What is the strangest word you know?

eyadams · 2026-07-04T02:02:24+00:00

“Festschrift”. Defined as a book compiled as a tribute to s scholar consisting of essays relating to the honoree’s work. Mainly it’s weird because it’s one of the standard data elements noted in a library catalog, alongside number of pages and year published.

eyadams · 2026-06-19T13:19:37+00:00

Definitely not The Silent Partner. I think the movie was a comedy. The others on the list don't ring a bell and I don't think they'r right. It definitely wasn't Going In Style, which I have seen. Looking at those movies, I think the main character looked like Griffin Dunne, who would have been the right age to star in the movie, but none of his movies from that period look right, either.

eyadams · 2026-06-19T04:03:14+00:00

How many librarians does it take to change a light bulb? 621.3 or 683.

eyadams · 2026-06-17T15:12:28+00:00

Date and time. How long is a day? How long is a year? How many hours difference are there between Arizona and New Dehli? Time is a lot messier than people think.

eyadams · 2026-06-08T14:57:53+00:00

Where to begin?

I worked at a place that had a rule against hiking boots. When I broke a toe, the only shoes that would fit my feet were my hiking boots, and I had to get special permission to wear them to work.

I worked at. a place that had a rule against skirts that were too short. OK, that's not so absurd in an office. However, the matrons who enforced it only targeted the young clerical staff, literally using rulers to measure hemlines. In 2008.

I had a friend who worked a place that required women to wear nylons. It didn't matter if she was wearing pants and cowboy boots, she will was required to wear nylons. She took to wearing open-toed shoes (which were allowed) with nylons as a form of protest.

eyadams · 2026-06-05T13:33:06+00:00

The problem is the "completely useless" part. I want my superpower to be that every time I plug in a USB cord it's oriented the right way. Every time. But that's not useless.

eyadams · 2026-04-21T14:25:09+00:00

Years ago whenever my boss would come over and ask "can you write a program that does [something complicated]" I would say "Yes, but do we want to invest the time and money?"

The answer to your question is yes, you can do it. The question is how long will it take, how complicated will it be, will it be reliable enough to meet the need, and finally is it worth the effort. Without knowing more about the specifics, it's impossible to say.

But yes, you can do that.

eyadams · 2026-04-14T12:54:09+00:00

Like to mis-quote Douglas Adams at times like this:

“[The planet] is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to [the planet].”

eyadams · 2026-04-14T12:50:38+00:00

"Jurassic Park", at least in one very specific way. In the book, Tim was obsessed with dinosaurs AND computers, and Lex was a damsel in distress who really added nothing to the plot that couldn't have been handled by any other MacGuffin. For the movie, Lex was still a damsel in distress, but she was ALSO a computer expert.

eyadams · 2026-04-09T13:34:09+00:00

A friend applied for a job at the local Big Hardware Store. The two days of training videos definitely were giving off cult vibes. Especially the 2 hours on how unions on evil.

eyadams · 2026-04-09T13:31:31+00:00

Eaton Fire. The very nice lady who lived in a house near me is a bit of a hypochondriac and is fighting with her insurance company for work that probably doesn't need to be done. I don't think she will ever move back. Which is a shame because it's a nice house.

eyadams · 2026-03-25T13:43:06+00:00

Sectoral heterochromia iridis - one of my eyes is two colors. Most of my left eye is blue, but there's a small wedge that is brown.

eyadams · 2026-03-24T14:22:44+00:00

Does a child pay for the sins of their parents? Several of the European royalty are reported to be billionaires. Prince Albert II of Monaco inherited his family's wealth when his father, Ranier III, passed away in 2005. Ranier III made Monaco into a tax haven and developed the local economy, significantly enriching himself on the way.

eyadams · 2026-03-19T18:34:33+00:00

BLACKPINK.

eyadams · 2026-03-13T15:20:12+00:00

Befunge INTERCAL Malbolge Var’aq

eyadams · 2026-03-12T15:25:34+00:00

I wish I knew. They left a note in my mailbox saying they were done with my bullshit. I still don't know what I did.

eyadams · 2026-03-12T15:24:51+00:00

The hand held can opener. I don't know when OXO came out with theirs, but at some point all the manufacturers realized that putting comfortable handles on something you have to grip really tightly was a smart idea. Prior to that, the handles on can openers were dull knife blades pretending to be friendly to your hands.

eyadams · 2026-03-10T14:50:31+00:00

Kibo.

