Aww, Bobby’s all grown up!
And now that I check up on it… “Exploits of a Mom” was published in October 2007. If Bobby had just been enrolled in school for the first time then, then he’d be 20 years old now. So he is, in fact, all grown up now.
On the other hand, it’s also apparently canon that Bobby never really took to computers (unlike his sister Help I’m Trapped in a Drivers License Factory Elaine), so maybe this isn’t him after all.
I had something similar happen on a Unix system back in the 90s. When inputting a new password, I mistyped a character, so I back-spaced and retyped. I made the same mistake on the repeat password input. Everything seemed fine.
The next time I tried to login again, it failed. I carefully typed the password very correctly. Failed. I left to do something else, came back and it worked! I had made the same typo and corrected it.
Yes, the backspaces were embedded in the password. The terminal was misconfigured, so the backspace key emitted an ASCII-8 instead of deleting the previous character. Fun times.
I often wondered if it was possible to do that.
He’s not wrong.
Seems to imply that ‘science enthusiasts’ are interested in just about anything… which sounds about right. Of course, he then missed many subjects. Medicine/psychology: Collection of research papers on developing more effective placebos.
That would be awesome to own the old kilogram prototype! Actually, just having a replica would be pretty cool.
It would be worth $32000 just in material.
Well, new, yeah, but it’s pretty old by now. Surely it’s depreciated.
Tell you what, I like you, I’ll be willing to give you fifty bucks for it.
Just happened to stumble on a new post right as it came out. No one had even said anything ExplainXKCD yet.
And it’s not like it’d even be very hard. But instead we get monstrosities like “One knob, turn it to turn up the flow, and then turn it some more to change the temperature”.
My old shower knob solved the problem, as far as I was concerned. You lifted it up to adjust water pressure, and turned it to adjust temperature.
Sure, the pressure control wasn’t high precision, and it did rotate a bit when you pushed it back down (so you couldn’t keep an exact water temperature to return to) but it worked.
I always assumed the ubiquity of the design you mentioned was largely that people didn’t care about changing the water pressure in their showers. And that the lower pressure settings were for filling things up from the faucet (as that’s the only time you’d use cold).
A consistent 10-second lag sounds like a luxury. My shower faucet has such features as hysteresis, where some final knob configuration does not uniquely determine the flow rate; as well as multi-modal behavior, where minor fluctuations in the input can permanently switch the output to a different state (freezing or burning).
Yup, all you need is two knobs. With those, the hardest part is finding them. When I redid my bathroom I only found one set like that.
I blame hotels. There must be some cost advantage to the single knob version
Our showers all have a single knob, turn it to adjust the temperature but the pressure remains constant. It’s a flow control valve, so the water temperature stays constant when someone flushes the toilet, instead of someone getting scalded. We like it.
So how do you turn the water off?
“Off” is no temperature, I guess you could say. I never thought about it; now I have something to ponder when taking a shower.