The intended recipient of a solicitation for attention is made aware of the situation, and of their role in it, through means other than just the solicitor-spoken words. Consider five people standing in a semi-circle formation, equidistant from, and with backs facing, a sixth person who shouts “Hey, you!” For ease of communicating the point,…
If you’re drinking water, it feels like a liquid. Alternately, if you managed to escape through an emergency exit the cabin of a doomed ocean-crossing airplane but forgot to locate an unsupplied parachute, the calm waves feel more like cement when you land. Let’s take it to eleven: a sea otter floating on his back…
There are often many ways of modeling the same thing. Models are inherently inaccurate, but the best are those which combine an acceptable degree of inaccuracy with a significant reduction in complexity. It’s obvious that the theorized output of a system depends on the model used to represent the system, but it’s nonetheless an important…
In spite of all the negatives that tarnish much of the advertised allure, there is at least one societal benefit to the existence of smoking as an activity. That it is an intangible benefit and is consequently difficult to quantify should not be interpreted to mean that its impact is negligible. After all, many of…
Priceless inquiry overheard in the workplace: do coffee, chocolate, and cocaine all come from the same bean? How appropriate that it was a Central America native in an adjacent cubicle who set the sorely misinformed employee straight. Being put on hold after dialing a military base building phone number, the soundtrack is a cross between…
What’s scarier: unexpected turbulence or turbulence announced before it strikes? That the latter will be severe is suggested by the fact that cockpit instruments could measure it and that the pilot considered it worthy of mention. If the former is severe, one wonders why an announcement beforehand wasn’t made, i.e. what sort of undetectable air…
Following is among the most offensive things I’ve written here. First, some background. Remember in one of the Harry Potter flicks, where Harry is battling Voldemort from a distance? Their respective magic powers are conveniently manifested as sorcerous energy light beams of different color. The beams meet somewhere in the middle, the forces of good…
Sometimes, upper management is not well enough aware of their employees’ backgrounds that they’ll delegate a task ill-suited to the worker’s experience. In such cases, it’s easier for the employee to accept the new job responsibility than to respectfully refuse it on the basis of being under-qualified. Reasons for the ease of acceptance/difficulty of refusal:…
One of my ongoing projects is to work through end-of-chapter problems in my EE textbooks. The reminiscence of this activity to late nights spent making mentally taxing progress on homework during past school years is obvious, but now the problem solving is accompanied by an ever-present sense of accomplished inconsequence. The feeling is strongest when…
Every day at work there are lulls where I’m left on my own to spend an hour or two as I wish. I’ve heard from former interns who recall with theatrical exhaustion the weeks they spent in certain departments without being tasked with anything, and how their time in these departments was characterized by boredom….
You must be logged in to post a comment.