Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com The Day You Almost Became THAT Customer Read The Day You Almost Became THAT Customer I realize that the woman ahead of us is returning a large number of items. The clerk has to find them on the receipt and then click on the item and do s...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Willie Singletary will you please go now? (Previously: [1] [2]) Welcome to Philadelphia! We have a lot of political corruption here. I recently wrote about the unusually corrupt Philadelphia Traffic Court, where four of the judges went to ...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Proof by insufficient information Content warning: rambly Given the coordinates of the three vertices of a triangle, can we find the area? Yes. If by no other method, we can use the Pythagorean theorem to find the lengths of the ed...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse A puzzle about balancing test tubes in a centrifuge Suppose a centrifuge has slots, arranged in a circle around the center, and we have test tubes we wish to place into the slots. If the tubes are not arranged symmetrically around the center, the ce...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Claude and I write a utility program Then I had two problems… A few days ago I got angry at xargs for the hundredth time, because for me xargs is one of those "then he had two problems" technologies. It never does what I want by defau...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse A descriptive theory of seasons in the Mid-Atlantic [ I started thinking about this about twenty years ago, and then writing it down in 2019, but it seems to be obsolete. I am publishing it anyway. ] The canonical division of the year into seasons i...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse The fivefold symmetry of the quince The quince is so-named because, like other fruits in the apple family, it has a natural fivefold symmetry: This is because their fruits develop from five-petaled flowers, and the symmetry persists ...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Mystery of the quincunx's missing quincunx A quincunx is the X-shaped pattern of pips on the #5 face of a die. It's so-called because the Romans had a common copper coin called an as, and it was divided (monetarily, not physically) into twe...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse My new git utility `what-changed-twice` needs a new name As I have explained in the past, my typical workflow is to go along commiting stuff that might or might not make sense, then clean it all up at the end, doing multiple passes with git-add and git-r...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse An anecdote about backward compatibility A long time ago I worked on a debugger program that our company used to debug software that it sold that ran on IBM System 370. We had IBM 3270 CRT terminals that could display (I think) eight colo...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Almost-trivial theorems A couple of years back I wrote an article about this bit of mathematical folklore: Mathematical folklore contains a story about how Acta Quandalia published a paper proving that all partially unifo...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Crooked politicians love crab cakes! I recently posted an article about the 2013 Philadelphia Traffic Court fiasco, in which most of the Traffic Court judges were convicted of accepting bribes: According to the indictment, Perri accep...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds BuyArtificial Intelligence from Bookshop.org(with kickback)(without kickback) One of the better books I read in college was Artifical Intelligence: The Very Idea (1985) by philosopher John Haugelan...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Untitled Read Around 2013 my daughter was working at a big New York university in a department that got government grants to perform special services (like disabled, autism etc). There was a woman in purcha...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com It’s Easy To Get Lost In IKEA But This Is Ridiculous Read It’s Easy To Get Lost In IKEA But This Is Ridiculous All the kids have vests with numbers on them, and parents fill out a form with some information like the name of the kid and the parent, an...
Feb 12, 2026 from BIX dot BLOG Isn’t This A Pretty Fall Since last March, I’ve several times here referenced Stanford Beers’ heuristic that the purpose of a system is what it does, applying it in some fashion to the system that is me, to the general sys...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Paint Me Skeptical Read Paint Me Skeptical Me: "Ma'am, this is half empty." Customer: "But it's also half full!" Me: "Cute philosophy, but I can't accept it as a return." Read Paint Me Skeptical
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com When The Sandwich Gets Extra Consequence Sauce Read When The Sandwich Gets Extra Consequence Sauce Customer: "Make sure you get my sandwich right this time. This is the best job you dropouts are ever gonna have, so don't f*** it up." I took the...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com As The Returns Churns Read As The Returns Churns Employee: *Into her radio.* "Was Michael working returns recently?" Radio: "Uh… yeah." Employee: *Into her radio.* "He… didn't check a box. Again." Radio: "God d*** it, M...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com The Inner Child Came Out Today Read The Inner Child Came Out Today Customer: "Where's the TV?! The one from the ad!" Me: "There are still two in the store, but they may be in other people's carts. It's first-come, first-served, ...
