermometer would be much more cost efficient.

    It's a pity that they decided to put the one thermometer into a vat of liquid nitrogen, though...

  • Some Random Cremasteric Reflex (unregistered)

    At minus 196, shouldn't Cox be experiencing significant shrinkage?

  • SpamBot (unregistered)

    That would be the Walgreens on Mercury, duh

  • El Supremo (unregistered)

    Both images show clear signs of Photoshoppage. Fakes!

  • igitur (unregistered) in reply to mikko
    Shinobu:
    The real WTF is that Americans still use Fahrenheit.

    Celsius Shmelsius...

    Kelvin is the only REAL unit of measurement for temperature.

    Who ever though out a scale that if you multiply by zero, you still get a value that represents non-zero!?

  • T$ (unregistered) in reply to igitur
    igitur:
    The true WTF is that horrible font used in "CENTER AT PERRY HALL"!

    Are you supposed to be able to read that while driving by?

    Granted... they didn't use Comic Sans.

    I'm looking at a still image and I can barely read it.

  • Pecos Bill (unregistered) in reply to mikko
    mikko:
    Shinobu:
    The real WTF is that Americans still use Fahrenheit.

    The US got to be the 800 lb. (yes, lb., not Kg.) gorilla of the manufacturing world by using feet and inches, pounds and degrees Fahrenheit, miles and yards, etc. Why would we want to change to something inferior?

    Methinks you haven't seen the "Made in" label on so many products here these days...

    Many global manufacturers here in the US have changed over to metric. All that's great for tool manufacturers. They get to sell us two sets of tools! Moronic. And, I find it inferior that I have to memorize huge tables of unit conversion (Just how many pints are in an acre-foot anyway?) There's 1,000,000 l (liters) in 1 Ml (Megaliter). How tough is that?

  • Paolo G (unregistered) in reply to david
    david:
    Even so, that's sloppy code. There are things called "sanity checks" - for instance: 
    if ( (temp > sensible max) or (temp < sensible min) )
{
    set a diagnostic code
    print alternate message("Have a nice day!")
}

    Even "sensible" heuristics like that can lead to some spectacular WTF's. I heard a story (probably apocryphal, but I think it was in one of Tufte's books) that the hole over the ozone layer went undetected for many years because of similar code in the satellite doing the observation. Once the level of ozone dropped to a level below that considered a "sensible min" when the satellite was launched, it simply stopped transmitting the data.

    This is where fuzzy logic might come in handy (OK, this is still ordinary predicate logic, but you get the idea):

    if ( (temp > sensible max) or (temp < sensible min) )
{
    if ( (temp > wayout max) or (temp < wayout min) )
    {
        set a diagnostic code
        print ("Thermometer broken!");
    }
    else
    {
        print ("Temperature recorded is %d; possible sensor error", temp);
    }
}

    Adjust the limits as required in future versions for climate change...

  • ELIZA (unregistered) in reply to Pecos Bill
    Pecos Bill:
    mikko:
    Shinobu:
    The real WTF is that Americans still use Fahrenheit.

    The US got to be the 800 lb. (yes, lb., not Kg.) gorilla of the manufacturing world by using feet and inches, pounds and degrees Fahrenheit, miles and yards, etc. Why would we want to change to something inferior?

    Methinks you haven't seen the "Made in" label on so many products here these days...

    Many global manufacturers here in the US have changed over to metric /* ED: Including all carmakers */. All that's great for tool manufacturers. They get to sell us two sets of tools! Moronic. And, I find it inferior that I have to memorize huge tables of unit conversion (Just how many pints are in an acre-foot anyway?) There's 1,000,000 l (liters) in 1 Ml (Megaliter). How tough is that?

    Quickly! How large is the cross-section of a 2-by-4? 5.25 inches. Perhaps they call it that because it's quicker than saying 1.5-by-3.5.

    Even apart from the brazen borrowing of units by that last remnant of the Roman Empire (I know of one moron who says that the Imperial electromagnetic units are much more intuitive than the metric ones; does anyone know how I can contraceive him until he learns), the different units for the same thing (quick, how many BTU in a horsepower, or horsepower in a kilowatt; a heater can have output measured in any of these units depending on power source), and the multiplicity of variant units (the Roman mile is 1479.5 metres while the Irish mile is 2048.3, for example, and the reason the units seem so standard now is that, for example, the standard inch is defined to be 25.4 millimetres), the main problem with the system is easily illustrated: What is the weight in pounds of a 1-pound mass in a force field of 48 feet per second squared? No, the answer is most definitely not one pound (can you seriously be confusing force and mass), nor is it 48 pounds but 1.49 pounds. Extension question: Why the foxtrot is a pound of force about thirty-two times ma? How much more difficult does science seem if even F = ma needs a multiplicative fudge factor? In metric: What is the weight in Newtons of a 453.6 gram (or 453.6 milligrave or .4536 grave) mass in a force field of 14.6304 metres per second squared? 6.636237810048 Newtons, using the more precise value of the pound from ESB-UC /* http://www.esbcalc.com /, or 6.636 Newtons, rounding to 4sp as they suggest. Every calculation done in the unprefixed units (assuming that you use the grave as the base unit of mass) is as easy as adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing two numbers here: When it says, F = ma, F literally = m*a; no wonder it is used throughout science.

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