Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Author: Ezra S F

  • Confirmations

    Received an email from a company they were using to validate my email address is the correct one. It specifically told me not to do anything if the email address is correct and to let them know if it was not. We’re writing to confirm that this is your current email address. If this email…

  • TED Talk: Let’s try emotional correctness

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    Sally Kohn gets an unbelievable amount of hate mail for doing her job: being a liberal pundit on Fox News. Political persuasion begins with emotional correctness: the respect and compassion we show one another. Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us. That is emotional correctness.…

  • Verification Codes

    One would hope that verification codes would be extremely random. More randomness makes it harder for a malicious entity (person or computer) to guess the code. Less randomness makes it easier. With all the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) out there, we hope there is enough randomness in these methods to make them unguessable by someone attempting to…

  • Outlook 2016 Appointments

    I got Office 2016 at work, so I am struggling through moved cheese. The big change for me is the To-Do appointments. In 2010, it showed several days worth of items. Which is ideal for me. I do not have a ton of meetings, but I like to see a list of what is upcoming…

  • Research BEFORE reacting

    A friend posted this article on Facebook, Everything wrong with this country happened this morning on my Facebook page, which showed an image with the original erroneous claim. The reactions to it were agreement with the bogus claim. Which was extremely sad because the originator of the claim now refutes it. The whole point of the article…

  • TED Talk: Randall Munroe

    I have followed XKCD for years. His What If? blog (and book) is really good as well. He walks step-by step through the inputs and effects of the questions. The What If for the video below is Relativistic Baseball. If the video does not load, then try Randall Munroe: Comics That Ask What If?  

  • Independence

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    Thinking about independence since it is the Fourth of July. Over the centuries it is amusing how close the United States has become with the United Kingdom (descendant of Great Britain). So much so that both the President of the United States and a candidate for the job both travel to the UK and talk about how…

  • Nebulous

    Schrödinger’s Cat is one of my favorite thought experiments. I tend not to think of things and black-and-white or not even in shades of gray but as simultaneously both. Well, I used to call things as having shades of gray until I realized that was wrong. I sometimes still make that error. The better I understand…

  • Blog It; Or It Didn’t Happen

    This blog is often my external brain. If I find something interesting, then I ought to blog about it. Later, when I need to reference it, then I can find it here. Failing to write it down can result in spending lots of time trying to reinvent the wheel. I guess part of the problem…