The Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm

Something I hadn't come across before, but it's impressive in its simplicity:

1. write down the problem;
2. think very hard;
3. write down the answer.

But you can't use that field; it's reserved!

Interesting story in Mike Dodd's blog:

Via Larry Osterman's recent series on concurrency, I ran across an older post from Raymond Chen on why you shouldn't use reserved fields in internal Windows data structures.

About ten years ago, when I was working on the QuickTime team at Apple, we got a report from a beta tester about some third-party application that was completely broken with the new version of QuickTime. Several hours of debugging in MacsBug later, I discovered that the problem came from that application using a reserved field in the heap data structures. In that version of QuickTime, we had included a patch to the memory manager to work around a problem in older OS versions. That patch needed to use the reserved field, which obviously conflicted with the third party app's use of that field.

When I sent the vendor an email about this, the response came back: "But you can't use that field; it's reserved!"

Umm ... yes.

Bilabials are fun!

Remember how a couple of days ago I wrote about Amy's first plosive?

She seems to have mastered it now; today she often said lovely words such as [æbæbæwæwæbæbæbæβæβæbæbæwæbæbæβæβæbæbæwæwæbæbæ]. (Judging by the length of the word, her "native language" is presumably something agglutinative. And with a fairly minimal phonology.) And Stella said she's been talking like that most of the day.

So, mostly [b] (voiced bilabial stop) but also several bilabial approximants and the odd voiced bilabial fricative. Bilabials certainly seem to be her thing. (And I think the vowel is [æ] rather than [a]. You could make a case for it being phonemically /a/, though, I guess.)

That follows the learning pattern she's already shown in a few other things: do something once, then several days later start doing it again, this time consistently.

Tomorrow, [æbæbæbæbæ] ("the world")!