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I'm more fine with that setup, given that we have a person who is clearly not in their right mind, after working all day and night while still somewhat sick with a cold. I've done some pretty dumb things while sleep-depped and sick (mostly involving saying "yes I am totally better now, now let me go to this party and be all active until I crash horribly", but still.)
I'm just sad that I'm apparently the only one who, upon hearing the phrase "the president's daughter" repeated all thread, can't help but think that clearly the president's daughter was kidnapped by ninjas, and Andrew should really be asking himself whether he's a bad enough dude to rescue her.
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Oh brother. Yes, Bush refused to accept the modern idea of "science", namely, anything said by someone who calls himself a scientist and which serves the political ends of powerful interest groups. He had this silly idea that he wanted to actually see some, you know, actual experimental evidence before taking drastic action.
Funny how today anyone who asks to see the evidence rather than blindly accepting everything he is told by "the experts" is labeled "anti-science".
Oh, and in his notorious stem cell decision, he said that when a scientist demands that the government fund his research, after all private sources of funding have dried up because he was unable to produce any results after years of work and billions spent, that the government might look at what he's actually doing before just signing a check. And that moral considerations might be taken into account when deciding what research to fund. Yes, crazy ideas. Obviously anyone who calls himself a scientist is above petty considerations like "morals". If a scientist says that it is more convenient for his research if he is allowed to kidnap people and torture them to death for his experiments, no one has the right to question that, because he's a scientist, right?
I don't particularly like most of Mr Bush's policies, but this "anti-science" argument is just silly.
And by the way, the "president" of the story is surely the president of the company and not of the nation.
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♪ And the science gets done ♫ ♬ And you make some neat notes ♩ ♪ Only if you manage to... stay alive! ♫
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It must be very confusing living in Europe. If you want to get a feel for even a simple thing like whether your car gets good fuel economy, you have to convert liters to gallons, then you have to convert kilometers to miles, and finally you have to convert Euros to real money. :-)
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I think you mean, "Am she bees done deaded?"
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Little known to Andrew, the DNA sequencer was also a DNA replicator. The president had been secretly funding the research in order to get his daughter cloned, but modified slightly so that she didn't look so much like Chelsea Clinton.
Unfortunately the first round of treatments on the daughter unleashed a wildly virulent horrible new disease of a class and category never before encountered by the human race. Also, those working in proximity to the sequencer/replicator were prone to infection from the odd bits that fell out and became airborne.
Humanity's last hope was dashed when Andrew opened the window, allowing chaos to escape. But at least he got a breath of fresh air, clearing his head just long enough to appreciate the demons he had unleashed.
See what happens when you let grad students putty their own CPU heat sinks?
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So, the real WTF is that the president doesn't have a daughter, it was just something the prof made up to get his results faster?
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Imperial or US liquid gallons?
Ever wonder why the same car sold in the US and Europe have different MPG ratings?
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Peer-reviewed science has degenerated into pal-reviewed political correctness, unavoidably biased to scare the taxpayers into coughing up perpetual grant funding.
That's how we got the whole "global warming" hysteria, which inconveniently had to be renamed "climate change" when the globe stubbornly refused to get warm enough to decimate everything.
"Climate change" in itself is a blatantly absurd term, since it implies that nothing should ever be allowed to change at all, anywhere.
Did you know that the tectonic plates are still moving? And the big island of Hawaii continues to grow with every eruption, entirely devoid of Congressional approval?
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Slightly different gas, and different emissions restrictions (thus more/less restrictive catalyzer).
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TRWTF is that he didn't immediatelly recognize that the crash was due to overheating.
If my PC keeps crashing (and it must have rebooted, because that's the symptom of overheating!) under CPU load this would be my first suspect! I have yet to see a JVM that causes a rebooting crash. Bluescreen at most. But a rebooting crash??!
TRWTF is that the poor ill guy was just inexperienced.
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Not really.
The guy was sick, with a fever. He was cold. Why would he notice the room was overheated?
When you're sick with flu, your brain also doesn't work as well.
(The last line is a mystery though)
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"I don't know that! Ahhhhhhhhh!"
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This must have been one of the few times where Windows were useful during a virus infection.
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Well, the title is "Human Heat Sink." Apparently she's cold now and taking the heat off of Andrew at work.
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+1s all around for all these "alternate" endings to the story!
"So, about the president's daughter," Steinbrenner said, "the rabbit died."
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The real WTF is management enforcing deadlines based on personal schedule, while making it sound that the company would otherwise collapse (or something). Usually, at the end, when the project doesn't get completed by the deadline, the employees working their ass of 60-80 hours per week (on short notice and without extra pay or time-off in future) discover that cruel truth: that some slime of a manager volunteered the whole group to work harder only for personal gain (bonus, points, recognition), while the top boss couldn't care less (whether January or Match, it's all the same to him).
In this story, the employee working hard is, obviously, Andrew; the slime manager is, obviously, Dr. Steinbrenner; the president (with sick daughter) probably didn't even as little as suggest the original deadline, but simply accepted the meeting invite for the demo, sent by the ass-kisser Dr. Steinbrenner.
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... and, yeah - the president's daughter is still too sick for him to even show up on that demo-meeting, which proves the point that he really doesn't care about the "when" too much. The sad part is that he'll probably never know the true extent to which his direct ass-kissing management staff is whipping his bottom-layer employees, and usually for reasons that aren't for general company's benefit (like I said, it's mostly about bonus, promotion, or similar).
I've seen that numerous times (and have been a bottom-layer victim of).
