A friend who has a young child in pre-school in Silicon Valley sent me this rhyme they learned recently:
99 little bugs in the code,
99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again,
101 little bugs in the code.
A friend who has a young child in pre-school in Silicon Valley sent me this rhyme they learned recently:
99 little bugs in the code,
99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again,
101 little bugs in the code.
A long time ago I started training to be a maths teacher. I didn’t make it, of course, so this isn’t my fault:
A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot – because players couldn’t understand it.
To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.
But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.
Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.
The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.”
It’s easy to laugh at Ms Farrell. Really easy. But while she must carry her share of the blame for her ignorance, so do we as a society when we laugh and move on rather than trying to change things, if not for Ms Farrell then at least for those coming after her.
I’ve seen origami before that is so complex you can barely see how it’s done. Then there’s this, where even though you can see intermediate steps in their creation, you still can’t believe it’s possible.
Update, via Bill:
I gave blood yesterday. This is something I always struggle with a little, because I’m quite a slow bleeder – something that in general I’m very pleased about – so it can take a while to suck the stuff out of me. That was true yesterday, where after an initial spurt they couldn’t get the blood flowing. The technician had a go at the needle, moving it in and out a little to try and make something happen, then the lead nurse came over and did the same thing. So far so good, but then he started twirling the needle around in my vein. Now in the US the natural response would be “Dude!”, but being fully British again I waited until he asked if I was alright, then said “Fine thanks”
On the radio this morning David Cameron was interviewed about the Tory party’s immigration policy. Among the points made by the interviewer (I forget who) was that limiting immigration as Cameron described was racist. We’re required as a member of the EU to accept any EU citizen (just as British citizens can work anywhere in the EU), and Europeans are predominantly white. Any limitations, therefore, must come from non-EU countries that are predominantly non-white. And that, the argument went, is racist.
It’s a fair point, I guess, but the interviewer seemed to ignore the fact that any immigration policy can be seen to be racist. You are apportioning a scarce resource to people not of your nationality, and to the degree that nationality is a proxy for race, that is arguably racist. But this completely ignores the importance of intent; if a country is trying to control immigration because it doesn’t want any of those horrible {insert group here} coming in then it’s racist however it’s done. In contrast, if you decide that your country is functionally full (public services are overwhelmed, for example) then a policy might be racist (“we’re pretty full, so no more {group}”) but it isn’t automatically so.
For example, I might choose to allow in only the 10,000 most intelligent applicants each year. That might appear racist – intelligence as commonly defined is a function of education, which is more widely available to some than others based in part on nationality – but if the intent is simply to welcome the most ‘profitable’ people it isn’t racist. In fact it’s arguably the opposite, as such a policy arguably lowers the overall status of existing citizens.
What’s the link with the ‘complaining’ of the title? The British are excellent at complaining, almost to the level of a national sport. A reporter making the mistake of skimming the surface appearance of an issue, such as the guy this morning, switches from being a probing investigator to a whiner with a radio show.