Conspiracy theories to worry about

Professor MaryBeard has a blogpost on electronic locks that are becoming more common in the UK universities:

They include an AMOK function.

 the special features they advertise specifically for educational use include:
"SALTO AMOK electronic escutcheons have a built-in card reader on the inner escutcheon. This inner reader enables users to activate the AMOK function mode in order to lockdown a room quickly. Only authorized users with AMOK privileges on their access plan can activate it."
Whatever that exactly means, I am sure it would be fine, unless you happen tolike mechanical keys. And in this case, the added disadvantage would be that this monstrosity would be going on a lovely Victorian door, and -- as it is now self closing (fire-regs) -- I assume I would never be able to leave the room open, and would have to make sure I took my card each time I popped out to the loo (though maybe the loo will soon be "escutcheoned" too). I suppose I would just end up wearing the card on a lanyard all the time, which is now the ball and chain of the office worker.

another question: would an EMP/solar flare disable the locks? Probably not, says this discussion (and many locks are EMP hardened to prevent that)

the real problem would be fires.


Here in the high crime rate Philippines, most middle class houses have windowbars, and every year folks die because they can't exit when there is a fire or flood....
which is why I have both a crowbar and a hatchet in my closet...

Hotel rooms only have bolt locks for the inside, so leaving is no problem, but getting caught in an AMOK closed room in case of a fire/bomb/flood/gas leak could be fatal.


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The Berenstain Bear rift proves parallel universes.



actually, it only proves that the brain can read and remember words even when spelled differently.

"STAIN" is psychologically a bad word on many levels in English, so people's minds would block it out as a misspelling, replacing it with the "Berenstein" since Stein is a common last word and many other last names have a "stein" ending (German for "stone"). Usually pronounced with a long I, but sometimes pronounced as a long E

for example:






hence Berenstein.

But I know German, and that the bears name is not pronounced with a long "I"....
So I remember the spelling as Berensteen...

Which either means this is a psycholinguistic phenomenum or I live in a different parallel universe.

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