This is a list of random questions that I felt like answering, and answers to those questions. Aside from this top section, all of them are questions which I have at some point in my life been asked in some form in some context, or which I've seen asked to the general public in some form (though some may have been paraphrased).
This used to be at the bottom of my about me page, but I decided to add more questions, so I made it its own page.
(2025-03-01) In addition to the "Questions about this page" section:
Also some questions have been updated. For details, see version history
Alive, relatively healthy, not sure where my life is going.
Hamster
Probably some waffle, with fruit and/or syrup. And a side of bacon.
Overall, what I generally prefer for breakfast and what I think of as breakfast foods tend to be bread-ish things (waffles, pancakes, French toast, bagels, pastries, etc.), rather than eggs, meats, or potatoes (although sometimes I get meat on the side, and I tend to like breakfast sandwiches).
For context: my understanding is that string players (and orchestras) prefer sharp keys, and wind players (and bands) prefer flat keys, but I started out with piano as a solo instrument. I then played pitched percussion (xylophone-like things, which have the same layout as piano) in middle school band, and piano in a high school orchestra. I also haven't played music much recently (so I'm kind of going by memory), and I was more interested in composing music than playing it, so I'm basing this a lot on what I'm inclined to compose in.
My default key if I were writing music or playing something by ear or from memory would be C major (no sharps, no flats), and I think overall I'd prefer keys with fewer sharps or flats (closer to C major in the circle of fifths) than keys with more sharps or flats.
If I were naming notes out of context, I think my inclination would be to call the black keys C♯, E♭, F♯, probably A♭, and B♭, which is consistent with notes used in keys close to C major. For white keys, definitely B rather than C♭, C rather than B♯, etc.; as a pianist, I'm used to sharp or flat = black key, which also contributes to my preference for closeness to C major.
On the other hand, if I were writing something in minor, I think my default choice of key could be either A minor or C minor, depending on random chance (so, either like C major in that there are no sharps or flats, or like C major in that the nth note of the scale is the letter I'm used to it being), so at least in minor, I'm okay with flat keys.
But I think in major I might be more inclined towards sharp keys? Thinking about it more, I think at least part of it is a preference towards keys that start with naturals; in major, F is the only key with flats that starts on a note that isn't flat, hence the preference for sharps there, whereas in minor there are plenty of keys that start with naturals but contain flats.
For the three major keys that have enharmonic equivalents (C♭/B, G♭/F♯, D♭/C♯), I think my preference would be sharps for all of them:
No. A giant robot would be too potentially destructive and an army of robots would be too actually destructive. Therefore, I shall make neither of those, and instead I shall take over the world with my CUTE LITTLE KITTY ROBOTS!!! *Meow*
(Note: I'll only allow robots I build to take over the world for myself; I'm not going to let you use them for your own evil plans. If you want to take over the world, then make your own robots.)
No. You just weren't paying attention when I walked over here.
No. I'd rather you didn't smoke at all, but if you want to smoke anyways, the least you can do is provide your own materials. And stand downwind from me.
(In practice I usually just say "no" or shake my head.)
I'm cross-dominant: I write (and draw, and use a fork) with my left hand and do almost everything else (e.g., using a computer mouse, throwing a ball, using scissors, using a knife) with my right hand.
(This means that I keep my fork in the same hand, not because I'm European, but because that happens to line up with my dominant hand. Also I don't really care about those sorts of arbitrary rules.)
Also, in high school I tried to learn to write with my right hand, just to see if I could. I was able to write fairly okay but still not as well as my left hand; I haven't done that in a while, and even then I still mainly used my left hand. (I also intentionally used different forms for a, t, and g when learning to write with my right hand. Sample.)
The only time I can think of where handedness has really caused me any issues was when I had a Palm PDA. Text input was done by writing letters with the stylus, and some characters (at least T, +, and -) involved a horizontal stroke, which for me is most natural to do right to left, but a right-to-left stroke means delete the previous character, so I kept accidentally deleting a character.
3.141
*spends a while counting on her fingers* 86, if you count the 3 at the beginning.
I memorized it in high school, a few digits at a time, and then haven't really tried memorizing more after that (but I still remember it!).
I remember it in groups of digits of varying length: 3.14159 26535, 8979 323, 846264-3383 2795-02, 884 197-169, 399-375-105, 820 974-944 59230-78164, 0628 6208 998 6280. Part of this is just kind of chance, but a lot of it is due to noticing certain patterns, especially the fact that there are a lot of three-digit palindromes near the beginning of pi; there's also a run of even digits with a five-digit palindrome, and three groups of four digits near each other that are anagrams of each other.
Become invisible. As a shy person, this could be useful (sometimes I just want to disappear and not be seen by others). And in theory, I could also use the power invisibility to fly, by sneaking onto an airplane, giving the best of both worlds.
