Ordinary Nothing

The trade-in idea isn’t new. Various sellers in various industries offer customers a discount if they bring in an older product similar to the one they’re buying.
You see many trade-in offers for cars, for televisions, lots of home electronics equipment, phones, refrigerators, and so on and so forth.

On the other hand, there are some things that you would normally not see offered as part of a trade-in deal. Like this tantalizing offer that I saw in the newspaper today…
A trade-in discount for… toothbrushes. Yes, you read that right. Bring in your old used toothbrush, and get a discount when buying a new one.

I mean… who would go to a store carrying a used toothbrush, for crying out loud ?! The discount price is small, the price for a brand new top of the line toothbrush is small. Would this really overcome the gross factor ? Would it overcome the reaction of other potential customers that would get out of the store when they see people brandishing their used toothbrushes about ?

Personally, I may buy another competing brand of toothbrush just to avoid being asked if I carried the old one with me…

And from a different point of view, this also doesn’t make much economic sense. Trade-ins are done as a sort of partial price discrimination. Trying to attract the customers who won’t pay full price because they have a similar product, but who may be willing to pay less to get a sort of an upgrade. Well, newsflash:

1. Everybody has a toothbrush. Everybody.
2. The features of a new product are meaningless in the toothbrush industry. People replace a toothbrush when it needs to be replaced. They will replace it in the same time, regardless of price variations of the new product or the available features.

So this trade in does not make their toothbrushes appealing (although maybe appalling) to more people. It does not attract extra customers beyond those that would by them anyway.

The only idea is to try and shift some people who already buy a toothbrush from the competitors to them. I admit that it is a valid economic purpose, but is this really the way? Somehow, I don’t quite see that.

If anyone wonders, the offer is for new Colgate toothbrushes. So if you happen to be in Israel, have your old toothbrush with you, and want to get a shiny, new, dirt-cheap Colgate toothbrush, now’s the time.
Me, I’ll buy Oral-B next time…

Some education system teach children math skills by teaching them how to do math. Some other education systems, ours included, starts by forcing the kids to memorize lots of meaningless information that looks like math, so that they will have the appearance of being able to do basic math.

Such as the multiplication table. Instead of explaining to kids the idea behind multiplying, they are forced to learn by rote the results of multiplication of all pairs of single digit numbers.

I personally preferred to do the math. This meant that it usually took me a bit longer than for some of my classmates to come up with the answer, but it also meant I was never in a position where I couldn’t provide an answer due to forgetting it…

In any case, here’s a simple trick that kids (can) use to aid in this. It allows to get result for the whole multiplication table when you only need to remember the lower half of it (1-5 times the rest):

Hold two fisted hands.

On each hand count off fingers by the difference from the number and 5 (so it you multiply 6×7, count one finger on one hand, and two fingers on the other).

Each finger that you counted is worth 10 (in this example, that’s 2+1, so we have 30).

Now multiply the remaining fingers on each hand (4*3, after we used 1 and 2. So 12 here).

Add the two results. Presto! The correct multiplication answer:
30+12 =42 = 7*6 .

Cute trick.

Of course, kids are mean towards anyone who is different, and so as you may have noticed the trick only work if you have five fingers on each hand. Those unfortunate souls scary freaks that have lost a finger, or the scary evil demon mutants with an extra finger, cannot use it as-is.

Thinking back to my school days for the previous post, I also recalled a certain incident.

I was sitting in class, the teacher was talking about something boring (Nope, been too long, I don’t remember what) and so I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t speak with anyone else or made any noise (That I recall. Been a while, like I said), I just didn’t pay attention.

She noticed. I think I said I was sorry (If I did, it was probably a lie, but it was for the sake of politeness to a teacher, which at that tender age seemed more important than complete honesty). In typical schoolroom manner she didn’t leave it at that, but instead told me to collect my things and leave the class.

What usually happened in those cases (I was far from the first kid asked to leave the class due to ‘interrupting’ the lesson. It was my first time, but far from being her first) was that the kid started crying, pleading, yelling, and making a huge loud mess begging to be left in the class. This never helped, the kids always got their schoolbag and went out to the hall, and it wasted lesson time, but everybody enjoyed the show.

