How can there be 4 potential Easter Sundays ?
I’ve always known it to be on the first Sunday after the full moon
following the vernal equinox. Simple.
I think that “potential,” in that question, was “here are four Sundays next year which fall into the range of dates when Easter could fall in a given year.” Obviously, there’s only one correct answer for 2026, at least for the Western calendar.
My 20th hs reunion (the only one I attended) was at a hotel in Anaheim. The organizer lived in Orange County, so that’s why it was there. It’s funny. The reunion in Grosse Pointe Blanke was held (partly) at the Vets Auditorium in Culver City. Why couldn’t our reunion have been there?
Anyway, there was a small band in a big banquet room. Attendance was decent. There were 632 (why do I remember this?) in my graduating class.
That’s like saying what day of the week will July 4th or what date will Labor Day be on? I know the date for July 4th every year, but not necessarily what day of the week that corresponds to & I know Labor Day is always the first Mon in Sept but that can be somewhere between the 1st & the 7th.
An unknown manuscript of a Sherlock Holmes novel that contains details about the Ripper killings that only the perpetrator would know at that time.
James Lovegrove has been writing Sherlock Holmes stories for the last several years. I think he’s really gotten Watson’s voice down.
He’d also written The Cthulhu Casebooks, which is a fun pistache of Classic Holmes and Lovecraft.
Unlisted Other: I have certainly heard it spoken out loud, but I can’t recall the last time.
As regards Fortran, just a few months ago, I was regaling some young ‘uns with my tales of doing Fortran programming via keypunch machine and mailing the cards off to U of Chicago to have the program run back in 1974 or so. They were of course enthralled.
I had just watched a video about the Voyager probes, which mentioned they were still running on FORTRAN programming.
I mean, I’ve probably heard somebody say “FORTRAN” in the last 20 years. Maybe the last 10. Maybe neither.
It’s just not the sort of thing I keep track of.
The last time I can definitely recall hearing FORTRAN was from my former boss, telling me about the legacy code that was apparently still buried somewhere in the code base for one of our programs. He retired during the COVID lockdowns*, and I’ve worked here for less than 10 years, so I’m pegging at as somewhere between 5 and 10 years ago.
*I joked that the company should send a piece of cake to everyone’s homes so we could have a virtual Zoom retirement party.
I recently was part of a discussion of which programming languages we each learned (mine was Pascal).
I voted that I’ve never heard it. But a far more accurate answer would have been that I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it. I’ve certainly seen it.
I came here to say the same thing. Fortran even came up somewhat recently, but i don’t recall if the conversation was spoken or in text.
The first time i heard it spoken was probably ~45 years ago.
I can give a pretty close estimate - it was spring of ‘82, in a “chemistry” class I was taking (it was really physics, of a sort). So about the same, 43 years ago.
Probably not, for me.
I chose “more than 20 years ago,” but I’m not sure of that. What I am sure of is that I don’t remember hearing it within the last 20 years, and I don’t remember being in any kind of situation where it would have made sense for someone to say “FORTRAN.”
Yes. This.
I’ve certainly not only heard but said the word “FORTRAN” in the last year.
Just last week I was telling my cow-orkers about my father learning to code in punch cards in college, they were appropriately flabbergasted when I told them that they would leave a box with all the cards in the college’s computer center and come back the other day to a terse “It failed” and having to debug it by having one person read the code instruction by instruction and another following it to see where it broke.
I’ve never coded in FORTRAN but I’m a proud second generation programmer and my father coded in FORTRAN and COBOL among other, newer, languages.
I’m fond of offering pearls of wisdom my father told me (like “never deploy on a Friday!”) and remarking “this wisdom has been in my family for generations… since my father told it to me”.
I’m sure I’ve said “FORTRAN” within the last couple years, when talking about my college experience, but I don’t remember exactly when. My first programming class was in FORTRAN. We keyed in the program on punch cards, submitted the deck, and got the printout of the result at best several hours later, sometimes the next day. It was a real lesson in carefully planning your code and debugging by hand. I learned to go to the computer lab on Sunday mornings when there was a football game, because it was less crowded and much easier to get access to a keypunch machine.
I don’t have a dryer. I hang my clothes to dry.
Will this post? The dreaded day may have arrived of the Unsupported Browser. I may have to switch to the iPad.