The Weekly Weird - 2017-02-17
- It's too late now but I hope you didn't get an even number of flowers this Valentine's day.
- Imagine how many more people would be interested in P vs NP if the Traveling Salesman Problem was phrased as a 24,727 stop pub crawl.
- Moore's law: dead as a doornail.
- Related: what the @#$% is a doornail?.
- Shall I compare thee to a shitgibbon?
- From the boy-that-headline-took-a-turn department: How Secure Is The Virtual Blowjob Marketplace?
- I think one reason I took up computers instead of more physical sciences is that it's pretty hard to kill someone with bad code (yes, not impossible, I know). If I had taken up, say, Chemistry instead I'm sure the headline "How a student unintentionally made an explosive" would have been written about me in time. How bad is TATP? Well Derek Lowe wouldn't work with it which is really all you need to know. I want to call out this bit especially (emph mine):
"...having realised what had happened, the graduate student immediately took the action needed to mitigate a potentially dangerous situation, rather than delaying or, worse, trying to cover it up. This was highly responsible — the most important thing done — and shows the value of investing in developing and fostering a culture in which colleagues recognise errors and misjudgements, and they are supported to report near misses."
- Seven Guidelines for Writing Worthy Works of Non-Fiction.