Archive for the ‘Thing-A-Week’ Category

Question: Why is it that celebrities seem to overdose only in hotels, rather than in their or their friends’ houses?

Ivan Pavlov was the first to explain in the late 1800’s that classical conditioning is a powerful tool in human behavior[1]. He showed us that the environment we’re currently in can have a large effect on our actions, but also in parts of our body that we don’t know about.

Imagine you’re standing in your dusty garage. It’s completely empty aside from you and ten cardboard boxes lined up in a row on the concrete floor in front of you. In each of these boxes are your personal documents, organized in chronological order. The boxes are closed, so how do you know what is in each box?

You look closer at the sides of the boxes and notice that each one is numbered: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. “Okay,” you think aloud, “but where is the TPS report I’m supposed to have? Lumberg needs it by this afternoon.”

When someone first starts programming, the whole concept of “interpreted” languages and “compiled” languages might seem a bit confusing. Luckily, you have someone super smart like me to explain them to you in a manner that even your great grandpa could understand — even if he’s dead!

All decent programming languages are either compiled or interpreted. What language you’re programming in determines whether you need to download an interpreter or a compiler to run the programs you create. There are a few differences between the two types of languages.

Thing a Week 5: True Story

Posted: 3rd February 2010 by Andrew Brown in Nonfiction, Thing-A-Week
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There was a college philosophy class that students always tried to get into because of how cool they heard the professor was. They said he gave open-ended writing assignments and provided ample time for debate and discussions in the classroom. Although he was lenient in the classroom, he always made sure the students learned by his dreadfully hard tests. His system worked well; students heard about how hard the tests were, so they tried extra hard to learn the material they needed to pass.

Thing a Week 2: Cracking Combination Locks

Posted: 13th January 2010 by Andrew Brown in Thing-A-Week, Tutorials
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Single-dial combination locks are a common appearance in safes and places such as locker rooms and school hallways where tons of locks need to be used in many different places. These combination locks unlock by spinning a dial clockwise to the first number, reversing the direction to the second number, and rotating clockwise again for the third and final number (assuming the padlock only has three-number combinations, which this guide will cover).