Hiccupps

My youngest daughter has recently started using PowerPoint at school and set herself a project of making a newspaper in it. She asked members of the family for contributions and my mum and dad went crazy (yeah, they're retired) and wrote half a dozen articles. They haven't got PowerPoint so they used Presentation  and emailed their pieces over to me as an  OpenDocument  file. I wasn't surprised that PowerPoint warned there might be problems opening it as I've seen similar things with Word. (My dad sends me all of his tech support questions as documents created in Writer  ...) So when it showed up as a single slide with masses of text, it was no big deal. I told Dad and got an email back the following day saying he'd been trying desperately to get it onto multiple slides but to no avail. Perhaps I hadn't explained well enough that I thought it was PowerPoint that had corrupted his content. But if it hadn't started as one slide, what was he doing? I ca...

The other day, I said I was reading Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr Feynman! by Richard Feynman and was captivated by it. I've finished it now, and I've pulled out a handful of quotes. I love this on bad (or as he puts it, cargo cult ) science and how strongly it relates to the way I want to perform and report testing: But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science ... It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty - a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid - not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked - to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw d...

I've been reading Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman!  by Richard Feynman and I'm captivated by the eyes-open way his anecdotes relate how he notices things, how he feels about things, how he feels about how he feels about things, what his interest in things is, and why, and how he is constantly motivated to experiment and learn and understand, and then share his understanding. Image: Google Books