I work in an office that was built in 1980. There are built-in ashtray slots in the restrooms. They’ve all been glued shut now, but it’s very obvious what they are.

There’s a main atrium in the building surrounded by the wings of space for cubicles. I can only imagine the smoke cloud that must have hung in the air back in the day!

“There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. But there are few old, bold pilots.”

Vote for who you want!

Gravity reversal. Like suddenly gravity switches to a universally repellent force and everything on the surface of the Earth starts falling into space (me included). Eventually you’d just “fall” away and the atmosphere too and you’d suffocate.

Tajabone by Ismaël Lo

More like he got a drift letter… 😁

A mystery to you and me both. They just can’t be convinced!

Looks delicious. I like goose, but we have several people in the family that won’t even touch the dark meat from a chicken, so goose is off the table. :(

“Hey, listen, motherfucker!”

A good hearty borscht (the red variety). Serve with a sprinkle of fresh dill on top and a spoonful of sour cream dropped in.

The worst is when they phrase the response as if there was just some slight, funny misunderstanding on the part of the machine; “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that! Did you want to…”

For some reason that one really drives my ire.

Being able to bring my own formula sheet (or notes) definitely helped. Two full pages of notes would be great, though I would still get some bad nerves even in those cases (the very idea that the next 60 minutes of class time decides a full 30% of the course grade just rattled me bad).

For me the ideal type of course would be the Thermodynamics of Mechanical Systems course I took. The exams were in-person but open-note and straightforward with relatively simple conceptual questions. Credit was split between the exams and bi-monthly “mini projects.” These would ask you to apply the class concepts to some larger set of related problems; parameters were provided and you would have to determine the answers using what was learned in class (for example, one project was to design a steam turbine power plant with a target output of 50MW, ambient temperature was 30C, cooling water is available at 25C. Determine the heat input needed from the boiler, choose an appropriate number of turbine stages with reheat if possible, size the condenser appropriately and add economizers if they can be used. You’d lay it all out and indicate the temperatures, pressures, power inputs and outputs, exergy of the system, etc.)

I did stellar in that class. I would have loved that format everywhere (simple concept exams + application projects).

Sure; it was Mechanical Engineering. The class was “Vibrations & Controls;” the first half of the course was vibrations / oscillatory systems, and then the second half was theory of feedback & control systems (classic “PID” controllers for the most part). The exams were pencil-and-paper, in-person, time-limited.

The first attempt we were allowed nothing except the exam and paper for answers; honestly I’m not sure what that professor was expecting.

In my second attempt the professor provided a formula sheet, but he was of the mindset of “If you know F=ma, you can derive anything you need!” so the formula sheets were sparse to put it mildly. It was just enough to keep me from fully collapsing in panic and bombing, but it was close.

I recently finished my degree, and exam-heavy courses were the bane of my existence. I could sit down with the homework, work out every problem completely with everything documented, and then sit to an exam and suddenly it’s “what’s a fluid? What’s energy? Is this a pencil?”

The worst example was a course with three exams worth 30% of the grade, attendance 5% and homework 5%. I had to take the course twice; 100% on HW each time, but barely scraped by with a 70.4% after exams on the second attempt. Courses like that took years off my life in stress. :(