I'm exactly the same way. I have a weekly gig that occasionally gets recorded and thrown up on the web. I hate watching the video, because whenever I do, all I hear are my own mistakes. People tell me it sounded great, and I think, "Sure, to someone with no musical training, maybe."
It never occurs to me to realize that "someone with no musical training" describes easily 80% of the audience. Maybe more.
I'd like to leave you with something my music teacher told me. There are no mistakes.
"Music comes from inside of you, and through thought and motion you set it free into the air around you. When you are true to the music, whether you are tone deaf or have perfect pitch, the musician hears your song that is uniquely yours and yours alone. If you want a perfect note for note reproduction of a song, buy a tape recorder."
It really helped me let go of some my perfectionist tendencies and just let the music out.
Even those with no musical training will probably disregard your mistakes if the overall performance is good.
Example: My favorite Irish traditional duo is Peter Horan and Fred Finn (both RIP, alas). They were legendary for the tightness of their unison playing. There is a great video [1] of them from 1982, when they had been playing together for 25 years. At the 1:05 mark, Peter (the flute player) switches to the next reel, and Fred doesn't. The result is complete musical chaos ... and then, at 1:07, Fred finds the tune, and they suddenly are both in perfect sync again.
Now, this sort of screw-up is almost the worst mistake a competent Irish duo could make. But hell, for me if anything it makes this video stand out in a positive way. Seeing the fumble and recovery is endearing.
It may or may not have been in customary informal usage for that long [citation needed], but it is still considered incorrect in strict, rigorous, formal usage. (Yes, this is on the cusp of changing, but for now, it's still true.) In formal usage, pronouns agree in gender and in number with their antecedents.
You can easily find citations in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Bernard Shaw, and so on. It's not "customary informal usage", it's just a regular, ordinary feature of the English language.
I was wondering: if it starves the fuel of oxygen, it stops the fuel from burning, even if it's still hot, yes? So if it could scale from frying-pan-level to house-level, at the very least, couldn't it be used to suppress the fire, the smoke production, and the further weakening of the structure, to allow a squad to search and rescue more safely? Then when you turn off the sound, maybe the material has cooled below the reignition point, but even if it hasn't, at that point you can fight the fire traditionally.
My understanding is that it doesn't starve the fuel of oxygen, but rather starves it of activation energy. I'm fuzzy on the chemistry, but I remember it being like this:
fuel + O2 + activation energy -> CO2 + H2O + energy
The propagating sound waves move two of the input components of the reaction.
fuel: stationary
O2: moves, but is replaced by more O2
activation energy: moves and is missing from future reactions unless/until new activation energy is introduced.
Again, I took chem long ago, but I think that's what's going on.
17 years ago, I worked for a hearing aid manufacturer. The common terms in use there were BTE and ITE, for "behind the ear" and "in the ear." Frankly, I thought the initialisms were poorly conceived. ITE is three syllables, same as "in the ear," and less meaningful for the uninitiated. BTE only saves you one syllable, again at the cost of meaningfulness. But either which way, your terminology is both understandable and correct.
Off-topic: While I was there, they asked employees to submit ideas for a new hearing aid marketing slogan, with the incentive of a free vacation to Vegas going to the person who submitted the one they used. For some reason, I did not win the vacation with my suggestion: "Stick It In Your Ear!"
My town just built a "Premium Outlet Mall." I was dubious of the wisdom of that plan, but I just visited it last weekend, and it seems to be pretty popular, even with the Mall of America just minutes away, and with Internet shopping available at the swipe of a smartphone or the click of a mouse. It's not an indoor mall, which I also find curious, here in the Land of 10,000 Snows, but it does have a free indoor parking garage just across the street. The projections are that the outlet mall is going to siphon off about 4% of the take this holiday season. (The article I read was pretty vague as to what size pie that was 4% of, to my chagrin.)
Interesting thing about the Eagan outlets is that there are non-outlet stores mixed in. I also found the outlet prices to be above that of other outlets (north of the cities). With that location I guess they don't need to be that cheap.
I didn't realize there were non-outlets there. The prices are strange--I've bought a handful of items, and they were all stickered at or below nearby retail, but when they rang them up, the actual price was even lower. While I love to get a deal, I prefer to know what the deal is before I hit the register. Anyway, that should be a good location, easy access from three interstates and a couple major trunk highways, but then, that's where Cedarvale was, and that died a slow painful death too.
Fascinating. I had known for some time that oak trees will commingle their roots, forming an oak internet. In good times, this helps smaller trees become better established through resource-sharing with mature trees. Unfortunately, the network doesn't just pass beneficial resources; it also passes the oak wilt pathogen, so if one oak tree gets the wilt, it's a pretty good bet that all the others in the immediate vicinity will get it too.
On my first day at one job, HR called me into a conference room to review my compensation package and everything. The HR rep wrote a number on a Post-It and handed it to me, saying, "This is your salary. Here at BigCo we hold salary in confidence between you and the company. In other words, please do not discuss this number with any of your co-workers."