I was being a pragmatist, and I was (still am) generally indifferent to social trivia. If the teacher told me to get my things and get out, it seemed to me that the best thing to do will be to get my things and get out. Which I quietly and promptly did. I mean, I was bored anyway, so why make a pointless scene asking to stay ?!

The rest of the lesson passed quietly in the hallway. I never had a problem to find things to do by myself. And I figured this was about the end of this matter.

Not quite. You see, as it turned out the poor teacher was incredibly offended by my behaviour. Yes, offended and hurt. And yes, to a large enough a degree to develop general hostility toward me, and to half sobbingly complain to my mom on the next meeting at school.

She got the feeling that I just don’t give a darn about her at all (why should she bloody care?) .  She expected the loud scene, and was shocked that she didn’t get it. How was it that she put it to my mother… "I told him to take his notebook and bag, and to get out to the hall. And he… he… he just took his things and went out! Just like that! He didn’t ask to stay! He didn’t try to convince me to leave him, or to argue! He didn’t cry, or anything! It was like he didn’t care that I sent him out! He didn’t care about me at all!!!".

Appalling, isn’t it? I was being a good kid that did exactly what his teacher told him to do, and doing so ranked by this teacher as one of the worst problems any kid gave her that school year…

Lately I started to get a large number of hits from various search engines, by people searching for "Tsunma" of all things. Some alone, some together with "tidal wave" or "disaster" or other things of the sort. So I assume it’s not some ancient Japanese folk hero that they’re looking for…

So just to make it clear to the poor people that look for info and can’t find it: You spell it Tsunami, not tsunma.

Go that?

Thank you, and better luck on the next search. Glad I could help.

I had to go to the pharmacy yesterday to take out some prescription. I arrived only about half an hour before official closing time, and this was a large central pharmacy, so there was a long line of people there.

Since they often have more customers than clerks (Yes, yes, they’re "pharmacists", and studies long and hard for it. Sure. But these days they don’t make prescription drugs, just take bought boxes off the shelves and give them to people. The only actual requirement is being literate) they have a queue system in place.

Near the entrance there’s a dispenser with a paper roll of sequential numbered tags. And next to the counter there’s a small electric billboard showing the next number to get services. Pretty common stuff. But the billboard only has a two-digit display. The numbered paper tags go to three digits.

I didn’t have any problem with it. I took out number 608, and the board showed 67. I never doubted that it means my turn is in about 41 people.

Other people seed to have a problem with it, and were not able to grasp the simple mechanics of number overflow over the hundred’s digit. Again and again (and again) someone would take a number and stare entirely puzzled at the billboard, until another person told them that "once it gets to one hundred it will roll back and start again". Then they’d sigh a long "Ahhhh" of understanding, mutter about how long they have to wait, and find a place to wait in.

The fact that so many people constantly were unable to realise that indeed the lower two-digit numbers will return, I found quite sad.
The fact that so many other people kept telling them "one hundred" I found somewhat sadder. The numbered tickets had the number on them! it was six hundred and something. There are only two ways to look at it:

 
1. The billboard shows only two digits. It will only reach to 99, and then start again. It can’t show a hundred, so it will never reach it.
 
2. The billboard shows the last two digits of the whole number. It will reach 600, not 100, it went over 100 nearly 500 people ago.

And yet nobody merely said that the numbers will return, they all said 100. ALL.

On a different side note, I was once at the same pharmacy when there were about 90 people waiting… This is very close to having 100 people waiting… In which case two people are going to come to the counter claiming it’s their turn whenever the billboard progresses…

After the pharmacy from the previous post, I went into a different store. At some point their public announcement system (a bunch of low quality, but high volume, speakers spread around the store) came to life with a loud "To all our customers! To all our customers! Your attention, please! A special offer! Only today!".

And that’s it. Silence.

People were staring at each other a bit puzzled. And nearly a minute later again an announcement. "Attention, customer! Pay attention please!". And died again, this time with a low quiet trace in the background of someone whispering to someone else a sentence along the lines of "… not working, I don’t know what…".

