“When a person is mystified by a good magic trick it is because he can’t figure out how the magician did it. When a physicist is mystified by an unexpected observation it is because he can’t figure out how the universe did it.
“The big difference, of course, is that the universe plays fair.”
— Martin Gardner, Science: Good, Bad, and BogusDear Yahoo!Finance editors
The following sentence in Laura Rowley’s article on the student loan crisis should have been caught and fixed:
Indebted grads are also less likely to go to graduate school, delay getting married, having children and saving for retirement.
Sadly, I suspect that this is the “fix”, and the original was clearly written in English.
Bad captcha
Text-based captchas have gone from distorted words to random strings that once appeared somewhere online, often distorted to the point that multiple letters overlap completely. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to hit the “give me another one” button on popular systems, because the first several choices were impossible.
Today’s new low: “ryōhei,”. I haven’t tried to type this in Windows recently, but on a Mac, it can’t be done from the standard US English keyboard. You either have to look “ō” up in the Character Viewer, or switch to the Extended keyboard definition and remember that you compose it with Alt-A.
Stone Clouds still not dead!
Once again, WoW gets the blame, but Eric has updated the site for the first time since July to say that he’s on the last page of the first issue.
Dear Developer,
When you send me a SQL statement that updates a 600,000-record table based on a join to a 900,000-record table, please make sure there are indexes involved. Also, please don’t test on a toy database.
Send help!
The invading forces haven’t reached my cube yet, but my folding screens and cardboard roof can’t hold them off forever!
(now, this one can invade any time…)
Mireille, Kirika, and... Sam Raimi?
Live-action adaptation of Noir in the works. I have mixed feelings about this, but as long as they don’t use that damn song, I’ll give it a shot.
Know your target audience...
Just spotted on Amazon: Kaleido Star: Season Two with Bonus OVA
Nice to see a box set with the OVA, but that’s not the fun part. This is:
Frequently bought with…
Loaded for bear,
…or at least little monsters. Earlier predictions for rain tonight have changed, and while it will cool down, I expect a significant number of trick-or-treaters and their attractive young mothers, so my 48-quart cooler is ready for action.
(yes, this is about forty pounds of candy; I give it out in roughly half-pound handfuls)
[8pm update: all gone]
