> If you are skipping a step in the procedure, aren't you also possibly going to skip writing a step down?
Exactly, so when she reviewed the notebook, she caught the error.
Even if she made a slip in the notebook, merely reviewing it helps jog the memory to revisit and replay what she did in the lab. It's the power of touchstones.
> What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?
The notebook doesn't always have to operate as a log. It can also operate as a plan of action.
Wouldn't attention to getenv() calls yield more benefit? Such calls are where input typically isn't parsed--because parsing is "hard"--becoming targets for exploit.
The present fix is to sanitize user input. Does it cover all cases?
EWD 1036: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)
“My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent’: the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.”
> Good textbooks have gone through expert reviews and multiple iterations of improvement.
That's an assumption increasingly false, unfortunately. The spirit of collegiality has been beaten back.
Far better to hone logical skills that sift between fact and error than to rely on social reputation. Ironically we're discussing a text designed to do exactly that.
The savvy LLM user already knows to be on the lookout for falsehood, if not bad pedagogy. That's a benefit, not a drawback of LLMs.
The logical skills to evaluate the output of a LLM are the same skills brought to bear reading any book. What makes you trust this textbook then? Textbooks are not infallible.
re: Chapter 15.8 on the so-called pigeonhole principle
Following Dijkstra’s EWD1094, here’s a way to solve the hairs-on-heads problem eschewing the language of pigeonholes and employing the fact that the mean is at most the maximum of a non-empty bag of numbers.
We are given that Boston has 500,000 non-bald people. The human head has at most 200,000 hairs. Show that there must be at least 3 people in Boston who have the same number of hairs on their head.
Each non-bald Bostonian must have a hair count between 1 and 200,000. The average number of such people per hair count is 500,000 / 200,000 = 2.5. The maximum is at least that; moreover, it must be a round number. So the maximum >= 3. QED.
A grid with 19 columns is enough. Every column at worst has all 3 colors, one of them used twice. Once we fix that one color, there are C(4,2)=6 ways of filling out the rest of the entries. Since there are 3 colors, there are exactly 6*3=18 worst possible columns. With 19 columns a repetition is guaranteed, yielding the desired rectangle.
For fun, try strengthening the result to a square.
No, I actually mean what I wrote: Not everything that counts can be counted. Take the happiness produced by a piece of software. Can we put a number on it?
Contrast Lord Kelvin: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in
numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the
stage of science.”
And also this doozy writ large in our lives: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Spitballing here: more land in the US means lower cost to stock cars in dealerships. Also makes it easier to do an impulse purchase with all the easy financing available, compared to the European scenario of waiting for delivery (and possibly changing one's mind).
> The fear of a legacy (or your ancestors or your lineage) being forgotten is very, very real.
Temple Grandin, decorated autist and celibate, once yearned wistfully about how to pass on the knowledge she has gained over her lifetime.
And who can forget:
“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” - Roy, Blade Runner (1982)
To answer obliquely: I observe some men to rage for vengeance at being cuckolded. Subsequently, in an episode of repeat impotence, the bullets rebound on the shooters.
Example: the father may take drugs to relieve the pain. Said father may invite the child to join him, setting up the child for life.