The Job Interview

Have you ever had a really bad interview? The following incidents really happened during interviews (reported by Robert Half of Robert Half International).

The Job Candidate...

• Dozed off and started snoring during the interview.
  


• Wore a Walkman and said she could listen to the interview and the music at the same time.
  


• Challenged the interviewer to an arm-wrestle.
  


• Said if he were hired, he would demonstrate his loyalty by having the corporate logo tattooed on his forearm.
  


• Interrupted the interview to phone his therapist for advice on answering specific questions.
  


• Brought her large dog to the interview.
  


• Abruptly excused himself, then, returned to the office a few minutes later wearing a hairpiece.
  


• Chewed gum and blew bubbles.
  


• Stretched out on the floor to fill out the job application.
  

Laws Concerning Food and Drink

Laws Concerning Food and Drink;

Household Principles;

Lamentations of the Father

by Ian Frazier

1997

Part II.

Laws When at Table

And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke. Drink your milk as it is given you, neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for; if you will dip your blocks in the milk, and lick it off, you will be sent away. When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table, and do not bite it upon its edge and by your teeth hold it to your face in order to make noises in it sounding like a duck; for you will be sent away.

When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed, and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within; I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister has done the same to you. Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is. And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why. And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that, that is why. Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass.

Atlantic Monthly

Kurt Vonnegut's Tips for Writing Fiction

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.

From his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

A Poem for Computer Users Over 40

A computer was something on TV

From a science fiction show of note

A window was something you hated to lean

And ram was the cousin of a goat.

Meg was the name of my girlfriend

And gig was a job for the nights

Now they all mean different things

And that really mega bytes.

An application was for employment

A program was a TV show

A cursor used profanity

A keyboard was a piano.

Memory was something that you lost with age

A CD was a bank account

And if you had a 3-in. floppy

You hoped nobody found out.

Compress was something you did to the garbage

Not something you did to a file

And if you unzipped anything in public

You'd be in jail for a while.

Log on was adding wood to the fire

Hard drive was a long trip on the road

A mouse pad was where a mouse lived

And a backup happened to your commode.

Cut you did with a pocket knife

Paste you did with glue

A web was a spider's home

And a virus was the flu.

I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper

And the memory in my head

I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash

But when it happens they wish they were dead.

~ Author unknown

Study Questions for the Nurses Board Exam

1. You are assisting a primary nurse with charcoal administration down an orogastric tube. The room measures eight feet by twelve feet. The patient starts to retch before the tube is pulled. Knowing that charcoal can spew out of a tube in a five foot radius (even with a thumb over the opening) and the stretcher is two feet wide, how many feet per second do you have to back up to get less charcoal on you than the primary nurse?
   


2. Doctor A picks up a chart out of the rack. S/he finds that it is a repeat patient with abdominal pain. Doctor A puts the chart back. Doctor B picks up the chart five minutes later and also returns it to the rack. Doctor A leaves the nurses' station heading south at three miles per hour. Doctor B leaves the nurses station for the doctors' lounge at five miles per hour. How long before the patient is at equal distance from Doctor A and Doctor B?
   


3. You were assigned two large treatment rooms and the gynecologic room. By the end of the day you have cared for ten patients. Four patients were female over the age of 80, all complaining of weakness. Two patients were male, ages 72 and 50. The last four were female, between the ages of 24 and 40, all complaining of abdominal pain. It is 3:00 p.m. and time to restock the rooms. How many bedpans will you need?
   


4. You are the primary nurse for an elderly patient with congestive heart failure. The IV stick was exceptionally difficult, but you are able to start an 18 gauge catheter on the second attempt. You leave the room to check on another patient. A relative thinks that the IV has stopped dripping and opens the clamp. How much IV fluid will infuse before you return?
   


5. You are sent for your morning coffee break. You need to use the restroom but can't find one unoccupied and have to walk down to the lobby. The coffee pot is dry and you have to make more. When you get to the cafeteria, the line extends ten feet into the hallway. You can't remember exactly when your break began. How much time do you have left?
   