I never did get to find out what was the special offer. And the announcement system wasn’t dead, if the thought occurred to you. It went on perfectly in it’s usual work of calling personal to come to specific stations.

Most odd. They got my attention, then did nothing with it…

Been a very busy week…

Anyway, things should be calmer now, so I’ll get back to posting things here. Will probably use the next few days to catch up (on volume) with a few extra posts, then get back to "normal".

Yea, yea, I know, I’m supposed to just start posting again, and not to actually announce that I’m going to, nobody cares… But heck, it’s my blog, and I can post this if I want to.
So there.

I noticed this lovely Guardian article talking about how according to WHO statistics "Europe is world’s suicide hotspot".

The article of course doesn’t mention Israel, so it wasn’t clear if we’re considered Europe or Asia for this purpose.
So off I went to the WHO website (They have a special, and large, suicide related area. How sad is that?), and looked at the statistics myself.

In the global comparison table, suicide rates here are higher than some countries, but are indeed lower than the scary levels of most west-European countries.

But it’s very hard to make anything from the data. What’s available on the site is PDF files. The data is collected over different years, and the PDF means it’s not easy to run any cross sections, sort the data, or whatever… I certainly don’t care enough, or am bored enough, to do hard manual work and check this for myself.

Personally, I’m not about the commit suicide in the foreseeable future, so there’s no urgency…

I am curious as to why suicide rates here are lower, though. Sociological theories related to suicide (well, the few ones that I actually came across. Really not my field, or area of interest) would suggest this indicate people here are happier, or that the population here is more cohesive. And I must say, they’re not, and it isn’t.
On the other hand, this is one mystery that I don’t feel any crucial imperative to explore…

At the start of this month broadcasting networks in the state of Connecticut in the US announced to people that due to a state of emergency the entire state is being evacuated.

How did this happen? They wanted to run a test of the emergency alert system and pressed a wrong button.

If it wasn’t so sad, I’d have started laughing. Oh, wait, I did…

This raises two important questions:

1. Why the heck is there a button pre-wired to a message about the state being evacuated ?! Is this something common? Do they evacuate the state a lot? Do they really believe there are any likely events that would justify evacuating the whole state ASAP ?
2. How do you evacuate an entire state or country? Where would you place all the people? Heck, how would you get them there? This is less a logistical nightmare, and more a logistical impossibility, no?
   

No wonder I love America. It provides so many wonderful amusements.

[Update: Found a way to tie the things]

Vindication, at last!

I knew these slick round laces had to be at fault. It couldn’t be that I just lost my knack for tying shoelaces at the same time when I replaced them.

I recently purchased a new pair of Rockport shoes. We’re repeatedly buying them for a long time. All their models I tried are extremely comfortable. In most cases a wrong size Rockport shoe still has a better fit than a right size shoe by someone else (Of course, this is a generalization, and there are exceptions).

Anyway, recently I purchased a new pair of black shoes, which came with these new, round, shiny, laces. They look very elegant. Prettier than the flat cotton laces I’m used to.

But they constantly and repeatedly untie themselves. A lot. When I’m at the office, sitting in front of a computer, it doesn’t really matter. But whenever I’m walking outside, I have to constantly stop and retire my shoes. Most of my friends have already promised to get me a pair of shoelaces for my birthday, which means I really have to go and buy a pair myself before then.

This is becoming more and more annoying. No matter how hard I tie them, they become loose nearly straight away, and untie soon afterwards. And I do know how to tie shoes. I’ve been doing it quite successfully for years and years.

But hey, now I found confirmation that the problem is indeed with the laces. That’s good. I could now finally force myself to spend the time of searching for a replacement. I don’t care how they look like as long as they do their job, the priorities are very clear (Well, I may draw the line at fluorescentic pink laces, as good as they may be, but you get the drift).

Hat tip to Pratie Place for the link.

Yes, we all know that the British are civilized, cultured, composed, and all that. The epitome of dignity.

So it would take something really serious (sports not included. For some reason nearly everybody tends to act like bloody morons when it comes to sports) to get a large bunch of them so rallied up that they’ll mindlessly run around acting like savages in a complete mass hysteria. Right?