I responded, "Don't worry, ma'am. I'm just as ashamed of that small number as you are."
[low 6 figures, 28 years experience, Upper Midwest]
The stuff that means the most to me would look like junk to anyone else: an origami crane, inexpertly folded; a used sock with buttons sewn on it; a styrofoam heart with tissue paper and googly eyes glued to it; a few really bad pencil drawings... Handmade by my children, and given to me with love. I'll never part with them.
>Four people need to cross a rickety bridge at night. Unfortunately, they have only one torch and the bridge is too dangerous to cross without one. The bridge is only strong enough to support two people at a time. Not all people take the same time to cross the bridge. Times for each person: 1 min, 2 mins, 7 mins and 10 mins. What is the shortest time needed for all four of them to cross the bridge?<
17 minutes, if you can stipulate that at the beginning of the problem, the 10 minute and 7 minute people are on opposite sides of the bridge, each paired with one of the other two guys.
18 minutes, if they must all start on the same side of the bridge, but there is no requirement for all of them to end up on the opposite side.
This also assumes that person who can cross the bridge in as little as one minute has no problem slowing down to accommodate someone else's slower pace; otherwise there's no real point to trying to share the torch.
I think the purpose of the puzzle is one of resource management.
It's not a hard puzzle, and I think that it's too easy to try to overthink it to sound smart, like you've done.
The reasonable assumption is that the four people are on one side of the bridge, and you want to have them all on the other side of the bridge.
The simple answer is that the person that takes 1 minute to cross goes with all of the other people, and then brings the torch back for the rest.
So 10 minutes, 1 back, 7 minutes, 1 back, 2 minutes. Total of 20 minutes.
There isn't anything technically specifying that they have to end up on the opposite side of the bridge at the end, but you wouldn't have a situation where someone really wanted to cross the bridge and end up where they started without a torch, and it indicates that the four people have one torch, which implies that they're a party of 4, not 2 groups on opposite sides of the bridge.
I think it's a good question, because it judges the state of the person being interviewed. Are they just scared away by a simple puzzle? Do they come up with some contrivance to try and show off how smart they are? Do they just come up with a practical solution?
Personally, I'd give the practical answer and say 20 minutes, give or take a bit for transferring the torch and turning around. I'd make the assumption that they were all on one side of the bridge and want to go to the other.
When you're given a request to send a request across a network and send a confirmation across the network, you're not going to go and send the some of the requests to the server, and some of the requests to the client, and some of the responses to the server, and some to the client, just because, despite the implied context, you decided that you could make it a bit faster by doing something that didn't make sense because it technically followed the rules.
You probably think your answer is still better, and that's why it's a decent question.
Sometimes these questions are explicitly asked to see if the candidate will check the assumptions when there can be more than one, even if one is fairly obvious.
I'm the guy in the interview who says, "Only one person can make it across. The 1 min guy, realizing there is only one torch (and given that one must hold the torch to cross)makes a grab for the torch and runs. The rest get eaten by wolves in the dark".
In the real world, a light source has a useful radius of illumination. This could be exploited. If the useful radius is greater than half the span of the bridge, everyone can cross the bridge in exactly 10 minutes.
If the useful radius of the torch is 25% the bridge length, the bridge can be crossed in 15 minutes.
So the correct answer to the puzzle question is "how much of the bridge does the torch illuminate?"
Then the questioner gets flustered, and you can suggest, "Maybe you should have given them one set of night-vision goggles instead."
If you solve the puzzle as written, you can only be as clever as the puzzle-maker. If you can break the puzzle and then fix it, you must be cleverer.
I have interviewed enough times to know that you can't please everybody. And some interviewers like to assert their dominance during the interview. If they see you as a potential competitor rather than an underling, they won't endorse you.
I once aced an interview brainteaser, and the interviewer actually tried to derail my solution by interrupting and making misleading suggestions. When I finished, he told me that I was the only candidate so far to give the "correct" answer. He was clearly unhappy about it, which confused the heck out of me at the time.
I wasn't supposed to do that. I was supposed to give a half-assed, partially correct answer and let the other guy show off how smart and superior he was, by giving me the "real" answer.
So yes, beating the brainteaser might backfire. If it could, would you still want to work there?
Well if you're stipulating starting positions, the fastest possible would be if the 7 and 10 minute men are on one side, and the 1 and 2 minute men are on the other. Each pair would only have to cross once, passing the torch while they are all on the same side. 10 minutes + 2 minutes for 12 minutes total.
Although, if one's interest level were continuously poked into a particular memory location every time it changed, you might find that if you peeked when it piqued you would find that it also peaked.
On an unrelated note, I was writing an article for a travel magazine, and found a very well-conceived online database of recommended places to visit. Sadly, I couldn't use it in my article, because I couldn't figure out how to cite the sight site.
It never occurs to me to realize that "someone with no musical training" describes easily 80% of the audience. Maybe more.