6. You are the primary nurse taking care of a particularly shy female in the gynecology room. Her private physician arrives to see her, but you can see that he is not in a particularly good mood. After much coaxing, the patient agrees to a pelvic exam. How many people will open the door during the exam?
   


7. An elderly man arrives in the Emergency Department by rescue squad. Twenty minutes later his wife arrives and registers him. She is shown the entrance to the department and slowly shuffles in. How many rooms will she walk into before she finds him?
   


8. You are assigned to the EENT room. You have a patient to be checked for a peritonsillar abscess. The ENT physician has been paged and expects to arrive in 45 minutes. Three hours later, he arrives and is at the patient's side, asking for a flashlight. Lightly jogging at 22 miles per hour, how many rooms will you have to search before you find one?
   


9. You have been asked to cover a coworker's rooms during her break. One of her patients is an elderly, confused male with an enlarged prostate. A catheter has been inserted and his physician is coming to see him. Somehow he manages to get off the stretcher. The drainage bag is firmly hooked to the side rail. Knowing that the catheter is 16 inches long and the drainage tubing is three feet long, will he be able to reach the door before pulling out the catheter?

Breakfast Similarity

The Theory of Breakfast Similarity states that: "Although most people want variety in their midday and evening meals, for breakfast they are content to eat the same thing day after day after day after day after day."

From a survey conducted by mini-AIR, which asked:

Do you like to eat the same thing for breakfast day after day after day after day after day?

The result:

YES 52%

NO 47%

NOTE: 7% of "YES" respondents, and, oddly, the same percentage of "NO" respondents specified that their answer applies only to weekdays, and that for them the opposite answer applied to weekends.

Several individuals sent in insightful observations, and a few others sent in observational insights. Here are a few of each:

"Yes. Since without a breakfast most people have a limited ability to think (at least I have), it is too hard a challenge to think up some nice meal early in the morning. It is thus logical that most people rely on food that has proven itself in the morning as the best strategy to getting booted up quickly." - INVESTIGATOR FERDINAND PEPER

"Your question confuses what we like with what we do. Do I like to eat the same thing for breakfast day after day? No. Do I eat the same thing for breakfast day after day? Yes." - INVESTIGATOR MARC AUSLANDER

"Cooked rolled outs with dried fruit, nuts, bran and acidopholus yoghurt, topped with 'single malt' honey from the Leatherwood tree (endemic to Tasmania -- the worlds greatest honey) for 25 years and counting." - INVESTIGATOR SIMON BAKER

"I do not like to eat the same thing for breakfast day after day after day after day after day. But I do like to eat the same thing for breakfast day after day after day after day. (There are, after all, limits.)" - INVESTIGATOR LESLIE LAMPORT

from:

http://improbable.com/airchives/miniair/twenty-first-century/mini2003-10.txt

mini-Annals of Improbable Research ("mini-AIR")

Issue Number 2003-10

October, 2003

Bluebird by Charles Bukowski

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too tough for him,

I say, stay in there, I'm not going

to let anybody see

you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I pur whiskey on him and inhale

cigarette smoke

and the whores and the bartenders

and the grocery clerks

never know that

he's

in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too tough for him,

I say,

stay down, do you want to mess

me up?

you want to screw up the

works?

you want to blow my book sales in

Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too clever, I only let him out

at night sometimes

when everybody's asleep.

I say, I know that you're there,

so don't be

sad.

then I put him back,

but he's singing a little

in there, I haven't quite let him

die

and we sleep together like

that

with our

secret pact

and it's nice enough to

make a man

weep, but I don't

weep, do

you?

This was published in Bukowski's book "The Last Night of the Earth Poems" circa 1992.

Einstein's Co-author: A Cautionary Tale for Science Editors

Among the many notable achievements of Einstein's work, was the discovery of his coworker in Berlin, S.B. Preuss, though it received little publicity.

A review article about cosmology stated: "The discovery ... of Hubble's law ... led Einstein to ... reject the notorious cosmological term (Einstein and Preuss, 1931)".

