* … an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center. When a programmer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sitting down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up. That behavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and never when standing. Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminal know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good debuggers, though, know that there has to be a reason. Electrical theories are the easiest to hypothesize: was there a loose with under the carpet, or problems with static electricity? But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible. An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard: the tops of two keys were switched. When the programmer was seated he was a touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led astray by hunting and pecking. – from the Programming Pearls column edited by Jon Bentley in CACM Feb. '85 *
101 EASY WAYS TO SAY NO
I'd love to, but…
1 I have to floss my cat.
2 I've dedicated my life to linguini.
3 I want to spend more time with my blender.
4 the President said he might drop in.
5 the man on television told me to say tuned.
6 I've been scheduled for a karma transplant.
7 I'm staying home to work on my cottage cheese sculpture.
8 it's my parakeet's bowling night.
9 it wouldn't be fair to the other Beautiful People.
10 I'm building a pig from a kit.
11 I did my own thing and now I've got to undo it.
12 I'm enrolled in aerobic scream therapy.
13 there's a disturbance in the Force.
14 I'm doing door-to-door collecting for static cling.
15 I have to go to the post office to see if I'm still wanted.
16 I'm teaching my ferret to yodel.
17 I have to check the freshness dates on my dairy products.
18 I'm going through cherry cheesecake withdrawl.
19 I'm planning to go downtown to try on gloves.
20 my crayons all melted together.
21 I'm trying to see how long I can go without saying yes.
22 I'm in training to be a household pest.
23 I'm getting my overalls overhauled.
24 my patent is pending.
25 I'm attending the opening of my garage door.
26 I'm sandblasting my oven.
27 I'm worried about my vertical hold.
28 I'm going down to the bakery to watch the buns rise.
29 I'm being deported.
30 the grunion are running.
31 I'll be looking for a parking space.
32 my Millard Filmore Fan Club meets then.
33 the monsters haven't turned blue yet, and I have to eat more dots.
34 I'm taking punk totem pole carving.
35 I have to fluff my shower cap.
36 I'm converting my calendar watch from Julian to Gregorian.
37 I've come down with a really horrible case of something or other.
38 I made an appointment with a cuticle specialist.
39 my plot to take over the world is thickening.
40 I have to fulfill my potential.
41 I don't want to leave my comfort zone.
42 it's too close to the turn of the century.
43 I have some real hard words to look up in the dictionary.
44 my subconscious says no.
45 I'm giving nuisance lessons at a convenience store.
46 I left my body in my other clothes.
47 the last time I went, I never came back.
48 I've got a Friends of Rutabaga meeting.
49 I have to answer all of my "occupant" letters.
50 none of my socks match.
51 I have to be on the next train to Bermuda.
52 I'm having all my plants neutered.
53 people are blaming me for the Spanish-American War.
54 I changed the lock on my door and now I can't get out.
55 I'm making a home movie called "The Thing That Grew in My
Refrigerator."
56 I'm attending a perfume convention as guest sniffer.
57 my yucca plant is feeling yucky.
58 I'm touring China with a wok band.
59 my chocolate-appreciation class meets that night.
60 I never go out on days that end in "Y."
61 my mother would never let me hear the end of it.
62 I'm running off to Yugoslavia with a foreign-exchange student named
Basil Metabolism.
63 I just picked up a book called "Glue in Many Lands" and I can't put
it down.
64 I'm too old/young for that stuff.
65 I have to wash/condition/perm/curl/tease/torment my hair.
66 I have too much guilt.
67 there are important world issues that need worrying about.
68 I have to draw "Cubby" for an art scholarship.
69 I'm uncomfortable when I'm alone or with others.
70 I promised to help a friend fold road maps.
71 I feel a song coming on.
72 I'm trying to be less popular.
73 my bathroom tiles need grouting.
74 I have to bleach my hare.
75 I'm waiting to see if I'm already a winner.
76 I'm writing a love letter to Richard Simmons.
77 you know how we psychos are.
78 my favorite commercial is on TV.
79 I have to study for a blood test.
80 I'm going to be old someday.
81 I've been traded to Cincinnati.
82 I'm observing National Apathy Week.
83 I have to rotate my crops.
84 my uncle escaped again.
85 I'm up to my elbows in waxy buildup.
86 I have to knit some dust bunnies for a charity bazaar.
87 I'm having my baby shoes bronzed.
88 I have to go to court for kitty littering.
89 I'm going to count the bristles in my toothbrush.
90 I have to thaw some karate chops for dinner.
91 having fun gives me prickly heat.
