Three Side Trips and a Rabbit Hole

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. At Inc., Suzanne Lucas presents a list of Payroll Mistakes she collected from fellow administration professionals.

I found the following especially amusing:

My dad once got a check when the manufacturing company he worked for audited its books and found it had shorted him a penny at some point. This was mailed to him at home. He was so irritated that the company wasted the time and money to issue him a check for 1¢ he vowed never to cash it so its books would never balance, LOL. I found it in his things after he passed last spring and it just made me laugh because that was so Dad.

That guy could have been the soulmate of me as a very young adult.

2. I'm not sure how long it's been around, but fans of Gary Larson's The Far Side comic can can enjoy it daily at the web site The Far Side: The Daily Dose.

Sorbitol, which isn't mentioned in the Less Wrong piece, because it is naturally-occuring, is one of the few sugar substitutes whose taste I can tolerate. (Image by BartVL71, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

3. Over at Less Wrong is an amusing piece regarding the discovery of artificial sweeteners titled "There Is Way Too Much Serendipity."

Here's the topic of speculation:

[V]irtually all the popular synthetic sweeteners were discovered accidentally by chemists randomly eating their research topic.

The author explores two reasonable explanations for how this came about.

And here's my favorite humorous bit, about the man who discovered cyclamate:

I know what you're thinking. The kind of guy who lights up cigarettes in a chemistry lab and places them in the middle of uncharacterised compounds before taking them to his mouth again, must have died young of an interesting death. I checked -- he proceeded to live to the old age of 87.

Enjoy!

4. And now for the rabbit hole, a Reddit thread titled, "Tell Me Your Most Exotic Selfhosted Solution, the Crazier, the Better, No 0815 Solutions!."

This one's pretty clever and gives the idea:

I live with a couple roommates in an apartment. For convenience we create a simple webpage where we could quickly see who's home. It works by querying the router (running OpenWrt) every few minutes for known phones connected to the Wi-Fi. We pretty soon realized that we could actually see which room someone was in pretty consistently based on the signal strength alone.

After that it didn't take long before we exploited it as much as we could, everything from automatically turning on the coffeemaker the first time someone left their room between 7-10am to blasting an alarm if someone left/didn't leave their room at certain times.

You will also learn that the 08/15 in the title is German slang for mediocre or run-of-the-mill.

-- CAV