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Odd, I was under the impression that the setting was more along the lines of a university research lab. The president was the president of the university.
"lab mentor"
"research notes"
"etc"
I've seen Profs who were slave drivers for students to finish their research papers just so they could get them upchanneled and approved for some high-falutin' trade conference or scholastic research talk.
And the Prof assigns his/her name to it as mark of prestige to the report as well as the prof gets a +1 to "published".
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As in: Einstein, et al, 1947
This system was self correcting to some extent -- if you wanted to follow up on some interesting research you contact, and work with, one of the lesser names. Everyone knew where the real knowledge came from.
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Yes, and it hit the president's daughter.
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Feeling colder than ever, from opening the window, Andrew sat on the radiator.
"What's that strange smell?" he wondered a moment later.
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First of all, you don't turn up the heat on a hot-water system by directly manipulating the radiator. Second, your system will crash way before it hits 230 degrees F. I don't know of any CPUs that will survive exceeding the boiling point of water.
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http://lmgtfy.com/?q=thermostatic+radiator+valve
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No, the president's daughter was sick and got the president sick so the meeting was probably canceled as a result. Meaning the rush job was in vain.
Also, I'm fairly certain they mean "president of the funding committee" not "president of the united states".
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I thought if we could only get our heads together long enough to elect the right person, he/she would just hand out limitless gobs of cash to everybody and we would all be rich. It is only a few stupid but powerful angry people -- racists, too -- who stand in the way, spoiling it for all of us.
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I've had similar experiences at work, as have probably most people.
One time I was working on a new feature just before Canada Day (think Fourth of July, you Americans). And just before I was going on vacation. I was told that my boss wanted to demo this the week after to a potential customer in Japan, and it had to be done. Period.
OK, so I put in all kinds of overtime that week, including working the whole day on Canada Day. Delayed my vacation by a day too. Got it done. Sent off the code along with instructions on how to install and run it on the laptop they were taking with them to Japan. Then took off for a well-deserved rest.
When I got back, I asked how the demo went, and if the customer was impressed with the new feature. "Oh, that? We didn't have time to show them."
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I'm pretty sure it's President of Earth, Richard Nixon's head.
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TRWTF is placing so much importance on a deadline to the level of the exact minute that people are forced to work while deliriously sick, using computers which are overheating.
If I found out that critical results had been computed on a computer that was repeatedly crashing, and the process had been monitored by somebody who was sick to the point of almost hallucinating, I think I'd chuck those results right out the aforementioned window. Getting the wrong results on time is no better than getting no result at all.
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"After running the DNA tests, it turns out the president's daughter is also his mother. We're handing this one over the Quantum lab guys."
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I got it. President's daughter. DNA sequencing. This is obviously for the Maury Povich show.
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0/10. Would not bang.
Captcha: I saluto you for trying!
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Disgusting. This used to be a site with legitimate WTFs.
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Dr. Steinbrenner called once again: "Is it safe?"
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It's not universally true, but it's definitely a common case.
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[quote user="Evan"]I should also say that I say "did the actual work" a bit tongue-in-cheek; adviser input is pretty invaluable, and at least for a while you probably wouldn't be able to do it without them.
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And then the poor bastard discovered that his overheated CPU had calculated everything wrong and rendered all that work useless.
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That was my guess, too.
When one thinks "dysfunctional organization" (which clearly is not like any organization any of the other readers works for) then one knows that artificial deadlines are a fact of life.
The key word in "artificial deadline" is "artificial". As in manufactured; as opposed to something arising naturally.
So the president's daughter was sick, and possibly the president, too. So he informed the committee that formed the funding committee, and the funding committee, that he would not be able to meet at the time designated...the self-same time that set the artificial deadline.
Since neither committee can meet without the president, the meeting had to be deferred. So the artificial deadline is deferred.
Which means that Andrew "died" for nothing...
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Oh, and then there's the rest of the story...
Remember how Dr. Steinbrenner started out by mentioning the, "...explanation about the president's daughter..."?
My guess is that he already knew the funding committee meeting was cancelled. He sounds like the type of boss who likes to, "See what his people [aka "slaves"] are made of."
So my guess is that the phone rang at 7:18 AM the next morning: "Andrew, can you...?"
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"...pick this phone up out of the snow bank that you threw it in?"
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Sheesh, that's seriously bad news. That means the US is actually growing in size. That's the very last thing the universe needs.
Looks like a job for Chuck Norris: plug them damn volcanos!
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My guess is it was the President's daughter who initially turned up the heat in the lab.
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But the best quote I've seen about Fahrenheit is that it is a "wonderfully human temperature scale: 0 degrees is too damn cold, and 100 degrees is too damn hot," and I will defend it. The 0/100 marks of Celsius are not much less arbitrary than Fahrenheit. How often do I -- or anyone, really -- need to know what temperature water boils at? If I want to know whether my water is boiling, I wait until I hear bubbling, not put a thermometer in it. Even 0 degrees is pretty useless -- the only day-to-day use I can think of is guessing how much I need to worry about ice on the roads (though the sun kind of kills that). And what kind of conversions do you need to do with temperature? I don't think I've ever heard someone talk about millidegrees or kilodegrees; and those measurements would work just as well with Fahrenheit as with Celsius.
Maybe I'm biased by location, but Fahrenheit is way better for actual, day-to-day use. Why do I say location? Because where I am, Fahrenheit actually comes really close to capturing the temperatures that I experience over the course of a year! We have a few days each year with a low around -10 and a high around 0. We have a couple days each year with a high around 100. Boom. Practical.
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