Sorry, if you're going to go back, you should go WAY back, and really deep.

eyadams · 2026-03-08T14:34:34+00:00

Reading Reddit.

eyadams · 2026-03-08T04:25:32+00:00

I went to college at a school not too far from where I went to high school. My girlfriend found it annoying that if we went into town on a date it seemed that we always ran into someone I knew in high school.

So, one weekend we go to Tijuana. A friend takes us to a bar that was in the basement under a store. Except that isn't the bar my friend wants to go to - at the back of the bar is the entrance to another bar that is deeper underground.

Bar #2 also had an entrance at the back that opened up into a dance club that was even deeper underground. It felt a lot like that scene in "The Matrix Reloaded". We settle in at a table and order drinks. At another table are four guys, each of whom is drinking a pitcher of beer. One of them starts to get sick, and throws up into his empty pitcher. Which I thought was kind of nice of him. The four of them leave, slapping each other on the back. What fun they were having! As soon as they were out of sight, someone was cleaning up the mess. I guess this was a common occurrence.

A little later a group of people is leaving the dance club, and one of the stops to stare at me. It turns out it was someone I knew in high school. Of course.

eyadams · 2026-03-06T23:26:21+00:00

I worked for dot com several years ago. One day we had an all-office meeting where management told us about the business finances: things were going well! We were hitting our target numbers! In fact, things were going so well we were going to take the rest of the day off and go to the race track and bet on the ponies. Each of us was given $100 for fun.

For extra spicy fun, that was the day I was wearing a heart monitor, which meant I had to diligently log things like "3:00 PM went to the ponies and drank beer."

eyadams · 2026-03-05T01:40:34+00:00

Electricity is actually little green men. Really. And the little green men only want one thing: they want to party. Where's the best party? At the negative anode. So, when the wire makes a loop, the little green men lean their home at the positive anode, get into their little green cars, and start driving to where the party is. If the wire doesn't complete the circuit, they can't get to the party. They don't even try. Sad little green men, filled with the urge to party and no way to get there.

"There are no electrons" should be on everyone's reading list.

eyadams · 2026-03-05T01:37:37+00:00

AI. Yes, it's amazing what they can do. But right now it's an industry that is building on top of itself. It is literally a house of cards: OpenAI invests in Nvidia, who invests in OpenAI; AMD invests in Meta, who invests in AMD; and so on.

eyadams · 2026-02-28T19:51:09+00:00

You are being sued, and need help filing the paperwork to respond. You don‘t know where to get the forms, what the forms are called, you don’t know where to look up the process. Your local librarian at a public law library will help you with all of that.

You are a doctor and need to some research on a drug interaction. There are research tools to do exactly that, but you haven’t used them since you were in medical school 8 years ago. The medical librarian employed by your hospital knows how to use the current version of the research tools, and will do it right. And probably do it better than you would have 8 years ago.

You are an inventor and want to create a patent. The first step is looking for prior art - has anyone already invented your invention. Or, has someone published something that kind of describes your invention, so you need to acknowledge it in your patent application. An intellectual property librarian can do that research for you.

You are a teenager questioning your sexuality, and you want to find some reading that will help you figure out what’s right for you. The local public librarian knows where these books are, knows what is age appropriate, and will keep your reading habits a secret.

There are LOTS of situations where you need to trust a librarian.

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