Something as serious as cheap furniture, at least. I mean, a whole new IKEA store was opened. If that’s not worth getting seriously hurt over, I don’t know what is…

I posted this on a certain group/forum, as a part of some discussion too crazy (in a good way) to get into here, a few days ago. This is a "proof" that witches are sweet and funny. Notice that this is about your average fairytale evil witch, no relation no any sort of actual wiccan religion.

Figured I might as well post this here. Very slightly edited to remove personal references or things tied too closely to the discussion on the group.

Warning: This is crazy even compared to my usual level…

Let’s start with the easy one - funny.

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

2 : differing from the ordinary in a suspicious, perplexing, quaint, or eccentric way : PECULIAR — often used as a sentence modifier <funny, things didn’t turn out the way we planned>
3 : involving trickery or deception <told his prisoner not to try anything funny>

Witches differ from the ordinary in suspicious, perplexing, quaint and eccentric ways. Surely you’d agree, no? And involving trickery and deception is certainly the modus operandi for any self-respecting witch. And let me tell you, among those who respect any witch, there’s certainly herself.

Ergo, witches are funny. I really can’t see how you could put up any valid argument against it.

Now let’s go to the more complex bit, proving witches are sweet. Please try and follow.

First, the easiest bit, witches notoriously have a sweet tooth. They are known for their attraction to all sweet food morsels, including cakes, cookies, and everything that would contain copious amount of chocolate. They eat more of those than is healthy, and the high blood glucose level is in large part responsible for the tell-tale of the trade, the large ugly warts. Every witch has those, but they are not caused by evil (Evil has no dermatological effects by itself), but by the endocrinical imbalance.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking "Aha! But I know many people who eat too much candy, and yet were I to drink their blood it would be salty, not sweet! So you must be mistaken!". But no, you would be wrong. Let me explain:

Witches try to avoid water. It is a well known fact, established by several well-published experiments (some may even be detailed in your collection of fairytales), that witches might melt if exposed to a sufficient amount of water. So far it’s quite simple, but you must be wondering what does that have to do with being sweet, right?

Well, this involves a little bit of basic chemistry. I’m certain you’re familiar with the concept of osmosis. As you well know, osmosis is the process in which, if I’d oversimplify, a solvent may pass through a membrane when on one side the solvent is present with a higher concentration of solute. Translated: If you’d add salt to a witch’s blood, at some point the salt concentration will be high enough that water from the air (and the air is full of water vapour) will be pushed by the osmotic pressure into the witch. The witch’s skin, and blood, will be exposed to more and more water.
And as I mentioned, we all know what happened to a moist witch. Not a pretty sight, let me tell you.

So while empirical data about exact dietary habits of witches is minimal, we can safely assume witches try to eat as little salt as possible. So the blood of an average witch, if drank, will not be salty.

But it will also not be plain bland. All this sugar we talked about, remember?

The end result is clear. Theory concludes that witches must be sweet.
Any other option doesn’t make much theoretical sense, and this model will be adhered to unless some contrary experimental data could be provided. And even if the data is contrary, which it’s probably isn’t, the witches are reluctant to share, and we’re forced to stay with the existing theory.

So witches in general are sweet and funny. QED (That, for everyone who was forced to write this during planar geometry lessons at school and have no idea why, is Quod Erat Demonstrandum in Latin, and very roughly mean "what we wanted to prove". Just FYI).

So there you have it.

Timing is everything, as they say. Just after I go ahead and post about the suicide rate statistics, and how the suicide rate is relatively low here, someone I know go ahead and kills himself…

This guy was the manager of a small company we (the company I work for) worked with on quite a number of projects. He was on good relations with my boss. I met him myself a few times when working on some projects.

He was a nice person, professional, easy to work with.

Last week he came to work in the morning, complete a few things, did a few meetings, then at around midday he left, went home, and hang himself…

His company was doing fine, business was good. According to rumours at the funeral (my boss went) he was depressive, and had a few bouts of rage and depression in the past.

A waste…

Instead of going and buying new laces to replace those annoying round laces that won’t stay tied, I decided to try and search a bit.