92 I'm going to the Missing Persons Bureau to see if anyone is looking
for me.
93 I have to jog my memory.
94 my palm reader advised against it.
95 my Dress For Obscurity class meets then.
96 I have to stay home and see if I snore.
97 I prefer to remain an enigma.
98 I think you want the OTHER [your name] .
99 I have to sit up with a sick ant.
100 I'm trying to cut down. 101 … well, maybe.
* Many have experienced the confusion of traffic accidents and have had to summerize correctly what happened in a few words or less on insurance or accident forms. The following quotes were taken >From those forms and were eventually published in the Toronto Sun Paper. 1) Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don't have. 2) The other car collided with mine without giving warning of it's intentions. 3) I though my window was down, but I found out it was up when I put my hand through it. 4) I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way. 5) A truck backed through my windshield into my wife's face. 6) A pedestrian hit me and went under my car. 7) The guy was all over the road, I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him. 8) I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law and headed over the embankment. 9) In my attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole. 10) I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home, as I reached an intersection, a hedge sprang up, obscuring my vision. 11) I had been driving for 40 years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident. 12) I was on my way to the doctors with rear end trouble, when my universal joints gave way, causing me to have an accident. 13) As I approched the intersection, a stop sign suddenly appeared to stop in time to avoid the accient. 14) To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front, I struck the pedestrian. 15) My car was legally parked as it backed into the other vehicle. 16) An Invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car and vanished. 17) I told the police that I was not injured, but on removing my hat, I found that I had a skull fracture. 18) I was sure the old fellow would not make it to the other side of the street when I struck him. 19) The pedestrian had no idea which way to go, so I ran over him. 20) I saw the slow moving, sad faced gentleman as he bounced off the hood of my car. 21) I was thrown from my car as it left the road, I was later found in a ditch by some stray cows. 22) The telephone pole was approching fast, I attempted to swerve out of it's way, when it struck the front of my car. *
THESE ARE ACTUAL EXCERPTS FROM STUDENT SCIENCE EXAM PAPERS:
Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the organ of the species.
Benjamin Franklin produced electricity by rubbing cats backwards.
The theory of evolution was greatly objected to because it made man think.
Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes and caterpillers.
The dodo is a bird that is almost decent by now.
To remove air from a flask, fill it with water, tip the water out, and put the cork in quick before the air can get back in.
The process of turning steam back into water again is called conversation.
A magnet is something you find crawling all over a dead cat.
The Earth makes one resolution every 24 hours.
The cuckoo bird does not lay his own eggs.
To prevent conception when having intercourse, the male wears a condominium.
To collect fumes of sulfur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube.
Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.
Algebraical symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about.
Geometry teaches us to bisex angles.
A circle is a line which meets its other end without ending.
The pistol of a flower is its only protection against insects.
The moon is a planet just like the Earth, only it is even deader.
Artificial insemination is when the farmer does it to the cow instead of the bull.
An example of animal breeding is the farmer who mated a bull that gave a great deal of milk with a bull with good meat.
We believe that the reptiles came from the amphibians by spontaneous generation and study of rocks.
English sparrows and starlings eat the farmers grain and soil his corpse.
By self-pollination, the farmer may get a flock of long-haired sheep.
If conditions are not favorable, bacteria go into a period of adolescence.
Dew is formed on leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them perspire.
Vegetative propagation is the process by which one individual manufactures another individual by accident.
A super-saturated solution is one that holds more than it can hold.
A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene triangle.
Blood flows down one leg and up the other.
A person should take a bath once in the summer, and not quite so often in the winter.
The hookworm larvae enters the human body through the soul.
When you haven't got enough iodine in your blood you get a glacier.
It is a well-known fact that a deceased body harms the mind.
Humans are more intelligent than beasts because the human branes have more convulsions.
For fainting: rub the person's chest, or if a lady, rub her arm above the hand instead.
For fractures: to see if the limb is broken, wiggle it gently back and forth.
For dog bite: put the dog away for several days. If he has not recovered, then kill it.
For nosebleed: put the nose much lower than the body.
For drowning: climb on top of the person and move up and down to make artificial perspiration.
To remove dust from the eye, pull the eye down over the nose.
For head colds: use an agonizer to spray the nose until it drops in your throat.
For snakebites: bleed the wound and rape the victim in a blanket for shock.
