R_Edward

I'm exactly the same way. I have a weekly gig that occasionally gets recorded and thrown up on the web. I hate watching the video, because whenever I do, all I hear are my own mistakes. People tell me it sounded great, and I think, "Sure, to someone with no musical training, maybe."

It never occurs to me to realize that "someone with no musical training" describes easily 80% of the audience. Maybe more.

It may or may not have been in customary informal usage for that long [citation needed], but it is still considered incorrect in strict, rigorous, formal usage. (Yes, this is on the cusp of changing, but for now, it's still true.) In formal usage, pronouns agree in gender and in number with their antecedents.

I was wondering: if it starves the fuel of oxygen, it stops the fuel from burning, even if it's still hot, yes? So if it could scale from frying-pan-level to house-level, at the very least, couldn't it be used to suppress the fire, the smoke production, and the further weakening of the structure, to allow a squad to search and rescue more safely? Then when you turn off the sound, maybe the material has cooled below the reignition point, but even if it hasn't, at that point you can fight the fire traditionally.

17 years ago, I worked for a hearing aid manufacturer. The common terms in use there were BTE and ITE, for "behind the ear" and "in the ear." Frankly, I thought the initialisms were poorly conceived. ITE is three syllables, same as "in the ear," and less meaningful for the uninitiated. BTE only saves you one syllable, again at the cost of meaningfulness. But either which way, your terminology is both understandable and correct.

Off-topic: While I was there, they asked employees to submit ideas for a new hearing aid marketing slogan, with the incentive of a free vacation to Vegas going to the person who submitted the one they used. For some reason, I did not win the vacation with my suggestion: "Stick It In Your Ear!"

I didn't realize there were non-outlets there. The prices are strange--I've bought a handful of items, and they were all stickered at or below nearby retail, but when they rang them up, the actual price was even lower. While I love to get a deal, I prefer to know what the deal is before I hit the register. Anyway, that should be a good location, easy access from three interstates and a couple major trunk highways, but then, that's where Cedarvale was, and that died a slow painful death too.

My town just built a "Premium Outlet Mall." I was dubious of the wisdom of that plan, but I just visited it last weekend, and it seems to be pretty popular, even with the Mall of America just minutes away, and with Internet shopping available at the swipe of a smartphone or the click of a mouse. It's not an indoor mall, which I also find curious, here in the Land of 10,000 Snows, but it does have a free indoor parking garage just across the street. The projections are that the outlet mall is going to siphon off about 4% of the take this holiday season. (The article I read was pretty vague as to what size pie that was 4% of, to my chagrin.)

Fascinating. I had known for some time that oak trees will commingle their roots, forming an oak internet. In good times, this helps smaller trees become better established through resource-sharing with mature trees. Unfortunately, the network doesn't just pass beneficial resources; it also passes the oak wilt pathogen, so if one oak tree gets the wilt, it's a pretty good bet that all the others in the immediate vicinity will get it too.

On my first day at one job, HR called me into a conference room to review my compensation package and everything. The HR rep wrote a number on a Post-It and handed it to me, saying, "This is your salary. Here at BigCo we hold salary in confidence between you and the company. In other words, please do not discuss this number with any of your co-workers." I responded, "Don't worry, ma'am. I'm just as ashamed of that small number as you are." [low 6 figures, 28 years experience, Upper Midwest]

The stuff that means the most to me would look like junk to anyone else: an origami crane, inexpertly folded; a used sock with buttons sewn on it; a styrofoam heart with tissue paper and googly eyes glued to it; a few really bad pencil drawings... Handmade by my children, and given to me with love. I'll never part with them.

>Four people need to cross a rickety bridge at night. Unfortunately, they have only one torch and the bridge is too dangerous to cross without one. The bridge is only strong enough to support two people at a time. Not all people take the same time to cross the bridge. Times for each person: 1 min, 2 mins, 7 mins and 10 mins. What is the shortest time needed for all four of them to cross the bridge?<

17 minutes, if you can stipulate that at the beginning of the problem, the 10 minute and 7 minute people are on opposite sides of the bridge, each paired with one of the other two guys.

18 minutes, if they must all start on the same side of the bridge, but there is no requirement for all of them to end up on the opposite side.

This also assumes that person who can cross the bridge in as little as one minute has no problem slowing down to accommodate someone else's slower pace; otherwise there's no real point to trying to share the torch.

Although, if one's interest level were continuously poked into a particular memory location every time it changed, you might find that if you peeked when it piqued you would find that it also peaked.

On an unrelated note, I was writing an article for a travel magazine, and found a very well-conceived online database of recommended places to visit. Sadly, I couldn't use it in my article, because I couldn't figure out how to cite the sight site.

Plus, do those 50% of the people tend to get lost going from place to place in their daily lives? And do members of the other 50% have a need to be able to precisely locate any of those people without maps, addresses, or street names?

I humbly submit that this is a very nice solution in desperate and ultimately fruitless search for a problem.

Do you mean to tell me that those crates of my dad's 78 rpm records sitting in my basement might actually be worth something? I was thinking about playing them on a 33.3 rpm turntable into my PC, then using Audacity to speed them up to 78, just to be able to hear the music again, and by association, remember my dad. Geeze, there must be at least a hundred of 'em down there, at least!

Or at least Dr. Emmet Brown.

Hmmmmm... I have a knee-jerk reaction to initiatives with names like "Everyone can <fill in the blank>." Everyone may benefit from being exposed to the rudiments of whatever activity you're promoting, but it is clearly, objectively, undeniably the case that no, not everyone can program, or dance, or sing, or build a curio cabinet for any personally or professionally meaningful definition of the term.

Now, it is certainly true that any fool can use a computer... Many do! But using one--or even learning by rote how to craft a Hello World program--is a far cry from being able to look at a problem and mentally break it down into computational steps, then build the program up from those steps. Until you get to the point where you're thinking computationally, I'm not convinced you can really call whatever it is your doing "programming."

Maybe I just need to adjust the onion on my belt and go yell at a cloud or two.