Browse by Tags

• baseball
• Best Of FAIC
• coin flipping
• customer service
• Dialogue
• English Usage
• geography
• Haunted House
• Mirrors
• optometry
• Psychic Powers
• public speaking
• Puzzles
• Rants
• Rarefied Heights
• Relationships
• Science
• vacation
• Weather
• Zombies

• The correct answer is "no"

  No technology today. I have not done a post on relationship advice in ages! Compare and contrast these two conversations: ****** Version One: Alice : Thanks for having lunch with me. I suppose you know what I want to talk about. Eric : Yeah, I do. I think Read More... Posted Thursday, July 02, 2009 7:10 AM by Eric Lippert | 13 Comments Filed under: Non-computer, Dialogue, Relationships, Psychic Powers

• What are the horns for?

  (Technology of a different sort today, just for a change of pace.) The first time I saw a picture of the Falkirk Wheel -- the world's only rotating boat lift, in Scotland -- I thought that it must be a really nice computer-generated landscape. It looks Read More... Posted Thursday, March 05, 2009 9:40 AM by Eric Lippert | 10 Comments Filed under: Science, Non-computer

• Customer Service Is Not Rocket Science, Part Two

  I find it irritating, but not surprising, when I get absurdly bad customer service from a business whose business model is based on volume and high margins. But I find it quite surprising, and indeed, greatly amusing , to get absurdly bad customer service Read More... Posted Monday, June 23, 2008 8:20 AM by Eric Lippert | 28 Comments Filed under: Rants, Non-computer, customer service

• Talking About The Weather, Part Two

  What we’re missing is a phenomenon that probably was described correctly by your high school science teacher, namely, the phenomenon of “ latent heat ” (which is what I was taught, though “enthalpy” would be the more modern term.) I said that the temperature Read More... Posted Friday, August 03, 2007 7:25 AM by Eric Lippert | 1 Comments Filed under: Science, Weather, Non-computer, Best Of FAIC

• Talking About The Weather, Part One

  No technology today; just talking about the weather. I love talking about the weather. I mentioned the other day that I had just returned from my ancestral homeland on the shores of Lake Huron, the great inland sea of southwestern Ontario. We got some Read More... Posted Thursday, August 02, 2007 7:31 AM by Eric Lippert | 7 Comments Filed under: Science, Weather, Non-computer, Best Of FAIC

• The horror! The horror!

  Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood has many nice things to say about my blog and one not so nice thing. Thanks Jeff! Much appreciated. And thanks for the links. (Jeff did not link to my most popular post ever , but he's probably not an eleven year old girl.) Read More... Posted Monday, January 08, 2007 3:22 PM by Eric Lippert | 6 Comments Filed under: Non-computer

• "Boolean or" or "boolean or"?

  I was writing the text for some new error messages for the expression tree library the other day. When I ran them past our user education specialists (that is, the people who will be writing the documentation to explain the error messages), one of them Read More... Posted Tuesday, October 31, 2006 1:52 PM by Eric Lippert | 19 Comments Filed under: Non-computer, English Usage

• How to make little girls scream like… well, like little girls

  [No technology today, so if you're only here for the witty banter about programming languages, skip this one.] Leah and I spent the week before Halloween volunteering at Nightmare At Beaver Lake , a haunted-house-style attraction that runs along the trails Read More... Posted Thursday, November 03, 2005 10:44 AM by Eric Lippert | 10 Comments Filed under: Non-computer, Best Of FAIC, Haunted House, Zombies

• Through the Looking Glass

  I'm back, I'm married, we had a fabulous time, and now I'm setting up new machines and figuring out what the heck I'm doing on the C# team. Today, we'll get back into it with some non-tech fun. A regular flat mirror seems like it ought to be perfectly Read More... Posted Monday, August 22, 2005 1:00 PM by Eric Lippert | 17 Comments Filed under: Science, Non-computer, Best Of FAIC, Mirrors

• Eric's Advice For First-Time Technical Presenters

  A few months ago an old friend had to give her first talk at a conference. Now, she used to do community theatre back when we were in school together, so she’s no stranger to standing up in front of a bunch of people and acting goofy. However there are Read More... Posted Monday, July 11, 2005 12:08 PM by Eric Lippert | 21 Comments Filed under: Non-computer, public speaking

• The Answer To Last Week's Puzzler

  Clearly I was looking for a leak in something, but what? The hard part is figuring out what the plumbers' putty is for. Plumbers' putty is like plasticene -- it isn't very sticky but you can mold it into any shape. I was looking for the leak in my fiberglass Read More... Posted Monday, July 04, 2005 9:01 AM by Eric Lippert | 2 Comments Filed under: Puzzles, Non-computer

• A Puzzler

  Some fun for the Friday of a long weekend. And a true story to boot! I had a job to do last Tuesday night that required the purchase of a few tools. As I was driving home from the store I took a look at the pile of stuff in the seat beside me and was Read More... Posted Friday, July 01, 2005 8:15 AM by Eric Lippert | 6 Comments Filed under: Puzzles, Non-computer

• If so smart Yoda is, why does not words the right order in his sentences put?

  Part three of my series on the impact of high-dimensional geometry on search algorithms will have to wait at least until after the Victoria Day weekend -- I'm crazy busy getting wedding invitations out, working on last-minute book edits and, oh yeah, Read More... Posted Thursday, May 19, 2005 11:55 AM by Eric Lippert | 16 Comments Filed under: Non-computer, English Usage

• That's a Big Transistor

  Here's some fun for a Friday. A few years back a bunch of my coworkers and I got to discussing the space program over lunch. Someone asked why it is that we continue to launch devices into orbit by strapping a big old tank full of liquid oxygen to the Read More... Posted Friday, January 21, 2005 5:37 PM by Eric Lippert | 24 Comments Filed under: Rarefied Heights, Science, Non-computer

• Whidbey Island And Bagel Mathematics

  I was highly amused to read on Raymond Chen's blog the other day that mathematicians are hard at work solving the problem of how to most evenly distribute poppyseeds over a bagel . The reason I was highly amused was not just the whimsical description Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 15, 2004 2:55 AM by Eric Lippert | 28 Comments Filed under: Rarefied Heights, Non-computer, geography