Odd braille

 

I audited a few lectures of a course put on by the  Manitoba Centre for Health Policy this fall. It was held in the Apotex Building on the Bannatyne Campus of the University of Manitoba. On the way to class I saw these dots on a glass wall.

IMG_20150916_143618 IMG_20150916_143524

Flipped image for readability of braille saying  "of pharmacy faculty of"
Flipped image for readability of braille saying
“of pharmacy faculty of”

They are Braille, and they read “faculty of pharmacy”. I can’t figure out where they are going with this. The writing isn’t really tactile, beyond the feeling of a vinyl sticker on glass. The writing is WAY bigger than normal braille, the letters are about 8″ tall. Being on a glass wall, it’s backwards from the direction you would enter from. They are about the same height of the ground that braille door signs would usually be, which makes me wonder if this is a tongue in cheek response by someone being forced to put a standardized sign on a glass wall that might look better without it. Or, was it just put there so no one runs into it?

Another possibility is that the pharmacists wanted a memorial of their previous status as a Faculty – they are now College of Pharmacy at the Faculty of Health Sciences.

Does anyone know more about this?

No drip

Drip stop on coffee urn
Drip stop on coffee urn

Having a new HAM Radio license gets me a 1 year membership with  WARC. I checked out their monthly meeting this Monday. I got to meet a few interesting people and we chatted about some of the digital modes in HAM.

And, I saw the drip stop on the coffee urn. A pop bottle cut just so you could get your cup of coffee in there without problem, but drips were caught. It made me smile. It’s the kind of thing I might have come up with, and the kind of thing a lot of people would find horrible and impractical.

What is the difference between people who would embrace that and others who would mock it? I wonder if it is related to the difference between people who back into parking spots and people who don’t.

people who back into parking spots

Last March I went to a presentation at Lyncrest Airport on electric transportation in cars and, more unusually, airplanes. I arrived a bit late and most people had already arrived. I noticed that an unusually large proportion of vehicles were backed in.

Unusual proportion of parked vehicles that are backed in
Unusual proportion of parked vehicles that are backed in

I am a big fan of backing into parking spots. You can maneuver in smaller spaces when the steered wheels are able to move rather than being constrained by being already in the narrow spot. You go backwards into the space where not a lot is going on, and when you need to leave and join traffic you are going forward where you can see. I can’t think of any disadvantages. Yet, the majority of people don’t. I don’t really understand that, although I can think of a few snarky comments.

It made me wonder what makes this crowd different. I think I asked a few people, but no one else seemed excited about this.