In a former job, I developed “software” (I clicked together some LabVIEW…) for custom designed scientific experiments, which many other researchers (mostly PhD students) would use. Wrote detailed SOPs for their usage, because everything was wonky and in constant evolution, and in some circumstances, data generated could be wrong. So I put a toggle switch with some cryptic acronym on the panel which was told to be flipped in the SOP when users reached the part where following instructions was really critical. The toggle switch did nothing but to log time and date and what user was logged in. When discussing weird data later on, first thing I did was to check whether that log existed, and if not heavily scrutinized the data with respect to errors that could be induced by not following the SOP.

… and then having carpet everywhere. Sometimes even kitchen and bathroom.

And a “perambulator” is a kid stroller. It was an enlightening moment when I first came across that word in Neil Stephenson’s “Seveneves”, delved into its etymology and then realised why my British friend called the stroller a “pram”. This is just a contracted form of perambulator.

It did not occur to me that there’s actually also a verb for it, so thank you for pointing that out! I love it, and I will use it henceforth!

I guess every religion old enough has such kind of loopholes. I know from Roman Catholic that there can be made up so many exceptions that the 40 days of lent before Easter books down to a few days of actually fasting. No lent if you’re travelling (commute to work counts), no lent if you have guests, and of course no lent if you are a guest somewhere else. And Sunday is exempt from lent anyways.

The permit requirement does not apply to kitchen knives, does it? Been some time, but I travelled to Tokio quite frequently for work, and always made it a point to go to kappabashi and get a nice cooking knife, some of the longer than 20 cm.

I guess it shows how out of touch (old) I am that it’s completely bewildering to me that there could be people who do not understand folders … on a computer. Phones, tablets, yeah, I get that, those actively make it harder and harder to access the folder structure. But computers?

Scientist here, a lot of my job is writing texts with references to other literature of the field, or reviewing such texts (or PowerPoints). Main screen has the document open, the other is actually in portrait format and has gazillions of open pdfs on it that are relevant to whatever I’m working on. I had to get this setup for working from home because productivity dropped immensely with only one screen.

This so much. I have a three days a week home Office deal, and I did Not, We, Fr for some time and it sucked. Monday I just could not find a proper start for the workday, which in the end translated to doing more work in the evening. Same on fridays, where I just did not find a proper cut to end the work day. So bad it even went into Saturday mornings. Now I do Tu-Th as home Office days, which works amazingly.

That’s not how thermodynamics work. It’s either transferring heat more efficiently, or not. But always the same, in both directions.

I’m pretty sure my Dad’s cat is really a glutton.

I am thoroughly confused, isn’t “Dudette” a term that’s used for female Dudes? Or “her Dudeness” if you aren’t into that whole brevity thing.

To be really inclusive, I would also use the term for female dogs, like, “Hey, dogs and…”. Yeah, no,.sorry, I’ll show myself out.

“This is some big shot of the football team. He’s not a C student. Grade again.”

Source: TA’d at a prestigious west coast Uni with a good football team.

Schnutzeplotzepfnitzekatz!

Guess the language…

Part of my work is to evaluate proposals for research topics and their funding, and as soon as “AI” is mentioned, I’m already annoyed. In the vast majority of cases, justifiably so. It’s a buzzword to make things sound cutting edge and very rarely carries any meaning or actually adds anything to the research proposal. A few years ago the buzzword was “machine learning”, and before that “big data”, same story. Those however quickly either went away, or people started to use those properly. With AI, I’m unfortunately not seeing that.

You can buy alcohol at Disney?! With everything being so prude about drinking in public in the US, this completely amazes me.

Or whenever using your credit card online. The pro version would be that it turns off functions successively depending on your BAC. At some point the only unblocked function would be to call a cab to go home.

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

We had quite the discussion at work about this very scene (I am loosely related to OSHA stuff), at some point people might think of deliberately having work “accidents” so the employer has to pay for superior replacement parts. And then have an advantage on the job market because of this. Same could go for sports.

I guess technologically, we are very close, but might need to work on the whole ethics part a bit more?

Having said that, I would not mind some advanced Kiroshis to replace my screwed up eyeballs.

Whenever someone brings up that argument (windmills are ugly), which is quite a controversial topic in the country I live in, I take them to the open pit coal mines of the area. Those are really ugly.

I do understand the argument that the intermittent shadows the rotating blades may cast on residential areas are annoying.