{"id":252,"date":"2002-05-29T11:53:42","date_gmt":"2002-05-29T19:53:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ogre.nu\/wp\/?p=252"},"modified":"2020-07-13T12:26:49","modified_gmt":"2020-07-13T20:26:49","slug":"stupid-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=252","title":{"rendered":"stupid computers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Save me from software that tries to outsmart me!
\n
\nHere I was working on a long document that contains a lot of numbered headings. The author not unreasonably wanted the meat of the headings, but not the numbers, to be underlined. MessyWord knows better: if the content is underlined, the number must<\/em> be underlined. As I am not yet an expert on MS Word 9x (having used WordPerfect 5.1 for the last dozen years), I gave up and took the underlining out; I never liked it anyway (particularly when, as in one of the headings, it covers more than one line of text) and bold ought to be enough.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile I got a plaintive call from my employer (a temp agency) begging me to round my time to quarter-hours. What kind of brain-dead system can’t handle numbers other than multiples of 15? Later it occurred to me that the problem was not so much a lack of resolution as an incompatibility of base: the data entry clerk had to translate manually from m\/60 to n\/100. But that can’t be the whole story; a few weeks ago they misunderstood “37:20” as “37.2 hours” and still ‘rounded’ it to .25. (Later<\/i>: “We bill in quarter-hours.” “That’s funny; the lawyers I’m working for bill in tenths.”)<\/p>\n

So I’ll write it up with ¼, ½, ¾. And next week I suppose they’ll insist on the bogus precision<\/a> of “:15” or “.25”.<\/p>\n

As a son of a physics teacher<\/a>, I have just enough science education that this bugs me. Never write more digits than you know!<\/i> And to a former programmer, accustomed to squeezing out every spare byte (can you tell how long it’s been since I was in the trade?), it’s also wasteful to use two digits for less than one digit’s worth of information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Save me from software that tries to outsmart me!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-neep-neep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4104,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions\/4104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}