The Universe of Discourse

Watch out for the Calendar Geeks
Yesterday on the private IRC server run by my employer, one of my co-workers said:

<MHO> [My wife] just informed me that this year, July has five Fridays, five Saturdays and five Sundays. This only happens every 800 or so years.

<MHO> Calendar geeks, rejoice!

First, I note that any weird calendar event that occurs, will recur in no more than 400 years, because the Gregorian calendar repeats in a 400-year cycle and 400 Gregorian years is also an exact multiple of 7 days. (It is 400·365 days + (100 - 4 + 1) leap days = 146,097 days, which is exactly 20,871 weeks.) So it is impossible that the event could be as rare as once every 800 or so years. If it happens in 2011, then it happened in 1611 (in Catholic countries) and it will happen in 2411 also.

Now in the particular case cited by MHO, it's clear that since the length of July doesn't vary, the number of Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays depends only on the day of the week on which July 1 falls. You get five Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays whenever July 1 falls on a Friday. Common sense suggests that this should happen about 1/7 of the time, and so around every 7 years, not every 800, or even every 400 years. And in fact it last occurred in 2005, and will occur next in 2016.

[ Addendum 20110527: It turns out this is actually a Thing; there is even a Snopes page about it. People will tweet almost anything, it seems. ]

[ Addendum 20110701: Matt Parker posted an extensive article about why he found this particular non-fact so dismaying. ]

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Why use a digital stadiometer?

The article periodically shows up on places like Reddit and Hacker News, and someone often asks why the stadiometer is so complex. Most recently, for example:

How is this an advance on looking at a conventionally numbered ruler (with a similar bracket to touch the top of the head) and writing down the number? It's technological and presumably expensive, but it isn't delivering any discernible benefit that I can see.

"But it's a really expensive stadiometer," I said.

"The service calls on the manual stadiometers were costing us a fortune."

This stadiometer transmits its reading via radio to a portable digital display. For this doctors' office, the portable display is a red herring. They had the display mounted on the wall right next to the stadiometer. I asked if they ever took it down and moved it around; the doctor said they never did.

At the time I observed that the answer was mundane and reasonable, but not something that one would be able to deduce. In the several discussions of the topic, none of the people speculating have guessed the correct answer.

When I was working on Red Flags talks, people would send me code, and I would then fix it up to be better code. Often you see code written in what seems to be the worst possible way, and the obvious conclusion is that the author is a complete idiot, or maybe just mentally ill. Perhaps this is sometimes the case, but when I took the time to write back and ask why the author had done it the way they did, there was usually a reasonable answer.

The diagram at right shows the structure of the program. Rectangles with rounded corners indicate subroutines; dotted rectangles are the temporary files they use for argument passing.

I suggested to the author that it would have been easier to have passed the data using the regular argument passing techniques, and his reply astounded me, because it was so reasonable: he said he had used the temporary files as a debugging measure, because that way he could inspect the files and see if the contents were correct.

I was thunderstruck. I had been assuming that the programmer was either a complete beginner, who didn't even know how to pass arguments to a function, or else a complete blockhead. But I was utterly wrong. He was just someone who needed to be introduced to the debugger. Or perhaps the right suggestion for him would be to call something like this from inside the functions that needed debugging:

        sub dump_arguments {
          my ($file) = (caller)[4];
          open my($f), ">", $file or die "$file: $!";
          print $f join("\n", @_, "");
        }

This is only one of many such examples. Time and time again people would send me perfectly idiotic code, and when I asked why they had done it that way the answer was not that they were idiots, but that there was some issue I had not appreciated, some problem they were trying to solve that was not apparent. Not to say that the solutions were not inept, or badly engineered, or just plain wrong. But there is a difference between a solution that is inept and one that is utterly insane. These appeared at first to be insane, but on investigation turned out to be sane but clumsy.

I said a while back that it is a good idea to get in the habit of assuming that everything is more complex than you imagine. I think there is parallel advice here: assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.

### Addendum 20240327 A fascinating example of a bad technical outcome that I couldn't imagine could have been caused by anything other than massive incompetence — until a very plausible explanation was suggested: [Software horror show: SAP Concur](BLOGREF/prog/crap-warning-signs-2.html).

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Adventures in systems administration

The toilet snake costs ten dollars. It is a three-foot long steel spring with a pointy corkscrew on the end. You work it down the toilet pipe while twisting it. It either breaks up the blockage, pokes the blockage far enough down the pipe that it can be flushed away, or else the corkscrew tangles in the blockage and you can pull it out. Professional plumbers use a much larger, motorized version to unclog sewer pipes.

People on the train stare at you if you are carrying around a toilet snake, I learned.

When I got home from work I snaked the toilet, and lo and behold, it disgorged a plastic comb. Mission accomplished, most likely.

Later on, Toph, who is three now and fascinated with all things poop, asked me for the umpteenth time why the toilet was clogged. This time I had an answer. "It clogged because someone flushed a comb down it. Do you have any idea who might have done that?"

Toph considered. "I don't know..." she said, thoughtfully. Then her face brightened. "Maybe Katara did it!"

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