Sometime ago, my manager asked me to put together a plan to validate a very complex system of software, so I requested a specification from the development team. After all, what was I supposed to test unless there was some document of what the system was required to do? But…
Years ago, just before moving to India for a few months, my parents gave us a travel book on India. It was chock-full of beautiful pictures of what might be the most colorful country on the planet. When we got there we discovered the same beauty illustrated by the book,…
When my wife and I celebrated our anniversary, we decided to spend a couple of nights at a bed and breakfast. The B&B had the option of spending a little extra money to get a room with a hot tub. The idea of a hot tub sounded nice so we…
Almost 8 years ago, Jon Oliver on the Daily Show decided to explore whether a new particle collider was going to destroy the earth as we know it. While the physicist working with the collider stated that there was no chance this would cause such a problem. However, a science teacher…
We all remember with fascination playing with paints as kids and the joy mixing them together creating new colors. The exciting discovery of a new purple from a brilliant red and a calm blue drove us to mix more and more colors together until we had the brilliant idea to…
“Look, she’s been proven to be a liar in so many different ways. This is just another lie,” – Donald Trump It’s hard to believe anyone found this statement credible from a man who clearly didn’t care for whether or not his statements were true – he made them for…
A couple weeks ago, I went for a longer run and decided to try a new technique: run and walk. The idea is to run for a while, but periodically walk to save energy for further in the run. Normally, I like to run the whole time because other wise…
In a probably apocryphal story, an AI research team tried to train a computer to detect a tank among a forest. They showed it 50 tanks in a forest so it could learn what a tank looked like and showed it 50 forests with no tank so it could learn…
Several years ago, we got together with some friends to teach them to play “The Settlers Of Catan”. We’d never tried using the recommended setup from the rule book so we gave that a go expecting that it would put us all in an equally good spot. The starting positions…
Jurgis immigrated to the US from Lithuania. After marrying the girl of his dreams, he finds a good job and the family buys a house. Of course, his job is in a meat-packing plant where apparently people sometimes fall into the sausage maker which doesn’t stop running, but it pays…