This guy has an entire site devoted to shoelaces, with various lacing types, and knots types.
I checked his "Ian’s Secure Knot", and it actually works! Very little extra work over the regular knots I use, but this one hold my new laces tied, even when I walk with them quite a bit. Drastic improvement.

A really amusing article about questions to ask after a complicated math lecture, to give the impression you can ask a serious question despite the fact that you really didn’t understand anything.

Surely a useful knowledge to have…

It’s relatively old (1983), but I think some of the questions are actually usable.  ;-)

Hat tip to Foreign Dispatches.

In the long line of Only-In-America (TM) stories, a pupil sues his math teacher and school for giving him too much homework for the summer.

Apparently the calculus homework really ruined all the fun the poor kid had from his vacation… and it’s obvious the school should not be able to assign homework for non-schooldays, no?

Stupid kid (Hey, it’s not libel if it’s true), and stupid legal system that could even entertain this notion… Just IMNSHO.

Hat tip to Overlawyered (which is one of the most aptly named websites out there, you’ll have to admit).

I mean, sure, wanting to be popular and remembered for ever and ever (Like Ozymandias, for example) is a common human trait. I wouldn’t get riled over someone who does something to help make himself remembered, and gain a name for himself.

But to create a method to monitor your popularity, and have anyone who express interest in you know how popular you are, after you’ve bitten the bullet ?! That’s crazy…

And to create it as a closed technological solution that rely on outside services, without forming any legal contract with those service, that’s just plain stupid.

Enter the Ego Machine:

Sullivan said he wanted to create an urn that was visually interesting, allowed some user interactivity and referenced the physical body. He decided that his remains will be integrated into a computer processor. A virtual agent running on the computer that contains his ashes will scour the web for mentions of his name. As the mentions increase, an on-screen image of Sullivan will morph into an image of his younger self. But if the mentions decline, Sullivan’s image will age, deteriorate and eventually fade away.

Yikes!

So I do very much hope this will remain just an art exhibit, but for some reason I’m sure there are people out there who would take this too seriously…

Whatever complaints I may have about traffic density and the prevalence of traffic jams, which are usually big and highly annoying problems, none of it is relevant at around 03:00 (That’s AM).
Just drove back home after meeting with a friend, and all the roads were totally free. There were a few cars here and there, but they were an exception.

These are the only times when I can come close to realizing why some people think driving is fun.

I can safely conclude that I think driving conditions would be much improved if far fewer driver’s licenses were issued, just as long as I was in the limited group that got them…

I was working at the office, and my playlist reached a track by Aimee Mann. While it was playing one of my colleagues came to me asking who is the singer.
I told him it was Aimee Mann, and to my surprise he said he never heard of her.
Which was nothing compared to my surprise at his next statement… "She sounds just like… what was her name… Shania". Shania Twain, as it turned out after I asked him.

Shania Twain ?!  Aimee Mann sounds like Shania Twain ?! WTF ?!

This guy loves loud music. I think that probably his ears are damaged and have stopped functioning properly… There can’t really be any other explanation, can there?

P.S. Just in case anyone cares, I like both of them, and have most/all of their CDs. Both Aimee Mann’s and Shania Twain’s. And yes, originals, legally bought. If someone would have pointed a gun to my head and forced me to give up ever listening to one of them ever again, I’ll say goodbye to Shania, but I won’t be very happy about it.

All sorts of people arrive through the search engines (Mostly Yahoo! and Google, with very few hits from MSN and AOL, and a negligible amount from Jeeves, if anyone is interested in the statistics) looking for various things.