The curious reader who has followed Einstein's life story and knows of his collaborations with M. Grossman, J. Grommer and W. Mayer (to name a few), but who has never heard of Preuss, eagerly turns to the references given. It is: A. Einstein and Preuss, S.B. (1931), _Akad. Wiss._, 235. Surely the _Akad. Wiss._ must be the Berlin Academy? Happily enough for those without access to the originals, Einstein's reports to the Berlin Academy were reproduced on the occasion of celebrations of Einstein's 100th birthday in 1979. A glance at the appropriate page of the 1931 volume of the _Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften_ (Reports of the meetings of the Prussian Academy of Science) reveals the workings of a creative mind. Let us look at the following sequence of references:

Einstein, A. (1931). _Sitzungsber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss._ ...

A. Einstein, 1931, _Sitzgsber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss._ ...

A. Einstein, _Sitzber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss._ ... (1931)

A. Einstein (1931) _Sber. preuss. Akad. Wiss._ ...

Einstein, A., 1931, S.B. Preuss. _Akad. Wiss._ ...

A. Einstein, S.B. Preuss, _Akad. Wiss._, 1931 ...

A. Einstein, S.B. Preuss, _Akad. Wiss._ (1931) ...

A. Einstein and Preuss, S.B. (1931) _Akad. Wiss._ ...

Thus, it turns out that the birth and death of S.B. Preuss occurred within such a very short time span that any scientific endeavors attempted could come to nothing. One hopes that this will be noticed by the people producing the citation index. Otherwise, in a generation or two, a young historian of science might apply for a grant to uncover more details from the brief, but not entirely joyless, life of S.B. Preuss.

Source: "Droll Science," an anthology compiled by Robert L. Weber

The Burns Unit

Tony Blair is being shown round a hospital, and towards the end of his visit he is taken to a ward to meet some of the patients.

He approaches one man, who has no obvious signs of injury, and asks him how he feels. The man replies: `Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the pudding-race!'

Perplexed, the PM approaches the man in the next bed and asks him why he is in hospital. `Some hae meat, and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it, But we hae meat and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit,' says the man.

A third patient tells him: `Wee sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, O, what a panic's in thy breastie...'

Embarrassed, Mr Blair turns to the doctor accompanying him and whispers: `What's the matter with them? Is this the psychiatric ward?'

`No,' replies the doctor. `It's the Burns unit.'

Anon.

Chapman - meaning of the word

English chaps selling chapbooks

To grasp the meaning of Chapman, consider the history. The original English spoke German as one would expect Germanic people to do. The key is the phrase 'Anglo-Saxon'. The Anglo component comes from the Angle people who came from Angeln and Engle. Its nearest modern equivalent would be southern Denmark. The language of the Angles was Englisc from which we get English. The Saxon component comes from the Saxons who came from what is now northern Germany. These Germanic people began as mercanaries in what became England in the dying days of Roman Britain and finished as its conquer starting a few decades after the last Roman Legion left England in the 5th century.

The English language was altered by Roman Catholic missionaries who brought their Latin mainly in the 8th century. Around the 9th century, the Vikings took over the north and east of England and many old norse and Danish words changed the English. Then, the Normans altered the language starting in the 11th century. Their status as conquerers is revealed in the English. For example, an Englishman tended to pigs, but the finer cuts went to the Norman masters. So swine and bacon (the opposite of living high on the hog, were least desirable and fit only for an Englishman) were English words. The finished product, mutton is Norman French.

Let us go back to German and old English to understand what a Chapman is. Among the German people, the counterpart was the surname Kaufman, which is derived from the old high German word 'chouph'. The old English had several words of similar meaning.'Cop' meant barter. 'Chipping' was a place where things were bought. 'Ceapian' meant to buy. The old English word 'ceap', also meaning barter, eventually mutated into our modern word cheap. More telling is the old English word 'Ceapman,' the old word for a pedlar or merchant, who were usually traveling merchants moving from village to village. It mattered not what specific goods they sold, they were Chapmans.

Chapbooks were thus small books or pamphlets, usually of popular tales, ballads, or poetry, etc., formerly sold on the streets by chapmen.

But be aware, the noun 'chapter' (= a main division of a book, treatise, etc.) has a different origin. It was first used in 1175-1225, coming from Middle English -- chapiter, var. of chapitre, from Old French, and from the Latin: capitulum (= little head; capit-, s. of caput head + -ulum -ule ). In Late Latin, it meant section of a book; in Medieval Latin, it meant section read at a meeting, hence, the meeting, especially one of canons, hence, a body of canons.

