Description Calculate the number of toys that land in each bin of a partitioned toy box. Mom and dad have a problem – their child John never puts his toys away when he is finished playing with them. They gave John a rectangular box to put his toys in, but John is rebellious and obeys his parents by simply throwing his toys into the box. All the toys get mixed up, and it is impossible for John to find his favorite toys. John’s parents came up with the following idea. They put cardboard partitions into the box. Even if John keeps throwing his toys into the box, at least toys that get thrown into different bins stay separated. The following diagram shows a top view of an example toy box. For this problem, you are asked to determine how many toys fall into each partition as John throws them into… Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
Randy Newman at the Hollywood Bowl
Great show . . . he’s 74 years old and doesn’t walk so well from the wings to the piano but he can still play, sing, tell stories, and he has a song catalog that few can equal. I put the set list into Spotify and included it here. Read more →
Boil the Ocean
My first thought is that “Don’t boil the ocean” is not very good advice because boiling the ocean is not a use case that anyone actually has. Why advise people not to do something that no one would do anyway? My second thought was: why not boil the ocean? Add some onion, garlic, white wine . . . you might get a really nice cioppino! Serves . . . well, I don’t know how many it would serve, but a lot! Read more →
Life Gets Better After 50?
About 15 years ago, economists made an unexpected finding: the U-shaped happiness curve. Other things being equal – that is, once conditions such as income, employment, health and marriage are factored out of the equation – life satisfaction declines from our early 20s until we hit our 50s. Then it turns around and rises, right through late adulthood. — The Guardian So once you factor out all the things that make life miserable, it turns out older people can be just as happy as anyone else! Read more →
Sources Say . . .
We can never allow our sources to make allegations, contentious statements or vituperative attacks behind a cloak of anonymity. It weakens our credibility and gives the sources an opportunity to benefit at our expense. It is fundamentally unfair to the other party and thus biased. . . . If a source wants to make a vituperative attack on an individual, organisation, company or country he or she must speak on the record. — Reuters Handbook of Journalism Read more →
Tom Apple Adventures
http://onegianthand.com/post/176842041416/tom-apple-adventures Read more →
Competitive Programming: POJ 1905 – Expanding Rods
Description When a thin rod of length L is heated n degrees, it expands to a new length L’=(1+n*C)*L, where C is the coefficient of heat expansion. When a thin rod is mounted on two solid walls and then heated, it expands and takes the shape of a circular segment, the original rod being the chord of the segment. Your task is to compute the distance by which the center of the rod is displaced. Input The input contains multiple lines. Each line of input contains three non-negative numbers: the initial lenth of the rod in millimeters, the temperature change in degrees and the coefficient of heat expansion of the material. Input data guarantee that no rod expands by more than one half of its original length. The last line of input contains three negative numbers and it should not be processed. Output For each line of input, output one… Read more →
The Holy Fire is Now the Forrest Fire
It’s wildfire season here in Southern California . . . The closest fire to us at this time is the Holy Fire, named either for its proximity to the small mountain community of Holy Jim (see map), or because God is purifying us with flame. Jesus returned as a burning bush and inadvertently ignited Trabuco Canyon. A suspect, Forrest Gordon Clark, has been arrested on suspicion of arson. He looks normal. The fire has been renamed from the Holy Fire to the Forrest Fire. 🙂 My wife is in the insurance business. Every summer she gets calls from people living in fire zones wanting to buy a homeowners policy. There’s no concept of guaranteed issue with homeowners insurance like there is with health insurance. — Does your house have a pre-existing condition? — Yes, it’s on fire. — OK, your first month’s premium will be $500,000. Read more →
More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of: Thought Leader
If “thought leader” is a title you can bestow upon yourself, then what is the difference between a thought leader and a crackpot? I am a thought leader, a proponent of unconventional ideas. You, on the other hand, are a crackpot. I am a visionary. I have visions. Sometimes I have them when I’m driving and I have to pull over. It’s a real burden . . . Read more →
First Lines
Newest addition to Lit Quizzes. identify the source and author. Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. Read more →
Math Skills of the Average American
My son was home for a visit this past weekend. After a family dinner at the Irvine Spectrum, we found ourselves in a women’s clothing store with a sale going on: 40% Off All Merchandise + An Additional 10% Off. My son said to me, “Isn’t that just 46 percent off? They probably want it to sound like you’re getting 50 percent off.” “You can’t underestimate the math skills of the average American,” I said. Right on cue, a woman said to her husband, “Why don’t they just say 50 percent off?” “Exactly,” he said. Read more →
Was Jim Acosta’s Life in Danger?
