Could you pass the Acid Test at Google or Microsoft?

Over the years, I've known dozens of people who've interviewed at Microsoft, and who have been asked all sorts of insane questions in their interviews. In interviews, I have often found the simplest questions were the best, like "What is the last book you read, and when was that?" When is almost always instructive. The answer ranges from "on the bus coming here," to "7th grade."

The Pingdom website came up with this compilation of questions:

Questions by Google

How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

Describe a chicken using a programming language.

Questions by Microsoft

You have a bucket of jelly beans. Some are red, some are blue, and some green. With your eyes closed, pick out 2 of a like color. How many do you have to grab to be sure you have 2 of the same?

Pairs of primes separated by a single number are called prime pairs. Examples are 17 and 19.

Prove that the number between a prime pair is always divisible by 6 (assuming both numbers in the pair are greater than 6). Now prove that there are no ‘prime triples.’

Imagine an analog clock set to 12 o’clock. Note that the hour and minute hands overlap. How many times each day do both the hour and minute hands overlap? How would you determine the exact times of the day that this occurs?

How much does a 747 weigh?

Imagine a disk spinning like a record player turn table. Half of the disk is black and the other is white. Assume you have an unlimited number of color sensors. How many sensors would you have to place around the disk to determine the direction the disk is spinning? Where would they be placed?
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The Star Trek Red Shirts

This image is from the wired blog...artist unknown

If you accompanied Captain Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy down to an alien planet and you wore a red shirt, the chances are you would not be beaming up.

Matt Bailey of SiteLogic analyzed the numbers and found 13.7% of Kirk's crew died during their three-year televised mission, and that 73% of those deaths were Red Shirts.

Here is someone's YouTube homage to the red-shirts.

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John Edwards experienced a Penile Zipper Injury in his rush to escape the Beverly Hilton Hotel

By Pablo Fanque,

All This Is That National Affairs Editor

I wrote an article a couple of days ago, in which I stated that All This Is That had published its last article on Ex-Senator John Edwards. I should have said "next to last."

How was I to know that I would be in the Formosa Cafe in Hollywood the next day, striking up a conversation with a young woman who turned out to be an intern at Cedars Sinai Medical Center (near Beverly Hills and West Hollywood)? Or that she had treated, along with a resident, a man named "Jack Olson" who was in fact John Edwards? And that she would treat him for a trauma that most often occurs in young boys?

You may snigger, but in fact, Ex-Senator Edwards experienced a common emergency room complaint about which dozens of articles have been published in medical journals. Look here. Or here.

As it turns out, my intern friend, Jenny, treated the Ex-Senator for a Penile Zipper Injury. She only understood what actually happened after the National Enquirer broke the story wide open. The Senator was in a hurry to zip up and hightail it out of the Beverly Hilton Hotel when he experienced a most painful misfire. The injury did not require catgut sutures, but did necessitate application of an ointment and dressing to the former Senator's tallywhacker. John Edwards was zipping up quickly as he realized the hotel was crawling with reporters and photographers.

"Jack Olson" and Rielle "Baby Mama" Hunter

The zipper injury John Edwards incurred has thus far not been mentioned in the press. Until today.
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analog+ digital painting: Map of New New Amsterdam

click the painting to enlarge

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McBush

click to enlarge

I can't figure out who did the original photoshop job, but I like it.
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Get Together Music Video by the Youngbloods (with Stephen Stills and Jackson Brown)

Here's a vid of the great 69ish Get Together by The Youngbloods. I went to a few rock festivals, and the best by far was the Sky River Rock Festival, where I saw the Youngbloods, Wishbone Ash, Delaney and Bonnie (w/ Eric Clapton as a guitar sideman), Jimmy Witherspoon (I remember vividly his smoldering "Soledad"), and The Buoys. This really is a tired hippie anthem, but I still have a soft spot for it. I've never heard a better version than the one they released as a single.


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A family affair? John McCain will not likely suffer the slings and arrows that now plague Ex-Senator John Edwards

John McCain will not likely suffer the slings and arrows that now plague Ex-Senator John Edwards. He had his own "affair" blow up last year, on the front page of the New York Times, and hundreds of other websites and blogs. But his wife stood steadfast. And how could she not?

Cindy McCain is John McCain's second wife. They were married in 1980. He admits to having an affair with her while he was married to his first wife, Carol. How angry can Cindy McCain really be when he husband steps out? No harm, no foul. John Edwards, on the other hand, had hell to pay at home. . .the same kind of hell that Elliott Spitzer, Mark Foley, and Larry Craig had to undergo.

I am pretty sure the next big political sex scandal will involve both partners: isn't it time we had a really good scandal with swingers (a/k/a "wife-swappers")? There has to be someone running who was involved in a key party or hot tub orgy somewhere, somehow. . .


The other other woman, Vicki Iseman
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Jack Brummet Poem: Survival

1
Around and within you—
The cunning enemy
Calculates your fall,

And a traitor within
Beats in your chest.
Know when to stand and when to run.

