Just as with teaching math, there a shitload of (controversial and sometimes mindless) ideology in the way. They’re always thinking of newer ways to describe things that never seem as good as the older ways, and to solve this, they bad-mouth the old ways to make them look bad. They’ve been doing this with Math teaching ever since the late 1960’s or so, which they’ve called New[sup]n[/sup] Math, for multiple successive values of n. In Old Math Algebra, they taught us that an equation is like a balanced teeter-totter (or see-saw): Whatever change you do on one side must be matched on the other side to keep it balanced. What could be more straightforward? I don’t think they teach it much that way any more.
Ditto Programming. I began to learn in the late 1960’s. The Cooking Analogy was standard pedagogy at the time. For that reason alone, it’s probably banned now.
Er… no, both of those are still pretty common. I think we might have used a balance scale instead of a see-saw, but that’s because we were learning to use balance scales in our science course the same year. We certainly had example problems with see-saws, though.
Though, admittedly, the see-saw analogy begins to break down when you have systems of dependent equations. It’s kind of hard to find a good example there, though.
That’s one of mine too - At the hospital where I worked there was a room with an outside door that was in regular use during the day. The room was heated and there was a thermostat near the door.
In the winter, if you went in during the night the room would be stiflingly hot because someone, during the day, had turned it up from 20 degrees to 30.
One quirk of human nature seems to be that we all have difficulty un-remembering things. At its simplest level this happens when you dictate a telephone number to someone and they mis-hear. They repeat the ‘wrong’ number back, and you correct them but they still hear it wrongly.
I’ve always thought it would make more sense to just grey out Save until you’ve saved at least once.
Anyways, one for the thread that just popped into my head: People who don’t understand that you often think things or about things you don’t want to think about. It doesn’t make you evil or crazy because you thought those things.
Re “Save” vs “Save As”, I’m stil a bit hazy on exactly how they work, I think because not all programs are consistent.
Say I open up a program called foo.txt, edit it and then “Save As” bar.txt. (I haven’t saved it as foo.txt in the meantime.)
There is now a copy of the new file on my disk called bar.txt, but is the file I still have open on my screen now bar.txt or foo.txt? I’m guessing it should be foo.txt, but I’m sure some programs don’t work this way.
That is correct but all programs that I am aware of (thousands in total) work that way. ‘Save As’ renames your file, commits the changes up to that point to disk and makes it your new working version as well. There are some rather rare options in some programs like ‘Make a backup’ or ‘Create a copy’ that do things slightly differently but ‘Save As’ always works the way you described and has for decades now.
‘Save’ simplys commits your changes to the current working version to disk. ‘Save As’ will do this as well if you don’t change the file name but it does it slightly differently than ‘Save’. It overwrites you current file with an exact copy of itself (there is no reason for a user to do that in practice but it will work).
Speaking of Save As… what the hell was Apple thinking by taking it away!!! You can duplicate and rename in ONE step with Save As… Now it’s duplicate, rename, save. And close the original. 4 steps. WHAT!!!
Locking yourself out of your car- probably habits learned before key fobs were almost universal. It’s a lot easier to lock it from the inside and close the door than use a key.
Often, the file name is in the title bar of the window (or maybe somwhere else in the window). So before you save, it will say foo.txt. When you do Save As bar.txt, during the process of saving, the window title will change to bar.txt. Not all editors will do this, but it’s something to look for next time you’re editing a file. The title will also often have something like a * following the file name if it’s been changed from the original, but not yet saved.
I have done this when what I am doing breaks from my usual routine. Generally, I get out of the car, lock it, put my keys in my purse, and take the purse to wherever I am going. But when I’m going to the gym, I lock my purse in the trunk, so that messes up the routine. It took two instances of putting my keys in my purse and locking them in the trunk at the gym before I started making myself say “keys” every time I put my purse in the trunk. After I say that, I look at my hand to make sure I am holding the keys and that they are not in my purse.
I can’t understand why people refer to Bob Dylan as a “bad singer”, like he is some drunk at karaoke night or something. He may have an unconventional quality to his voice but the range and control he had (before he ruined it) was spot on.
I have neighbors who will mope under the ceiling fan all summer and be bored to death and stir crazy, but they never seem to go any farther than a relative’s house in this or a nearby city. I have told them they could take trains or buses here and there and all over the place, but they won’t budge. They just keep spending money on endless trips to Costco.
Can’t fathom why people think flu shots give them the flu. True, it doesn’t shield you against every strain, but that doesn’t mean the shot “gives” you the illness.
You could indeed have flu-like symptoms afterwards, but that is still not “the”
flu.
I just found another one. I can’t fathom why a lot of Christians (especially the more missionary ones) can’t seem to fathom that I don’t accept the Bible as truth.
I don’t mean “I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t think the Bible is a crock of shit”, I mean why they seem to have no frame of reference that somebody else might not see it as truth. Even the things I’m the most cock sure about I can understand somebody disagreeing, I mean, obviously I think those people are wrong, but I can grasp them the fact that they don’t agree with me.
I was approached by a missionary today, it was some weird thing that I assume is new about God having a wife in the Bible, and how woman is created in God the Mother’s image just as man is created in God the Father’s. And something about how the Jerusalem that descends from heaven in Revelation is her and… such. Whatever, the specifics don’t really matter.
The point is, he flat out asked me if I believed in God and the Bible. I said no, but he said he’d convince me with evidence. So he pointed out some cute verses in the Bible that seem to vaguely point to there maybe being a wife of God. And he tried to invite me to study with his group because studying about her will increase my chances of getting salvation. He didn’t seem to comprehend that if I don’t accept salvation or the Bible in the first place… then using the Bible to prove to me an extra condition of salvation isn’t a winning strategy. I mean, he convinced me that if I ever find myself transported to a universe where the Bible is true that there’s a smidgen of a hair of a possibility* that God might have a wife-god. But he didn’t seem to be able to comprehend that using the Bible to convince me of things doesn’t work when I don’t believe the Bible is true already.
It’s just, when somebody disagrees with me, the first thing I try to figure out is the basic facts we disagree on, and when they’re very fundamental, I see the argument isn’t going anywhere. I sincerely mean this without any malice: it must be nice to be so sure of your beliefs that in your head you truly cannot understand anybody having a different stance than you.
Really not even that if you have even a basic layman’s understanding of the translation of the Bible, but I didn’t feel like getting into an argument with him.
More complex than that I’m afraid. foldl over lists in Haskell is tail recursive whilst foldr is not. Yet due to Haskell’s laziness you almost always want to use foldr, as foldl will only compute the final result of the fold when the end of the list is reached, either diverging in the case of infinite lists or building up a massive thunk as it traverses finite ones.
Yeah, me too. I get why they need to believe it, indoctrination plus pants-peeing fear of devil-filled hells and the promise of the afterlife of your dreams complete with all your dead pets, childhood friends, and white puffy clouds to recline on. But I can’t fathom why they don’t apply the same critical thinking and skepticism to the Bible that they do news stories, political statements, UFO’s, leprechauns, ghosts, and whathaveyou. How in the world do they think the other half of the planet is coping? Do they think God deliberately left the yellow, red, brown, and black people on other continents out of the loop or something?
If they aren’t surprised that a Mongolian shepard doesn’t believe in the God of the Bible or the stories, why must I?