Saturday, February 23, 2013

C&EN

I'm an ACS member, and I get weekly copies of C&EN that I read on my phone during my commute.  I greatly preferred reading them in paper form, but times change and we sometimes have to change with them, albeit under duress.

When I read the articles on my phone, using their terrible app for android, the pictures' alternate text (at least that's what I assume it is) shows up below the picture.  Way back when, in the early days of the internet, the alternate text was to be used to describe a picture if it wouldn't load, or some other issue arose.  Almost immediately it got used for other purposes, or completely ignored.  In some cases the alternate text is used to add to the image (i.e. in XKCD an additional joke or comment is displayed in the alternate text), or in some cases it is a remnant of the description of the image left by the image providing company.

Typically I could give a shit about that sort of thing but this one showed up a few weeks back

with the text:  "beaker full of cash"

I realize I'm a picky bastard, and it makes sense that the person working at the photography website that presumable housed this stock image may or may not know the difference between a beaker and a flask, but I fully expect a trade journal that would like to think of itself as one of the preeminent in the world, in the field of chemistry no less, would proofread some of their shit a little better.