Dinner with friends
Most of the people we invite for dinner are clearly geeks too, in one or the other way. We know chemists, physicists and of course computer scientists.
In advance to such dinners we always collect some questions, which life brings up: “Why is cream getting compact when being whipped?”, “Are the lights really out when I close the door of the fridge?”, etc. Depending on who is having dinner with us, we bring up those questions and are sometimes surprised, how the pros are struggling in their own domains when it’s about simple kids questions.
The most challenging guests are those from the same domain. I had a PC support call during dessert and was explaining to my dad how he can check connectivity. Even though I was on the lower floor when I said to him “now you write ‘ifconfig -a’ “, there were two people calling out “he’s got a Windows, it’s ‘ipconfig’!”
December 16th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
I think that’s a great idea. Do you have a list of all the questions? I like the fridge one. Sometimes I sneakily open it again, just a little crack and if you open it just a tiny bit you can see the darkness, which is kindof reassuring. We don’t want to be wasting energy in times like these…
February 2nd, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Sure, I have more: Why does cream get whipped (chemically)? Why doesn’t the warm air of the equator immediately go to the poles (I mean right now)? Why does neon light start to flicker sometimes?
And apropos fridge: We thought of putting a wireless webcam into it, but how can we be ever sure that the light would also be out if there wasn’t any cam? And there’s the energy waste again