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Tell us your naughty stories

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Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#131
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the occasion, but yes, bonus if you appear to work there. My favorite place to go is the women's bathroom. They always have soap, paper towels and usually something like hair gel or other amenities. Men's bathrooms have nothing , plus women are cool about it.

When my gym was doing some building work, men and women swapped changing rooms (all the builders were men) and I was amazed at how clean, spacious, and well-appointed theirs was. You know they even have individual shower cubicles, not just a big open space with shower heads hanging from the ceiling? Luxury!

I'm guessing you didn't miss the black broth either.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#132

At my very first internet job, in 1998 or so, I was hired as a temp. They said they wanted me to find websites that would be good publishers for their content network. They said to do so by searching AltaVista for sites, and then looking to see if they had a web counter, the kind that say "You are visitor number XXX". If the counter said over 100,000 they considered that a good sized publisher and someone else would…

That is beautiful.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't roulette a losing game? Or did you have some optimal betting strategy?

We didnot play with our own money, but with the coupons on the back of the cinema tickets. But even so, we should have made slightly less than 300 a month, but we did a slightly more on average. We did not really have an optimal betting strategy, at least nothing that can be proven scientifically, there is no such thing. But after some time we started to bet on the wheel, e.g. "Voisins du zero" or "Jeu zero" and we k…

> We did not really have an optimal betting strategy, at least nothing that can be proven scientifically, there is no such thing.

Ah, but there is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, one more hack from college although it probably won't work these days. All of the professors in the science department at my university would tape lists of their student's IDs and their test grades outside their office through out the semester including finals. When looking for classes for the following semester, I just had to look at which professors gave better grades on average and sign up for their classes. T…

So you actually took the 75% A classes? Did you learn a lot from those profs, or were they just giving the As away? I would figure that, knowing nothing else about the prof, the one with grades in the middle would be the most effective teacher.

In my experience, the median grades are higher for smaller classes, and those smaller classes are often more advanced and populated by graduate students. It's not that the professor is easier, it's that everyone works really hard and learns a lot, because they're motivated by the work itself.

This does not hold true for large classes where the median grade is an A, however; those are usually genuinely easier.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#135

Free sodas freshman year. Chem lab + NaCl + soda machine + Russian roomate.

Can you elaborate? I could do with some free drinks…

http://www.snopes.com/science/saltwater.asp

It says false at the top, but goes on to explain it did actually work for a period of time, by shorting out the mechanism.

One kid was even electrocuted when he tried it on an ungrounded machine!

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#136
Senior year, I took a intro Psych course where the final was online. The questions were multiple choice, chosen from a large pool. The test was setup in such a way that we could re-take the exam as many times as we want and students would receive their highest score as their final exam grade. The idea was that if you took it 20 times, you would inevitably learn most of the material.

So, I imagine you can guess how I took the exam. After writing an running few scripts, my final exam scores showed that I took the exam 31 times: The first 30 times (as I was collecting questions and their answers) I received 0% and each exam took ~30 seconds. On the 31st exam I got 100% and it took ~45 seconds.

As you would expect, I got an A+ for the course. I never did bring it up to the prof.

In a similar vein, in my astronomy course we had online quizes and one type of question asked us to identify a picture. Viewing the page's source would occasionally reveal the the picture's filename, e.g. "sagittarius.gif".

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#137
post #74
post #37

Studying for an engineering dynamics final, the old "when in doubt, pick C" saying popped into my head, so I decided make a frequency plot of answers for the 4 quizzes we had that term. The prof had B as the correct answer ~50% of the time. At the end of the 2 hour final I had only finished 13 of the 20 problems, so I quickly marked B for the 7 remaining. I got the 2nd highest grade in the class, bumping my grade fro…

Does every bar have happy hours? I thought it's rare thing for bars to have.

Most bars do. The markup on alcohol is absurd. As an individual, I can buy a keg of a very good beer for a cost of approximately 38 cents a pint. That same beer at a bar costs more like 4 or 5 bucks.

Cutting the margin down still covers costs considerably, but happy hours are a 'loss leader' to get you in to a bar that would otherwise be less occupied, and perhaps as a signal for those driving by looking for a 'happening' bar, which is usually done toward the end of happy hour.

There might also be motivation to get you somewhat drunk so that you'll stay after happy hour and not realize that you're paying full price for beers.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#138

Fast Food Hack: When I was in highschool, Burger King ran this "checkers" game, where you'd get a card with a little checkerboard on it, then scratch your way across it by picking squares until you either lost or won a prize. The one feature they advertised was that "Every card is a winner", meaning that if you picked the right path you were guaranteed to win something. A friend had a sister who worked at a Burger Ki…

This reminded me of the time when I was a kid (maybe 5 or 6 years old), I went with my aunt to buy the newspaper or something like that. They were also selling these scratch lottery tickets and my aunt would usually buy me one or two.

I don't really remember how, but I figured out that the scratch-off paint on the winning tickets had a slightly jagged edge.

My aunt couldn't beleive it, nor could the seller: she would buy me the first ticket, I'd pick it out, scratch it and use the proceeds to buy another one. This went on for a few days... After my aunt bought me the first one, I'd proceed going through the whole stack until I picked out all the winning tickets.

Unfortunately, the best I could do is win back the money invested, as the most frequent prize amount was the price of the ticket.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#139
post #127
post #4

On my recent trip to Africa, I avoided giving bribes at 3 different spots in the airport by doing the following: When they asked me for "something to have lunch with", I'd lower my voice and say "it's not possible now" then quickly glance at the person behind me. Neither I nor them had to pay anything.

Brilliant - I wish you posted this tip earlier when I went to Africa. Will do it the next time I go to India for sure.

It won't work in India. Because they don't take bribes at Airport (at least).

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#140
post #127
post #4

On my recent trip to Africa, I avoided giving bribes at 3 different spots in the airport by doing the following: When they asked me for "something to have lunch with", I'd lower my voice and say "it's not possible now" then quickly glance at the person behind me. Neither I nor them had to pay anything.

Brilliant - I wish you posted this tip earlier when I went to Africa. Will do it the next time I go to India for sure.

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