2
You gather your friends
Around you
Like a shock of wheat,

Like a bulwark
Or a last ditch bivouac
In the cold rain and snow.
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Speaker of the House rips into the dwarf (Senator Joe Lieberman)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted Sen. Joe Lieberman on Wednesday for his "totally irresponsible" remarks about Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and warned that the Senate might retaliate by revoking Lieberman's committee chairmanship (if they take control and no longer need his 51st vote).

Pelosi chastised some of Hillary Rodham Clinton's more vitriolic supporters for being "less than gracious" toward Obama. She did, however, praise the Senator for supporting Obama after their brutal primary fight.

Pelosi's interview with KGO Radio (810 AM) talk show host Ronn Owens [who was on the KGO in the mid 80's when I lived there] in San Francisco is certain to roil the Clinton backers, despite the fact they got their wish to have her name placed in nomination. But the House speaker's excoriation of Lieberman, was the big news and is certain to please hard core Democrats, who are angry at Lieberman's continual rips on Obama.

On Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Senator Lieberman questioned Obama's patriotism, calling the election a choice "between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put his country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate that has not."

Pelosi was asked by a caller on Owens' show what could be done about the attacks from Lieberman, the Democrats' 2000 vice presidential nominee who, though an independent, still caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate. "One of their best weapons, of course, is someone who is considered by some to be a Democrat."

Pelosi mentioned the timidity of Senate Democrats taking on Lieberman while his vote is crucial to preserving the Democrats' 51-49 majority. And she alluded to the fact that Lieberman's top spot on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will be in jeopardy if Democrats gain seats in the Senate in November.

"In 85 days or something, they will have five more Democrats. They won't need him to make the majority. And it will be interesting to see what the leadership in the Senate, the Democratic leadership in the Senate, does at that point in terms of Joe Lieberman's chairmanship of his committee."

We love Dr. Gary Greenberg's book and website: Sand grains

A microscopic view of grains of sand from Maui.

Sandgrains.com—Exploring images through the microscope: The microphotography of Dr. Gary Greenberg—and the book, A Grain of Sand, by Dr. Gary Greenberg are endlessly fascinating. Visit the website, and buy a copy of Greenberg's book here.

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John Edwards and Rielle Hunter: the long, slow slide into obscurity begins

illustration from Co-Ed Magazine

By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Editor

This is our last posting on Ex-Senator John Edwards, in order to let him drift into the obscurity he so richly deserves. . .like the old televisions in the 50's and 60's. . .when you turned them off, the picture collapsed to a small dot in the center of the screen that slowly faded away. John Edwards has hinted that he intends to carve out some sort of public role for himself, but that's the same delusional thinking that led to his current predicament. It's time to air the stench out of All This Is That.

According to today's Daily News, "John Edwards didn't confess his adultery with his flaky videographer, Rielle Hunter, until after he officially announced his presidential run in December 2006."

The National Enquirer reports that "Edwards didn't confess until after an unwitting campaign staffer walked in on him with Hunter and word got back to his wife, who confronted him." They further report: "They broke up a bunch of times, especially when Elizabeth was rediagnosed [with cancer]," a friend of Hunter's, Texas publicist Pigeon O'Brien, told People. "But they got back together."

And a "bombshell" that will surprise no one who has followed the story: "sources close to Hunter say that Edwards and his mistress choreographed their public tango over a DNA test: he offered to take one last week, she declined to allow it. "They worked that out together in advance," a source described only as "an insider" told the Enquirer. "She's still protecting John because she loves him and thinks they may eventually have a future together."
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Cindy McCain's Breasts:::::::::A coked Up First Lady??::::::::Is Cindy McCain Jeri Kehn's replacement or more like Martha Mitchell Jr. ?

With the John Edwards brouhaha, I kind of missed the "show us your t**s" McCain "controversy." This is good. Check out McCain's speech on YouTube (below). He experiences at least two or three brain freeze moments (I bet there are no TelePrompTer™s at Sturgis), offers to have his wife strip for the crowd, and panders to the crowd on gas prices and the war.

“I was looking at the Sturgis schedule and noticed that you have a beauty pageant and so I encouraged Cindy to compete,” McCain said to hoots from the largely male crowd. “With a little luck, she could be the only woman ever to serve as both the first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.” Senator John McCain a/k/a "The 44th President" a/k/a "George W. Bush's Third Term Stand-in." Miss Buffalo Chip is a title given to the winner of the Sturgis beauty pageant that features topless (and often bottomless) contestants.

I'll admit I don't spend much time tracking John McCain. And I know very little about Cindy, other than she has more money than Yoko Ono...which is nothing to sneeze at. Is is true that she is coked up, or frequently flying on Oxy's, or some cocktail of hashhish, Xanax, and Maker's Mark? Two times over the last week people have said "You don't know about Cindy McCain? You? I can't believe it." No, I don't know. Write in and disabuse me of that notion. I am too busy trying to find images of Cindy where she took her husband's advice. I mean, we kind of need someone to take the place of Jeri Kehn Thompson in the G.O.P. babestakes, but Cindy does have a spooky, severe, Aryan side.

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