The fact that a large fraction of these posts are stories taken from R-Ladies meetings or from the bug reports at work probably says that I am not spending enough time hanging around at the end of the runway waiting for planes to land. Also today I went to my doctor’s office (family medicine, not one of my neurologists) to catch her up on how things have been the past six months—and to get a hepatitis A vaccine because I am not interested in getting any more vaccine-preventable illnesses.

This post is both from R-Ladies and from the bug reports!

There is a problem in one of our prealgebra classes that asks the students to find the smallest positive integer such that something-or-other is true. The answer is, I dunno, let’s say 33. I get an awful lot of bug reports in which the student has tried the problem and then given up and then written in very angrily asserting that 33 is not positive!

A few weeks ago at the R-Ladies meeting, I was explaining why I don’t use a particular package in my code. The author of the package seems to have no respect for the concept of backwards compatibility (which is his choice). Sometimes I would accidentally update things, and then my code would break, and I would have to spend half a day searching stackexchange trying to figure out what went wrong. The organizer of the R-Ladies group is a big fan of this package, and she explained that the author only breaks things with every other release. She said that the even numbered versions are backwards compatible and that the (and here I’m quoting) “negative” versions could break things (of course she meant to say “odd”).

Isn’t it interesting that so many people have so fully internalized an isomorphism between the groups \(\mathbb{Z}_2\) under addition (a/k/a {0, 1} under xor) and {-1, 1} under multiplication?