The UK’s Export Control Office (“ECO”) has just released a video on export control that has the tenor and excitement of certain videos they used to show us in high school health class on those touchy subjects of serious concern, and you all know which ones I mean. I think they even hired the same narrator and just told him to say al-you-men-i-um instead of allume-i-num.
Slam down a double espresso and then click play to watch:
For those in the U.K. that the video doesn’t put to sleep, it might scare them into not ever exporting anything again. It doesn’t clearly delineate what can and can’t be exported and then promises jail time for mistakes, solemnly intoning the old canard that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” (Well, actually it is, at least in the United States. A criminal prosecution for export violations requires that the defendant have at least some knowledge that the export was illegal or improper.)
My absolutely favorite part comes near the end where the soporific narrator intones:
What the ECO does, and the licensing process, is, of course, more complicated than a short video like this can ever hope to explain.
Translation: this video was produced in order to spend some extra funds that were lying around the agency but that’s not something we could admit, at least until the very end of the video where there was a very good chance that you had already decided to watch something much more interesting, like, you know, the one of that dachshund with the machine that throws tennis balls for him.
If you weren’t able to make it through the ECO video, but are still dying to know what was in it, the ECO helpfully provides a transcript here.
Considering the way the US Government has inflicted the ITAR on the world and how intrusive the ITAR is into normal business I thought you were a bit hard on the POMS (Ausie term for persons from the UK). While bemoaning the fact that we get no choice in complying with the ITAR it sometimes beggars belief that it can be so parochial. It would be funny if wasn’t so serious about itself.
I think you will find that the the US is one of the very few countries in the world that calls it aluminum. The rest of the world calls it aluminium.
Wikopedia has: “Most countries spell aluminium with an i before -um. In the United States, the spelling aluminium is largely unknown, and the spelling aluminum predominates. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary prefers aluminum, whereas the Australian Macquarie Dictionary prefers aluminium.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) adopted aluminium as the standard international name for the element in 1990, but three years later recognized aluminum as an acceptable variant. Hence their periodic table includes both, but places aluminium first in alphabetical order. IUPAC officially prefers the use of aluminium in its internal publications, although several IUPAC publications use the spelling aluminum.
I know that the American “aluminum” is in the minority and wasn’t complaining about “aluminium,” just making the point that it was just the same narrator from those helpful “educational” high school videos but with a British accent. Of course, until we all agree on how to say “schedule,” we certainly can’t hope for any uniformity on alumin(i)um! 🙂
Forget the UK’s export video, did everyone go and check out Jerry and his tennis ball machine? Now, that is impressive. (And highly in need of an export license should “it” decide to go abroad, by the way).
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