Winchester Mystery House

The Winchester Mystery House is one of the strangest houses in history and a prime tourist destination if you are ever in San Jose, California. It was built at the end of the 1800s to house the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles and, as you might expect, is rather bizarre.

It was built by Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Winchester and heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune. She believed that she was being haunted by the ghosts of all those killed by the rifles. These visions started after the death of her husband in 1884. Considering the popularity of the rifles, that is a hell of a lot of ghosts, particularly Native Americans. To rid herself of these ghosts, she decied to consult a medium. The medium told her that she could either build a house to contain the ghosts, or she could stop making the rifles and give up all her lovely cash. Which do you think she chose? She believed that work needed to continue on the building as long as she lived, as the rifles kept producing ghosts. She bought a small farmhouse in San Jose and work began soon thereafter.

As the house was only ever intended to be lived in by ghosts, it was extremely unsafe. The rooms were designed to attract the more high-class ghosts and drive off the peasant ghosts! Stairs climb into ceilings or simply into nothingness. Doors open onto airshafts, sheer brick walls, or even out of the side of the house above the ground floor. Some windows show great vistas of walls, and the house seems terminally unsafe, perpetually on the brink of collapse. Mrs. Winchester had also been told that ghosts loved cupboards. She stuffed the house full of cupboards, some less than an inch deep, and in bizarre shapes to fit as many on to the walls as possible.

By the time of her death in 1922, the house stretched over six acres, with 750 rooms, eight floors, 2000 doors, 10,000 windows, 40 staircases, 47 fireplaces, 52 skylights, 6 kitchens, 3 elevators and six safes full of rifle blood money. Construction finally ceased after her death from heart failure.

Marketing Terms Explained

You go to a party and you see a sexy girl across the room. You go up to her and say "Hi, I'm great in bed, how about it?"

That's direct marketing.

You go to a party and you see a sexy girl across the room. You give your friend a tenner. He goes up and says "Hi, my friend over there is great in bed, how about it?"

That's advertising.

You go to a party, you see a sexy girl across the room. She comes over and says, "Hi, I hear you're great in bed, how about it?"

Now that's the power of branding.

Article by Mark Twain

History of Search Engines (before Google)

Although we credit Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines for giving us the system we use today to find information, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientists to work together to build a body of knowledge for all mankind. He proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. In fact, a long list of great minds contributed to the development of the information system we use today:

Hypertext

Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution. While Ted's project Xanadu, for reasons unknown, never really took off, much of the inspiration to create the WWW came from his work.

Theories of Indexing

George Salton was the father of modern search technology. He died in August of 1995. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the Saltons Magic Automatic Retriever of Text, otherwise known as the SMART informational retrieval system. It included important concepts like the vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms. Search today is still based on his theories.

Archie

In 1990, Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, created Archie; the first search engine. It was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files. Archie users could use a variety of methods including e-mail queries, telneting directly to a server, and eventually through World Wide Web interfaces. Originally, it was to be named “archives” but was changed to “Archie” for short.

Gophers

Archie gained such popularity that in 1991 Paul Linder and Mark P. McCahill created a text-based information browsing system that used a menu-driven interface to pull information from across the globe to the user's computer. Named for the Golden Gophers mascot at the University of Minnesota, Gopher tunnels through other Gophers located in computers around the world, arranging data in a series of menus, so that users can search for specific topics.

World Wide Web

Until 1991, the World Wide Web had not yet come into existence. The main method of sharing information was via FTP. Tim Berners-Lee wanted to join hypertext with the Internet and created the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor, called WorldWideWeb. He then created the first Web server called httpd, short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon.

The first Web site was built at: http://info.cern.ch/ and put online on August 6, 1991. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994, and the Virtual Web library, which is the oldest catalogue of the web.

