h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Let's hope the aliens see in the same spectrum bandwidth as we do, otherwise we will see some crashes in the future

A Researcher after my own heart. I kept yelling while watching 'Independence Day', 'Oh, sure, the alien use MS-compatible software!'

A colourblind colleague of mine had a similar problem in the States with horizontally arranged traffic lights where in one state green was left and in the other it was right. (He can't distiguish red from green)

Luckily nobody got hurt.

Not standardising them is just plain stupid. I apologise on behalf of the whole country. One of the many downsides to pigheaded insistence on extending 'states' rights' to driving laws....

Apologies accepted.

I see what you mean Dmitri about the colour coded traffic lanes idea I sent you. I hadn't thought about colour blindness in this respect either, even if just mentioned as a side issue.

Talking of standardization, this is apparently what made Germany so efficient in its industry because of some government minister deciding to get everybody in the country to follow strict rules, instead of all going their own way and nothing being compatible and interchangeable.

No, I can't remember his name. Heard it on a radio program (BBC Radio 4 documentary), didn't take note at the time and couldn't trace who it was after as even the Germans government department I emailed didn't recognize the description (might have been around the time of Bismark as it wasn't the nineteen hundreds, I am pretty clear on).

Maybe somebody knows. It's amazing what information we can pool around here.

I'd thought maybe our Bluebottle would point out the colourblindness issue...