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.
Tom Apple Adventures
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 line with the displacement of the center of the rod in millimeters with 3 digits of precision.
Sample Input
1000 100 0.0001 15000 10 0.00006 10 0 0.001 -1 -1 -1
Sample Output
61.329 225.020 0.000
Solution below . . .
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.
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 . . .
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Greetings from the infernal regions!
Man arrested at New Mexico compound was allegedly training child to commit school shootings — NBC News
Here’s a photo of the gentleman in question, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj:
One of the few black men in America actively involved in his children’s lives. Kudos, sir!
See you in Hell . . .
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.
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.
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
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. 🙂
Thomas Jefferson: Jim Acosta vs. Ernie Pyle
My fellow Americans –
I see that journalists are now positioning themselves as putting their lives on the line for America.
Some poor fool at CNN was afraid of being murdered when he showed up at a Trump rally and people chanted “CNN sucks!”
He’s not exactly Ernie Pyle, is he?
A CNN reporter at a Trump rally is like a guy wearing a Yankees jersey to a Red Sox game. “You suck” doesn’t mean “I want to murder you.”
I have never heard anyone advocating violence against journalists except other journalists. It’s all they talk about. There’s going to be violence against journalists! Our lives are in jeopardy!
In the event of violence against journalists, no one will happier than journalists, because they will blame it on President Trump.
Meanwhile, in a journalistic spirit of peace and rapprochement, the New York Times has just added a woman to its editorial board who encourages her Twitter followers to “kill all men.”
“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 much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether. It was in the interest of absolutely nobody to get to the bottom of anything whatever. . . . The jig was never up. In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying “You’re too hard on yourself.”
See You in Hell: Sarah Jeong Edition
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Greetings from the underworld!
Someone named Sarah Jeong was hired by a newspaper to work on their editorial board. It turns out Sarah has some pretty woke tweets.
Here’s a sample:
Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.
Ha ha, that’s pretty good. Who hired her to write editorials? The Sweet Briar College student paper? No, it’s the New York Times!
Earlier this year, the Times hired someone named Quinn Norton, then fired her on the same day because of what it called racial and anti-gay slurs. I don’t know exactly what Quinn Norton said but I’ll bet it wasn’t as provocative as dumbass fucking white people pissing on the internet like dogs!
Look, I hate white men and white people in general as much as anyone, but I also hate Asian women. Unlike the New York Times, I don’t have a double standard. I hate everyone equally.
If the Times feels like “dumbass fucking white people” accurately represents its editorial posture, it’s fine by me, but they should really shut up about “divisive” language aimed at the media.
You better be nicer to us, you dumbass fucking white people!
See you in Hell . . .
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.”
How to Not Get a Job Teaching Computer Science
She was a software engineer interviewing for a job teaching high school computer science.
One of the interviewers read a question:
XYZ School District is committed to effective learning for all students. Key in this work is improving the success of historically underrepresented, low-income and/or students of color. What are your experiences implementing instructional strategies shown to be most effective in increasing the success of these populations?
She knew what the “right” answer looked like but after a momentary hesitation decided to answer honestly.
“I think it’s probably counterproductive to single out groups of students as needing special handling to be up to the standards of the other students.”
“We’re not saying that they’re not up to the standards of the other students,” the interviewer said.
“Okay, let me say it another way. We have four labels available: ‘historically underrepresented,’ ‘low-income,’ ‘students of color’ and ‘none of the above.’
“From a practical point of view, it seems like a very effective system. Each student is given whichever labels seem appropriate. Instead of having to assess every student in detail and then decide how to teach them, we just have to decide which labels to give them.
“It doesn’t matter that students with a certain label are completely different from one another in every other respect. The ‘low-income’ students get the ‘low-income’ instructional strategy, the ‘students of color’ get the ‘students of color’ instructional strategy, and so on.”
“So my answer is that I’m not going to implement special strategies based on assigning students to categories. I’m going to teach everyone as individuals.”
She didn’t get the job.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
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: 
The Power of Prayer
A Facebook friend posts: Prayers for my mom. She’s in the ICU.
I refrain from saying that a few months ago we were all praying for your dad and he died. 🙁
And That’s the Truth: Held Back by History
[And That’s the Truth is a feature by our guest blogger, Sojourner Truth– PE]
Black folks been treated very poorly over the years. Jews been killed and run out of almost every country on earth. Asians been slave labor, ostracized, put into prison camps.
Now Jews and Asians are doing all right for theirselves. Why are black folks held back by history and other folks aren’t?
Never been a Jewish president, never been an Asian president, maybe never will be. Politicians never helped nobody. They promise to give you this or that, or such and such a privilege, if you will give ’em your vote and your money, and when the time comes, they recollect nothing of the kind.
Don’t wait for people to do things for you. Keep your families together and make sure your kids get a good education in school.
And that’s the Truth!
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.
See You in Hell: Fake News Edition
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Greetings from the Underworld, my friends and foes!
I’m reading about a hostage situation, including a fatal shooting of one of the hostages, at a Trader Joe’s in Los Angeles over the weekend. It was covered nationally and even internationally.
Here’s a photo from a British news site of the suspect being taken away:
I looked at the major US news sites — CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC — and about a dozen smaller sites . . . no one mentioned the race of the suspect, no one gave the suspect’s name, and no one ran a photo.
I could understand a media policy where, in reporting shootings, we consider race to always be relevant, or we consider race to never be relevant, but not a policy where race is only considered relevant when the victim is black and unarmed.
Headlines like this are common: Police Shoot Unarmed Black Man.
But not this: Police Shoot Unarmed White Man.
Or this: Police Shoot Armed Black Man During Commission of Crime.
Or this: Black Man Shoots Unarmed Woman at Trader Joe’s.
See you in Hell!