And while most of the socks in the drawer are red, that one is blue!

What? Are we into non-sequitur foo? ;D

Did you ever try to light it? Once it's going good, it's exothermic, no doubt. But spontaneous combustion while floating on water isn't as common as you might think.

Also, it seems unlikely the 100W skimmer is going to be doing much burning itself. So I presume it has to deliver the skimmed oil to some other location -- which takes time and power as well.

I was aware of the presence of nitrogen in organic compounds (but not, I think, in sugar?).

l may have misunderstood the intent of the original sentence, and simply reacted to the sentence itself. I suspect the intent was to suggest that N2 was created rather than NO2, but "organic matter is converted into harmless nitrogen gas" is not the same as "the nitrogen in organic matter is converted into harmless nitrogen gas" in my usage of the language -- I was, actually, expecting to see CO2 and water in the list, rather than the implied "nitrogen in".

Ah well, modern american english usage appears to include an implied "and whatever" somewhere in almost any sentence.

Still one of my favorite moments, 3x years later, is the stunned sputter from the summer student (who'd written a unix program to interpret an octal dump from 1ESS error messages) when, on my first run of it, I redirected a unix directory into it and it crashed immediately...

His introduction to diabolical testing.

That's one way to make testing fun.

From the article:

...

I presume at least one of those aerobic bacteria has a philosopher's stone in his pocket? Converting sugar, which is a carbohydrate, into harmless nitrogen gas, requires more than mere chemistry.

Struck me there were a couple of similar chemical faux pas(ii? -- how does one do pluralization on such imports?) in the article, making one wonder whether some parts of it can be believed...

Especially since, at least in the US, we seem to have been making crime stories the prime entertainment for decades, and there's a lot of money made from fear mongering.

The presence of competition is not a necessary condition for a "free market".

Probably true -- and competition will certainly arise if the monopoly charges a lot more than it costs for a competitor to arise. And, as we've all seen, anybody with a basement can just buy a bunch of 1200 baud modems and set up their own ISP business, if they can convince their local phone company to connect them.

OH? That's been done -- and replaced?

Well, then, all you have to do to become a competitor is install fiber optic cables throughout some "reasonable" neighborhood, and convince Comcast / Verizon / ATT / other local monopoly to connect you.

We don't need no stinkin NN, we just need a couple of billion spare dollars.

We certainly don't want to trust the Government -- just trust our corporate overlords, who've been working for a long time to create mistrust and incompetence in a government that used to work fairly well.

I must say, my first reaction to the question was "Danny Goodman's Hypercard Handbook" (or whatever it was called). Hypercard really was a great program for the OP's interests. Too bad Hypercard isn't around any more.

I note that the OP did not say he wanted to become a programmer, merely to learn some technical skills.

One of the hardest things to learn in this regard is the unnatural precision required -- that is, speakers of natural languages are used to almost every word having multiple meanings, and having amazing flexibility in word choice and sentence structure in anything they want to say. Computers are much more structured and computer languages have much greater constraints. For the purpose of learning, it helps to think there's only one meaning and only one way to say something.

I think HTML (or perhaps better XHTML) and CSS is a good place to start, actually. Creating/copying a simple web page with HTML and then modifying it by adding a list and then using CSS to change the appearance of some simple elements will illustrate that precision. CSS has the "advantage" that any syntax error simply results in the statement being ignored, without causing the whole thing to "die". The "advantage" to XHTML over HTML is the same -- it's more tightly constrained, and errors simply result in NOTHING. That is, of course, also it's "disadvantage" because a "minor" error doesn't provide much in the way of a clue as to where it is.

I'm sorry I can't suggest a good book to start with for a total beginner, though.

I did take a brief look at "Scratch", and that might be a good place to start, too. Don't allow yourself to be put off by it being aimed at kids. If you're a beginner, you want something that's intended to be easy to use to do something "interesting" -- something where you can see the result quickly and easily. After you've changed the color of a fish sprite (a tutorial video I watched) and made a whirling butterfly you begin to see how the pieces fit together.

As someone else said, if you have a mac available, Automator may be a good place to start trying to do something actually useful.

Be prepared to ignore many of the remarks from programmers who frequently fail to recognize just how unnatural their normal way of thinking is.

Oh -- one more thought -- If you want to try something that doesn't require a computer, but will help you to learn to think like a techie, find a "good" book on Plane Geometry and learn to do the proofs and work the examples. Of all the HS math courses, this is the one most like programming -- you have some basic "facts" and ways of combining them and have to make something new.

Good luck

How about they patent it? Then they can charge you for using it!

Luckily it takes years for patents to be awarded...

I have done 10 to 15 hours straight on a project, and been wiped after that, but the most interesting time I was working with two other guys to redesign/redo a program in Smalltalk. We were essentially doing triples programming and we found that 6 hours was just about all we could handle. 3 hours in the morning, lunch, 3 hours in the afternoon and then we were basically wiped. After that we could do email or other unrelated things, but not programming.

The level of concentration in that effort was as high as I've achieved -- we were in the unusual position of basically knowing everything we needed to know, so we didn't need to spend time investigating this API or that library or what the requirements were -- we could focus on exploring the design space, implementing and testing.

It was exhilarating but exhausting.

NOT! -- or rather, SO WHAT?

Let's, for the moment, assume you have a combined hardware and software system that have both been mathematically proved correct. Presume the proof was completed at Noon on 1 Jan, 2010. The particular hardware and software so proved is then installed in a vehicle and driven for 50,000 km throughout the USA -- through rain, snow, desert heat, etc -- and is involved in several minor impacts (backed into a tree, jumped a curb)...
In that process salted water is splashed throughout the engine compartment, one dog got carsick, a kid dropped a coke and it splashed under the seat, Dad dropped a cup of coffee under the same seat, the windows were accidentally left open during a rainstorm, a total of 10,000 km was driven with a smoker in the car, and the car was taken to the "detailer" 5 times, where they sprayed various cleansers on the vinyl surfaces (and into the air), etc.

A lot of those events can have impacted the hardware that was proved correct before Noon on 1 Jan, 2010. Corrosives in the air, moisture, dust, yukky liquids, etc.

Is that proof relevant to the system at the end of that period?

Fact is, the real world may be modeled by a mathematical system, but it is, itself, not a mathematical system. The mathematical system may be incapable of failure, but the physical system still may fail.

To me it seems bizarre that in 2010 we are using electronic document preparation software -- MS Word, for instance -- to prepare a document. We then [print it,] fax it, [scan it,] and feed it to optical character recognition software in order to get it back into some semblance of the original, probably with a few extra errors caused by the low fidelity of faxes.

Is it really not possible to use email for document transmission?

I agree -- thinking about it, I realized it's probably a problem with almost any control system. Essentially tweaking the speed button is generating an error signal which the system tries to zero, but there's a delay involved (takes time to accelerate). If you keep increasing the error signal, it will keep trying to match. If the error signal gets large enough, the system will downshift and try to accelerate faster. At that point, it's almost certain to overshoot what you requested (and that's probably much more than what you intended) before the system can recover.

It would probably make sense to modify such systems to set a high speed limit -- and also to sense the brakes -- if the brakes come on, shut the throttle.