I have been posting on Quora since April of 2014, earning top writer status in 2017 and 2018 and running up, as of this writing, 5.6 million views by Quora readers. While many of my posts are of limited interest, I'm inordinately proud of some of them. With this post I will begin retrieving some of my particular favorites from Quora and reposting them here on my blog. There is some fun history behind this particular post. Back when I was a grad student at CMU back in the 1980s I was friendly with Jeff Schrager, a fellow grad student at the time, and he posted a hilarious item in, as I recall, rec.humor.funny, an early netnews group. The item was titled "How Many AI People Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb" and I admired it so much that I tracked it down and put it up on this blog some years ago (https://nygeek-blog.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-many-ai-people-does-it-take-to.html). Several years ago someone posted the question, "What are common stages that PhD studen
In 1972 I bought the first HP 35 calculator sold on the Caltech campus. It was not by far the first one on the campus – HP had distributed pre-release copies to numerous faculty members. Max Delbrück, my next-door neighbor, had given me my first experience with the calculator one evening while hosting my landlady, her family, and me for dinner. I was smitten. When the Caltech Bookstore posted the impending availability of the calculator I was the first on the list. The arrival date was not known, so I haunted the bookstore. HP-35 (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Mister_rf) They finally came in sometime in November of 1972, if I remember correctly, and I happily paid the $395 price (about a quarter of my life savings at the time). It was everything I had dreamed of and more. It transformed my Physics lab performance from C (great on execution and writeup, not so hot on accuracy of calculation) to A. It made me popular as a member of study groups. Games with HP 35
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