For asphyxiation: apply artificial respiration until the patient is dead.
Before giving a blood transfusion, find out if the blood is affirmative or negative.
Bar magnets have north and south poles, horseshoe magnets have east and west poles.
When water freezes you can walk on it. That is what Christ did long ago in wintertime.
When you smell an odorless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide.
* Keywords: Bureaucracy MEMORANDUM From: Headquarters - New York To: General Managers Next Thursday at 10:30 Halley's Comet will appear over this area. This is an event which occurs only once every 75 years. Notify all directors and have them arrange for all employees to assemble on the Company lawn and inform them of the occurrence of this phenomenon. If it rains, cancel the day's observation and assemble in the auditorium to see a film about the comet. MEMORANDUM From: General Manager To: Managers By order of the Executive Vice President, next Thursday at 10:30, Halley's Comet will appear over the Company lawn. If it rains, cancel the day's work and report to the auditorium with all employees where we will show films: a phenomenal event which occurs every 75 years. MEMORANDUM From: Manager To: All Department Chiefs By order of the phenomenal Vice President, at 10:30 next Thursday, Halley's Comet will appear in the auditorium. In case of rain over the Company lawn, the Executive Vice President will give another order, something which occurs only every 75 years. MEMORANDUM From: Department Chief To: Section Chiefs Next Thursday at 10:30 the Executive Vice President will appear in the auditorium with Halley's Comet, something which occurs every 75 years. If it rains, the Executive Vice President will cancel the comet and order us all out to our phenomenal Company lawn. MEMORANDUM From: Section Chief To: All EA's When it rains next Thursday at 10:30 over the Company lawn, the phenomenal 75 year old Executive Vice President will cancel all work and appear before all employees in the auditorium accompanied by Bill Halley and his Comets. *
Kick the Mongrel
In a previous account I told how reading a book on cryptography led
to my getting an F.B.I. record at the age of 12 and about subsequent awkwardness in obtaining a security clearance. By request I will now describe how I learned that putting provocative information on a security clearance form can accelerate the clearance process. First let me describe the environment that gave rise to this gambit.
White Faces in New Places
In 1963, after living in Lexington, Massachusetts for 8 years, I moved
to the Washington D.C. area to help set up a new office for Mitre Corporation. After three days of searching, my wife and I bought a house then under construction in a pleasant suburb near Fairfax, Virginia. I hadn't noticed t during our search, but it soon became evident that there were nothing but white faces in this area. In fact, there were nothing but white faces for miles around.
We expected to find some cultural differences and did. For example,
people drove much less aggressive than in Boston. The first time that I did a Boston-style fake-out at a traffic circle, the other cars yielded! This took all the fun out of it and I was embarrassed into driving more conservatively.
When I applied for a Virginia driver's license, I noticed that the
second question on the application, just after "Name," was "Race." When filling out forms, I have always made it a practice to omit information that I think is irrelevant. It seemed to me that my race had nothing to do with driving a car, so I left it blank.
When I handed the application to the clerk along with the fee, he just
looked at me, marked "W" in the blank field and threw it on a stack. I guess that he had learned that this was the easiest way to deal with outlanders.
Our contractor was a bit slow in finishing the house. We knew that
there was mail headed our way that was probably accumulating in the post office, so we put up the mailbox even before the house was finished. The first day we got just two letters – from the American Civil Liberties Union and Martin Luther King's organization. We figured that this was the Post Office staff's way of letting us know that they were on to us. Sure enough, the next day we got the rest of our accumulated mail, a large stack.
It shortly became apparent that on all forms in Virginia, the second
question was "Race." Someone informed me that as far as the Commonwealth of Virginia was concerned, there were just two races: "white" and "colored." When our kids brought forms home from school, I started putting a "C" after the second question, leaving it to the authorities to figure out whether that meant "Colored" or "Caucasian."
Racing Clearance
About this time, my boss and I and another colleague applied for a
special security clearance that we needed. There are certain clearances that can't be named in public – it was one of those. I had held an ordinary Top Secret clearance for a number of years and had held the un-namable learance a short time before, so I did not anticipate any problems.
When I filled out the security form, I noticed that question #5 was
"Race." In the past I had not paid attention to this question; I had always thoughtlessly written "Caucasian." Having been sensitized by my new environment, I re-examined the question.