I would either (a) have really bad stage fright and not think of anything to say for 55 seconds, then think of something really important to say that I really wanted to say and not have time (possibly that would happen a few days later), or (b) refer everyone to a page on my website (having thought of a), so I could put what I wanted there, but then forget to actually make the page (or remember to make the page but leave it with a "coming soon" message on it) until everyone has forgotten about me. I'm not sure which.
Because I'm too afraid of hurting him. His legs are probably fragile, and his insides as well, so if I tried to move him I might damage something.
"Yes, I'm sure my artificial intelligence won't become sentient and evil."
I'd be one of the SCPs, not knowing where my anomalous properties come from, wishing I could just get away from there and live my life, living in fear that they'd consider me too dangerous or that my anomalous powers would turn against me.
To be more specific… perhaps a reality bender living in constant fear that one wrong thought could cause the whole universe to disappear.
16:20
No, I use 24-hour time. The military does not have a monopoly on 24-hour time, and military time has a bunch of extra things like saying "hundred hours" which make no sense and annoy me (it's worse even than that Verizon 0.002¢ thing! at least there, the number had some relation to the intended price!). I just say "eighteen o'clock" or whatever. And besides, I'm a pacifist and anti-military.
I also sometimes use hours ≥ 24 when talking about times I stay up past midnight (e.g., 25:00 Friday = 1:00 Saturday; I generally think of it as still Friday, because I haven't gone to sleep yet).
[asked on an episode of Stephen Georg's Breakfast Stream, among others]
The week starts on Monday, and ends on Friday. Saturday and Sunday aren't part of the week.
Being from the US, I'm used to calendars that have Sunday to the left of the week, and Saturday to the right, but that doesn't mean that's how I think of the week outside of the specific context of looking at a calendar. I don't wake up on Sunday and think "Wow, it's a new week!".
(Perhaps I'm more inclined than other people to consider times that are in between two other times not to be part of either? I remember when I was young thinking of the night as not a part of either day it was between; and, if it's not Wednesday, I'd consider "last Wednesday" and "next Wednesday" to refer to days that are a week apart from each other.)
Because they're different C's. You get one constant from ∫ x dx—let's call it A—and another from ∫ 1 dx—let's call it B (this is different than A)—and then in the final result you get x2/2 + x + A + B, but how much is in A vs. B doesn't matter (e.g., A = 1 and B = 2 gives the same result as A = 3 and B = 0), so we can just give A + B a name—let's say, C—and forget about the original A and B.
Well, technically any file is a hard link, so you can determine this e.g. with the -e operator in Perl.
However, I suspect that you want to know whether a file has more than one hard link. For instance, you might want to decide whether to write directly to the file or delete the old one and make a new one depending on whether the file has multiple hard links. If you're using the command line and just want to know, you can use ls -l; the number right after the file permissions tells you the number of hard links (for directories, it tells you the number of files in the directory). If you're writing a C/C++/Objective-C program on Unix, you can use the stat function (or any related function, see man 2 stat [Linux, BSD]); check if st_nlink in the resulting structure is greater than 1. If you're writing a Perl program, check the fourth value (array subscript 3) in the list returned by the stat function (you can subscript the return value if you put the stat call in parentheses, like (stat($file))[3]). In other languages, check for a function named "stat", or you can try parsing the output of ls -l.
Keep in mind that the original and the link are indistinguishable; you can't tell which was made first (unless you have other knowledge about the process that created them), not that it would matter if you could.
See, was that so difficult to answer?
(That said, at least some filesystems do treat files with multiple hard links differently than other files. For instance, HFS+ (a.k.a. Mac OS Extended, used by Mac OS 8.1 (not Unix-like) through 10.12 (Unix-like)) normally puts the filename and where the file is on disk together, rather than separating them in a separate inode. Making a hard link in HFS+ moves the original file to a hidden directory and replaces it with a file with metadata pointing to the file in the hidden directory [source]. So on that file system, and any others that use similar methods, it actually would make sense to say that some files are not hardlinks (although as far as I know, the difference between a normal file and a hardlinked file with one reference isn't exposed to userland).)
Game Boy games: Super Mario Land, Kirby's Dream Land, Tetris, Mickey's Ultimate Challenge, Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2, and Tom and Jerry; of those, the ones I remember playing the most were Super Mario Land (where I only got to 2-1 once before I replayed it in high school) and Tom and Jerry (which I beat).
Computer games (Macintosh): Amazon Trail (I remember liking the photo-taking sections and not really understanding what was going on in the towns) and Gizmos and Gadgets
SNES games: both at home and at my preschool/after-school care we had Donkey Kong Country (I didn't know there were sequels), but for some reason when I was really young I didn't want to actually play console games, just watch other people play them, so while this is definitely a game from my early childhood I didn't actually play it until high school.
[from jan Misali's video and its follow-up]
Games I would consider mainline (as of early 2025):
That makes 20. I'm also not sure about Bowser's Fury (haven't played it) or New Super Luigi U.
Reasons I consider Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island different from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3:
Other opinions about this topic: