Reminded me of this quote by Steve Jobs (talking about Gil Amelio): "Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water. And my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction."
For the record, I didn't find her post funny or even particularly well-written.
I guess if there's something that can be taken from this article it's "Program or be Programmed". The author didn't understand the inner workings of the Google Factbox data, so she assumed computers control her identity and her online information. However, with a little more computer knowledge, you can figure out how to control this data yourself.
Humans control the computers; it's not the other way around.
I was confused, the header says "Release Date: August, 2000" but it definitely sounded like 1910 English (also, seemed weird to talk about people living on 1£ a day). Thanks for clearing that up.
Was using Stylish extension on Firefox. It does seem natural that custom user styles take precedence over "built-in" styles, but it seems like it's not always the case =/
When I'm stuck on a problem for way too long, I start typing it out in Stack Overflow. Usually by the time I'm done describing it, I've already solved it.
The first technique won't work if the sales are rounded off to the nearest pixel, which is pretty much almost always the case.
The second method won't work if the sales do not follow a Poisson distribution, for instance a product will have better sales at launch and during advertising campaigns. The sales figures don't always float around a constant average.
Also, I hadn't checked the math on the second method but the units don't add up.
On the LHS, you have [sales / pixel]x[pixels] = [sales]
On the RHS, you have ([sales / pixel]x[pixels])² = [sales]²