The Old New Thing

The importance of remembering parity in a back-and-forth race on your flying bicycle

May 20, 2013 May 20, 2013 05/20/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that one of my friends had made the U.S. cycling team. (Perhaps because everybody else got busted for doping.) Even more implausibly, I also made the team. To celebrate, he challenged me to a short race. The path ran along a river, in which a medium-sized boat was setting sail. Our bicycles somehow could fly (which we considered ...

The secret lair of Administrative Assistants

May 13, 2013 May 13, 2013 05/13/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that a colleague and I were looking for a copy of a TN3270 emulator in order to investigate a bug. The search took us into an abandoned-looking Building 5. But upon entering, we discovered that Building 5 was actually the secret lair of all the Administrative Assistants. Oh, and we eventually found the bug in TN3270. It ...

Dentistry in the Brazil-like future

April 29, 2013 Apr 29, 2013 04/29/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that I was living in a nursing home in some Brazil-like dystopic future. In this future, people had become so horribly disfigured that they wore flesh-colored suits under their clothes all the time just so they would look good "naked". This vanity extended only to people under the age of around 40. The old people in the home were ...

Dreaming about games based on Unicode

April 22, 2013 Apr 22, 2013 04/22/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that two of my colleagues were playing a game based on pantomiming Unicode code points. One of them got LOW QUOTATION MARK, and the other got a variety of ARROW POINTING NORTHEAST, ARROW POINTING EAST, ARROW POINTING SOUTHWEST. I wonder how you would pantomime ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER...

Your tenant and your lover, in your dreams

April 15, 2013 Apr 15, 2013 04/15/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that a friend of mind said, "Between your tenant and your lover, you should get along with at least one of them...

Another meaning of the word leptoceratops

April 8, 2013 Apr 8, 2013 04/8/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that a number of the form (10ⁿ−1)/9 was called a "leptoceratops." And it had to be tied up with a squid...

The joke’s on you, because PATH goes to Penn Station, not Grand Central!

April 1, 2013 Apr 1, 2013 04/1/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that I was asked to develop a hill-avoiding bike route from my childhood home. Along the way, I rode through a daycare playroom (twice, due to a spiral path), met Madonna, the ghost of Alec Baldwin's wife, a team from The Amazing Race trying to figure out which PATH train goes to Grand Central (trick question!) and waited for the ...

Dreaming about a rather unusual guitar rehearsal

March 25, 2013 Mar 25, 2013 03/25/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that I watched a long-time colleague of mine rehearse the guitar in preparation for the new "hot pants" competition of the Miss Universe pageant. The scary thing is that the pageant may actually do it...

Derive the age of the planet Jupiter from the properties of liquid hydrogen and the planet’s surface temperature

March 11, 2013 Mar 11, 2013 03/11/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that my homework assignment was to derive the age of the planet Jupiter. The professor hinted that physical properties of liquid hydrogen and the current Jupiter surface temperature would be useful. My classmate Ted, on the other hand, had to extend a C++ base class to record a GUID name. The two of us were taking a class ...

Around and around and back and somewhere else

March 4, 2013 Mar 4, 2013 03/4/13

Raymond Chen

I dreamed that I was navigating through an enormous house, with lots of twists and turns. I eventually became convinced that the house was only locally Euclidean. Yes, I sometimes have topology dreams...