Further reading: http://info.cern.ch/default.html

Computer Mouse using the Left Hand

Alain Delisle at the Robert-Sauve Occupational Health and Safety Research Institute in Montreal, Canada, asked 27 right-handed volunteers to control their mouse using their left hand for a month. He found they were able to complete standard computing tasks using much smaller movements of their shoulders, arms and wrists (Applied Ergonomics, vol 35, p 21). It is these movements that can lead to musculoskeletal problems.

The reason for the improvement, says Delisle, is that standard computer keyboards are not symmetrical, and with the letter keys centred in front of the user the numeric keyboard sticks out a long way to the right. The result is that you have to stretch further to reach a mouse placed on the right of the keyboard than the left.

Delisle's volunteers got so used to having the mouse on the left that over the month's trial they learned to work nearly as fast as with the mouse on the right. Sixteen of the volunteers found switching so beneficial that they kept their mouse on the left after the trial. If you are right-handed and cannot countenance changing, Delisle recommends using a keyboard without a numeric pad.


Paul Mark
New Scientist

The Origin of Basketball

VERSION 1:
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Ollamalitzli was a 16th century Aztec precursor of basketball played in Mexico. If the rubber ball was put through a fixed stone ring on one side of the stadium, the player was entitled to the clothing of all the spectators. The captain of the losing team often lost his head (by execution).

VERSION 2:
Modern basketball was devised by the Canadian-born Dr. James A. Naismith (1861-1939) at the YMCA at Springfield, Massachusetts, in December, 1891, and first played on January 20, 1892. The first public contest was on March 11, 1892.

VERSION 3:
According to recent scientific evidence, the precursor of basketball dates back 3,400 years. American and Canadian anthropologists have unearthed a ball court of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica in Chiapas, Mexico, that dates back to approximately 1400 BC -- at least five centuries earlier than any other excavated court. Warren Hill and Michael Blake of the University of British Columbia and John Clark of Brigham Young University in Utah said the finding proves that formal courts have been present since the very inception of settled village life and were important in political, social and religious life.

“The discovery and dating of this ball court indicates first, that large-scale ball courts, requiring significant amounts of labor, were in use much earlier than previously thought; and second, that ball court form was conserved with few modifications until the Spanish Conquest (in the 16th century),” they said in a letter to the scientific journal Nature. It seems neither the game, in which players competed to pass a rubber ball through a wall-mounted hoop, or the sponsorship has changed much in thousands of years.

The scientists think that elite villagers may have sponsored the construction of ball courts to enhance their status and prestige and that inter-village competition may have helped to maintain community solidarity.
(REUTERS News Service 04/29/98)

A Bit of Cheers (the TV show)

Diane: How can you compare Disneyworld and Tibet, where
we might possibly unravel the mysteries of life?

Sam: Well, there are a lot of mysteries you can unravel
at Disneyworld.

Diane: For example?

Sam: Um, all right, all right. Why is it that uh
Donald Duck wears a top and no bottom whereas
Mickey wears a bottom and no top?

Cliff: Uh well, Sammy, it's because you know, the duck's
privates are hidden by the feathers and the
mouse's is, well, need I say more.

Frasier: While you're at it, I mean, why is it we've
never seen Donald fly? I mean, I've seen that
damn duck to the karioka.

Carla: And if Mickey is dating Minnie, how come he has
such a high voice?

Sam: Whoa whoa, wait, are you trying to tell me that
Mickey is a...

Diane: All right all right all right! We'll go!
We'll go!


Choosing a honeymoon spot
"Norm's Last Hurrah"

Room Air

At the University of Alberta, graduate students were required to act as laboratory demonstrators in the Physiology courses given to medical, science, and nursing students. One of the laboratory sessions was about "respiration," and experiments involved measuring such things as tidal volumes, functional residual capacities, vital capacities, etc. The students had to obtain samples of oxygen and carbon dioxide from the gases they exhaled, as well as samples of room air, to make a comparison. On many occassions, nursing students, our future health care professionals, would ask demonstrators where they can get samples of room air. Tired of being repeatedly asked the same question, one demonstrator thoughtfully and carefully labeled a large gas-sample bag "ROOM AIR." Enthusiastic nursing students, continuing to ask where they could find room air samples, but now were being directed to the large air bag in the center of the laboratory. Everyone seemed happier.


Glen Wheeler