Some, surprisingly enough, actually find them here, despite the relative rarity of posts I have here. Some, on the other hand, do not… These are the latest ones worth mentioning (Yes, this does mean there are ones who are not, or at least not enough):

tsunma
I have a post dedicated to this, but so many people come looking for tsunma (why? why?), that I’ll mention it again. The word you are looking for is very probably tsunami. Unless you’re Ms. Tsunma who is doing ego surfing, in which case I’m sorry to tell you that I haven’t written anything about you so far, and very probably won’t in the future. Nothing personal, quite the opposite, I just don’t know you or anything about you at all.

rubber girl india
I considered adding her in here, it was very tempting, but I decided I’m not flexible enough. You may want to try in places located in, you know, India…

rockport shoelaces
Got a few of those. Another proof that those things are a problem. I even posted a link to a possible solution, so I hope everyone found what they wanted. A pity they needed to find it here instead of the official Rockport website, which doesn’t mention any problem with their shoelaces.

aunty showing sex parts
Not around here she isn’t!
I do have an aunt, but she isn’t featured on this blog, and she doesn’t show her sex parts. Not to me anyway. And I’m very grateful for it, too.
Also, may I recommend trying to find sex parts of someone who is not your aunt? It would be a lot more legal in most places. Seriously.

underground hacks for security alarm keypads
And I’m supposed to just publish those on an Internet-accessible weblog?! Are you nuts?! The police have computers too, you know. Not that they know what to do with them, but they might someday, and there’s no reason to draw them here.
Now, for the right price, I may just be able to arrange something. Contact me in private. If the price is right enough, I may even not pass your message to the aforementioned police…

mozilla thunderbird not sent shut down started
Are you talking about a computer running Windows? Well, sorry to disappoint you, but all running applications are notified when you try to shut down. Really. This does include Thunderbird…
If your version of Thunderbird ignores the close notifications then you must be doing something wrong. Try upgrading to the latest version. It works. And I never had a problem with it on shutdowns.

goverment home based buiness
Government is not a home-based business. Government tend to be quite large, and are usually run from very large and sprawling complexes of office buildings, not homes.
Unless you’re in a dictatorship, you can run those from home.
As a dictator, you can even allow yourself not to spell government and business properly, and none of your subjects will complain. That’s a big big plus for you.
On the other hand, if you’re really looking to start your own government home based business, in your own little country, you may start by getting a country. The rest will just tend to follow. The economic advisers, to help you run it like a good business, can come later. Priorities are important.

yahoo desktop search hebrew support
That’s an easy one. Yahoo! desktop search no Hebrew support.

yahoo mail problem
I think this is too technical for me, with too many details. Very hard to know which of them are important and relevant to the problem you describe.

greensleeves lyrics lorena mckennitt
It’s Loreena McKennitt, not Lorena. Spelling it right may make it much easier to locate lyrics. Try it sometime. Otherwise you will only find lyric sites that can’t spell authors names, and we can all guess how well they will spell the lyrics themselves…
In any case, this isn’t her song. It’s an old song. Try to run a search for "lyrics greensleeves". You’ll find lots of results. Many of them good. Promise.

Yaron Davidson
Yep, people were searching for me, by my name. Two of them. Yippee!

 
• Were they my old friends, deciding to see if one of their friends have a web presence (I only told two about this blog, one apparently doesn’t quite know what a blog is and so paid no attention, the other probably doesn’t have the time to come visit too much, not that I can blame them as it’s not that interesting here) ? Nope, none of those.

 
• Were they random strangers looking for someone else by the same name? Nope.

 
• Where they nice friendly people I met on-line who want to know some more about they guy they’re chatting with? Well, almost… Of the large group of people who recently came to know me on a certain group/forum, the two that came here looking for me are exactly the two who apparently really didn’t like me. Not the curios ones, not the actively friendly ones (and of course not the silent masses). Only those I managed to pissed off.

Tells you something about people, no?
Here’s an added fact, then: Guess among the people of this group, who did I went to do on-line searching for (before, and so independently of, seeing those referrer logs) ? Yep, you guessed right… An interesting psychological insight… People only take the time to look for info about people who annoyed them, or people they think they annoyed. Where everything is nice and cosy, we’re all (For the sake of this argument, assume I’m human enough to be included under the "people" category) content with leaving well enough alone… Lazy buggers the lot us.

Someone in the US ran a bogus contests. There was a lawsuit. The jury wanted to to award $1 million USD, and split it between the 1,800 contestants. So far so good.

Then someone made a mistake, and wrote the decision in a way that indicates each of the contestants is to receive $1 million USD, not just their relative part. Well, mistakes happen, but luckily everything has to be reviewed, so surely some clerk or the judge will catch it, right?