It doesn’t look that way to me: Taking selfies with Trump supporters in Tampa. Really enjoyed talking to some of the folks at the rally and hearing their concerns. As I told many of them.. we can’t do the news just for the Republicans and Trump supporters. We have to do the news for all Americans. pic.twitter.com/onOOM6q9l8 — Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 4, 2018 Read more →
You Are Very Fake News
Click to order! Update 5 Aug 2018: Newseum has decided to stop selling these shirts and apologized for selling them in the first place. 🙁 Fortunately I ordered mine yesterday. 🙂 Read more →
“You’re Too Hard on Yourself”
“He has suffered enough” meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too. A sufficiency of suffering, in public life, consisted in a loss of face perhaps, or office, or, earlier, in getting caught, or in committing crimes, or having wanted to commit them. And if the real sufferer was the public man in violation of the criminal law, and a sufficiency of suffering lay in his various states of mind, then it was perhaps everyone else who got off too easily. . . . Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn’t remember it, but if they had done it or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so… Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Next Year’s Teacher
I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week in an AP Computer Science Principles class for the upcoming school year . . . Schools are adding more CS classes and, almost without exception, retraining in-service teachers to teach them, rather than hiring people with knowledge and experience in the field. I met with the teacher today to do some upfront planning. At one point, he was calculating how many printouts we’d need for 6 groups of 4 students each . . . “Let’s see,” he said, “6 times 4 is 20 . . .” If you think that’s funny, guess what class he normally teaches: accounting. “Are you going to write that?” someone asks me. “Does he know you have a website?” “I don’t know what he knows or doesn’t know. Except he doesn’t know what 6 times 4 is.” Read more →
EppsNet Book Reviews; The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
I can’t come up with a better synopsis than this article from the Boston Review: Each of these men suffers from memory and from the compulsion to obliterate it; from a mourning and melancholia so deep that it is almost unnamable; from the knowledge that he has survived while those he loved have not; from problems distinguishing dream and reality; from a profound sense of displacement. Highly recommended! Rating: Read more →
Passing for Normal
The onset of the state of mind consisted in a loyalty to objects. She apologized to one egg for having boiled it, to another for not having selected it to boil. Since it was impossible to know with much precision whether an egg prefers to be boiled or not to, she was always in a state of indecision, followed, as soon as she had taken any action, by extreme remorse. Since this is not far from the predicament of most people of any sensitivity or conscience, she passed for normal. — Renata Adler, Speedboat Read more →
Only So Big a House You Can Have?
Obama: “Right now I'm actually surprised by how much money I got. And let me tell you something, I don't have half as much as most of these folks… There's only so much you can eat. There's only so big a house you can have. There's only so many nice trips you can take." pic.twitter.com/LALI5TCA0i — CBS News (@CBSNews) July 17, 2018 In other news, the former president and his wife bought an 8,200-square-foot house with 9 bedrooms and 8-1/2 bathrooms in Washington, D.C. for $8.1 million. In fairness, he did say there’s only so big a house YOU can have. He didn’t say there’s only so big a house HE can have. Read more →
Animal House Tax Policy
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland sued the federal government over the Republican-led tax overhaul Tuesday, alleging the new law championed by President Donald Trump unfairly singles out high-tax blue states. — wsaz.com I thought this was noteworthy in that I can’t remember ever in my life hearing a Democrat say anything about people in high tax brackets other than they are not paying their “fair share.” If a Democrat has ever before said that people in high tax brackets are being singled out unfairly, I can’t remember it. The new federal tax law passed last year caps the deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000, meaning that residents of high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland — and California, where I currently live — will see big increases in their federal tax bill. It reminds me of a scene from… Read more →
See You in Hell, Champions of Diversity
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] I love diversity and inclusion and equity. Why do I love diversity and inclusion and equity? Because they make everyone hate each other even more than they already do. On one side, you have the people thinking “Look, life’s not a fucking fairy tale for anybody. I’ve been eating a shit sandwich every day of my adult life to stay alive in this profession and these narcissistic pricks want to coattail their way in on a ‘diversity’ exemption.” And on the other side: “The numbers prove that these privileged cocksuckers aren’t giving us a fair shake. Fuck ’em. Their time is over.” In fact, “love” is too weak a word for what I feel. I luuurve it! I loave it! I luff it, two F’s, yes I have to invent! Hell is open borders. Heaven has… Read more →