This trio was replaced on Top Gear on the BBC about 10 years ago. Did they make a similar program shown on a different “channel” since then?

Related to the humorous aspect of this post, I have a friend who worked in the building industry in the UK mostly as a bricklayer. He told me he had a series of jobs working in crematoriums building the “ovens” with special fireproof bricks. I guess he’d qualify as a firewall engineer! On a more serious note, I’ve said b4 on this forum, the use of the term “engineer” is highly regulated in most jurisdictions (I’m familiar with Canada, USA & UK). You cannot call yourself an engineer unless u have a recognized engineering degree & you have met the conditions to get a license to practice such as a P.Eng.(Canada), P.E.(US) or C.E.(UK) or similar elsewhere. If you call yourself an engineer without a license & you are reported, the relevant governing body (e.g. Professional Engineers Ontario where I live) will pursue you. It’s usually people like those who call themselves HVAC engineers who fix furnaces & A/C units that get in trouble but I have seen one or two cases where something similar to software engineer got someone in trouble. In most cases, the resolution is a warning to stop using the term engineer but I’ve seen cases where the courts fined those ignoring the warning.

The round the world ticket was available in the 1970’s when I first moved to Canada from the UK. It was the basis of a sort of scam against the airlines where a “business” called a Bucket Shop would sell you a one way ticket across the Atlantic (for a fraction of what the airlines charged) which was actually part of one of the round the world tickets. They somehow got a refund for the unused parts & the difference from the original cost was so low that they still made a profit. Had to use it once as a penniless student returning to Canada after a long stay in the UK. It involved some skulduggery where I paid cash for the ticket at the airport & they gave me a ticket with the coupons from all the other legs of the round the world trip torn out. They provided an explanation to use if anyone at check in asked where the other coupons had gone which I’ve forgotten but no one said booh about it.

Definitely an aviation fan. Started when I was 11 making rubber powered model planes, moved on to “control line” with small ‘nitro’ powered engines & finally had a 1 channel radio control plane (you pressed the one button once for left rudder, twice for right rudder, thrice for up elevator & 4 times for down elevator. The motor was uncontrolled! I soldered together the transmitter & receiver from kits. The Tx had valves whereas the Rx was cutting edge tech using transistors!) the year before I went to Uni in 1968. After that I had a long hiatus until I got back into RC in 2008 with electrics. The high point was competing in a couple of IMAC competitions where you fly routines of 10 aerobatic maneuvers over several rounds in front of judges who give points for how accurately you fly. In the interim between ‘68 & ‘08 I did a lot of flying on business as a consulting engineer & vacations. Without a doubt the most memorable was a trip to northern Saskatchewan where we were doing baseline environmental studies for a Uranium mine. I flew Air Canada from Toronto to Saskatoon then next morning at 6am got on a 6 seater twin engine plane to fly 600 km north to Wollaston Lake where we landed on a gravel strip overlooking the lake. While the pilot unrolled his sleeping bag to have a nap under the plane, we walked down to the lake & climbed aboard a single engined Beaver on floats. We took off and flew 30 mins and landed on a small lake next to the mining camp. Finally two of us climbed into a small helicopter with the pilot and flew around to inspect four flow gauging sites located on small creeks in the vicinity. Once that was done by late afternoon we reversed the process & got back to Toronto the next day. One last memory which I just thought of which I think equals the Wollaston L. trip. In 2010 I was building an RC model of a single engined bi-plane called a Fox Moth (very similar to a Tiger Moth but with a fuselage that can hold 3/4 passengers). Mine was based upon one which flew site-seeing tours from the beach at Southport in NW England where I was born. I discovered the plane still existed & was owned by someone in Northamptonshire so I contacted him & asked if I could visit & take pictures of the plane to use in building/decorating the model. The owner graciously agreed & so I went & got loads of pics. Then to my surprise he pulled it out of the hangar & took me for a 15 minute flight around the local area. An amazing experience to fly in a bi-plane built in the 1930’s which is covered in “doped” canvas & star

Mashed potatoes have their place in life. I think the best is as a topping for Cottage Pie or Shepherd’s Pie. They’re also excellent as part of a Christmas dinner alongside Turkey, Roast Potatoes, Brussel Sprouts, Carrots, Stuffing, Gravy and Cranberry Sauce (the latter being a North American tradition I enjoy ).

Quote:

And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!

The Galaxy Song. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

trønderen wrote:

We made 'graphics' on the line printer from '|' and '-' characters and pixels from white (space) to black (a lot of characters printed on top of each other).

There was an alternative - the Calcomp plotter. You wrote commands to move a pen around with the tip either up or down and could draw whatever complexity of graphics you needed. In my case, when I did my M.Sc. in 1971 I was developing a continuous simulation hydrologic model that could calculate flows at a point on a river over a long period of time using various meteorological data. It had a version which produced hourly flow estimates. With maybe 20 years of data, the hourly output was a lot of numbers. To illustrate the results for my thesis, I plotted a graph of the observed flows and the simulated flows on the Calcomp plotter. The x-axis was about 8 foot long. The first time it ran, the plotter operators turned it off as they thought I'd programmed an infinite loop and was going to ruin an entire roll of their very expensive plotter paper!

RB

Persons using the title Software Engineer who do not have an Engineering degree & a professional licence (e.g. P.Eng. in Canada) should desist as it is illegal to call yourself an Engineer in many countries without those qualifications. If the relevant governing body finds out (e.g. PEO in Ontario), they will take such a person to court as a matter of policy & the offender will be fined & have court costs to pay.

RB (P.Eng.)

