This Is Why I Love Computers

In this election season, we're pretty used to seeing candidates and their supporters stating utter absurdities as if they were obvious facts, on the order of "the sun comes up in the morning." But as good as the politicos are at deadpanning insanity, they don't begin to compare to a computer. Here, two bits of absurdity I found in the last few days.

First, from the Weather Service. Note Friday's forecast:


Slight chance of nothing? Sounds like my social life.

And then I got this warning from a writers' conference message board:

I think relativity's involved here. It must be that I can post a message every thirty seconds as measured by the bits flying around inside the computer at something very close to the speed of light. Thanks to Einstein's time-dilation effect, that works out to about every ten hours from my (relatively) stationary perspective.

Well, that's one way to shut me up.

Second Part of ProjectsAtWork Article is Now Up!

The concluding installment of my two-part war story about project failure is now up on the ProjectsAtWork website. Called "How Many Miracles?" it addresses the question of just how many "great leaps forward" can a project need for success and still have any chance of actually working. Click here to read it.