Wrong. The judge apparently didn’t think a punishment of  $1.8 billion USD was anything extraordinary, the trial was concluded successfully, and the jury were released.

And since due process is… due, instead of saying oops and fixing it, there has to be an official motion and considerations.
I almost wish the judge would decide to let the jury decision stand, just to see how it will go…

Apparently the all civilized Connery is only so dignified when he get assigned a dignified role to play in a movie. When it comes to taking care of his house, and relation with his neighbours, Connery is quite different.

Shocking, just shocking. Who could have imagined that an actor would have a different temperament than the characters he usually portrays ?! How can it be?!

What strikes me most odd here is that he certainly have more than enough money to take better care of his property. He doesn’t have to live in a place which is rat infested, for crying out loud. So what gives?
Being obnoxious I can get, liking loud noise I can get, liking bad smells I can get, but liking rats for company??

The lead character (or the second lead, depends on who you ask) in the series JAG, Sarah MacKenzie (played by the excellent actress Catherine Bell), is fluent in many languages, including supposedly Hebrew.

In the recent episode "Straits of Malacca", when searching for information on a captured pirate, one of the characters gets information from a contact in Israel. But the information is in Hebrew. He asks Mac how is her Hebrew, to which she answers "Not as good as my Farsi" (The character, and the actress, speaks very fluent Farsi), but that she can handle it.

She then stands in front of a computer screen, and with a look of concentration starts to translate the information contained in the email about the pirate.

They showed the computer screen, and the email. And it wasn’t even close to the alleged content.

First of all, the text was reversed, in a LTR direction instead of the Hebrew RTL one. So when I tried reading it, it took more more time than it took her to "translate" it. She must be a very fast reader. To illustrate, try reading the following:

noitcerid gnorw eht ni si ecnetnes siht

Fun, right? Very legible.

Second, it wasn’t a personal dossier, it was a news bulletin, copied from the website of the Israeli government.

And it doesn’t talk about a pirate. It is an announcement that the site of the Ministry of Health has opened a new on-line forum on paediatric preventive medicine. The text on the bulletin, and in the email shown on screen on the show, talks about childcare: vaccines, nutrition, and so on.

I do have to hand it to her, Catherine Bell is a very good actress. The translation scene looked very convincing. She made all the right facial expressions and gestures of someone reading a text in a foreign language.
Of course, not being able to actually read what’s on the screen, she probably didn’t find it harder than any other acting chore. Someone who can read Hebrew would have had an hell of a time trying to avoid bursting out in laughter.

And I really don’t get it. JAG has a huge amount of viewers, both in the US and worldwide. They know some of them can actually read Hebrew. They went to the effort of finding text in actual Hebrew letters, but not of getting relevant text.
I’m not sure how they did it. Did they just found someone, told him "Go find a text, any text, in Hebrew" and he went and found something? Decided that the likeliest place is the government’s website, and picked the first news link there?
If the episode was shot on Jan 4th (the date in the news bulletin, which is also visible in the email message on the show), it could be. But it’s just dumb. It’s too dangerous to show random real text. If you don’t care that the text is totally unrelated, it’s safer to make a random jumble of letters.

But why have unrelated text? It seems very unlikely that they couldn’t find anyone who can read and write Hebrew. Hebrew speaking people are not that rare. How much would someone possibly charge to write an actual page of text that looks like the beginning of a personal dossier? Heck, they can turn to some fan of the show in Israel, and have it done for the price of a name in the credits.

Hey, DPB :  I’d do it myself if you need any Hebrew text for future episodes. No problems. Seriously.
If you don’t like me, I can find other people here who will.

Putting a not-relevant text, and letting a main character treat it as something else, looks very ridiculous and unprofessional. I don’t like to use words like pathetic, but, well, if it quacks like a duck… And if the text was indeed picked without any screening (which must be true, since why use it if you have someone capable of screening it?) that’s just poor judgement. You might have gotten a text about anything. That’s very very risky. For a new low-budget home indie film, that would have been understandable. But for a very serious, successful, and high-profile series?!