All of my known forebears came from Europe, mostly from Southern
Germany with a few from England, Ireland, and Scotland. A glance in the mirror, however, indicated that there was Middle Eastern blood in my veins. I have a semitic nose and skin that tans so easily that I am often darker than many people who pass for black. Did I inherit this from a Hebrew, an Arab, a Gypsy or perhaps one of the Turks who periodically pillaged Central Europe? Maybe it was from a Blackfoot Indian that an imaginative aunt thinks was in our family tree. I will probably never know.
As an arrogant young computer scientist, I believed that if there is
any decision that you can't figure out how to program, the question is wrong. I couldn't figure out how to program racial classification, so I concluded that there isn't such a thing. I subsequently reviewed some scientific literature that confirmed this belief. "Race" is, at best, a fuzzy concept about typical physical properties of certain populations. At worst, of course, it is used to justify more contemptible behavior than any concept other than religion.
In answer to the race question on the security form, I decided to
put "mongrel." This seemed like an appropriate answer to a meaningless question.
Shortly after I handed in the form, I received a call from a secretary
in the security office of the Defense Communications Agency. She said that she had noticed a typographical error in the fifth question where it said "mongrel." She asked if I didn't mean "Mongol." "No thanks," I said, "I really meant `mongrel.'" She ended the conversation rather quickly.
A few hours later I received a call from the chief security officer
of D.C.A., who I happened to know. "Hey, Les," he said in a friendly way, "I'd like to talk to you the next time you're over here." I agreed to meet him the following week.
When I got there, he tried to talk me out of answering the race
question "incorrectly." I asked him what he thought was the right answer. "You know, Caucasian," he replied. "Oh, you mean someone from the Caucusus Mountains of the U.S.S.R.?" I asked pointedly. "No, you know, `white.'" "Actually, I don't know," I said.
We got into a lengthy discussion in which he informed me that as
far as the Defense Department was concerned there were just five races: Caucasian, Negro, Oriental, American Indian, and something else that I don't remember. I asked him how he would classify someone who was, by his definition, 7/8 Caucasian and 1/8 Negro. He said he wasn't sure. I asked how he classified Egyptians and Ethiopians. He wasn't sure.
I said that I wasn't sure either and that "mongrel" seemed like
the best answer for me. He finally agreed to forward my form to the security authorities but warned that I was asking for trouble.
A Question of Stability
I knew what to expect from a security background investigation:
neighbors and former acquaintances let you know it is going on by asking "What are they trying to get you for?" and kidding you about what they told the investigators. Within a week after my application for the new clearance was submitted, it became apparent that the investigation was already underway and that the agents were hammering everyone they talked to about my "mental stability."
The Personnel Manager where I worked was interviewed quite early
and came to me saying "My God! They think you're crazy! What did you do? Rape a polo pony?" He also remarked that they had asked him if he knew me socially and that he had answered "Yes, we just celebrated Guy Fawkes Day together." When the investigator wanted to know "What is Guy Fawkes Day?" he started to explain the gunpowder plot but thought better of it. He settled for the explanation that "It's a British holiday."
An artist friend named Linda, who lived two houses away from us,
said that she had no trouble answering the investigator's questions about my stability. She said that she recalled our party the week before when we had formed two teams to "Walk the plank." In this game, participants take turns walking the length of a 2 x 4 set on edge and drinking a small amount of beer. Anyone who steps off is eliminated and the team with the most total crossings after some number of rounds wins. Linda said that she remembered I was the most stable drinker there.
I was glad that she had not remembered my instability at an earlier
party of hers when I had fallen off a skateboard, broke my watch and bruised my ribs. The embarrassing thing was that I had run over the bottom of my own toga!
The investigation continued full tilt everywhere I had lived.
After about three months it stopped and a month later I was suddenly informed that the clearance had been granted. The other two people whose investigations were begun at the same time did not receive their clearances until another five months later.
In comparing notes, it appeared that the investigators did the
background checks on my colleagues in a much more leisurely manner. We concluded that my application had received priority treatment. The investigators had done their best to pin something on me and, having failed, gave me the clearance.
The lesson is clear: If you want a clearance in a hurry, put
something on your history form that will make them suspicious but that is not damning. The investigators get so many dull backgrounds to check that they relish the possibility of actually nailing someone. By being a bit provocative, you draw priority attention and quicker service.
After I received the clearance, I expected no further effects
>From my provocative answer. As it turned out, there was an unexpected repercussion a year later and an unexpected victory the year after that. But that is another story.