Some Blog Site

I like my drinking water cold. Very cold.

If you were to ask me what temperature I want my water, I would say “32 degrees”. With the understanding that we’re talking in Fahrenheit.

Some people might laugh and say that I would be drinking an ice cube, since it would be frozen then.

But it would not be frozen. It would be freezing. I would drink the water at the beginning of the phase change, so it would be 32 degrees but still liquid. It’s the freezing point, not the frozen point.

I’ve been thinking of ways to lower the temperature even further so that my drink could be even more refreshing. I’ve come up with two so far.

1. Add something, so it’s not pure water. Like when you make ice cream and you add rock salt to the ice. But adding salt to the water would defeat the purpose of making the water refreshing, so skip this one.

2. Add pressure. 32 degrees is the freezing point of water at normal pressure (1 atmosphere). If we added some pressure to the water bottle, the freezing point of the water should be reduced. Unfortunately, the pressure would have to be about 2000 atmospheres to make much of a difference, so I don’t think that would be feasible. Plus we would have to pressurize the entire kitchen, so that I could open the bottle to drink the water without it freezing instantly upon depressurization.

3. Keep the water moving. It is common knowledge that moving water freezes at a lower temperature than standing water. Or sitting water. Or water that is lying down. Maybe if I get a refrigerated drinking fountain and kept the button constantly pressed, I could turn the temperature down a few degrees below the normal freezing point. The only drawback to this is that when I capture the water in my mouth, it will have stopped moving. And that may cause it to freeze up and make it hard to actually drink.

Maybe I’ll just have to be satisfied with the standard 32 degrees.

Now that school has started, here are a couple questions. One math question and one grammar question.

1. What is the value of twelveteen?
A : 120
B : 112
C : 22

2. What is the past tense of snowblow?
A : snowblew
B : snowblowed
C : snewblow

Time’s up. Pencils down.

Hand your paper to your left and we’ll being grading.

Ready?

1. Your guess is as good as mine.
2. Trick question. “Ran the snowblower” is the right answer.

We were in line to buy tickets to enter a tourist attraction. The line was accumulating, even though the place had two cashier windows open.

I inclined my ear toward the windows and heard people at each station discussing memberships. Meanwhile we, and everyone behind us, were interested in simply buying tickets for the day.

I thought it was an inefficient process to have all available windows processing memberships. My plan would be to have one window dedicated to normal tickets – the quick transaction – and one window that would take membership applications as well as sell tickets.

That would have made my experience better. But would it be better overall?

Let’s assume it takes an average of 2 minutes to buy a set of tickets. And let’s assume an average of 10 minutes to buy an annual membership.

In order to replicate my situation, let’s assume the two memberships are at the beginning of the line. So for the first 10 minutes, the line does not move as both windows are busy with memberships. Then there are 20 minutes left to sell tickets. At 2 minutes each, times 2 windows, that equals 20 sets of tickets.

So in 30 minutes, 2 windows process 20 sets of tickets and 2 memberships. How does that compare with my proposed setup?

The first window is only tickets. In 30 minutes, it processes 15 sets of tickets.

The second window is memberships and tickets. This window takes 20 minutes for memberships and then has 10 minutes for tickets, so 5 sets of tickets.

The total is still 20 sets of tickets and 2 memberships.

That doesn’t show any difference. But the difference does show up in the average wait time.

Average wait time in the first case is 0 for the memberships and then 10 + ((0 + 2 + 4 + 6 + 8 + 10 + 12 + 14 + 16 + 18) / 10) = 10 + 90/10 = 19 minutes per set of tickets

Average wait time in the second case is (0 + 10) / 2 = 5 minutes for memberships and then (0 + 2 + 4 + … + 26 + 28) / 15 = 210/15 = 14 minutes for the first window and (20 + 22 + 24 + 26 + 28) / 5 = 120/5 = 24 minutes for the second window.

The average is not 14 + 24 / 2 (which equals 19 minutes), since more people had the lower wait time. The average is 210 + 120 / 20 = 16.5 minutes.

So dedicating a window to the slower process results in a lower wait time for 90% of the clients.

Not only is it faster, but it also feels faster to everyone, since the main line is always moving. With the original configuration, it felt very slow because the whole line did not move at all for 10 minutes.

There are many short, wise sayings that have become popular over the years. But whether they are related to sewing or farming, not as many people relate to them as they used to. So they should be updated.

Here is my attempt at updating some of these proverbs to be a bit more modern, whilst still retaining at least some of their meaning.

• A text in time saves nine.
• A text of prevention is worth a phone call of cure.
• A watched web page never loads.
• An app a day keeps the doctor away.
• Let whoever is without sin post the first tweet.
• Don’t count your likes before they’re clicked.

Any other sayings that need updating?

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these are tweets.

• There used to be 5 main Top-Level Domains: .com, .org, .net, .edu, and .gov. Now there are hundred, including .photography, .surgery, and .vacations. It seems to me that having so many and such specific TLDs defeats the point of a TLD. The specific part should be the domain name and the suffix should be general. To paraphrase Syndrome: if everything’s a TLD then nothing is a TLD.
• If I hear someone say “Sometimes you gotta fight fire with fire”, I check to make sure they’re not employed by or a volunteer with any of the local fire departments. If my house is burning, I want the fire trucks to show up with water, not more fire.
• It warmed my heart the other day when my son informed me that we were out of dental floss. That must mean he is using it without being told.
• Kids these days don’t know what an answering machine is. They think it’s something like Siri.
• People can goof off, but people can’t goof on. Would goofing on mean they were well-behaved?

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these are tweets.

• It’s amusing to watch people when someone tells “heads up!” at a ball game – everyone looks up. That is the worst thing to do. If the ball were aimed right at you, it would smash into your face. Instead, you should cover your head with something.
• I ran past a turtle in the road during my morning jog the other day. He was about the size of a dinner plate. In both diameter and height. Poor guy had been run over.
• If you make your own bread, you know there’s sourdough starter. But no one ever has sourdough stopper. I bet there’ll be a big demand for that if someone invents it.
• Sometimes there’s wisdom in crowds. Other times there are stampedes or riots. You need your own wisdom too.
• When I see the names of the new soccer teams here in the USA, I have to remind myself that FC doesn’t stand for “fight club”.

When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace.

Deuteronomy 20:10

Anyone else disappointed at how solar walkway lights perform?

I don’t want to see the lights – I want to see the path, the area around the lights to be illuminated.