Persons using the title Software Engineer who do not have an Engineering degree & a professional licence (e.g. P.Eng. in Canada) should desist as it is illegal to call yourself an Engineer in many countries without those qualifications. If the relevant governing body finds out (e.g. PEO in Ontario), they will take such a person to court as a matter of policy & the offender will be fined & have court costs to pay.

RB (P.Eng.)

ENCRYPTED

I know one "old lady" (my mother-in-law) who at 90 years of age while immobile & bored due to a hip operation managed to keep a scammer (who wanted to help her remove viruses from her computer) on the line for an hour and a half. She told them her computer was upstairs & it would take her a while to get up there to turn it on. She put them on hold. Eventually, they hung up & called her back & she said "Oh yes, I forgot where I was going. I'll try again." Ditto with variations two more times. Finally, she said, "I'm upstairs now & I just remembered I don't have a computer." The language at the other end was not too pleasant but she dined out on that story for several weeks!

Lots of interesting replies. Here's mine. We had a Computer Club at my grammar school in 1966 run by one of the science teachers. We learnt about binary numbers & how computers (at that time) worked. We had some type of primitive system that was collectively programmed to solve simple math/logic problems and show the answers in binary using lights on or off. My first real programming experience was learning Fortran at the end of 2nd year Civ. Eng. degree in 1969. For some unknown reason, after the exams we had a 2 week course each morning waiting for exam results to be published. Needless to say, we spent most of our time partying & so often had less than clear heads in the morning. For the first couple of days of the Fortran course I couldn't make any sense of it. How could i = i + 1? Then it suddenly clicked & I was hooked. The next year I did my 3rd year project programming a simulation of a water resources system to optimize withdrawals from different sources to meet the demand from a nearby city. It was punched cards which were delivered to the Computer Dept. on the other side of campus. If you submitted by 11am, you got your print out the next day. If not you had to wait until the day after. From there I moved to Canada to do a Masters including a thesis developing/programming a deterministic conceptual hydrologic model. This led to a 40+ year career as a water resources consulting engineer doing computer modelling. At first, we did lots of programming but eventually pre-packaged models took over so I kept up my interest as a recreational programmer with a C64, etc. learning various languages, etc. continuing up to today.

Boxing Day originated in England hundreds of years ago. Wealthy people with servants would give them the day off on the 26th & would give them a Christmas "box" i.e. a sum of money. Another version has it that it refers to tradesmen or others who provide a service (e.g. garbage men) receiving a similar Christmas "box" or tip on the day after Christmas. One final version is that churches would collect money in an offering "box" for the poor in the period leading up to Christmas. They would distribute the alms collected in the box on the 26th in honour of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, whose feast day is the 26th. Overall, a somewhat more honourable day than the current version where for some reason after spending 2+ months buying a bunch of useless stuff, people want to go out and spend a load more money on more stuff they really don't need but have to have because it's "cheap"!!!!

My two cents on this is to try to eliminate the need for motivation by doing something I love doing which improves health and fitness as a side benefit. Mostly, I'm talking about cycling which I've enjoyed since my dad gave me my first "road bike" with 5 derailleur gears when I was eleven. I like to ride 3 times a week targeting about 200 km per week. It's most fun riding with a group from my club but I'm happy to ride alone as well. If I have to go more than 2 days without a ride I get unhappy!. In the winter I love cross-country skiing (although I'm not real fond of winter itself). If there's a gap between those two seasons then I ride my turbo trainer. That's where motivation is needed as I really don't like indoor exercise! RB

Thanks. Should have known the government was involved! RB

As the question says, daily New Articles & Insider News e-mails stopped arriving several weeks ago. My Settings shows those boxes are still ticked so why did they stop & how do I restart them? Thx RB P.S. I posted this Qu. elsewhere & apparently someone objected & closed it. Hopefully, I can get an answer here.

Joe, Interesting. What do you mean when you say:

Joe Woodbury wrote:

50% accuracy saves so much time that even that level of accuracy is worth it.)

Interesting. I'll have to look into backprop.

Mark, The Stanford system uses a "Recursive Neural Tensor Network" to train its sentiment model. The sentences are first parsed and processed into a set of "binary trees" with sentiment scores (0, 1, 2 for -ve, neutral & +ve in my case) attached to each word and phrase. I'm afraid I'm not an expert in the theory of NLP so not sure how that fits into "backprop or RNT." I've learnt a bit about the overall field of NLP & a fair bit about the Stanford approach with the hope of creating my application without making some dumb error but that's as far as it goes.

Eddy, Thanks for your comments. What you say is definitely true regarding sarcasm, hypothetical situations, biases, etc. Similarly, there are many unexpected sentences, weird opinions and invented words. My data set is from about 10 different speakers with sentences randomly selected from the segments where they are specifically discussing a particular stock. Even though this is a fairly narrow domain it's amazing how many ways people come up with of saying the same thing. Also, they very seldom say "buy", "sell" or "hold" even if directly asked for their recommendation. They will usually say about 5 or 6 sentences which I, as a human, can interpret as a veiled buy/sell/hold recommendation. I am not sure if training using a more general source would help. The original "model" provided with the Stanford NLP API is based on film reviews & it gave only about 52% accuracy on my original training set. It's training data contains a lot more general phrases as well as film related ones. I might try combining my set & theirs for an experimental training run & see if that helps. Ultimately, however, I think that what's needed is another "layer" of intelligence that actually puts things together to "understand" the sentences rather than just applying a kind of matrix of +ve/-ve scores for words and phrases in the sentence. The "sentiment" analysis is only a part of my code, another part is "rule based" from looking at keywords and the structure of questions/answers. I hope by combining these two things that I can get a bit further.