Hmm, got 500 Error code, Internal Server Error. Here is a backup:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191213101529/https://www.digit...
“My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: “My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
#22https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
Indeed! From the article: > In 2010, the Pontiac Division of General Motors received... > This was a cool act by General Motors especially in this world of Internet when news can go viral in matter of seconds From Snopes: > This legend surfaced in print in 1978, but an anecdotal sighting places it even earlier than that, in 1971.
Yes. It's a neat story, but it has that smell of an urban legend. What engineer would come back for four nights in a row rather than just figuring out why the car didn't start the first time?
Re: “My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
#23Reminds me of my wife's macbook air wifi that was always spotty when she was using it, and always got back to normal when I used it. She thought I had some kind of magic engineer's touch. After much thinking, we realized that when she was using the laptop in her bed, she would put it on her lap with her legs bent, so that the computer was sitting at a 45 degree angle wrt to the floor, while I would put the computer f…
Did she change her posture or did you get a wifi dongle?
Re: “My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
#24Reminds me of my wife's macbook air wifi that was always spotty when she was using it, and always got back to normal when I used it. She thought I had some kind of magic engineer's touch. After much thinking, we realized that when she was using the laptop in her bed, she would put it on her lap with her legs bent, so that the computer was sitting at a 45 degree angle wrt to the floor, while I would put the computer f…
Humans are basically bags of mostly water, and water is not god to radio signals. Have seen the exact same problem in rooms that are far away from the router. Massive difference if any of my body parts is in the way of the signal
Wifi is weird sometimes. I once had to help my nephew with his network. He had 2 adjacent rooms, but with half a meter concrete inbetween. Needless to say the signal would not penetrate from one room to the other, no matter how close we moved the router and laptop to each other in their respective rooms.
But moving the router and laptop back would make it work all of a sudden. Turned out, moving them back would position them in front of the windows, and the signal would then go out of the window and bounce of the neighbouring building to the other room's window.
Re: “My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
#25If the car didn’t start then how did he come back the next day to get more ice cream? Surely he waited a bit and the car would start. And the timing issue would be obvious from here? I’m also worried about his health. Should he really be having ice cream everyday?
> I’m also worried about his health. Should he really be having ice cream everyday?
Why not? As long as you are not overweight, I don't see much of a problem.
Re: “My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
#26Not the point of the story, but I wonder if engineers would reach the solution faster than non-engineers due to their practice debugging. As soon as I read the guy was driving to the store to pick it up I knew it had to be timing due to store layout.
My guess is yes. Especially if you're doing debugging, your whole day is hypothesis testing. You have a model of how a program works and from there you come up with potential explanations, you try to reproduce the problem under various conditions, you collect data, and so on.
Re: “My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
#27Correlation vs causation, eh?
There is causation, just not directly from ice cream to vapor lock. It's a diagram with three entities, ice cream -> time to cool -> vapor lock
Re: “My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
#28Vapor lock was a thing in the time of carburetors. This story is from the 70s, when "internet virality" was not yet on people's minds.
It may be hard to recall but before the internet people shared stories, and the really good ones would spread quickly across the entire population. There were people back then too who would try to come up with things that would spread, maybe not with the same intent (or profits) as now, but still the overall effect was the same
Re: “My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
#29Not the point of the story, but I wonder if engineers would reach the solution faster than non-engineers due to their practice debugging. As soon as I read the guy was driving to the store to pick it up I knew it had to be timing due to store layout.
And also equipped with a firm knowledge that flavor of ice cream can't be the problem. Thus naturally looking at all other variables
Re: “My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed! From the article: > In 2010, the Pontiac Division of General Motors received... > This was a cool act by General Motors especially in this world of Internet when news can go viral in matter of seconds From Snopes: > This legend surfaced in print in 1978, but an anecdotal sighting places it even earlier than that, in 1971.
Yes. It's a neat story, but it has that smell of an urban legend. What engineer would come back for four nights in a row rather than just figuring out why the car didn't start the first time?
An engineer who is using logic, reason, and observation to find the root of the problem instead of just patch it once?