何毓琦的个人博客分享 http://blog.sciencenet.cn/u/何毓琦 哈佛(1961-2001) 清华(2001-date)

博文

The One-Track Mind of Scientists/Engineers

已有 2783 次阅读 2020-3-21 18:47 |个人分类:生活点滴|系统分类:海外观察

For new readers and those who request to be “好友 good friends” please read my 公告 first

The One-Track Mind of Scientists/Engineers

There is a story often told about Isaac Newton and it goes like this: He owns two dogs, one large, one small. In order to let them go in and out of his house freely he opened two holes on the side of his house: one large, and one small. Then one ordinary person pointed out to him that the small dog could use the large hole just as well. There is no need for the small hole.

Recently, because of the coronavirus situation in the US people are advised not to go out and mingle with people. Many younger friends of ours all call us and help us with grocery shopping. So I reminded my wife that when we reimburse our friend by adding up our share from the bill she should also figure in the portion of total sales taxes we should reimburse our friend because the tax is calculated based on the whole purchase, hers and ours combined. This seems to be a bother until I thought of a clever solution: whoever shop for us should go through the cash register with her stuff first in one bill and separately in another bill for our stuff that she is buying for us. This way what we should reimburse our friend will be automatic and correct. She look at me incredulously, sarcastically, and said “what do you think we have been doing?”




https://wap.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-1224629.html

上一篇:On Metaheuristics for Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization
下一篇:My life since 1/25/2020
收藏 IP: 74.104.134.*| 热度|

5 郑永军 许培扬 史晓雷 沈震 刘立

该博文允许注册用户评论 请点击登录 评论 (3 个评论)

数据加载中...
扫一扫,分享此博文

Archiver|手机版|科学网 ( 京ICP备07017567号-12 )

GMT+8, 2024-3-29 16:19

Powered by ScienceNet.cn

Copyright © 2007- 中国科学报社

返回顶部