Most annoying phrase known to man?
I have been wasting time, those precious minutes of my life that will never return, by eliminating the odious phrase "known to man" from Wikipedia articles. It is satisfying, in much the same way as...
View ArticleProduct types in Java
Recently I wanted a Java function that would return two Person objects. Java functions return only a single value. I could, of course, make a class that encapsulates two Persons: class Persons2 {...
View Article"Known to Man" and the advent of the space aliens
Last week I wrote about how I was systematically changing the phrase "known to man" to just "known" in Wikipedia articles. Two people so far have written to warn me that I would regret this once the...
View ArticleBipartite matching and same-sex marriage
My use of the identifiers husband and wife in Thursday's example code should not be taken as any sort of political statement against same-sex marriage. The function was written as part of a program to...
View ArticleNo flimping
Advance disclaimer: I am not a linguist, have never studied linguistics, and am sure to get some of the details wrong in this article. Caveat lector. There is a standard example in linguistics that is...
View ArticlePeriodicity
The number of crank dissertations dealing with the effects of sunspots on political and economic events peaks every eleven years.
View ArticleA child is bitten by a dog every 0.07 seconds...
I read in the newspaper today that letter carriers were bitten by dogs 3,000 times last year. (Curiously, this is not a round number; it is exact.) The article then continued: "children ... are 900...
View Article
