Make a Wish, Already

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Wikipedia disambiguation page for the commonplace partial phrase “rule of three” lists nine items. Actually it lists 10, the tenth not being an example of the concept of the rule of three in day-to-day life but the title of a play; it may have been added by an editor simply to amuse himself or herself. (It was not me.)

It would be a perfect example of the rule of three to have three sets of three things make up the possible definitions of the phrase; it is comic to have 10 instead. So, why three wishes? Why do we knock on wood three times for good luck? (Does anyone knock for bad luck? There are a lot of people on our planet and even more have existed and departed; someone must have.)
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Statistics

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The newspaper’s weekly circulation was a closely guarded exaggeration. The circulation manager knew the number, the editorial department knew it, the advertising manager knew it. The newspaper’s circulation was about 2000 copies per week. Now you know.

The pliability of the words “circulation,” “copies,” “newspaper,” and “week” was tested regularly. This is because if the advertisers had been told the 2000-per-week number, they might have asked the newspaper to pay them for the honor of placing their ads; thus, they were given a number 10 times larger. More often than not, they were told that over 20,000 pairs of eyes “saw” any given issue of the newspaper. Actually, in an effort at a specificity that would grant legitimacy, they were given a figure of “21,000 readers.”
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Windows 10: Really Good, Horrible, or Both?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Reviews of Windows 10, which was released this week and made available for free for the next year by Microsoft for those who bought a computer that was pre-loaded with Windows 7 or 8, are in. Most celebrate its unified personality: We have our desktops back and the Start icon has been restored to the bottom-left-corner.
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